Tech Journal

making outlook's task view more useful

Outlook's Task view is handy for keeping track of day-to-day work tasks. I keep it open in a separate window and use various formatting and filters to show the data I want. In particular there's a "DASL" filter to show a combination of all open tasks, and those completed within the last two weeks:

To set the DASL filter:

Click View->Arrange By->Current View->Customize Current View
Click Filter
Click the SQL tab
Click "Edit these criteria directly"
Enter the following:

("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/811c000b" = 0 OR 
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/810f0040" >= today(-1209600))

written by Chris Beach
16/11/07 04:26pm
(5 months, 3 weeks ago)

setting up an ethernet modem with a wireless router

I was suckered in by the new Belkin N1 Vision (with its lovely built-in screen), only to find out it's only a wireless router and doesn't include an ADSL modem. What an arse!

The real pain came trying to set the thing up. I tried getting my old Netgear ADSL router to work in modem-only mode. This was fruitless, so I ordered a dedicated ethernet modem (A Linksys AM200). When this came along I spent a LOT of time fiddling with various settings (DHCP, DMZ etc). This is the combination that works for me, on Virgin broadband:

Modem (Linksys AM200)

Mode: Bridge Only (note: this turns the modem into a simple non-routing device and the web interface will no longer function
VCI: 38
VPI: 0
IP: 192.168.2.1
DHCP: disabled

Router (Belkin N1 Vision)

Connection Type: PPPoE
Username: my.name@adsl.virgin.net
Password: As selected when registering with Virgin
Service Name: [blank]
MTU: 1452 (default)

..and finally it works!

written by Chris Beach
16/11/07 12:34am
(5 months, 3 weeks ago)

captioncompetition.co.uk - a zero-maintenance website

The idea behind my new site captioncompetition.co.uk is simple - pull an interesting photo from Flickr every day and let people add captions which can be voted on. Photos can be browsed with their best captions, and there is a "top captioneers" list, showing the users who've added the best captions.

I already have some scripts for handling photo uploads but I have deliberately avoided using them. Using Flickr gives two important advantages:

I don't have to concern myself with accepting uploaded photos, which would require some form of manual moderation. Instead I've set up a group on Flickr which is moderated by Flickr users (and Flickr's own system which blocks porn, politically incorrect images etc). An automated job on my webserver loads the most interesting new photo from the group every day. To do this, it sorts the photos using Flickr's "interestingness" algorithm, which works surprisingly well.
The Flickr API allows me to serve the images on captioncompetition.co.uk from Flickr's own webservers. All I'm serving is the HTML and CSS, which are negligible in size. If my server was serving images, the bandwidth usage would be orders of magnitude greater, and very costly as the site grows.

I have also written a script that posts a comment back on the photo within Flickr to say the photo has been featured on captioncompetition.co.uk, with a link to the relevant captioncompetition page (a shameless advert for the site!). The script waits until several good captions have been added to the photo before posting. To work this out, it takes an aggregate of the vote score, and posts a comment when this score exceeds a set threshold. Without this check, a Flickr comment could be posted and bring visitors to captioncompetition.co.uk to see a page of bad captions.

As of today, there are 128 photos, 548 captions and 50 signed-up "captioneers" (users). The site is growing, and is now the number one result in Google for a search on "caption competition." It's satisfying to reach a conclusion on a website project, such that the site can now run itself.... though I will undoubtedly be tinkering with it for some time smilie face

written by Chris Beach
16/09/07 01:56pm
(7 months, 3 weeks ago)

interhost technical support seems to have gone on holiday

Update [27/09/07]: Today Interhost have moved me onto a new host and my quota is now a healthy 50GB.

Update [10/09/07]: Interhost have responded to my ticket suggesting a move to a new VPS. I have asked them to confirm that I'll be getting the quota and bandwidth allowance that corresponds to what I'm paying.

I just posted my eighth ticket (see below) on a single request for support from my hosting company, Interhost UK. They have a problem with my (and probably other customers') filesystem quota.

Twice so far this year my webserver, a virtual private server (virtualised Linux host) has crashed because available space has mysteriously reduced to zero, despite me being well under-quota. Twice I have had lengthy, frustrating exchanges with Interhost technical support. They've run "fixquotas" but not explained what exactly why this is necessary. They've not proposed any long-term solution. They've not offered any promise that they'll pick up on this problem when it next occurs to save me the hassle of chasing them to fix it. And worst of all, they are now being evasive about contacting me at all. I have called three times in the last couple of weeks after my tickets went unanswered for a couple of days or more. On the other end of the phone - a non-technical person who attempts to call the technical support department but this goes straight to voicemail. I'm promised a call-back. It doesn't come.

I once recommended Interhost, but not any more.

Further to my unanswered post on Monday:

Over the last two days my filesystem availability has dropped from 2.1GB (on Monday) to 1.7GB today, despite no increase in usage from my VPS. If the mysterious drain on space continues at this rate my VPS and websites will be crashing by the weekend.

My total available space is now apparently a measly 6.7GB, and I have had to cancel backups and delete data to fit within this. I'm paying for a 50GB allowance. I'm being charged double the cost of a 10GB allowance, but getting less than 10GB!

Where is the explanation of the problem? Where is the proposed long-term solution? Where is Mark? Where is Interhost technical support?

I used to be really impressed with Interhost, but recently it seems all I get on the phone is blank, un-technical people that promise callbacks that never materialise, and several tickets I have raised have sat unacknowledged for days or even weeks (as is the case with my ticket regarding domain registration).

Update [27/09/07]: Interhost have moved me onto a new host and my quota is now a healthy 50GB.

written by Chris Beach
05/09/07 03:17pm
(8 months ago)

comments (total: 5)

Interhost are crap

Hi chris,

I too share some of your issues with Interhost, we have 1 VPS and have been with Interhost for over a year. Things have slowely been going downhill. Recently we have had problems anfter problems with our VPS and yes your right a phone call is usually picked up by someone who doesnt knowe a VPS from a cabbage. They offer to take your details down and promise a call back but the call never comes.

Mark it seems runs everything and when Mark isnt there everything falls apart. If your reading this and thinking of moving over to a VPS with Interhost then think again....this used to be a little gem of a company but its going sownhill FAST...if your value your support and reliability then think again....

25/09/07
09:29pm

replies: 0

Recommend another VPS

Interesting posts. I am a new customer and had some very basic questions (not even technical) about billing etc., and posted them by ticket system on Monday. Also rang. It is Friday and silence. Rang just now and tried to speak to somebody... anybody. And NOBODY could take my call. I asked the person who answered the phone whether they were an outsource phone answering company but she said she worked for Interhost. I then asked her if nobody was available because they had not come into work or just busy... and she said it was a bit of both.

Can anyone recommend another VPS hosting company in the UK that actually communicate with their customers?

Thanks, Andrew

Andrew

23/11/07
09:24am

replies: 0

exact same experience by the sounds of it

Hi Chris,

I was flabbergasted to see your post today as we've had exactly the same issue. We moved a site to a VPS with them around 9 months ago after doing some stress testing and finding the server to be very fast and responsive mirroring Interhost's technical staff at the time. Our site sells tickets to an event that happens once a year, and so it was with horror during the busy period of sales we had the zero space based crashes you describe making our sales (front end AND back end) unavailable for long periods of time. After much toing and froing over a period of a few weeks a move was suggested. Unfortunately by this time we only had an hour of selling left, so decided to leave off and do it slowly and methodically. Since then we've written test rigs to specifically test the ordering process and find that it won't even finish running on the Interhost VPS - i.e. we process 100 orders in 700 seconds on our development server, but the Interhost VPS won't get to the end of the 100 orders. Not only that the server was at some stage hacked by the looks of things. Interhost have promised callbacks on both issues but it has remained impossible to get hold of anyone. It's such a shame as they seem to have fallen into the classic hosting trap of:
1) setup hosting company with great prices and watch the customers arriving
2) think - this is a doddle this hosting lark, why didn't we do this before
3) things start getting busier and the wheels start coming off - hosting turns out to be pretty complicated
4) hide under desk hoping it all goes away

Hey ho. I'm going to try and sort this out this week, I wonder if it's worth comparing notes? Gimme a shout or IM me:

alex at (romeo echo echo foxtrot november echo tango) dot co dot uk if you want to

reefnet_alex

18/09/07
09:20am

replies: 0

a2b2

I have to VPS' with a2b2.com and although today isn't the best day for me to recommend them since my 2nd one died on me for some reason, possibly my slack security not theirs. However, they got me a new VPS ready within an hour then I just had to restore data from my own backups. If you know your stuff then their dirt cheap, unmanaged packages can't be beat.

Will

05/09/07
10:11pm

replies: 0

File Space

I've had the problem with file space on a Windows VPS wee have with Interhost going to zero this was due to a large ammount of .tmp files in "c:\windows\system32\drivers" now they wasn't able to explain why this would happen just told me to delete them, so I now run a bat file everyone hour to check for tmp files and delete them.

In the past when I haven’t noticed them, there would be around 16,000 of them totalling 4.5 GB. SWSoft forum say's the node has likely been compromised in some way.

Graham

21/01/08
10:05am

replies: 0

5 comments

fixing phlickr's internal php references so it can be used from scripts throughout a filesystem

Phlickr is the PHP5 API for the excellent photo-sharing website Flickr. It works well from what I've seen so far.

One problem though - the various PHP files within the Phlickr API reference each other using relative links i.e. require_once 'Phlickr/API.php', which means that all scripts that use the Phlickr API must be in the directory that contains the Phlickr directory. For me this proved inflexible as I nest my PHP scripts within various directories.

Therefore, I needed to run a substitution on the Phlickr API files in order to make the referenced paths absolute. Here we can use PHP's global $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable, which provides the physical filesystem path to the root directory serving up the PHP files. Here's a substitution command I came up with, which should be run within the Phlickr API directory:

find . -name "*.php" | xargs sed -i "s/'Phlickr\\//$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '\\/Phlickr\\//g"

Note: this command works for me in bash - I haven't tried it in other shells.

After the substitution, the Phlickr API should be placed in this root directory, but other scripts that need to access it can be placed in subdirectories

written by Chris Beach
04/09/07 11:31pm
(8 months, 1 week ago)

auctioning judgetheweb.com and judgetheweb.co.uk

I've decided to auction off a couple of domain names that I'm not using at the moment:

judgetheweb.com [visit auction]

judgetheweb.co.uk [visit auction]

They're both starting at £0.99 and have no reserve. If you know anyone who might be interested, please let them know!

I also have a few more "spare" domains but I'm curious to see the response to these auctions before I give the others a shot.

Does anyone know of any good places to promote these sales? I will be hitting facebook.com as soon as I get home, of course!

written by Chris Beach
20/06/07 11:44am
(10 months, 3 weeks ago)

automating spam assassin's learning process on plesk

Update [22/11/07]: I have updated the script to make it more generic

Amongst other techniques, Spam Assassin uses a bayesian filter to judge the probability that a mail is spam. The bayesian filter works on the probability that certain words in the mail identify it as spam or non spam. In order for this to be effective, the filter needs to be taught - and this can be automated to a degree.

It took a fair amount of Googling to work out this solution, so hopefully it will save you some time if you have a similar setup to mine (Linux, Plesk, Qmail, Spam Assassin). You may need to substitute your Spam, Learn and Trash folder names if they differ from mine:

1. Inside your Spam mail folder, create a folder named Learn.
2. If a spam mail is not caught by Spam Assassin, get in the habit of moving it manually to your Spam/Learn folder (do this in your mail client).
3. Create a script /var/scripts/dailyMailJobs as follows:


#!/bin/bash

MAILNAMES_PATH="/var/qmail/mailnames"
SPAM_LIFETIME_DAYS=2
TRASH_LIFETIME_DAYS=4

# learnAndFlush args are the following directories: MAIL SPAM SPAM.LEARN TRASH 
function learnAndFlush {
        echo -e "\n\nLearning new Bayesian data from spam for $1 on" `date`
        sa-learn --dbpath ${MAILNAMES_PATH}/$1/.spamassassin --spam ${MAILNAMES_PATH}/$1/Maildir/$3/cur/
        # Flush Spam.Learn
        flush $1 $3
        # Flush Spam
        flush $1 $2 ${SPAM_LIFETIME_DAYS}
        # Flush Trash
        flush $1 $4 ${TRASH_LIFETIME_DAYS}
        echo -e "\nLearning new Bayesian data from the last 24hrs of non-spam for $1"
        find ${MAILNAMES_PATH}/$1/Maildir -mtime -1 -type d -name cur -not -path "*$2*" -not -path "*$4*" -not -path "*/Maildir/cur" -print -exec sa-learn --dbpath ${MAILNAMES_PATH}/$1/.spamassassin --ham {} \;
}

function flush {
        echo -e "\nCleaning $2 from ${MAILNAMES_PATH}/$1"
        mtimeArg=""
        if [ "$3" ]
        then
                echo "Only deleting mail older than $3 days"
                mtimeArg="-mtime +$3"
        fi
        find ${MAILNAMES_PATH}/$1/Maildir/$2/cur $mtimeArg -type f -exec rm {} \;
}

su popuser
# Substitute your mail directory here:
learnAndFlush chrisbeach.co.uk/chris .Spam .Spam.Learn .Trash

4. Place this in your crontab so it runs every day (e.g. at 00:15):


15      0       *       *       *       /var/scripts/dailyMailJobs >> /var/cronjobs/logs/dailyMailJobs.log

This script will teach Spam Assassin that the mails in the Spam/Learn folder are spam, and the mails elsewhere are non-spam. It will also perform some housekeeping, deleting the Spam/Learn mails that have been learnt, and deleting old mails from Trash (5 days or older) and Spam (3 days or older).

written by Chris Beach
01/02/07 08:12pm
(1 year, 3 months ago)

one comment

server-side mail filtering using qmail/procmail/safecat under plesk

After enabling Spam Assassin on my Plesk-managed domain I had been relying on email clients to move spam-tagged emails into a "Spam" folder. This was impractical as it only worked when a client was open, and rules had to be set up on each client.

After a lot of digging on Google I worked out a server-side solution. The key app here is procmail, which runs rules on incoming mails and can file them into folders. Procmail should already be present on your Plesk installation. Another app called safecat is required to place filtered mail into a maildir within the file system. The following steps apply to my mailbox "chris" on domain "chrisbeach.co.uk" You will obviously need to substitute your own mailbox and domain.

1. Create a folder called "Spam" in your mailbox.

2. Install safecat (see http://jeenyus.net/~budney/linux/software/safecat.html)


cd /tmp/
wget http://jeenyus.net/~budney/linux/software/safecat/safecat-1.13.tar.gz
tar xvzf safecat-1.13.tar.gz
cd safecat-1.13
make
make setup check

3. Create /var/qmail/mailnames/chrisbeach.co.uk/chris/.procmailrc


MAILDIR=/var/qmail/mailnames/chrisbeach.co.uk/chris/Maildir
SPAMDIR=${MAILDIR}/.Spam
DEFAULT=${MAILDIR}/
LOGFILE=${MAILDIR}/procmail.log
LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} for ${LOGNAME} "

# All mail tagged as spam (eg. with a score higher than the set threshold)
# is moved to the designated spam folder
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes.*
| /usr/local/bin/safecat "${MAILDIR}/tmp" "${SPAMDIR}/new"

4. Edit /var/qmail/mailnames/chrisbeach.co.uk/chris/.qmail so that it contains only the following two lines:


| /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc accept
|preline /usr/bin/procmail -m -o .procmailrc

Let me know how you get on, and also if you know of any enhancements I could make to these instructions

written by Chris Beach
01/02/07 02:46pm
(1 year, 3 months ago)

comments (total: 6)

No need to use safecat anymore

Procmail newer as 3.14 is able to deliver to Maildirs as well:

MAILDIR=/var/qmail/mailnames/xxx/yyy/Maildir
DEFAULT=${MAILDIR}/
SPAMDIR=${MAILDIR}/.Junk/
LOGFILE=${MAILDIR}/procmail.log
LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} for ${LOGNAME} "

# All mail tagged as spam (eg. with a score higher than the set threshold)
# is moved to the designated spam folder
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes.*
${SPAMDIR}

saper

11/02/07
07:57pm

replies: 0

sa-learn

Have you considered using sa-learn in conjunction with SpamAssassin?

More information at: http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.1.x/doc/sa-learn.html

Nitin

01/02/07
03:51pm

replies: 1

nice, but

I used the solution posted by "saper" and it did work (thanks).
BUT webmail won't read the mail which is in the spam folder. I *do* have mails in the spam folder but they just won't show up in the folder of the webmail client (horde)

Does anyone have a good idea why?

Thanks

raven

22/11/07
03:17pm

replies: 0

Easy Plesk Implementation

I have been trying to get SA to work under Plesk for many hours now.
This did the trick.

I tried saper's suggestion to use .procmailrc without safecat and it did not function properly on my install (even though my procmail is 3.22)

My ISP wanted $6.95 a month the enable SA. When they "installed" SA it did not function properly in Plesk. That set me off of trying to figure out what was wrong, so I had them "uninstall" SA in Plesk. I am grateful that they hosed my install because after much searching (and help from a friend that compiled safecat for me on his local machine), now SA is functioning properly and we don't have to pay a dime.

Thanks for the post!

rocketman

07/10/07
01:52am

replies: 0

for me dosen't work

Hi for me it dosen't work.
--- Logging for popuser procmail: Skipped "* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes.*"
safecat: fatal: could not stat directory: file does not exist
procmail: Error while writing to "/usr/bin/safecat"
procmail: Lock failure on "/var/qmail/mailnames/domain.es/pruebas/Maildir/LOGFILE=/var/qmail/mailnames/domain.es/pruebas/Maildir/procmail.log.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "/var/qmail/mailnames/domain.es/pruebas/Maildir/LOGFILE=/var/qmail/mailnames/domain.es/pruebas/Maildir/procmail.log"

jose galvez

23/04/07
07:33pm

replies: 0

very cool

I have been wanting this for a while.
Thanks!

jpkelly

25/02/07
07:10am

replies: 0

6 comments