Archive for August 7, 2007

Richard | August 27, 2007
6 comments

Personal Spam Filter Service

Update: Implemented Dylan’s solution, ported to Dreamhost.

Spoiled by the high quality of spam filtering at my workplace, I now want the same level of service on my personal mail. Dreamhost’s filters (using SpamAssassin) are not even coming close. Not willing to farm my email life out to Google or Yahoo!, I want to retain my owned domain email addresses yet have the spam removed before I download my mail. I found a review of personal spam filtering solutions at PCWorld and even signed up for a trial of OnlyMyEmail.com (only $4 a month!) but was disappointed to find that this particular service does not support downloading mail via IMAP. I want to be able to synchronize message status between at least two computers, so POP won’t do it for me.

Have you found an affordable, effective, personal spam filtering solution for owned domains?

Category: Software/web |
Richard | August 25, 2007
No comments

Allow feed access to a protected Drupal site

We are released our new intranet Drupal site for Catlin Gabel community members. Protected by login, it provides blog, podcast, social bookmark, knowledgebase, photo gallery, and e-portfolio services to students, teachers, staff, and parents. Drupal will serve as a user-centric complement to our group-centric Moodle course and planning group sites.

Drupal continues to amaze. Today, I found the solution to a classic problem of login-protected intranets. When the user accesses the site with a web-browser, we want to present a web-based login form. However, what about subscribing to RSS feeds? Protecting a site with form-based login breaks other applications such as iTunes and feed readers.

Fortunately, Drupal developers anticipated this problem and created two modules that address the problem: HTTP Auth and SecureSite. I tried both this evening, but at first they completely broke the site for LDAP users. Then, another great Drupal moment: the Drupal forums indicated that others had run into the same problem just this past July, and developers patched the LDAP Integration module. Now, LDAP and HTTP Auth play well together, and the tool works brilliantly in iTunes!

iTunes auth

I don’t know whether the patch also fixes securesite, and it appears that the module has a history of security vulnerabilities.

I am getting mixed results with blog feed readers. NetNewsWire, for example, shows the authentication window but does not display any content. More investigation to do here …

Category: Software/web |
Richard | August 19, 2007
2 comments

Oh, what has happened to you, Yahoo!?

After years as my preferred web portal, I have finally kicked Yahoo! to the curb. The last straw was when they began to feature glossy “popular interest” stories in the top spot of the home page. Now, either I will just head straight for Google News, or perhaps I will try one of those personalized portal services. I continue to prefer “blank” as my home page.

who cares?

Category: Social studies |
Richard | August 13, 2007
No comments

How long does it take? Part 3

Two years ago, I developed an admission inquiry form in about 60 hours of dedicated time. This past May, I migrated the script from my previous school to my current school in just a few hours. I felt pretty good about the ease of getting this script to run in my new school’s server environment. Then, I met with the admission office to adapt the script to Catlin Gabel’s admission process. This part is taking much longer. This school has four divisions, two admission officers, and more multi-kid families applying for admission. It is not taking quite 60 hours, but I bet I have spent 20 hours making changes to the script to bring it to my current programming standards and adapt it to Catlin Gabel’s admission process. Check it out.

Category: Programming |
Richard | August 13, 2007
No comments

Network Freeze

Some time ago, our systems administrator proposed a network freeze in the two weeks before faculty return to school. We would make no more changes to the network infrastructure without leaving sufficient time to test them before everyone came back and the year started. Well, today is the day, and I believe that we are within a day or so of meeting that deadline! Our team is nailing down the final details of how Macs will connect to Windows printer shares, and we flipped the switch on Cisco Network Access Control (a.k.a. Clean Access) this afternoon. About half of the file shares are moved from the old RAID array to the new, and I am wrapping up testing and loose ends on the half dozen or so web scripts I developed this summer. We are just in time, too, because our dedicated teachers are beginning to return from vacation to start preparations for the upcoming year. We are freezing the network configuration just in time.

Category: Tech Direction |
Richard | August 7, 2007
One comment

Cross-Platform Training

We are teaching teachers iPhoto and Picasa simultaneously today. It’s remarkable how similar are the two applications.

side by side

photo training

Category: Software/desktop |