Stripping Headers in Postfix
How to hide Received headers when relaying emails - handy when you trust an authenticated user who shares an IP with a known spammer.
archive for 2008
Royal Mail and User Agents
So I've finally tracked down why Royal Mail's website looks horrible in Firefox on Linux. They sniff user agents and if it isn't one of their 'supported' browsers then they send different HTML that doesn't render properly.
Asterisk iCal Reminders
If you're anything like me, you've probably missed appointments due to your bad memory. Well now there's now excuse, you can use your trusty basic phone to recieve reminders with reminder calls from Asterisk.
My new script, AsteriCal, will poll your Google Calendar's iCal URL and call you to remind you of upcoming events. Find out more here
Dial No to 0870
You may have heard of the site Say No To 0870. It's a UK database of mappings of Company Names and their 0870/0844/0845 numbers to their geographic equivalents. Using the geographic equivlalents is a good idea - they're cheaper and included in a lot of plans' free minutes. Some companies can detect people calling their geographical numbers. Prefixing the number with 141 to withhold your number sometimes beats the system; sometimes it doesn't.
I thought it'd be a good idea to integrate the Say No To 0870 database with my Asterisk PBX, so that when I dial a number beginning with 08, Asterisk will actually call the geographical number with my Trunk provider. I achieved this using Asterisk AGI and Python. I screenscraped the Say No To 0870 website (theres no API, nor did they reply to my email) and untangled the HTML with Beautiful Soup.
Festival and Asterisk
How to setup Festival with Asterisk for arbitrary text-to-speech in your PBX.
Whilst playing with asterisk, I wanted the feature of text-to-speech, so the PBX can read things such as caller IDs.
Steam Tray Icon’s rampant CPU usage
Its very rare that I boot into Windows XP, but when I do the computer is extremely unresponsive for a good minute or so after login. There is no hard disk activity and no response from clicking anything, even the Start menu.
Disclosing a key to a GPG-encrypted file without exposing your private key
I was recently reading Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill -- Some Scenarios and scenario 2 about session keys perked my interest. I wondered if it could be done with GnuPG, and after researching for a while I discovered it can, and here's how:
lejog.maniacmartin.com retired
The cycle ride is over, and I'm in the process of collecting those pledged sponsorships. People have an amazing ability to not have any money on them when its time to pay up, which is pretty convenient for them.
Appalling service at PC World
I think the email I sent to customer services explains it perfectly
Benchmarking Wordpress and Django
Regular readers will know that I recently migrated to lighttpd from Apache 2, to try and enable my blog to handle traffic spikes better. Out of curiosity, I decided to benchmark the new setup.
Migrating Django and CherryPy to lighttpd
After learning that my 256mb Debian Xen VPS died instantly after being reddited, I decided to take some action to prevent the same thing happening again.
webpwman released
webpwman is an online password manager that I wrote in CherryPy, that can import from KDE pwmanager CSV exports, and run behind an SSL-enabled webserver (which also prevents MITM attacks). It asks 3 security questions, which it randomly rotates on every correct login and asks for a master password which is used to decrypt the password from a json file. The idea being, that if you're on a compromised public terminal, then the bad guys should only get the passwords you viewed that session.
Moment of fame on reddit
I was checking mum's Google Analytics today, and happened to glance at my own:
A little common sense…
<em>To all those people who told me I should switch my cycle ride's direction to 'John O'Groats to Lands End':</em>
I’m famous!
I was featured in this week's issue of the Market Rasen Mail, regarding my sponsored Land's End to John O'Groats Cycle ride.
Command history
Apparently, all the cool kids are blogging their shells' history. Cool, I thought, I'll do it too. But in zsh, the code they used only gets the history of the currently opened session, and I'd just closed all of mine, plus I use multiple shells in Yakuake.
Initial thoughts on web.py and SQLObject
I recently started writing an online password manager. The basic idea is that it would ask 3 questions from a bank of questions, and then prompt for a decryption password and the name of a service of which to get a password. The service would run over SSL, and the passwords would be exported from my laptops KDE pwmanager in my server backup script.
Upgrading from Django 0.96 to 1.0 Alpha
This post is by no means up to the standard of the official Django 1.0 alpha release notes; it merely details what I had to do to get a Django 0.96 site working under Django 1.0 alpha.
Introducing breeze
I have recently embarked on writing a simple open-source BitTorrent private tracker and community website, as a single Django project.
20% off most food and drink in stations
I read in the latest edition of Which? that you can get a card that entitles you to 20% off food and drink in many outlets in stations. It appears to be valid on franchises run by SSP - including Pumpkin, Burger King, Caffè Ritazza, Camden food co, Millie's, The Pasty Shop and Upper Crust outlets in stations.
JibJab on 2008 Election US Campaigns
Featuring Bush, McCain, Clinton and Obama. See it here
Land’s End to John O’Groats Cycle
I've decided to cycle the length of the UK for fun (and charity as well). And what better way to get in the mood by trying to learn Django and make a semi-useful Python app. So, I've given it a shot with a GPS/Google Maps mashup thing to analyse blogged route parts from maemo mapper on one of Andrew's Nokia internet tablets. Obviously you won't be able to see all of that until after we have actually blogged something - so check back after Monday, 12th August to see live progress (if it all works that is).
Split Ticket Rail Travel
Previously, I thought that that the cheapest way to travel from Market Rasen to Oxford and back was a Saver Return (Route not via London) with a <del datetime="2008-06-25T17:20:00+00:00">Young Person's</del> 16-25 Railcard, costing £32.35.
Javascript and Online Banking
I have recently started using Opera for my day-to-day surfing, as Firefox 3 Beta 5 locks up now and again, and decides to use 100% CPU. This usually happens when I have a few tabs loading that have Flash video in them. However, Opera's javascript engine isn't quite like IE or Firefox's.
WordPress won’t upload
Something that's been bugging me for a while is that when I updated my Wordpress install (using svn), file uploads ceased to work. Attempting to upload a file resulted in the message "An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.".
PwManager for Windows
Having just put Windows XP back (in a dual boot configuration) I wanted to share the password manager that I have in the KDE system tray with Windows. I looked on the internet, and the only thing that has been ported is the pwmanager_dump program. However, combined with some the Windows ext2 driver, GNUWin32 tools (grep, awk, xargs etc) and a program that copies its command-line argument to the Windows clipboard, I have a hacked-up working pwmanager that syncs with linux.
Virgin CEO: “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks”
Whilst I'm not one to cover a news story that's already been covered elsewhere, TorrentFreak has a priceless quote from Virgin Media's CEO: “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks".
Fixing SpamAssassin’s FORGED_HOTMAIL_RCVD false positives
Lately people have been telling me about emails that I never received. A quick analysis reveals that these ended up in my Trash folder - meaning that SpamAssassin gave them a high spam rating.
