Month: February 2009

Car Photo of the Day: Wrenching.

Not really a car, but one of its major components. In this case a rather famous one. While you guys ponder the nature of this machine I’ll be out in the barn wrenching on my daily driver. The recent cold snap forced me to switch to running 100% petro-Diesel and I suspect that has contributed to a common malady in VW TDI engines, a clogged EGR/Intake manifold. I’m pulling both the EGR & the intake manifold off the Jetta’s much-smaller-than-this-photo’s engine and cleaning out the accumulated soot. Thankfully there is a wonderful community of smart folks online, in the form of tdiclub.com who share all the “how-tos” of TDI maintenance freely. Armed with that info, I’m off to do battle! Wish me luck & See you soon!

Cleaning up after a break in.

ok, not really.

Ever wander out to your car, which had been left sitting in a presumably safe parking spot to find a window broken? That moment of gut-wrenching shock as you recognize the violation on your personal space and property? Well, I had that happen to me this morning, except it wasn’t my car, or my house… it was this website.

Last night between 11:10 and 11:18 somebody hacked my site. They used some flaw in PHP, or even WordPress itself to change permissions on some of my files and create a WP admin account for themselves. Thankfully that is about as far as they got before they were locked out by our server software. The lock-out is total though, which is why the site was down from that time until this morning when I woke up and was able to start putting it back together again with some help from two good friends of mine, WRD and Nick. Bill helped me figure out what had happened (he also built the system that detected the intrusion and shut down the site) and start me on the path to fixing it. Nick provided me with a little insight into mySQL-fu when Bill was away at lunch. (Thanks again Nick! I owe you another sushi dinner!)

It took me a while, but I was able to root out the compromised accounts, get the site running again (re-uploading a lot of stuff from backups, which was easier than trying to find what was broken and fix it!) and then take some steps to tighten up security on the administration side of WordPress. I locked everyone, including MYSELF out of the admin section all day until I was confident I had locked down access to it. Once I confirmed that my security mechanism was in place I let myself back in…

So that is why there was no CPotD posted today. Or anything else for that matter. I was cleaning up the broken glass and ripped up dashboard of chuck.goolsbee.org.

Car Photo of the Day: TwoFifty @ around Nine O’Clock.

Winter is in some sort of odd state of suspended animation here in the Pacific Northwest. Unlike our usual slate grey skies and endless mist falling on cedars, we have high thin clouds, pervasive non-rain, and cold-ish, but not too cold temps. It has been a weird winter. I hope that doesn’t mean we’ll have a wet summer, as I count on running a few rallies this year, including the Monte Shelton, where this 250 (whose particular designation, GTE maybe? I’m not a Ferrari expert, I have forgotten) was photographed after the sun set over the Pacific. Of course I have a lot of small jobs, and maybe one big one (brake system rebuild… sigh) on the Jaguar to do. I haven’t even LOOKED at the car, much less done any work on it. Need something to get me motivated!

This photograph is really not that great… the background is way too busy and that chain link fence really screws up the horizon… but the light on the car is wonderful and I’m too lazy to clean it up in Photoshop. Just mentally ignore the distractions and soak up those dying reflections in the paint as you contemplate warm summer evenings. 🙂

GyazMail update.

GyazMail on my MacBook Pro

It has been several months, and to be honest… I’m very happy. So happy I stopped noticing the fact that I was “in transition” away from Eudora, and just got settled into using GyazMail. I still fire up Eudora about once every two weeks, usually to search for some obscure older bit of correspondence. I’ve moved most of my relevant mail archives directly into GyazMail anyway, so this need is really only for the truly obscure stuff. If you recall, I wanted to leave Eudora behind as it was becoming orphanware, and started showing some odd behaviors under 10.5. I know, somebody will chime in and say it is working just fine for them… but it was getting unstable in my case. I tried using Apple’s Mail.app. It reminded me of all the things I hated about NeXTMail, it’s predecessor under NeXTStep (which was really MacOS X Version Minus One… or perhaps MacOS X is really NeXTStep 5.5? …but I digress.) Mail.app is loaded with annoyances for me. So much so that I would rather continue using Eudora. Entourage is another one I looked at and dismissed quickly as it reminds me too much of everything else in Microsoft Office: overly mouse driven with buttons galore, screen real estate taken up by unused elements, and an odd focus on integration with other Microsoft products, rather than integrating with ME. When I found GyazMail I was intrigued, as it appeared to do 95% of the things I wanted it to do right out of the gate. Looking further I could bend about 3% of the rest of it to my will, leaving a small percentage (do the math, there will be a quiz later!) remaining for the developer to fix, should I choose to bug him with requests. To date I have made no contact with Goichi Hirakawa, GyazMail’s developer beyond sending him some money via my friend Kee Nethery‘s Kagi for his work.

Here’s a short list of the highlights and lowpoints, with full exploration to follow:

Why I left Eudora behind:

  • Lack of stability and compatibility with MacOS X 10.5 and beyond.
  • Lack of support for OS X technologies, notably integration with AddressBook and iCal. These were key to successful syncing with my smartphone, be it my old Treo, my current Blackberry, or whatever I use in the future.
  • “It’s dead Jim.”

What I miss about Eudora:

  • The ability to search across multiple mailboxes and accounts, based on easy search terms.
  • Stationery: The ability to have pre-built mail content, complete with headers, available from the message menu. This is very handy for those of us who administer mailing lists. I had a bunch of mail templates I used for interaction with the list server, as well as canned replies for frequently asked questions from or situations with the list subscribers.
  • The “read through everything with the spacebar” nature of the inbox.

What I love, so far, about GyazMail:

  • Fast, lightweight, stable.
  • EXCELLENT integration with Apple’s AddressBook.
  • Easy to import old Eudora mailboxes into GyazMail.
  • Growl notifications.
  • Excellent multi-account & multi-server support.
  • Better handling (though still not perfect) of HTML-formatted mail.
  • Excellent preference/filter/rule UI and handling

GyazMail annoyances:

  • Overly “clicky” UI. Especially in multiple accounts, when reading new mail, I find that I spend too much “mouse time” bouncing between the left (accounts/mailboxes) pane and the right (message reading panes) of the main window. Eudora had this wonderful way of just space-barring your way through all unread mail. In GyazMail you have to click TWICE to change the mailbox you are reading. Once to change accounts/mailboxes, then once more into the message reading pane to change the focus of the spacebar’s reading emphasis. If you don’t make that second mouseclick
  • Some HTML rendering bugs.
  • Lack of finer control over HTML behaviors within incoming mail. A sort of “all or nothing” approach.
  • Mailbox-intense left pane can use up a lot of screen real-estate, making navigation a scrolling chore. Eudora’s choice to bury this in a menu was more elegant.

(Note: This post is still a work in progress, check back often)

Continue reading “GyazMail update.”