My current hosting provider is going out of business so I'm moving on. The new server is already up and running but as long as the domain transfer is underway I'm unable to properly configure web and mail for it.
When I installed the old server it was running a web-based admin-software named Confixx that was standing in my way more often than not. It took me a few months to get rid of it completely. The new machine is running what seems to be its predecessor in spirit, an AJAXy web-app named Plesk and I've already started to hate it. I'm seriously contemplating to remove it from the system, but this will probably not work without jumping through some hoops.
Anyway, Plesk is interfering with my manual configuration and I can't configure virtual web hosts or mail servers before the domain is transfered. This probably means the website will be down (not that anybody would notice) and the samaflost.de mail domain dysfunctional (not that anybody used it much) for a few hours if not days in the near future.
path: /en/personal/hosting | #
Shortly after I left for vacation the fetchmail process that pulls email from one of my main mailboxes to the machine with the "big-enough" disk to hold a few weeks worth of email in my inbox died. This lead to my mail provider rejecting emails for me after the mail box was "full". Unfortunately this was the address my @apache.org address is forwarding to so it ran out of space rather quickly - less than 24 hours it seems.
If you received bounces from my provider, I'm really sorry about that. I hope no failure mails have been sent to any of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to, haven't checked yet.
I'll have to re-think my mail strategy and probably need to re-subscribe to lists that have dropped me (I think ezmlm does that). The later might lead to a sort of spring cleaning so this problem may have some good effect in the end as well.
path: /en/personal | #
I was planning to commute to work by train because of the Essen Motor Show today anyway, but since it started snowing last night and we even had some serious storms (at least for Germany) it turned out to be the right idea.
Traffic lights were off in Mönchengladbach, the bus took far longer than it was supposed to and I don't really want to imagine sitting in my car during that time.
Going by train I had the opportunity to fix a bug in Ant and write a new loadresource task (like loadfile but works on resource collections). Not bad at all.
The downside is I'll reach work about an hour later than usual and I have no idea how long it is going to take me to go back.
path: /en/personal | #
Going through the list of my last post to see where I stand two weeks later:
- Windows XP instead of Linux or MacOS X.
Well, based on what I try to do with the OS (nothing, just work with it), it is OK. I installed a couple of Cygwin tools and XEmacs so I'm not completely lost.
- Outlook instead of Gnus/XEmacs
Oh how I miss Gnus. Thank God I only need to use Outlook for work mail. The rest of Outlook (address book and calendar) is fine, but the mail client is a joke. Threaded views? Outlook's mail sorting rules are dumb and limited - or I am limited, I don't know. "Outlook has removed the superfluous line breaks" - oh, thanks, who said they were superfluous? And it is really really hard to create a well formated plain text response to a HTML mail.
- VS.NET instead of XEmacs.
OK, VS.NET is quite usable. I've only found myself edit sources with XEmacs seldom - rectangular selections, M-x string-rectangle and search/replace with regular expressions are what I missed so far. I have edited solution and project files with XEmacs more than once, though.
- VSS instead of CVS.
I don't believe in the "only one can edit a file at a time" model, but other than that it works. Not that I feel save.
path: /en/personal/job | #
Today is going to be my first day at my new job. My job title is "Chief Developer", I'll still be doing project management but my focus will move closer to development again.
My new employer is mainly a Microsoft technology shop (you in the back, I've seen that, stop giggling) which means I'll have to adapt to quite a few changes in my work environment:
- Windows XP instead of Linux or MacOS X.
- Outlook instead of Gnus/XEmacs - no, I won't start sending HTML-Mails or quote the messages I reply to at the bottom of my mails.
- VS.NET instead of XEmacs.
- VSS instead of CVS.
- Some technologies like Sharepoint that I never used an equivalent for.
Nothing on that list scares me, I've used Lotus Notes in the past and nothing can be worse than that, but in combination it means a really big shift and it'll be interesting to see how well I'm going to adapt.
path: /en/personal/job | #