Mandrill MX: Invalid

I’m experimenting with Mandrill and every domain I’ve added, including some I added months ago, were showing “MX: Invalid”. The MX records were in place, for one domain, they were in place before I added the domain to Mandrill.

When their support helpdesk got back to me, the solution was simple. I had to click the “Test” button next to each domain. What a PITA. I waited a couple of days to click a damn button that I found no reference to in their documentation. Bah humbug.

Oh well, it’s working now. :-)

Lost a package of two bank cards and my UK driving license last night. Cards cancelled, now looking into replacing the license. Oh well…

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Security Update Notifier

A while back I installed apticron to get an email when updates were outstanding on our servers. However, it emails for all updates, and there are updates released every day, which means I get one email per server per day, useless noise that I end up ignoring.

Today I built a solution, security-update-notifier. It’s a very simple (crude!) shell script that can be scheduled with cron to generate an email each day when there are security updates pending. It relies on apt-check, part of the update-notifier package.

We manage our machines with puppet, so I built my first ever public puppet module, a simple wrapper around the script. Tomorrow morning at 4:44am I’ll hopefully get an email for one server. I’ve left one with updates outstanding, one with only non-security updates outstanding, and one up to date, to test each case. Fingers crossed.

Zim on Mac OSX

Took me a bit of time and experimentation to get it working, now I have Zim running on OSX, and in the end, it was pretty painless. I think these are the steps I took.

First, install MacPorts. I downloaded the dmg then installed it. MacPorts requires XCode, but I had already installed the XCode command line tools from here (apple ID required). Every time I run anything with port, it warns about missing XCode, as I understood this, I can safely ignore the warning.

Then I found details somewhere on which packages to install. I ran this command:

sudo port install python26 py26-pygtk py26-simplejson py26-xdg

I also downloaded the zim source code package. Then I had some issues where zim wouldn’t start. Turns out I was using the default Apple version of python instead of the MacPorts version. I extracted the zim source, cd’d into the directory, and then I was able to start zim with the following command:

/opt/local/bin/python2.6 zim.py

Took a few tries to get it to start properly, but eventually I got it working. I kept re-opening it. I also had to have XQuartz installed, which I think is an OSX X implementation. Don’t know, it was already installed on my system.

If you try to follow these steps and find anything missing, let me know what to add and I’ll update this post. Hopefully this saves somebody else a bit of hassle.

Touchscreen problem on the Nexus 4, painless call to Google and there's one on the way, mine to be returned within 21 days. Happy days. :-)

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Just got a Logitech T651 trackpad for mac. Might be rushing back to the store in the next ten minutes to swap it for the Apple one… #fail

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Saturday night in Le Champ Martin, population 2, nay, make that 3 including me! It's warming up to be quite the evening! :-D

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Onboard and sailing for Calais. Expected to land in just less than 90 minutes, 3 hours to Paris, unload the passengers, then 2 hours on…

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London in just over 8.5 hours, compulsory toilet breaks every 2 hours kept the boys in line! :-) London to Paris fully loaded tomorrow…

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Thanks to Corstorphine MOT & Auto Centre I now know that the LPG distributor is leaking coolant, and no charge for the pressure test! :-)

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Unity drove me mac

This post has been a while in the making. Bottom line, I bought a mac. I’ve had it for about three weeks now, and so far I haven’t looked back.

new macbook pro 13 inch retina

There’s something between Bangkok and operating system choice for me. I first converted to Linux in Bangkok, and I decided to buy a mac in Bangkok some 7 years later.

The decision was a long time brewing. It all started 5 odd years ago with John Berns. He converted from Ubuntu, and told me something that I shot down at the time (sorry John! ;-) ) but have long since remembered. He said, since he got a mac, he doesn’t spend time fixing his computer, he spends his time working.

As I fully come into my fourth decade, I’m entering a new phase. My late teens and twenties were defined by idealism, militancy, and fuelled by an unbridled fiery energy. As I settle into my thirties, about to turn 31, my focus has slowly shifted. My idealism has faded somewhat, some of my zest for life has faded, and I’m more focused on productivity.

The decision to buy a mac was a decision to get stuff done. I chose a 13″ MacBook Pro with a Retina display. It’s a phenomenal piece of hardware, and the software is close enough to *nix that I thought I’d survive the transition. My precious terminal is still just a hotkey away (thanks iTerm2). My expectation was that the machine would just work. It has almost completely lived up to my expectations. It’s phenomenal hardware, an acceptable user experience, and very, very, very productive. It simply works.

Leaving Ubuntu

Leaving Ubuntu was a hard decision. I’d been a dedicated convert and evangelist for some time. I’m still running Ubuntu on all of our servers. In general, I’m a big fan of what Ubuntu has done for the Free Software space.

However, the stumbling block for me was Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop interface. Mark has spoken about his vision for Unity, and about not just competing in the operating system space, but leading, setting a new standard. I think that’s a noble cause. But all the chaos and confusion that comes with such rapid change has a cost, and an impact.

Personally, I reached a point where my laptop was a constant struggle to use. I didn’t want to use Unity, and I specifically didn’t want fancy 3d effects at the cost of speed. I wanted a fast, simple desktop. Ubuntu had not been that for some time. I considered Mint, which is apparently the second most popular distro behind Ubuntu. But in the end I was burned out. I’d had enough of fighting with my operating system.

I think the popularity of Mint is testament to the damage that Unity and the broader Ubuntu direction are doing to the Ubuntu userbase. I think a quiet exodus of long standing, core users is underway. I think the effects will be easier to see a few years from now. Maybe it’s a good thing, maybe Ubuntu will truly compete in the desktop space. I hope so.

Personally, I’d like to see a simpler version of Ubuntu LTS with much better backports. I don’t want to upgrade every 6 months, nor do I want 2 years to get the latest and greatest software. For now, I’m sticking to Ubuntu on servers, and if I had a desktop, I’d probably install Mint. But day to day, I’m now officially a Mac user.

Ctrl-left and ctrl-right on iTerm2

I couldn’t jump word at a time on iTerm2. Eventually, I found a beautifully elegant solution using BetterTouchTool (an absolute must have, couldn’t live without, fantastic piece of software). I set up a keyboard shortcut, only for iTerm2, where I mapped the alt-left to send a keyboard shortcut to a specific application. The shortcut is ctrl-left and the application is iTerm2. Then the same for right. Works like a charm. Elegance. :-)

It works because when I’m in iTerm2, pressing alt-left, sends ctrl-left to iTerm2. While actually pressing ctrl-left switches desktops. The ctrl-left never reaches iTerm2, OSX picks it up first, but the BetterTouchTool workaround works, means I can use ctrl-left as normal, and use alt-left as normal on local and remote terminals. This has been bugging me for a couple of weeks now. Solved. Fantastic.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a sweet sense of satisfaction at winning an eBay auction in the last 4 seconds and staying on budget!

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