Thanks boingboing.

Here is video and a couple of scanned articles by James Leatham. He made a great SciFi short in 1981 using an Apple II for special effects. The long and short of it is that since the Apple didn't have the horsepower to produce the actual animations he wanted, he set it up to render still images and control a stop motion video setup.

The short itself rules. I love the Space Buccaneer guy who sounds like he's from from Maine. I love the hair. You have to wait until 15:21 for the best part though.

Since my exit, stage left from VistaPrint earlier this year, I've been running my site at 1and1, with no real complaints, except that their VMs only offer Fedora Core 4, which is ages and ages old. I've been running UW-IMAP since then, and I've had some complaints. I believe those complaints might be client relate, but they might not, so I decided to try out some different servers. My only real complaint is that when running multiple clients against the same message store, they get out of sync.

Here's an example. I have two "main machines", a Mac Pro and a MacBook both running Mail.app on Leopard. If I leave the Pro running with Mail open and sorting, and go away and run the MacBook, any folders that the Pro sorts first don't get updated unless I click on them. Basically, it seems as if either Mail.app doesn't check every folder every time it updates, or UW isn't updating clients correctly. I have "Use IDLE" checked on the Macs, and I do belive UW supports IDLE, so it should push.

I've tried Thunderbird, but it annoys me in other ways. It doesn't, as of 2.0.0.9, sort by received date. It will sort by date, but it's whatever date the sender sets, which can be way wrong. There is a setting for it, "mailnews_use_received_date" in the equivalent of about:config, but it doesn't seem to do anything. You can also sort by message received ID, but that doesn't work when you're sorting mail to different folders.

So I was helping a friend with his 1and1 VM install and decided to mix things up a little. He has the same FC4 install that I do, and he'd gotten rid of most of their (now unsupported) Plesk install. I killed the rest of the default stuff, installed and configured Postfix, and went to decide on a server for IMAPs. I tried 'em all. I ended up in a fight between Dovecot and UW. UW didn't seem to want to deal, but Dovecot in the RPM version they support for FC4 (0.99) has some real problems with Mail.app. I ended up in giving him the same situation as me, UW-IMAP and hope it works.

I tried Cyrus and Courier, but neither of them met my requirement for "easy to deal with" and I dumped them both. It was at this time that I started thinking "Gee, I should either get a new VM and put Exchange or Zimbra on it", I hear exchange is a fine IMAP implementation, and they probably have 10x the developers of any of the Big 5 IMAP servers. Of course Exchange must be a weird mix of SQL guys, IIS guys (SMTP transport), IMAP guys and MAPI guys. I don't care, it seems to work. I might do an MSDN install of Exchange on W2k3 to see how it works, and if it works, give it my $39/month from 1and1 so I never have to think about mail again.

I just can't believe people still have to think about this shit. It's been a clear decade since MS came out with a Brainless Mail Transfer Agent under the Exchange banner (and it was relatively stable) and end-users didn't have think about their MTA anymore. I chalk this up to petty bickering and bitching within the IMAP community. The UW guy hates the Courier guy, and thus embraces the Cyrus guy even though he has the same gaping holes as everyone else. It's a huge mess.

I'm back on UW, I compiled and installed UW on my friends machine after giving up on Dovecot because of the Mail.app issues and the fact that newer versions of Dovecot wouldn't complile.

I never want to have to think about my email, come on Open Source Community, help me out here.

For some time, I've been annoyed by Mail.app not checking all folders every time it checks mail. My situation is that I have an IMAP server at a colo, a Mac Pro at home usually with Mail.app running and more importantly, running its filters, and a MacBook running Mail.app that I take with me to work or wherever.

The problem is that as mail comes in and gets filtered by the Pro, the laptop continues to check mail every minute. However it does not "see" messages that get filtered off. So if Dave sends me mail and it goes to the Dave folder, the only way I notice it is if I manually click that folder, which isn't happening.

So how do you fix it? I know there is probably a way, but I've not found an official answer to this in the months I've been looking, so here's what I've got that actually works.

Hit the Mailbox menu and select New Smart Folder. Use "Message is not in mailbox" rules if you don't want to check things like your spam folder (I have my spam stored on the server so if something gets filtered, I see it. Also make a rule to specify "Message Type" as "Mail" so it excludes any RSS feeds you have.

This should hit every folder you have, and when it does, it will actually "touch" that folder, and make the unread message count for that folder update. So what I've done was just collapse the "Smart Mailboxes" in Mail, and I'll probably forget that thing exists, since the unread message counts are now correct.

Woo, yay Apple. My life clearly isn't complicated enough. I'll update this with screenshots later, this is kind of a draft so I remember what I did.

[music | Public Image Ltd. - Same Old Story]

I think this machine defines the fine line between "Apple Fan" and "Apple Fanatic", so here are some first thoughts on the Macbook Air in disorganized bullet-point fashion:

• The very thing keeping from an iPhone (one of the biggies), that it turns into a $400 doorstop because you can't replace the battery, carries over to laptops now, x5.
• External CD/DVDs suck, since you have to carry them all the time. 90% of the time you don't need one, until you find yourself in a motel room in Dumpwater, FL at 3am with the word "FUCK" breaking out in hives across your forehead
• No wired ethernet? Next. Actually, here's a good point, my MacBook, and others around me, can't get DHCP on my office's wireless LAN, PCs work fine, but I have to be plugged in until I can be bothered to figure out why.
• I would constantly feel as if I was going to hammer my fingers through the machine into my desk while typing, and actually might
• I don't trust my iPod hard drive to hold my music. Why would I trust one to hold every damn important file I own in the world? Backup schemes are great until you're on the road for 3 weeks and the drive dies on the plane. While waiting a couple hours for some Genius to hand me a new drive for my Pro, I watched them non-chalantly toss dead iPods on a pile and hand a new one to whatever quivering-with-rage customer and move on to the next dead iPod.
• So that means you have to spend an extra grand to buy the 16GB downgrade to solid state. neat. To be honest, I've had my 30GB iPod for a couple years, and it hasn't died, yet. But I don't rely on it either, Murphy isn't gunning for me yet

That's the bad, what about the AWESOME?

• LED Display, this could be really, really nice. Time will tell but things are going the right way
• This one's been overlooked by everyone I've seen discuss the device, which isn't many people: If the only CD/DVD is USB2, and you can presumably reload the OS, that means Apple now has firmware that will let you boot from USB2 devices. I would love to see this back-ported so I can use Bootcamp this way on the Mac Pro and macbook I already have.
• 802.11n, as long as the firmware on this can be updated if there's a change before it gets ratified, awesome. If you have to take it in, that sucks.

In short, the next person who says I should just go drop for one of these is going to get my "Old and Clunky" MacBook across the head. "There, see, if that was a MacBook Air, you'd be in a whole lot less pain, and my laptop would be in a thousand pieces on the floor, so it would be lose-lose, now go screw, and get a bandaid for god's sake".

Here are some tools I've written which could be of use to other folks. It's going to be mostly Cisco related, some of which is still being formatted before I upload it, more to come.

CSSManager is a tool to simplify suspending and activating services in a Cisco CSS load balancer. It adds a couple of features like the ability to "lock out" a server and to add comments to a suspended machine to give context for its suspension. More features to come.

CSSPump A tool to display at a click the state of all services on a Cisco CSS 11000 series load balancer. It reads the comments set by the CSSManager above and adds them to the display of active/down/suspended servers.

OpenSWAN to PIX VPN. How to configure FreeS/WAN (Now Openswan) on Linux and a Cisco PIX as endpoints for a 3DES IPSEC VPN.

The new MacBook came in today, and I've been tooling around on it for the last couple hours.

[music | Pigface - King of Negativity]

Time will tell:

Couple issues with the iBook.
Firstly, and most annoying/dangerous(?) is that twice now, I've been just sitting using the thing, I think both times I was just selecting/deselecting blocks of text on some webpage in Safari, since I have a wacky habit of doing that as I read, and the machine went into hibernate. Couple panicked seconds later, it comes out of hibernate, and the battery has completely discharged. I haven't run off of battery at all, it's always been plugged in while I use it. I checked my battery serial, but it's not one which is eligible for recall.

I finally half-jumped ship on Linux. I have 5 computers, one runs windows as a dual-boot for my wife's sake, she uses it about once every four months to check her mail when she's not at work. The rest of the time, that machine is in SuSE. It has dual monitors and is very nice. I have an HP Laptop, 15", 60GB disk, DVD-ROM/CDburner, 9 lb. desktop replacement that I use for watching movies in bed and surfing from the couch.