Archive for November, 2004

I spent the day at home today, not feeling well. Being stuck at home I
had a chance to catch up on some things, including cleaning out my
email Inbox, which unearthed a few messages that I need to reply to but
had forgotten about. So if you’ve sent me a message in the past month
and haven’t heard back, you should soon. I’ve got 19 pending items in
by Inbox at the moment, and I hope to get that down to < 10 before I
go to bed.

Also today I wrote a little program, href="http://fettig.net/svn/yarn/trunk/examples/yarncopy.py">yarncopy.py,
which uses Yarn to copy messages from one location to another. It’s
just a little script, 118 lines of code, but since it’s based on Yarn
it can work with lots of different formats and protocols.  You can do href="http://catb.org/%7Eesr/fetchmail/">fetchmail-type things:

yarncopy.py pop://abe@my.server mailto:abe@localhost

Or rss2email-type
things:

yarncopy.py http://fettig.net/rss/rss2.xml \
 mailto:somebody@example.com

And you can even do weird things like IMAP-to-blog:

yarncopy.py imap://mail.example.com/Inbox \
 metaweblog:http://example.com/mt.cgi#Weblog

It will prompt you for user names and passwords as necessary.  Right
now it copies every message, every time, which limits its usefulness,
but with some more work I think it has the potential to become quite a
powerful tool.

I’m moving my mail and web hosting to TextDrive. Hopefully the
transition will be complete by the end of the weekend.

Taking a moment to blog some random things from the past couple of
weeks…

1. Yesterday I got this message from the new iTunes 4.7:

src="http://www.fettig.net/weblog/iTunes Message.png" height="194" width="490">

“This will prevent… AirTunes remote control”? Does anybody know what
that means? A Google search on href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22airtunes+remote+control%22">“AirTunes
remote control” returns a few instances of people wishing for an
AirTunes remote control, but no mention of such a product actually
existing. Is this a hint of things to come?

2. Spammers have been spoofing my email address as the source of
their messages. Not only that, but they went the extra mile and faked a
“Received” header so it looks like the message came through my
provider’s SMTP server. I’m getting a lot of messages bounced back from
non-existent addresses that they’re trying to spam. Two hundred fifty
eight bouncebacks messages in the past three days, to be exact. I’ve
set up a filter to deal with them, but it’s still extremely annoying.

3. I got a new cell phone, a href="http://commerce.motorola.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prrfnbr=262351&prmenbr=126&phone_cgrfnbr=1&zipcode=">Motorola
v505. I like it. It has a camera, which is silly but fun. I’ve been
sending pictures to Hannah, pictures to Flickr, pictures to my href="http://fettig.net/sandbox/mt3/">test blog. There seem to be
a lot of questions, but no answers, regarding its compatibility with href="http://www.apple.com/isync">iSync. If anybody has some
definitive information I’d love to hear it.

4. href="http://homepage.mac.com/amake/shared/docs/software/firefoxy.html">FireFoxy
is a slick little OS X app for making your FireFox widgets look
better.  You wouldn’t think a little thing like that would make much of
a difference, but it does. Every form entry becomes a little more fun.

5. I quit my job.  As of Friday, November 5th, I’m working for
myself again!