Ness' Outpost

I was having mail bounce last week with this message going out to people trying to email me.

Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

This is the Postfix program at host jackd.nesser.org.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the message returned below.

The Postfix program

<null@nesser.org>: can’t create user output file

I remember having this problem in the past and I just deleted a bunch of old emails and things went back to normal. At lunch today I had some time so I investigated the problem and set the maximum size to infinity for my mailboxes now. So if there is room on the hard drive, my email will keep coming in.

In the postfix main.cf file simply set this variable:

### No maximum size to a mailbox
mailbox_size_limit = 0

Sorry for the interuption in service. Things should be back in order now.

These differences are a result of the SOAP specification being somewhat vague in some areas… These variations in implementation can mean the difference between a properly functioning system and days spent popping Advil.

Ferrara & MacDonald – pg 79

Lauren and I went to the auto show in Toronto this weekend. We saw lots of cars that I will likely never be able to afford and maybe a few that I could.

I did my “proof of concept” demonstration for the service department this morning. It went pretty well, the demo went smoothly, but I didn’t cover all the little things that seem cool to me but in reality aren’t all that interesting to people who don’t deal with the inner workings of software.

The two interfaces were described, one being wireless and on a handheld scanner and the other a web based front end. The web service which was the unsung hero of the demo didn’t get any exposure but made the whole thing work, but only I could see the SOAP messages flying though the air!

I took a quick snapshot of my workspace. There isn’t anything magical or proprietary in the image so don’t get excited, but this is where I spend 8 hours of my waking week days. :)

Notice the wireless AP, handheld Symbol scanner and the stack of books, the top one is a C# and .NET development book. The two sheets of paper on the wall marked up with a highlighter is a packet trace of my first web service bug. Now sitting there as a prize for a job well done.

In your opinion, which situation is more secure?

• Giving your credit card to an employee at a restaurant.
• Purchasing something online with a secure connection to the sellers website.

Joel Spolsky – from the fame of joelonsoftware.com fame has published an article about “JavaSchools”.

“JavaSchools” are the Universities and Colleges that have migrated their curiculum to a Java only environment. I would extend that (pun intended) to include .Net tools as well though Mr. Spolsky doesn’t take it that far. These are the schools who are more interested in teaching students how to use technologies instead of how to think and develop their own solutions.

I think Joel sums things up pretty well. Learning how to do something difficult is often more rewarding than just having something handed to you, especally when things start to go wrong. Joel has a different frame of mind though as someone wishing to hire new grads he’s looking for people who can solve problems, not work within the framework.

I suggest you read his article.

I saw this post on /. today and had to check it out. The Christmas season is coming and if you want to get your favorite keyboard jocky something to read over the holidays here is a pretty good selection.

Personally I could do without the UML, design patterns and stuff like that. But I really do want to own Knuths volumes, that’s on my list. Replace CVS with SVN, throw in Code Complete and a few more books like “Hackers and Painters” and you’ve got a pretty good shelf.

I’m going to have to take my own photo once I get all my books in one place. They are distributed over multiple sites and some are on loan right now too. I’m down with the swapping of books on a borrowed basis.

If you are ever wondering how geeky you are just go to an IEEE meeting and you’ll meet the alpha of the flock. I went to the meeting tonight in Burlington at Gennum where the presentation focused on television technologies. The speaker mentioned that rear projection models give the best value over LED and Plasma TV’s currently.

Apparently as TV’s get larger the more noticeable the flaws in the signal become. These flaws are introduced by compression/decompression (up to 50%), signal errors, low bandwidth of HD signals (so providers can squeeze more channels into the signal) and the way film is digitized.

The chips that Gennum creates are able to autosense and correct these errors in the signal as well as having the ability to autodetect 60 of the common signal types (PAL, NTSC, etc.). The chip is able to decode and present at least two independent channels of data including resizing the signal on the fly and overlaying graphics and text on the signal for menus.

Overall the presentation was concise and to the point. I was a little irritated by one audience member who felt it his calling in life to distract the speaker and inturrupt whenever he felt the need. There’s always one in a croud.

At the end of the presentation pens with a blue LED lights in them were given out. Now I am able to write in the dark if the need ever arises.

This morning I was so excited to have received a letter from Australia. But there wasn’t a letter, just little pieces of plastic with some screening on them. That’s right, I finally have my pocket protectors.

I’m already putting them to good use now that I’ve started up a rewrite of my configuration code from my summer contract. I’m just sitting here waiting to hear back from employers – I might as well do something.

You can find my development ongoing at code.nesser.org. It is no where near done, in fact the Makefile will not even build the project yet, but I do have the linked list module completed and abstracted away from the storage. Now I’m working on persistant storage to and from a file. Next is the CLI parsing and calling the lower levels.

So as you can see I’m doing some bottom up development. Feel free to test and file tickets or suggestions in the tracker if you have some free time.