simonb.com: a 35mm comedic short about a man

Google have released their chart API. Here’s a few alternatives for Python:

• Matplotlib
• ChartDirector
• jpgraph
• dislin

See also vtk and MayaVi

Google Apps is a marv thing. And free too. Since looping our email through Google we’ve been getting much less spam. But I’ve noticed the following quirks:

1. smtp.gmail.com is clever about the From field. The user I authenticate as is the one that shows up in the From field when the message is received. So even if I set the From field to be info@..., if I login as simonb@… The receiver sees email From simonb@… Once you’ve authenticated most services let you set the From field to whatever you like.

2. Mail from me to me is invisible to POP. I was emailing error messages to myself which appeared to come from me rather than the from the From field I’d set (see above). These messages appear in the GMail online Inbox but when I try to download via POP they are invisible.

The above is solved easily enough by creating a new user to represent my test box and have the email sent as the test-box-user. Proceed.

Here’s a page explaining how to make the sasl_passwd.db file used by Postfix when SMTP relaying mail.

It’s often useful to have a local SMTP server one can throw messages at without passwords and authentication. For example, if you’re doing a quick hack or sending messages from a program like Apple’s Mail. It’s even more useful if your local SMTP server can contact your regular SMTP server to send the messages into the greater interweb.

Macs come with postfix installed which can do just that - but without any graphical means of configuration I doubt most people know it even exists. It is a fully functional mail server though and can be used as such. Postfix Enabler will probably work for most people who want graphical configuration. Others will read Postfix’s excellent docs and edit the config files using vi. However, there are a few cases in which Postfix Enabler falls short. Namely if you’re contacting a SMTP server that expects STARTTLS.

To get postfix to use STARTTLS when contacting a SMTP relay you simply add:

smtp_use_tls=yes

to /etc/postfix/main.cf

Newer versions of Postfix recommend a different way of saying the same thing - check which version you have and read the docs. My Mac has 2.1.5 current release is 2.4.

Doing the above after using Postfix Enabler fixed my problems.

Of course, if Apple respected my choice of email client (Thunderbird) rather than forcing me to use Mail everytime I want to mail an event from iCal none of this would matter.

Yahoo Pipes is very cool. Proof at last that the Internet is a series of tubes.

Baseline Mag has an overview of how MySpace coped with rapid growth. Basically a good lesson in how not to build a dynamic database backed website. 

Here’s a list of some JavaScript books:

• Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig - amazon.com
• PPK on JavaScript by Peter-Paul Koch - amazon.com
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th edition by David Flanagan - amazon.com
• The JavaScript Anthology by James Edwards and Cameron Adams - amazon.com
• Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax by Christian Heilmann - amazon.com
• DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith - amazon.com
• Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith - amazon.com

Personally I spend a lot of time with The Definitive Guide.

Shanghai Metro has a new website. There’s no metro map on the site though. Why would there be?

Note to self: for the following to work on a Mac with fink’s python

xml = urllib2.urlopen("https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent").read()

Your python needs ssl support.

fink install python24-socket-ssl

Phew!

The audited 2005 financial statements for the Mozilla foundation are online. Income from search kick-backs was USD 50 M. Profits after tax where about USD 26 M. Wonder if any of this money will find its way back to the unpaid volunteers… See also Mitchell’s blog.

Firebug 1.0 beta is out. If you’re a web developer you need Firebug. It makes a lot of things easy that used to be a pain. It is marv.

Doctor Fun, the long running Internet cartoon, has come to an end. It started back in 1993 which makes it probably the original Internet cartoon. It is, in my opinion, the best cartoon on the net.

Color wheel demo of differing foreground and background colors and how they affect accessibilty.

Google has a new function that lets you compare search and news results for keywords. Above is an image for the trends for Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. It is interesting to note the following:

• Search Volume: Beijing has the lowest search volume, Shanghai is double Beijing’s and Hong Kong is more than double Shanghai’s
• News volume: Shanghai has the lowest news volume, Beijing and Hong Kong are approximately equal at double Shanghai’s volume

It’s interesting the Beijing and Hong Kong generate about the same amount of news. One would expect Beijing, as the capital, to generate more than Shanghai. But I am surprised how close Hong Kong and Beijing are. Maybe this is the language effect - I am searching in English. Search volume tells another story there is clearly a huge amount of interest in Hong Kong (at least for English searchers) - much more so than for Beijing and Shanghai. If one adds Taipei and Singapore to the results (left as an excercise for the reader) we see Singapore at double Hong Kong for searches while Taipei is the lowest of all five. So in terms of where the action is (at least as far as Google is concerned) we get the following (high to low): Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei. Which is interesting because I’ve visited Singapore many times and I can safely say it is the most boring place on Earth.

Q: What’s the only web browser that my Internet banking supports?
A: IE 6

Q: What’s the most insecure browser you can use?
A: IE 6

Oh, dear…