I've just received an e-mail from an ISP we manage at work that the Southern Cross Cable has been damaged due to storm activity. So if anyone notices a slow-down between Australia and the USA, this would explain it. I will be curious to see if InterNode's investment in bandwidth via Asia to the USA shields their customers from this most recent Southern Cross dilemma. Internoders.....comments??

I'm not going to bore everyone with stuff they've read elsewhere. This is purely my first impressions for the sake of posterity. So with no more intro, here it is, my top five new features in Leopard/iLife '08 I can't live without:

1. Spaces. Some people hate them, I can't live without them. Organise my work spaces into logical areas in a virtual space. Make sense? No? Tough. Get a Mac!
2. iPhoto '08. Nothing revolutionary in the product but a nice evolution from the '06 iteration I've been used to. The interface is a lot more intuitive and polished. Now to find another plugin that will allow me to upload directly into the galleries here at the Gray Matter and I'll be set.
3. Tabbed terminals. We've all (by now) seen tabbed browsers and Unix environments (KDE/Gnome/Enlightenment/et al) have had tabbed terminals for a long time. It's so good to have the same functionality in OSX. Now I can open one terminal program and run many shells without cluttering up my work space. W00t.
4. Apple Mail. The new RSS integration is superbly done and well integrated. I can now read my RSS feeds just as easily as my e-mail. This totally kicks butt.
5. Speed. It's faster than Leopard from a purely subjective point of view. Applications open faster, switching between apps is snappy without significant lag, boot up and shutdown is not painful. All round, even with all the eye-candy, the whole system feels faster.

Another noteable mention is the "stacks" feature which greatly reduces clutter in the dock. Don't know what I'm talking about? Then get a mac :P Seriously, you wont regret it.

I'm not going the end with "insert non-Mac system here" bashing, but I will say that in terms of intuitive interface, usability/features out-of-the-box, speed and overall "polish" Leopard makes the other offerings in the market today look decidedly dated. Vista looks good, don't get me wrong, but damn(!!) could BE any slower? Linux (the desktop distributions) are fantastic for out-of-the-box features and productivity tools but compatibility problems with new and/or exotic hardware can make getting going non-trivial, especially for the new Linux user.

Compatibility is really a moot point on OSX; if you don't own a Mac then you can't install it (without some serious hacking). That in a lot of ways is what so good, and at the same time bad about OSX - Apple never have to worry about obscure hardware combinations, but if you don't like their hardware, there aren't a lot of options to modify specifications greatly. If they didn't build it, you're on your own. Microsoft and Linux are in a totally different world of pain having to ensure support for all manner of different components, and then having to make sure they all play nice together, which we all know is easier said than done. I'm not convinced that Vista would be selling as well as it is if it weren't for the OEM market bundling deals that Microsoft have done - regardless of the legality or "fairness" of those deals (I'm not going into that...most people know my thoughts).

But I digress. Leopard is everything we were promised for the next iteration of OSX; Apple did not disappoint. However, initially the annoucement was OSX and iLife would be bundled and not be separate products once Leopard hit the market. This didn't happen. My only guess is that after seeing what was on offer in Vista, Steve Jobs decided there was no good business or marketing reasons to bundle the two cash-cows for Apple to remain competitive. Who knows. Even so, the purchase price for OSX+iLife is still significantly less than a comparable Vista bundle and you get arguably the best desktop operating system available, period. I'm one very happy Mac user.

After spending a fair amount of time yesterday getting my Mac Mini rebuilt as my desktop machine (it has spent the last 18 months of its life faithfully as the Gray Matter mail, web and everything-else server) I was most disappointed this morning when I couldn't get Apple Mail to stay up long enough to read a single message. After about an hour of googling I decided that none of the fixes seemed to be applicable to my situation.

So I decided that rather than try and let someone else solve the problem, I'd try and think it through. Being a new installation, less that 24 hours old, it's not too hard to go back in your mind through the step you made in building the system. So one at a time I started mentally trying to pinpoint the moment when everything went pop. Then it dawned on me. Before I put the mini to sleep last night I installed Growl. Even though their site simply advises you need OSX 10.4 or better (I have 10.5.1) there are evidently some problems with Growl 1.1.2 and OSX 10.5.1; specifically Apple Mail. In short, the mail plugin for Growl will cause Apple Mail 3.1, as shipped with OSX 10.5.1 to completely fail with a segmentation fault. After disabling the Growl mail plugin, all of a sudden all my e-mail came back to life.

Like most new software platforms, OSX 10.5, Leopard, is a steady evolution of its predecessors. However, this introduces a number of compatibility concerns for third party developers and OEM's. Given how Apple took an open source project called "Cover Flow" and integrated into their base operating system (and now made it even more pervasive in Leopard) it seems odd to me they haven't done a similar thing with Growl. It seems every Mac user I know has Growl installed if for nothing else than for mail and IM notifications. So get with it Apple, either built your own notification framework and user-space applications, or take Growl and do your Apple magic with it :)

As many people know, I run a mail system for myself and a few other family members and friends. Up until this week it used a very robust backend being driven by Mac OSX and postfix, mailscanner, spamassassin and clamav. However, in my day job I've been gaining a lot of experience and respect for a bundled open source platform called Zimbra. So I thought I could kill two birds with a one nuke and drop Zimbra onto a new Linux-powered machine. In principle, this was (and still is) a good idea. It provides me, as an administrator, a number of benefits such as:

• Centralised user/account management
• Extremely simple deployment of virtual domains etc
• Intuitive web administration as well as a plethora of command line tools (so I can roll my own scripts for routine tasks etc)
• Having everything in one place makes backup (and restore) a LOT simpler
• Being a commercial product with an open-source alternative means I get the best of both worlds: an free product with a proactive vendor constantly developing and improving their product.

All these benefits mean I have more time to spend doing things that I enjoy and less time doing mundane stuff that I really hate. Also it gives me a real-life test environment with real-world mail feeds that I can experiement with before deploying anything on the production systems in my day job.

Of course, I'm not the only winner. Users of my system can now do all sorts of things they couldn't before. Such as:

• Manage their own mail and account details in a single web interface.
• Store mail on the server and have it filtered server-side.
• A featureful web mail client with their own address book.
• Ability to create RSS feeds for specific mail folders (or their entire mailbox) which opens up a whole new way to interact with the mail server.

There are other features as part of Zimbra such as secured (SSL/TLS) mail that were part of the old system too.

It is this last feature though that is causing me all the grief. Over the last 3 days, since deploying the new server, a single feature has failed miserably. Sending mail requires users to authenticate themselves so the system knows they are allowed to send mail through the server. Otherwise, the server would be an open mail relay which are the bane of the Internet and good way to get yourself onto so many block lists the server would be rendered useless within a day or two at the most. I'm busting a valve trying to fix this, but in the meantime, at least webmail works completely!!

Warning - serious geek tech follows :)

Despite all my efforts to get this one little feature working, all I've managed to ddo is eliminate a bunch of things that aren't causing the problem. Finally, it's come down to a rather complex interaction between four components: postfix -> saslauthd -> tomcat(via soap) -> ldap. In that chain, it appears the failure is in the interaction between postfix and saslauthd but getting any meaningful information out of the standard logging has proven to be difficult at best and utterly useless the rest of the time. Seems I am going to need to break out some big guns and start doing stack traces and library traces to see where this is falling down. In any case, this is several orders of magnitude more complex than it should be for a bundled product from a commercial vendor being installed onto a supported platform.

Having resisted the pressure from friends I finally caved in and joined Facebook. Yeh, yeh, I'm now a web 2.0 (sic) whore and all that. The good thing is that I've made contact with some long-lost friends from high school and other people who I worked with the aviation industry etc. Whilst this website is good for posting my personal thoughts and happenings, it's rather "isolated" in that I'm the only one here. I'll continue to update this site and it will still be my main outlet but for those less important notes and ramblings, head over to Facebook.

I've seen this before, but it arrived in my mailbox today from a friend. Given my previous employment in the aviation industry and my current career in information technology, I think this is a great cross-over :) Enjoy!

A number of people use my mail server to filter their ISP mail. In other words, mail from their ISP is redirected to my server, which then scans (viruses and spam...among other things) then delivers it to a Gray Online mailbox. I'm proud that most of the people using my server have noticed a significant difference between my filtering and most ISP's. Namely, my filters ACTUALLY WORK! Why? Simple - I've been basically a full-time e-mail and Unix administrator for the better part of the last decade. I know e-mail and I've seen the rise of spam and viruses. Consequently I've been able to adapt my filters in small evolutionary steps, rather than having nothing and having to revolutionise my mail systems (like most ISP's seem to have done).

Enough trumpet blowing, the core of my mail system's "brains" comes from one open source package; MailScanner written by a guy named Julian Field. MailScanner then plugs into a number of other tools like SpamAssassin, ClamAV and MailWatch for MailScanner. However it is ClamAV I'm most impressed with at the moment.

Happy Easter! Welcome to the new and improved Gray Matter. What? You can't tell the difference? Sheesh! The lack of gratitude is insulting :P Seriously though, all the changes are in the back-end and have very little effect on how the site looks. The upgrade has vastly improved spam detection for comments and track-backs along with a number of other security fixes. Kudos to all the developers over at Geeklog! I've also clarified the copyright for all the work on this site and added a short warning to all potential bandwidth leechers on the About Us page. You leech, your site will have a referrer ban slapped on it :)

Anyway, just wanted to put a quick note to explain the downtime yesterday (if anyone noticed) and say happy easter! Take care y'all.

You may have noticed that The Gray Matter has a new domain. I've registered "gray.net.au" recently and have now moved everything to the new domain. Along with the new domain, I have installed a new (and vastly improved) gallery to house all our photos. Please follow the Photos link and check it out. As before, only registered users can see the full-size images in most of the galleries, so if you haven't already registered, now is a good time! Let me know if you find any broken links or weird happenings...there were plenty over the weekend and I can guarantee I haven't nailed all the bugs :P

I don't normally broadcast when we're heading away for a week or so (I have to think about the security of my unoccupied house!) so I'm announcing our return from Cairns! We decided that it was a good time to steal a week and see my parents and my brother and his family. Considering my girls hadn't seen their "Pa" since early this year, and Elise had never met him, it was a great trip purely from that perspective. We got up to other things too...