A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
March 27
I'm not entirely clear why I added In The Electric Mist
to my watchlist, but it was a really enjoyable movie with some
excellent music and some perhaps intentional, perhaps
unintentional humour.
March 24
Still haven't solved the Postfix config problem. It's nice that
I've got debugging and a script to exercise the desired pass/fail
scenarios, but it's frustrating that everthing I try to enable one
condition breaks the other, and vice versa.
March 21
Well, on the upside, I now know how to do debug logging for a
specific sender IP in Postfix. Alas, I have not managed to debug
my specific problem: I want allmail@example.com to wind
up in the waider mailbox, but I do not want to receive
spam where someone purports to be someluser@example.com
and thereby bypasses the various hurdles I am attempting to put in
the way of this. It seems that as soon as you say "virtual domain
goes to mailbox", even sender addresses are rewritten to check
against the allowlist which is exactly what I don't want and also
seems to contradict what
the documentation says.
To be abundantly clear: I'm trying to block envelope-level
spoofing. It appears that it will happily iterate over the rules
I've provided, and at some point stumble on "oh, someluser@example.com
is an example.com address and so maps to waider
and is thereby permitted. Yay!" and I toss virtual config out the
window again. This
says nothing about virtual, canonical, rewrite, or
aliases; this
suggests that the rewriting only happens after the mail is queued,
but the testing I'm doing doesn't even get to the point of
submitting the mail, just the envelope headers, and I can see
that's returning me a 250 response and the logs show it's
done a virtual lookup in order to arrive at this conclusion. In
fact I'm looking that page again right now and it says, "Virtual
aliasing is applied only to recipient envelope addresses,
[...]." (my underlining). Right there in black and
white. LIES.
Maybe I'll figure it out tomorrow. Note, this is broken on a live
server I own; I'm trying to fix it on the new server I'm setting
up so I can never again see a faked-sender-envelope
spam.
March 20
Dead of Winter,
in which Emma Thomson does a sort of badass Frances
McDormand. It's a good movie, with approximately the same sort of
pacing as the speech in that part of the world - slow, but
relentless. I was calling the shots a bit in places - there are a
lot of Chekov's Guns in this movie - but that didn't
detract from it.
March 18
Dammit, another one of my scrapers just had the format changed
from out under it. Five minutes of hackery verifes that the
replacement is parseable, but will need more work than
e.g. a trivial renaming of CSS selectors.
March 16
Voyager, in which Star Trek does Stephen King's
Christine. Kinda silly.
New mail server is up and configured with DKIM, DMARC and SPF
outbound. No idea what's currently enabled inbound beyond Can't
Spoof Me. Will find out shortly how regrettable that is, I
imagine. I will say it's nice having a more-or-less throwaway
domain to test this stuff out on, since if I screw it up it's no
big deal.
March 15
Tesco delivery notice format change again. As before
it's moving towards cleaner HTML but it doesn't make it any less
annoying to have to figure out what they've done and update my
scripting accordingly. I do try to make this stuff deal
with variations in input, but there's a point at which you have to
embrace the crazy and pin down an exact class attribute, or an
arbitrary hierarchy, and those are the things that
break.
March 14
Beverly Hills Cop?
don't mind if I do. It's aged a bit (or I have, or both), but it's
still a pretty decent movie.
March 13
Misconduct
kept us guessing right to the end who was pulling the strings -
and why - but the last scene was, I think, an unnecessary gotcha
added to the back of the story. Also the lead character had a
worse sense of decision-making than Twilight girl.
March 12
Discovering which bits of my server setup are so stale they no
longer have equivalents on new installations. Dammit. Also very
cautiously setting up an email server. Which, well,
hurdles. Hoops. Flaming barrels.
March 10
Server sufficiently up to support a webserver, albeit without
any of my usual toys yet wired up. Oooh. I'll finally be able to
stop referring to Python3 explicitly as python3 in order
to avoid the Python2 lurking on the old server.
March 9
Further to last night: I'm aware I have yet again started
another project without finishing the previous one. DVD ripping
will be back, this server build thing is on a bit of a
timeline.
March 8
I have embarked upon a long-delayed server rebuild project,
combined with a server relocation project, which means that the
rebuild shouldn't interfere with things until I switch over to it.
That's the plan, anyway.
March 7
The Journey
has been on my watchlist for a while and we finally got around to
it this evening. It's flawed but fun. Meaney's McGuinness is
pretty good; Spall's Paisley doesn't have the look quite right but
the accent and mannerisms seem to work well enough. Blair's
bumbling soundbite-heavy approach is wonderful, and their
Bertie Ahern looks more like his predecessor and isn't given any
useful screen time anyway. Overall I really enjoyed
this.
March 6
The Holcroft Covenant
is pretty much straight-up 80s cheese. It's funny looking at
well-made movies from this period because then you see something
like this movie and the difference is a bit stark. Anyway, Michael
Caine runs around with a bunch of different people and the movie
does a good job of keeping you guessing who's on which side, but
that aside this is fairly forgettable stuff. Also that parade in
Berlin was entirely gratuitous.
March 5
Noticed that tonight's ST:Voyager blurb didn't match the episode
we were watching, so checked and ... yep, Virgin Media has found a
new and interesting way to stiff us on season
recordings. It looks like we're missing the end of S5/start of S6
episodes which I imagine is a cliffhanger plus resolution
setup.
March 3
Managed to recover a time machine backup from the dreaded 'Time
Machine has arbitrarily decided that fsck no longer fixes things'.
March 1
Finally got around to upgrading my Mac to Tahoe. First
impressions: I can no longer tile 9 terminal windows on my laptop
screen using default settings. This is mildly annoying - I don't
usually use the full 3x3 layout, but I had been using 3 across the
bottom and 2 or 3 on the right edge, neither of which works
now. I'm not sure if this is font changes or chrome changes -
possibly a bit of both. It occurs to me that it'd be handy to have
a gadget I could feed in my desired geometry to and get back a
list of settings that would allow that (font size, whatever tuning
I can apply to window trim, etc.)
The upgrade itself: I shut down all my apps prior to running the
upgrade. When the laptop rebooted, it appears to have reverted not
even to the pre-shutting-down-apps session, but an older session
from our weekend in London where I had a couple of
camera-monitoring apps open. I have no idea. Also the
"your laptop has been upgraded to Tahoe" box that popped up on
first login after the upgrade was kinda jarring - looked
unfinished, almost blunt by comparison to the usual Apple
fare.
My ssh connections are warning me about "post-quantum
cryptography". Clearly I'll need to read a manual or
two.
Hmm. Bumping the resolution from 1710whatever (???) to 1920 gives
me back lots of room for my terminals with not much appreciable
difference in other things. Maybe I'll need to do a bit of font
tweaking since it now looks like I could fit 3.5x3
terminals.
Definitly not enjoying "everything is round". I mean, look. The
screen is a rectangle, mostly. Making huge rounded corners just
wastes space.
The Markdown "support" added to Notes leaves a bit to be
desired. Exporting as Markdown creates a folder and puts your note
inside it; importing creates a new folder in Notes called
"Imported Notes" (and Imported Notes 1, and Imported Notes
2...). I'd really much prefer if it supported Markdown via
copy/paste.