cPanel + ASSP

I was looking in a couple of Spam-related plugins for WHM/cPanel in the summer of 2010.  After some digging and trial runs I decided to buy a licence of “ASSP Deluxe”, which is essentially an integration script + UI for WHM wrapped around the opensource scripts in the ASSP package (Anti Spam SMTP Proxy). So far I’m really pleased with the results. On the current config, it catches close to 99.5% of all spam on my adresses with a couple of false positives (like 1-2 per week). Those false positives are mostly poorly engineered newsletters or notification mails from webservices etc.

I was looking for a solution which keeps admintasks low and doesn’t need constant monitoring. Means, simple/stupid “set and forget”. This is mostly the case with ASSP Deluxe – I’ve only had to fix 1-2 things in the past 6 months which is OK with me. The cool thing was that the problem and a link to the solution was right inside the UI. The link leads you to the support pages of the developer and there are step by step instructions to fix everything back to normal. The integration with WHM works smooth, Gabriel (the guy behind ASSP Deluxe) was setting up everything on my WHM box remotely, so I didn’t had to worry about messing up the conf.

The performance of ASSP depends heavily on configuration. You can go very deep with that. But compared to SpamAssassin which comes with WHM per default, ASSP performs a lot better. It might very well be that you can get there with SA aswell, but that will require some serious config tweakin’ – which is what I don’t have time for.

All in all, it was really worth the (actually rather inexpensive) licence. One less thing to worry about. :-)

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Supernatural

Yes, the SciFi blogging goes on! One of the latest additions to my RSS download queue (he he he..) is Supernatural. I watched all seasons over the past 2 months. Actually, Aasemoon suggested this one to me quite a while ago but I was a bit worried about the whole “theme” of ghosts, demons and stuff – it sounded a bit cheesy first, but then I just got myself the seasons and started watching.. and I couldn’t stop doing that.

And I can only recommend it, if:

  • you like either zombies, vampires, werewolves, demons and (insert creepy creature here) getting slayed for good in a number of very creative ways and with a number of very creative self-made weaponry :-P
  • you like seeing angels getting caught in political wars. That is even compatible to an atheist’s view :-P
  • you like two guys watching doing this who were growing up in the 80s including heavy metal soundtracks and references to all the nerdom you can imagine, including bashing pseudo-nerdom quite a lot :-)
  • you like punch lines from a leather-jacket wearing bruce willis kinda character driving a car that is more dear to him than his brother sometimes :-)


The only time it got a little boring was when the plot handled some internal relation kinda thing, between the two main characters. While this added depth to the relational aspects of the characters, it was boring to watch. However, some of that was also quite interesting with some nice 180° turns which were quite unforeseeable.

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Stargate Universe

I enjoyed Stargate so far, SG1, the direct-to-DVD movies, Atlantis etc. So I had high hopes for Universe. Now that the thing is running for a rather long time already, I can say: It’s .. well .. it’s not really what I expected. :-P First of all, what’s going on with all that “Beverly Hills 90210″ inside the SciFi framework? Jeez, if I wanna watch a soap opera, I do so by watching an actual soap opera, not a supposed SciFi series. Plot writers, don’t get me wrong, I understand that this is what humans do, but heck, does it have to be 30% of the whole storyline – of a _SciFi_ series? Then, the whole alpha dog stuff between the scientist and the military guy. Well thank god this is over now, it was getting very annoying.

Well, all in all, I keep watching it, because I still hope the story goes a bit more interesting and the last two episodes were actually quite good. Besides the fact that the poor guy’s girlfriend got killed. Of course, the nerd’s girlfriend got killed eh? It seems that the series is really just about whom’s girl-/boyfriend gets killed, injured or possessed by alien’s meddling with their minds. :P Well at least that adds some sort of irony. :-P

Anyhow, we’ll see. I kinda miss SG Atlantis, it was at least a bit more witty from time to time.

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Moving on

This blog has become rather unuseful. I just don’t blog much anymore due to the lack of time which I’m currently undergoing. Those past days were an exception to the rule, but that was because I scheduled the publishing of articles.. :-P

I am gonna move away from a “Blog Site” back to a “normal” page, sooner or later. WordPress will be replaced by Drupal as it is currently the thing I’m mostly using everywhere else. Migrating the content off of WP shouldn’t get too difficult.

Some things I’ll consider for the new (12th or so..) incarnation of genox.ch is again centralized content, no more flickr for pictures etc. Those services are just not personal enough.

On Drupal I’ll probably create a lot of different containers which are more like categorized extended Twitter messages than a Weblog per se. Somehow when I say “blogging”, I say “some content which is kinda larger than 3-4 SMS in total”. But for such large things I just don’t have time.

Why not use Twitter altogether and kick this local stuff to nirvana anyways? Well because I kinda hate being depending on 3rd party services, I like doing “my thing” and I’m not looking for attention, nor exposure..

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CCK: Reordering Fields

Another one in the line of “D’oh!” moments. On normal node forms with CCK fields you can order the form elements – but you cannot specify a different order for the node display. The node-order will simply apply to both edit mode and display mode.

Drupal Community to the rescue! Here you go: Content Display Order let’s you do exactly that. One of those small but absolutely necessary Drupal modules which make you go cry in a corner because it took you 1 year to find them. :-P

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CCK: redirection

One of the biggest “D’oh!” moments I had using Drupal in the past 3 years was when I tried to achieve a simple redirection from one page to another (e.g. “virtual” pages with no actual content but needed to have a decent navigation structure). It is possible to do that using the menu editor and creating a menu item, but for most end users this is too complicated.

So here it is, CCK Redirection. A CCK field which lets you specify a target URL and one of three smart redirection methods.

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Limitations of SWFupload

SWFUpload is a JS/Flash library, enabling the upload of multiple files (batch) into media apps or CM systems. In my case Drupal, but AFAIK WordPress uses this library too. It’s a sweet thing to have for content administrators, especially if they have to add a couple of files from time to time. Less frustrating, better user experience.

Recently I ran a lot of pages behind .htaccess files, restricting access to HTTP authenticated users. SWFUpload does not work in such an environment due to one simple fact: Flash can’t (or seems to fail while trying..) authenticate à la HTTP. Well, great huh.. So how can one protect a directory in the webroot without using .htaccess but disabling *.world from accessing it, especially while haveing a full-featured CMS running there?

One reason I want my work-in-progress sites from being inaccessible is to be able to configure all the sitemap submission services before moving the page to the live site. Otherwise, our friendly neighborhood spiders from Google et al will index an unfinished page, leaving “Lorem Ipsum” in the search results and.. argh..

The only way which spontaneously pops into my mind is to restrict the access by IP address. Which again makes things horribly complicated if you’re not working on your dev network or want the client to check it out. But it seems like this is one of the very few options left besides HTTP authentication. Maybe some rough wildcard on the client’s provider’s IP ranges might do the trick. Well, gotta figure this one out sooner or later..

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New EP out: Hourglass

New EP from yours truly.. Click here to download the thing. Published on enoughrecords.

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SSD to the rescue

Installed an SSD as system disk in my hackintosh. Migration worked perfectly, speed is amazing. Regular harddiscs are an incredible bottleneck. :-P Before you buy a new Macbook (for example) upgrade the thing with an SSD HD. It might already provide enough speed.

BTW. The model I chose was the “OCZ Vertex 2″. Seemed to be the best one for OSX due to it’s lack of TRIM support on an OS level.

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Hackintosh Ahoy!

Hooray ye olde swashbuckling, grogg drinking plank lumpets! I’m writing this post on my very first hackintosh which I got to work after 3-4 days of fiddling around and reading, reading, googling, reading, and so on. You get the picture. I have to say, once I got myself the right parts, it was darn easy to install OS X and with the great tools provided by folks like puru.se (Kakewalk) or in my case (haveing a Gigabyte P55-UD5 board) “iBoot + MultiBeast” from TonyMacx86 it was actually rather easy. No command line hacking, no manual kext fiddling. :)

I started this “just for fun” because on one hand, I wanted to get myself again a dedicated gamer PC (I know, but I just can’t stop..). I also wanted to try out this hackintosh thing once and see if I could get it working. Why? Well, just “because”. And in the end, I now replaced my iMac with this very hackintosh setup.

The hardware

  • Gigabyte P55-UD5 (Bios F8)
  • Intel i7 860 (quad core @ 2.8Ghz, overclocked to 3.8 Ghz)
  • 2 x 2GB OCZ HyperX DDR3 Memory (overclocked to 1600 Mhz)
  • nVidia GT 240/1GB
  • A hotswap harddrive bracket which allows me to *physically* swap Win/OS X

Notes

  • If in doubt, boot into safemode using “-x” at the Chameleon-Bootloader prompt. Chances are high that your graphics card’s chipset isn’t natively supported. Booting into safemode allows you to install and run OS X for the first couple of times until you got the drivers properly working.
  • Forget booting off of USB devices. Get a SATA CD-ROM drive. Saves a lot of pain and nerves.
  • RTFM(&forums), *before* ordering the parts :-)
  • RTFM, especially the parts about BIOS settings :-)
  • Patience is a virtue: you’ll reboot about a hundred times but eventually you’ll manage to get it working. :-P
  • Once you get everything working properly, create a CarbonCopy off your OS X drive for easy recovery.


It really comes down to a simple rule: Look at the different hackintosh-methods, then buy the parts which most successful installations use. Not the other way around. The problem in my case was that the motherboard I was looking for initially is already EOL so I had to take the next best thing which turned out to not work using Kakewalk. So I stumbled across tonymac’s iBoot + MultiBeast method. This however didn’t work with the ATI card I bought initially and also, trying to install everything from USB devices turned out to be a huge source for all sorts of bugs and weird behaviours. So in the end, I got myself a SATA DVD-ROM and a cheap nVidia card to fill the gap until the fermi-based cards get a couple of revisions and OS X support. :-)

I guess I learned more about OS X trying to get it to boot on a non-Apple system than by using it every day for 12 hours in the past 5 years. :-)

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The Art of Pragmatism

The web (or let’s say, the technology underneath the hood) is once again facing an evolutionary step towards becoming more userfriendly for both developers and consumers. I put big hopes into CSS3/HTML5 and a more streamlined production process for creating websites due to less workarounds. With more and more websites haveing heavy usage of ajaxified user interfaces, there will be even more streamlining happening in the future. Of course I’m haveing browser compatibility on my mind as I’m writing this. It seems like even Microsoft is understanding now how important it is to support standards and I think they’re trying really hard to get back their share of the cake by starting to get less ignorant. I can only hope they actually walk the way and don’t fall back to old habits.

The numbers of people using old browser versions is still too high to forget about the annoying compatibility round at the end of every design process, but the trend is to force “nice degradation”, rather than “full conversion”. From my point of view, this is the best approach by far and I’ve been practically going there since about a year. This means, designing for state of the art browsers, but with nicely degrading fallbacks for old versions. This is reducing production overhead and costs. I rather spend the time on the initial design than on achieving the same looks with a fossil browser like IE6.

How does this affect the viewer? Well, basically not at all. The functionality has to be the same of course – it just looks a little bit different in the end, downgraded. The content is still being displayed perfectly well and the brave people using current browsers will enjoy the feature richness, while the fallback makes sure that old browsers at least display the information which is meant to be displayed in the first place. And well, if you think about how someone must perceive the web who is *still* using IE6, he might be used to a lot worse and what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t miss, right?

Well, I know, this isn’t exactly new but I know the fight some webdesigners might have over this, inside and with their bosses and clients. It is, however, a matter of displaying key points to why this approach is more efficient. There are tons of objective reasons which support this approach, be it efficiency or to create future proof designs. Be brave. :-)

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Understanding Clients

Dear clients, I don’t mean to insult you or rant about our sometimes tense relationships. We’re all “just” humans, with our very own personal goals and our very own approaches to problem solving. But try to look at it from our perspective, too. I know, you pay the bill so you are the boss. But then, this whole thing doesn’t work if what you actually want doesn’t end up in our place in a form which allows us to actually *understand* what it is, that you want.

It sounds so easy: meet, discuss, define, do. But it’s not. Every human being has a different approach to communication and it is our job to adjust to that. But it’s not just the designers job to take responsibility for understandement, it’s also the client’s job to provide spot-on definitions. In a perfect world, anyways. Don’t worry, we’re always going to figure out a way in the end, but it might turn out frustrating for both parties at some point: for the designer, because he feels lost in a bunch of cloudy definitions and for the client, because he doesn’t feel understood.

Also, you have to realize that you cannot expect quality work to be done on inhuman schedules or right on the first try. It just doesn’t work this way. Dear clients, please try to understand how the creative process works and give us the necessary time and space to come up with the dazzling solutions to the problems you ask us to solve.

Please, don’t expect us to read between the lines all the time. It’s a time consuming task, frustrating and it doesn’t help anyone in the end. Au contraire. It will kill the creative drive, thus affecting the outcome of the solution in a negative way. See, pressure is a good thing to achieve a lot of results in a short time and be productive. But quantity and quality are quite the opposite. No designer has a button on the back of his head which reads something like “Generate a Great Idea” or “Make it Snappy”. It doesn’t work like that. The “perfect solution” is something everyone wants, but realistically, it doesn’t exist. There’s always a gap somewhere between what’s possible and what’s perfect. You can get only as close as possible, which requires a constant stream of constructive feedback from your side, the opinions of others and realistic goals to be set upfront. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now and this is basically what it comes down to: Be communicative, be clear and specific if you know what you want and be open for everything if you don’t know what it is, that you actually want and let us do the job of developing an idea. It is obvious that the latter is the more time consuming approach. The “sweet spot” is somewhere in between regulation and creative freedom. Let us find this spot together and “make it snappy” together. Both sides want to produce great results, this is a fact. But also, both sides need to “adjust” their communication protocol to allow an error-free and clear communication to start with.

See, I love clients. But we expect some love in return, too. :-)

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Winter Impaired

This is why I don’t like winter: At some point half way through it, I start to get the winter-blues really hard. Like now. I’m constantly tired, no matter how much coffee I drink, no matter how much I sleep. I usually have a nap sometime in the late afternoon to get back to work and have a couple of actually productive work hours past six in the evening. Otherwise I’d just be zombie-ing around in front of my screen and clicking on links in Google reader. I already need more sleep than the average human being. But this is somewhat annoying. :P Or maybe I’m just hopelessly overworked. That’s another option. Can I haz some sunshinez, pleez?

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Epson R2880: Proofing 2.0

I already wrote an article about printing proofs with the Epson R2880, little more than a year ago. Since then, I tried out various approaches. Here’s what works best for me and what I still consider a “low budget” solution, compared to a professional RIP of course. ;-)

  • First, the hardware: The Epson R2880 is a pretty reliable printer. If you use it frequently, that is. This printer needs to be used at least a couple of times a week to prevent clogging. Also, it doesn’t like low air humidity. Trust me, it *will* clog eventually. But otherwise, fantastic price/quality ratio.
  • Second, the ink. Using OEM ink will most likely cause your budget to explode. My first try in refillable ink was efillink.com. They resell a pigment ink which is slightly less glossy than the OEM ink. Saves quite a lot of $$$. There’s also a german store, farbenwerk.com, which offers different brands of refill inks. Once I run out of ink, I’ll get my next batch from there (shipping’s obviously a lot cheaper from .de to .ch than from the US..).
  • Third, the paper. Thanks to a friend of mine, I have access to original Epson paper with a small discount. Works for me.
  • Fourth, the software. If you run OSX, there’s no way around Printfab Pro. I run it on my MacMini server, network sharing works perfectly and so does the RIP software.
  • Fifth, and basically the most important part: The calibration. I use Spyder3 + color eyes pro for my iMac/Eizo CG24W screen-setup and Spyder3 PrintSR for printer calibration. This was the second largest expense all together, but well worth it.
  • Sixth, the knowledge: RTFM. I’m not kidding. Color calibration is by far the most “cloudy” technology I came across and everybody tells you something different. Especially on the internet. :P It’s best to stick to the literature that’s shipped with your software and hardware.


This setup enables me to create combinations of settings/profiles for every known printer, ink and paper and therefore maximum flexibility at the lowest possible cost. And for the same price for which you have to buy a RIP software license, you even get professional screen calibration and a color spectrometer to read color patches and make your own ICC profiles – and not just for one printer.. I think this is by far the best quality/price ration that you can possibly get. Total investment: Around 2’000 CHF, including inks, paper, software licenses, all hardware.

The result is by far better than I expected and can be labelled “pretty darn accurate®”. Maybe there’s even a way to get this workflow FOGRA certified. :P But afterall, I’m not a printshop. If your client wants a FOGRA certified proof, it’s safer to order one from your printshop and have your client pay for it. The difference however is ridiculously small. There’s a bigger difference from one offset printshop to another.

Ed.: Forget Refill Ink. It stinks, clogs your printheads and makes you go nuts in all sorts of different ways. I switched back to original Epson Ink for the 2880 and in return have a loooot less problems. Unless you can’t afford to buy OEM ink. But then, why did you buy that printer in the first place?

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Nodes: Inserting Images

While Drupal provides a lot of extensions and gimmicks, one of the big downsides currently is image handling. Basic image handling, like inserting images into a node’s body field are quite the task to achieve – there’s plenty of approaches but almost all fail at some point. Mostly because of bugs or lack of basic features.

Basically, from the enduser point of view, a vanilla install of Drupal (stable/core) doesn’t provide any way of creating richtext content, including image embedding. Instead, there are like 7 different ways to do this. One of the things I would like to have changed in Drupal 7 is … While I’m typing this blog post in WordPress, I notice 2 things: first, I never had to worry a single second about WYSIWYG functionality. Second (and most important), media asset management and embedding options are already there, with all the gimmicks you can imagine. Or, to be more specific, with all the gimmicks you actually *need*.

I wish to see the same approach for Drupal. I don’t want to choose between 8 different richtext-editors, nor between 4 different approaches on inserting an image into text. I want to have TinyMCE in the Drupal core and a streamlined image handling using CCK/FileField: a) because CCK is moved to core and b) because Insert (formerly known as “FileField Insert”) does this thing with a few tweaks already and so far is the most promising approach to streamlined content creation and editing.

After all, it took me around half a year now to find an actually stable, easy to handle and overhead-less solution for this. Most of the functionality I’m currently using isn’t even marked “stable” yet, thus I’m taking a big risk for a feature which is considered “basic” from the enduser POV. Making content creation and media management easy is the whole point of a web content management system, isn’t it? Thus, I officially vote for a core solution for that! :-)

I previously wrote that ImageAssist is a nice solution for exactly that. There’s a number of problems with IA which made me switch to a simpler solution (FileField/Insert): a) it doesn’t support ImageAPI/ImageCache/CCK, which is becoming the new de-facto standard for filehandling with D7, b) avoid using unnecessary JS based UI functionality if you rely on a colorful selection of components, c) I ran into all sorts of basic styling problems and wasn’t able to find workarounds for most of them, d) the usability is a pain, e) buggy and slow release cycles, f) and that is a general rule: avoid anything which opens a popup-window and is a key component. :P Keep it simple stupid, please.

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