Ham → @huangfamily.com → huangfamily.com@gmail.com → gmail@huangfamily.com → Deliver

Spam → @huangfamily.com → huangfamily.com@gmail.com → Gmail Spam folder

At the top of my .procmailrc file (which handles all mail sent to @huangfamily.com), I added the following rule:

The rule basically says, send all new messages to Gmail, and if they return, deliver them. Since Gmail doesn't forward spam, only clean messages will return. To prevent loops, the rule checks for the X-Forwarded-For header set by Gmail when it forwards messages. Messages sent directly to gmail@huangfamily.com are dropped.

I suppose that a smart spam bot could fake the X-Forwarded-For header. They can't fake Received headers, though, so if this starts happening, I could replace the condition with one that checks that the message was sent from a google.com relay.

• [dannf@debian.org: Bug#360003: xine-lib: implicit pointer conversion]

xine-lib built from CVS should work.

Use of uninitialized value in hash element at /mt/extlib/CGI.pm line 554

That's if you're lucky and you're debugging with cgiwrapd. Otherwise you will probably just get an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.

The offending link looks like this:

/mt/plugins/StyleCatcher/stylecatcher.cgi?;from=list_templates;blog_id=1

But I was also able to make mt.cgi die by just passing it

/mt/mt.cgi?;foo

Here's a patch which fixes the problem for me.

--- MT-3.2-en_US/extlib/CGI.pm  Wed Oct 12 08:55:56 2005
+++ mt/extlib/CGI.pm    Tue Jul 11 19:18:56 2006
@@ -546,6 +546,7 @@
     my($param,$value);
     foreach (@pairs) {
        ($param,$value) = split('=',$_,2);
+       next if not defined $param;
        next if $NO_UNDEF_PARAMS and not defined $value;
        $value = '' unless defined $value;
        $param = unescape($param);

--- MT-3.2-en_US/lib/MT/Template/ContextHandlers.pm     Tue Oct  4 17:01:01 2005
+++ mt/lib/MT/Template/ContextHandlers.pm       Sun Feb 12 00:14:12 2006
@@ -1045,7 +1045,11 @@
     $words = 40 unless defined $words && $words ne '';
     my $excerpt = _hdlr_entry_body($ctx, { words => $words, %$args });
     return '' unless $excerpt;
-    $excerpt . '...';
+    my $body = _hdlr_entry_body($ctx, { words => ($words + 1), %$args});
+    if ($excerpt ne $body) {
+       $excerpt .= '...';
+    }
+    $excerpt;
 }
 sub _hdlr_entry_keywords {
     my $e = $_[0]->stash('entry')

Here's a trick I use to host several different websites on huangfamily.com without having to pay for additional virtual domains each month. I had to pay one-time vanity domain charges for each site, but I use the magic of mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file to provide the illusion that each site is hosted separately.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} .*craftlog\.org$
RewriteRule ^index.html$ craftlog/ [L]

RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} .*princetonjudo\.(org|net)$
RewriteRule ^index.html$ princetonjudo/ [L]

RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} .*oomny\.net$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/oomny/.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ oomny/$1 [L]

craftlog.org and princetonjudo.org are both Movable Type blogs stored in subdirectories of the huangfamily.com document root. Requests for the front pages of each site are rewritten to requests for their subdirectories. oomny.net is Ariel's website hand-coded in WordPad. Requests to Ariel's site are silently prepended with oomny/. I gave her full FTP access to the oomny/ subdirectory and just told her to code as if it were the document root of her server.

• Export iTunes Playlist to M3U
• Using Export Playlist to M3U with an Archos Jukebox
• things: iTunes2m3u update
• XML.com: Hacking iTunes

Specifically, I couldn't get any of them to convert my music collection to M3U for import into amaroK. Either the script didn't work, ran only on a Mac, didn't convert 8-bit filenames correctly, couldn't handle UTF-8 encoded track names, or all of the above. So I wrote my own Python script to do it.

My music resides on an NTFS partition that is obviously not mounted as C:/My Documents/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Music on my Linux partition. The script takes an option for automatically replacing the path to the Music Folder with an alternate path, e.g., /mnt/Music/ or something similar. It takes an iTunes XML file as input and writes the playlists to .m3u files.

• itunes2m3u.py