Author: Matthias

Opera 10 send mail problem

I just discovered I had a mail in my outbox I sent last week. It turned out one of my email accounts was not properly migrated from Opera 9.
I ran Wireshark and it seemed Opera was sending a wrong parameter with the EHLO command (which queries an ESMTP server for its capabilities). It sent EHLO smtpserver instead of EHLO myhostname. Of course the server replied this could not be the case since he was that host himself. =)
So I grepped the accounts.ini file to see where that information could come from. It turned out there was a fqdn property present containing the smtp server name which was not present anymore in a newly created account (yet it seemed to attach some value to it, apparently). So I simply deleted the fqdn property and all was solved. 🙂
Keep in mind, I am upgrading the same opera profile since Opera 7 so I guess my particular upgrade scenario has received less attention. 😉

git through proxy

You’re at work and want to access your git repo who’s residing in the free external world?

create the following config file in your .ssh folder:

Host
ProxyCommand connect -S <proxy host>:<proxy port> %h %p

replace the hosts and port as appropriate.

You can find the connect executable for windows here (contains a lot of other useful socks info as well).
Hat tip to pieter.

drop dropbox

For some time now, I’ve been evaluating dropbox. From time to time, I need to be able to store a file and have it available at another location in a synced fashion. First some history.
Before Dropbox, I was (ab)using gmail through the firefox gspace plugin, but, 1) you need firefox 2) you pollute your mail space 3) it’s buggy and bloated 4) but still doesn’t have all features I want. The reason I chose gspace back in the day, was because it was presumably cross platform through use of the firefox platform. That turned out to become limited functionality and eventually useless at all (may be fixed by now). It had also issues with having your gmail open in a tab at the same time. So I looked for an alternative and dropbox seemed promising.

My requirements for a ‘online storage’ solution are:

  • cross platform native clients: to allow sharing between work and home computers.
  • web interface: when you’re in the wild at someone else’s computer where you don’t want to install a client.
  • corporate-proof: can operate from behind different types of proxies.
  • server-side backup: when you accidentally overwrite a file from another location, or when syncing fails to do the right thing.

My nice-to-have’s are:

  • revision history: same as server-side backup but extended to multiple backups.
  • desktop integration: status overlay (aka tortoise stuff), context menu to perform web actions, for example, revert to some revision, make public, …
  • exclusion filters: handy when you don’t want your lock or temp files (due to editing) to be uselessly synced all the time.

Dropbox seemed to fulfill all my wishes except exclusion filters. Until recently. 🙂 At work, when I resume after suspend, the client doesn’t automatically sync back to the server (this can also be a proxy issue here at work, but it doesn’t work anymore and there’s nothing I can do about it, i.e. it’s closed source). But there are other things that bug me: 1) explorer integration is slow but not optional. So you have to live with it. 2) The (windows) client feels sluggish and quite heavy to load. 3) Linux client always lags behind and the desktop integration is only for gnome. Linux users had to wait long for a release, but even now, they are not treated very well. Then of course, there is the whole discussion of dropbox being closed source but the front-end part being open source, confusing people all around. 🙂 They give the impression they care about the linux users and open source, but in reality, they can’t make it true. In fact, I have no problem using a closed client, but it has to work very well then. 😉
Dropbox has free and paid accounts. The free accounts are limited to 2GB storage and only 30 days history. No problem for me.
So up until recently, I was quite happy with dropbox, but since the windows client fails to reconnect after resume and the linux fails to start, I guess I’m counting its last days. 🙂

If anyone knows a decent cross-platform alternative, please let me know.

But it did raise that thought again in my head: why not try to start an open source online storage sharing solution? Is it so hard? Why does it not exist yet? Of course, I’m not targetting a system which can take loads and loads of people uploading their latest torrents to share with the rest of the family *rolling eyes* 😉 But simply, you know, some system that can handle a few accounts (or even just private) which you can install on your own server and offers basic syncing functionality with some better-than-dumb compression/file-diffing mechanism. Personally, I also wouldn’t need fancy public web sharing like photogalleries and the like, so…

Maybe I’m missing something? 🙂

DIY old timer: Le Patron

Last weekend, I ran into an old pal from high school (Kenny Butstraen) and guess what: he’s building cars! Up until recently, he was mainly focussed on building Le Patron: a kit car based on a Citroen 2CV chassis. Last year, with this car, he was the youngest distributor at the largest car expo in Belgium. For Dutch reading people, there’s an interesting article by HLN.


Le Patron Le Patron

But his real passion is in building authentic replica’s or models of special vehicles, for example, for use in war movies. At least, that’s what I understood from the very short talk I had (we met in a DIY shop just before closing hour ;)) and what I find on the website 🙂


sdkfz1.jpg sdkfz2.jpg

Very interesting stuff! I’ll try to meet up with him and hope to get back to you with more pics from his work place! 🙂