Andy Dixon

I unfortunately advised someone a while back to use Simply Mail Solutions for their email hosting.

This was a big mistake.

They seem to think that it is a sensible idea to block encrypted zip files. Not that spammers would send encrypted zip archives, and if they did, some simple bayesian filtering would be able to identify a ‘your password is..’ element in an email message.

So, on quizzing Simply Mail Solutions, the response that they gave for us to relay to a City Council on sending sensitive content is:

We would suggest that ******** City Council could provide the file they are sending in a non-encrypted format which would then, providing it is virus free, arrive in your mailbox.

Which means that they seem to think as a ‘professional’ email hosting service, that it is perfectly fine to send sensitive information unencrypted. Obviously they have no problem if it was their information being bounced around the internet unencrypted..

Seriously though, sounds like there’s a power crazed BOFH who obviously does not now how to properly configure spam and virus filtering properly and using FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) to their advantage. I have seen to many of them, and I love it when they come crashing down.

I keep getting emails from production companies which should be going to Andy Dixon Facilities, and I keep forwarding them on. Its annoying to say the least. I even offered to sell my www.andydixon.co.uk domain name to them and they didn’t even have the decency to say ‘Thank you but no’.

So, if you by any chance are reading this, not that anyone does read my blog, you can still have the domain name, but I am no longer forwarding emails for you. Anyone sending emails to my thinking that they are you will not be getting any response, or depending on how cantankerous I am feeling may get an email questioning their researcher’s researching skills.

If the money is right, I may even part with my andydixon.com, but that would be considerably more…

I needed PHP 5.2 on Centos 5, so the following gave me the extra repositories which hold lots more stuff:

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm
rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm


Then:

yum --enablerepo=remi update php


Today, after a tragic day at work (my development VM died amazingly, had to create a new VM and, being centos, had problems mounting the other VM’s hard disk due to conflicting LVM names. Long story short, managed to rename it, and after 45 mins of inode errors started copying it all across to a new VM.

Anyway, today, I am dead chuffed since my veg plot has started to take form. I now have Strawberries, Tomatoes, and Cauliflower all planted up. The strawberries seem to be fruiting already, as are the tomatoes. Tomorrow, I should hopefully expand on this further, and grow even more vegetables.

After a rather stressful afternoon with the kids, I am left on my own with the drone of the aircon kicking out non-muggy air, sober and with a bastard of a backache. Think I dinged my back doing something. Nontheless, the baby monitor is on and I can hear the ocasional coughing of my youngest.

I tarted up my blog a bit too. Gave it a slightly fancier header. Brief but fun.

So far, my experiment in blogging is not going very well. I havent updated for a while, and here I am writing a draft on my Blackberry whilst feeding my youngest son.

I have spent most of my time a somewhat ‘hacky’ coder – everything from obscure variable names, to no comments and no formatting. Over the last few months, I have been straightening things up, comments, formatting, logical thought processes.

My development VM at home now has the debugger module running, so I am excited about giving it a go, but being on my own for a weekend with two ‘little angels’ may mean I’ll be spending my time playing Bloons 3 instead.

Until later, need to provide yogurt to the little one now.