I really hate complaining about Dreamhost, I know it may seem like I enjoy it, but I really don't.

This is probably no surprise to some of you.  But remember the custom .procmail setups I wrote about a few months back.  To catch you up, no one can create a mail user with shell access on Dreamhost anymore.  This means that custom .procmail setups cannot be done anymore.(There may be a work around to this, but it has not been accomplished yet)  Dreamhost previously told us that anyone who had an email address with shell access would be grandfathered in and would be able to keep it.

Well not anymore.  I have received warnings from other Dreamhost users that once your account is "upgraded" in the upcoming migration process, you will lose all custom .procmail setups and all mail accounts will lose their shell access.  All of this has happened with NO WARNING for a number of users.

This means you may wake up in the morning and find that your custom filtering no longer works.  More and more it looks like Dreamhost no longer wants to host email.

Continue reading "Dreamhost Will Delete ALL Custom .procmail Setups in the Next Year"

I looked quickly and did not see any code out there to determine the nth occurrence of a specific day of the week in a month.  For example Thanksgiving is the 4th Thursday in November.  So I designed the following

<?php
$year = 2012; //Pick your year
$interval = 4; //Week number, in this case the 4th week
$dayofweek = 4; //Day of week 0=Sun, 1=Mon. . .
$month = 11; //Month 1=Jan, 2=Feb

$firstday = jddayofweek(gregoriantojd($month, 1, $year), 0);
if($firstday <= $dayofweek){
  $date = (($interval * 7)-6) + ($dayofweek - $firstday);
}
else{
  $date = (($interval * 7)-1) + (6 - $firstday);
}
echo date("n/j/Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $date, $year));
?>

It looks a little messy, but it works perfectly

I am a big fan of roundcube but I have always wanted the ability to integrate some instant messaging into it.  Well google finally released a gtalk gadget that allows you to integrate gtalk/gchat into any page you want.  Although, google has done a very poor job of announcing this and I don't think most people know about it.

Anyways, it is a very simple single line <iframe> code.  I just quickly added it to the roundcube template and made a few changes to the CSS code and it works perfectly.

Click the image above to see a larger screen shot.  I will write up the code for this later when I have some free time.

The semi good news is that after a year of service I can now report on the uptime provided by Dreamhost.  In the end I received 99.886% uptime.  Which sounds good at first, but in the end this amounts to over 10 hours of downtime.  Nearly half a day!  Luckily, I really only rely on Dreamhost for email, however with their recent suggestion that Dreamhost will no longer offer email, I am a little uneasy about continuing with them.

But, I have a few months of free service creditted to me for all the crap I have put up with.  So I will be researching other hosting options over the next few months.

Full breakdown of the downtime is available after the jump.

Continue reading "Bush's New Plan to Lower Gas Prices"

You can no longer create a shell account with a custom SpamAssassin install on Dreamhost anymore.

Why am I so upset about this? Because this was one of my main reasons for using Dreamhost. A custom install of SpamAssassin(SA) allows me to use custom rulesets, ClamAssassin(Virus Checker), DCC, pyzor, Razor, and much more. Without a custom install I am left with the default Junk Mail filterig provided by Dreamhost. This Junk Mail filter is based on an UNCUSTOMIZABLE install of a very old version of SA. The end result is a poor Spam Filter.

And honestly a poor Spam Filter is basically worthless.

1. Dreamhost Advertised a Custom SpamAssassin Install when I Puchased my one year Contract.

Yup, in fact they still promiss it on their Hosting Features page. They also provided instructions and support for how to use it here, here, and here. Additionally, they have provided continual service for this over the years. You will note that each of those pages contains a warning that this feature is no longer available. I had to fight to get that warning admitted to the wiki, more on that later.

At no point did Dreamhost ever say that procmail support may be deleted at anytime. Nor did they give any indication that procmail support would be revoked at any point in time.

Continue reading "Dreamhost Removes SpamAssassin"

. I have also sporadically used Picasa2 from Google. While I thought Picasa2 was a nice free product, I never really had much use for it. However recently a few new features in Picasa2 have gotten my attention.

Notably Picasa2 allows for an XML export of an album, this export can even be directly uploaded by FTP to a web server. (Tools->Expiremental->Publish via FTP . . . then select XML as the page type). Then I found out that one of the modules available for gallery2 allows for a direct import of Picasa2 XML pages. Picasa Module. I tried it out and it worked as promised.

However, I found one error. If you do not enter a caption Picassa will automatically copy the itemName into the itemCaption field. Personally if I don't enter a caption on a photo, I would prefer it remain un-captioned. So I hacked the module to fix this issue.

Continue reading "Gallery2 Picasa XML Import Hack"

I want to have plants on my balcony, but I knew I would be incapable of watering the plants everyday. Clearly I needed an automatic watering system, however, I live on the 5th floor and have no access to water on my patio.

I saw an automatic watering system like this. But it was just too much money and it didn't hold nearly enough water. So, I decided to make my own watering system that could hold a lot more water. I was able to make a 5 gallon system for less than $30.

I am back from Australia! And I only have minor injuries!

You can check out my pictures here.

I will do my best to sum up what I did:

Day 1: Amazingly I didn't have jet lag, or at least very little.  Today we drove to the Grampians, a large national park outside Melbourne.  We spent most of today climbing.  And then camped that night.

Day 2: Today we woke up to really annoying birds.  After that we took a really cool hike and then did a quick climb.  Sean and I ran to the airport to catch a flight to Sydney.

Day 3: I spent the day touring Sydney.  I did all the touristy stuff.  And then Sean and I went out to a authentic Australia BBQ dinner.

Day 4: Took the ferry to Manly today.  And hung out over there.  The ferry is a really good way to get a great view of the city and the surroundings.

Day 5: Spent the morning at the beach.  Today was an amazing day at the beach, this is when I really realized that Sean is living in paradise.  Then that night I caught a flight with Ehren to New Zealand.

Continue reading "My Trip to Australia and New Zealand"