Palast der Republik

Make Gmail Default Mailer for Embedded mailto Links

2011-09-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is as much reference for me as it is for everyone else. If you're interested in making embedded mailto links dispatch to Gmail in Google Chrome, simply download this excellent extension from Google: Send from Gmail.

Google Apps and IMAP Authentication Woes Notes

2011-09-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

I spent the better part of last night helping my friend Cindy migrate her small business' domain services away from her original hosting over to Google Apps (free). While the process was mostly straight-forward and quick, the process of getting IMAP setup for her was taxing. The problem, as an IMAP client would correctly identify, was that I was providing incorrect credentials to login to Google's IMAP servers.

"the username or password for [user] is incorrect," from Mail.app or Apple Mail.

"Username and password not accepted," from Mozilla Thunderbird.

Having done several Google Apps migrations in the past and already using it on my own, I had known that sometimes, after a password had been incorrectly provided several times, Google would lock an account out and force it to complete a CAPTCHA challenge in order to verify identity. Successfully completing the Unlock Captcha was not what was required to bypass this.

Secondarily, Google makes clear on its Google Apps Editions Comparison page that IMAP clients are enabled for new accounts. Troubling.

After some experimentation and eventually creating a dummy user under her domain, I was able to replicate this same authentication problem. I, then, asked her what the password she had been using was and found that its strength was about as poor as my dummy one. Abruptly I decided to reset my dummy user's password to something more difficult.

Lo and behold, it was password strength that had prevent IMAP from working with the dummy account. And, sure enough, the same held true for the real account. For reference in the future, be sure to use a tough password with your Google Apps accounts when wanting to integrate with IMAP, POP, and SMTP.

Order to Personal Configuration File (Dotfile) Chaos

2010-02-16T05:04:00.000-08:00

I have been using UNIX clones for about 13 years now, which is a bit crazy to reflect upon, actually.

One of the consistent themes throughout these years has been that the environments where I operate keep getting more complex—e.g., my presences across many computers become complexer as the number of machines I manage increases. This is something that undoubtedly many people in my field experience with some degree of chagrin.

Keeping personal configuration files synchronized across these machines becomes ever-more daunting, especially when there are locality- or environment-specific preferences at play.

There are a number of strategies to dealing with this, but many of them have shortcomings:

Manual Copying and Synchronization: This may involve archiving and copying with utilities like tar and pals or rsync.

Common limitations to this approach are dealing with reconciling different revision histories across instances, especially when the overall delta is large.
Using a Networked Filesystem: This may involve using Samba or NFS.

Generally such a solution requires the ability for all nodes to have access to this common data store. Such things are not always possible with laptops or when there is a partition in place with the network security policy.
Centralized Version Control: CVS or Subversion come to mind.

The weaknesses hereof have been written ad nauseum.

This is going to be a small challenge.

2008-06-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Mid-May this year I bought a semi-classic car for three purposes: Restoring, having something that I could maintain myself without understanding modern electronics, and forcing me to learn---once and for all---how to drive a standard shift transmission. The third goal is most important to me, actually. I don't feel right having staved off driving a stick shift car for so long.

So what did I buy? A 1972 Datsun 510 coupe, very similar to the one pictured above. For those who are unfamiliar with the brand Datsun, it is a former naming of Nissan that was dropped in the early-1980s.

So what made this type of car so compelling? For starters, it is not much larger than a modern Mini Cooper. It has a superb turning radius, so it beats my 2001 Accord, which I hope to get rid of once the the Datsun's new and happy. Plus, when tuned properly, it gets exceptional gas mileage.

As for pending work, I need to ...

Flush fluids,

Tune the carburetors,

Rewire some of the electronics,

Wire temperature and fuel gauges,

Wire the backup-lights,

Wire the windshield washers,

Install a sound dampening kit (Ordered),

Install front and rear bumpers (Ordered),

Install air filters (Ordered),

Install interior fabric kit,

Install grommets in the firewall, and

Get the climate control system working,

Given just how simple this car is by today's standards, the important tasks are insanely easy. Plus, a ten-year-old could practically buy all of the replacement parts for this car with his weekly allowance.

In any case, last night tweaked me out a bit, because it was the first time that I have driven that car on my own for any appreciable duration. Learning to drive a stick shift is unnerving as it is, so I did not want to compound it with stop-and-go traffic, major traffic, and hills. My plan had been to drive the car at 0100 in the morning from Mountain View, where my employer is located and the car had been parked, to San Francisco and park it in my driveway to begin repairs in the coming days. The result: I made it home just fine with stalling the car only once, and that stall happened when I was parking it.

This is going to be a small challenge, but it will be worth it: I have a love-hate relationship with trial-by-fire situations, so I am looking forward to this project of mine keeping me on my toes. It is one of those things that in now + two months I will look back upon and wonder why I had been fretting.

I can see. Finally.

2008-06-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

The medical industry has earned a special place in my skeptical heart: I only tend to patronize it every couple of years or so, or at least when the need is pressing.

That need came again recently.

I spend a huge chunk of my life in front of the computer at work and, to a diminishing degree, at home. Enough so that I have noticed my near-range vision start to get fuzzier and more difficult to focus. This culminated into an amusing trip to the optometrist this morning.

Much to my optometrist's chagrin, my vision was discovered to be better than perfect. I guess I don't feel bad for not having visited an optometrist in over 15 years now. In any case, the only major defect is that my eyes suffer from focusing fatigue. For this, I now have a prescription for incredibly low-strength reading glasses.

I am thoroughly excited but a bit daunted by the pressure of choosing the frame aesthetics. Anyone have useful advice for my dear face?

The sad thing part of today's outcome is that my optometrist is totally rad for a medical professional and that my eyes' lack of aberrance will diminish the need to visit her in the future.

Fixing Gtk+ Abnormal Font Size

2008-06-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

It certainly says something about a piece of software when the majority of front-page query results on Google for it pertain to bugs than actual praise. A case in point is gnome-settings-daemon, the userspace daemon that loads preferences for Gtk+ and GNOME applications.

I gave up using fully-featured desktop environments like KDE, GNOME, CDE, XFCE, etc. about two years ago and never turned back. One of the major drawbacks from this with Gtk+ and GNOME applications is that font sizes never seem to render accurately in the absence of gnome-settings-daemon. Primarily their sizes appear at least three points larger.

Given this, I had explored several setups with Gtk+ resource files but never found anything quite satisfactory until now.

I ended up tweaking ~/.gtkrc-2.0 such that

style "user-font"
{
font_name="Verdana 7"
}

widget_class "*" style "user-font"

gtk-font-name = "Verdana 8"

was included, and behold the results in the lower-right quadrant.

Enjoy.

What's in a name?

2008-06-03T17:27:00.000-07:00

So someone asked me what the name "Palast der Republik" is all about.

It's a building in Germany whose name translates into the "Palace of the Republic," and it served as the East German parliament building from the 1970s through the late 1980s. After the collapse of the East German state, performance and street artists took it over as squatters. I appreciate its retro architecture; it was something that stood out greatly in my travels. Sadly it has been demolished.

Interesting history: The main room contained hundreds of intricate light fixtures. This earned it the name Erich's Lampenladen, Erich's Store of Lightbulbs, after the then-authoritarian Communist Party General Secretary.