chrishowie.com

I’ve already sent out a message to those I contact frequently, but for the rest of you, my email address has changed from cdhowie@gmail.com to me@chrishowie.com.

I have decided to migrate away from Gmail for a variety of reasons. I figured I’d use my domain so that I have flexibility in my provider choice. For example, if I decide to change my mail provider I don’t have to get a new address. So this change should be permanent.

Now, being a tinkerer, I figured I’d set up a mail system for myself that retains the features I like from Gmail while doing away with the downsides of using Gmail. My final system is complicated, but effective. And it was a fun four days setting it up! (No, that wasn’t sarcasm. This is the kind of thing I enjoy.)

My MTA is Postfix, running on mail.chrishowie.com. It accepts mail for me and delivers mail from me. The standard security features are in place: SPF/blacklist checking and no unauthenticated relaying. I also established SPF records for my domain. I do not have a spam filter, but I might set up SpamAssassin later if I actually start seeing spam in my inbox; no spam has made it past the sender blacklist check yet.

For downloading mail, I set up Courier as a POP3 server. The observant will note that this would nullify one of the most useful aspects of Gmail: access to your email from anywhere. Once you download from a POP3 server and delete, your mail is gone from the server and lives in your mail client.

That’s where the rest of the rig comes into play. On my home LAN server I have a multi-piece system that provides me with this anywhere-access. I have a getmail4 cron job that fetches mail from my POP3 server, as well as from my Gmail account (so people can still reach me using my Gmail address), and some of my other mail accounts, and delivers the mail to my maildir using Dovecot’s delivery agent. From there, the agent processes my sieve rules, sorting my mail into various folders. (It’s like your favorite mail program’s “filters” only it runs on my server instead of my mail clients, so the configuration is centralized.)

For reading all this mail, I run Dovecot, an IMAP server. All my mail clients fetch mail from this server, and since it is IMAP, changes to messages (like moving a message between folders, or adding tags, or whatever) are actually pushed back to the server. So I can use several mail clients at once and they all have a consistent view of my mailbox.

The only major piece I have yet to set up is an LDAP server for centralization of my address book. The rest has been working quite well. I can use Thunderbird at home, or my mobile phone’s email client when I’m out of the house. No limiting or inconvenient web interfaces required.

I’ve switched this blog to new hosting. Hopefully the only difference you’ll notice is faster load times.

About two weeks ago I started collecting statistics for this website, something I’ve always planned on doing but never actually cared enough to sit down and do. Two weeks doesn’t make for a great sample period but the results are still interesting.

Almost 25% of visitors use some version of IE and 44% use Firefox. (20% did not identify their browser.) This is rather astounding to me. Apparently either FF gained more market share than I thought or this blog tends to attract the kind of people who use FF (probably the latter). Mozilla, Opera, and Safari are straggling at 5.7%, 3.3%, and 1.4% respectively.

Out of the 25% using IE, the usage is almost exactly split between IE6 and IE7, with IE7 almost a full 1% ahead. Can someone please explain why people are still using IE6? Seriously people, this is 2008.

Firefox >= 3.0 accounts for a little over half of all FF traffic with various versions of 2.0 making up for most of the difference and a negligible amount of 1.0 and pre-1.0 hits making up the rest.

When it comes to operating systems, almost 54% are using Windows, 21% Linux, 3% Mac OS X, and 22% unidentified. Windows XP wins with 40% overall usage and Vista can claim 7%. Most of the Linux hits didn’t identify the distro.

The search robot report is interesting. From the major search engines, Google was the most conservative, making 236 hits for 2.83MB of data. MSN hit 975 times for 9.71MB. The winner is Yahoo: 2057 hits for a whopping 27MB. I’m not quite sure why Yahoo needs so much… Google seems to keep up just fine while consuming only a tenth of what Yahoo does.

Not surprisingly, the most popular blog posts are not about my own projects. The most viewed one by far was a gripe about gnome-terminal. Seems many people have the same irritation that I do.

So yeah. I don’t really have any point to make, except possibly that people should not be using IE6 anymore, and some search engines should really optimize their crawlers better.

Etch has finally been released. I have upgraded layla (the server running this blog) from Sarge to Etch, and the upgrade process was pretty smooth. Only a few things needed manual attention.

Quite surprisingly, there weren’t any problems upgrading the kernel to 2.6.18, even though this required replacing hotplug with udev, something I’ve experienced pain with before. One reboot is all it needed.

Now that the blog is running, expect posts regularly!

Well, by regularly I mean every so often. And maybe you shouldn’t expect them or you might be disappointed.