I haven't posted here in a long time, but now I'm back given that blogger is updated. My main posts though are at:

1. Tong Family. A site all about our lives and recommendations.
2. Marketing Playbook. A site all about marketing.
3. Free Return. Politics, politics, politics.
4. Geekfishing. All about observations that help me in my job.

Mailing List managers

As we go off and do the UCDS chess tournament and also the tournament coordinator job, I need a good mailing list manager. Here are the top ones: Mailman. This is written in Python and is the top hit from Google, but I have to learn Python. Sigh and it requires a C compiler and root privileges so won't work in a hosted environment Ez Mailing List Manager. Nice package but requires qmail and more Unix root level permissions. Majordomo. The granddaddy of package. I hadn't realized it was written in Perl. This also requires root access and a c compiler. Sigh.

PHP and Perl Mailing List Managers

As usual, PHP has a zillion freeware ones. Here's a short list at: HotScripts.com: PHP/Scripts and Programs/Mailing List Managers PHP Resource Index Perl List Managers. Here are the Perl ones. PHP Mailer. This appears to be a good mailer set of classes. Here are the actual programs I've found. Haven't tried them all but will start form the top: 452 Multimail. This seems like a good one but won't install on my geekfishing.net. I think there is an issue with the way get/post works in PHP4. I also noticed that this has not been updated for a year and it is only 52KB. Wow, that is small. Acmelist Lite. This supports multiple mailing lists. MyMail. Seems to only support one list. So I won't try right away. PHP My Newsletter. This ones seems to have a bug in it probably due to the way that arguments are handled. ONly supports one list it seems and it has lots of French in it that makes it hard for me to debug. Ciao-ELM. Referred to by the PHP Mailer class library above.

Cometa launches

This is the project to build a huge nationwide 802.11 network. Very exciting and well covered. Interesting to see notes about it from Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log :

Hot Blog Trends

Spotted on the loose seem to be three big things:

RDFWeb: FOAF: the 'friend of a friend' vocabulary. Most of the cutting edge folks are implementing this. I read the spec and literally can't tell what it is for.

Changeable blog skins. These mainly take advantage of CSS to flip different photos and themes onto a web site dynamically. Pretty cool.

RSS/RDF/etc. Lots of content oriented things where you can use structure reading of blogs.

Hosting Unstood (volume ii)

BLOGGED ---at the-protagonist.net. Another amazing site. This is supposed to be hosted by a 16 year old in the Phillipines. Amazing, not sure I believe it, but pretty amazing. She is another person who does hosting of others via this incredibly complex ISP network:

1. The Protagnist is an 800MB virtual server offering plans at $4/month for 100MB.
2. Host Radius. They have plans for 800MB for $12/month or 3GB for $35. They were started this summer and have a single server it looks like. They even say the $12 plan is good for hosting a bunch of your friends
3. Dedicated now. Underneath them is the actual dedicated servers that are in a managed facility. This has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Plans are $120/month for a 60GB hard disk Pentium 1.7Ghz running Linux if the machine is dedicated. I don't exactly understand how the pricing. You can see that you can get something like 60 sites at $12 each on a 60GB machine so that nets you $720/month on a $120/month machine.
4. Pegasus. Underneath that is a management company that does it all. They have three companies, Pwebtech, Mehost and DedicatedNow all essentially selling out of the same data center.

Hosting Guides

If that isn't confusing, what isn't? Of course, you can also use some of the hosting rating services to figure out what you need. The top ones according to google are:

• Web Host Ratings. But this one only does shared hosting reviews
• HostRecord. The second most hit, but this one seems to cover all types of hosting.

Internet Holiday Shopping

Well it is that time of year again for shopping. I just hate the mall. I've tried the last three years to get everything done by the first week of December. So, I thought I'd list where and what I think about doing:

1. Shutterfly Photo Albums, etc.. Hoops swears by this site. They did a nice calendar for him. Super high quality. Something great for the grandparents.
2. Cooking.com and Metro Kitchens. Connie wants a bunch of cooking things. These are the two sites that I use quite a lot. Metro Kitchens is just a small shop in Atlanta, but I like using the smaller guys.
3. Bluefly. Jon Anderson says they have great prices on clothes. I'm sure I'll need that for Dave, Pete, Linda and Mimi

Flag screen savers

Waving Flag. Nicest I've found, the flag just waves.

American Flag Screensavers. Was rooting around for a flag screensaver. Can you believe someone has an entire page just collecting them.

Wherify Wireless - GPS Locator FOR CHILDREN

Jon Roberts wanted something for his parents that would help him track his dad, if he had an accident. Here is one for kids that could work. Kind of cool actually. Maybe I should get one for myself

Wherify created the world's first Personal Locator to help you determine your loved one's location in minutes. Wherify's GPS Locator helps keep loved ones safe by combining Wherify's patented technology with the U.S. Department of Defense's multi-billion dollar Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites plus the largest 100% digital, nationwide PCS wireless network.

1. Built-in pager
2. Atomic Clock synchronization
3. Request 911 help if you push a button
4. GPS Technology

o r g a n i c a. Another interesting expression of the web is this crawler. It crawls Weblogs looking for references, so you can see the most linked sites. Another set of things to go through sometime. Sort of like seeing the insides of a good google for weblogs.

Updates to b2mail-rt.php

OK, I did some quick hacks to get b2mail to accept any email and this is now running on Geek Fishing. In looking at the code, it is pretty clear that it doesn't follow the RFC822 standard super well, for instance, if you have multiple mail imbedded, it doesn't quite work, so I need to get a structured header, body and attachment reader into the code. Here are the changes I'm going to make:

Goals

1. Proper Header handling. SquirrelMail - Webmail for Nuts!. This is a nice freeware POP3 mail reader based on PHP. This is where the base code for POP3 retrieval was taken for B2, so I'm looking at it now to see what it does. Seems to have a nice plug-in architecture and also a place to get structured mail reading.
2. Signatures. It is really amazing how much junk is at the bottom of email. I'm going to change the way the thing looks to cut the bottom off to allow an array of possible things to blow away in the form of string1:string2:string3 that is set in b2config.php. To do the former, I'm going to have to learn how to use arrays and the cool explode and implode commands that PHP has. There is a basic tutorial in ONLamp.com: Arrays in PHP: Part 1 [Jun. 07, 2001] that I"m going to study.
3. Concatenated mail. I'm going to detect all the mail that is stuck together and unglue it and put each into its own blog entry so you can see the mail separately.
4. MIME types. I'm going to process complex types like MIME, so rather than just sticking it into stuff, it will recreate the JPG or whatever and upload it
5. Another thing to work on is the encryption of passwords in b2. It isn't all that secure and I need to think about this. Using md5 function seems like one choice. I also need to post to the b2 forums since I'm sure other people have notice this.