China has published pictures from its first moon orbiter.

Interesting talk by Bryan Cantrill on DTrace. At the beginning he rips into Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Scott’s talk at Google is here.

“Print file was not accepted (client-error-document-format-not-supported)!”

Google Apps is a marv thing. And free too. Since looping our email through Google we’ve been getting much less spam. But I’ve noticed the following quirks:

Here’s a page explaining how to make the sasl_passwd.db file used by Postfix when SMTP relaying mail.

We like to print invoices in a variety of currencies. There’s no setting in QuickBooks for this - it takes the system default… Well, most of the time. If you have your Region (International PreferencePane, System Preferences) set to one where the little yellow triangle shows up with the message about Unicode and WorldScript, the currency symbol is ignored. So, say I have China selected for no other reason than say I’m in China and billing in Yuan QuickBooks will use the $ (USD) symbol. I have to set the Region to ‘United States’ (not the Unicode one,…

I’m re-installing the latest in a line of sick iMacs after it has returned to us with new hard disk. I keep getting “perl crashed” messages appearing in the console when doing a software update and when trying to print with cups. The perl crash log tells us why:

It’s often useful to have a local SMTP server one can throw messages at without passwords and authentication. For example, if you’re doing a quick hack or sending messages from a program like Apple’s Mail. It’s even more useful if your local SMTP server can contact your regular SMTP server to send the messages into the greater interweb.

Stephen Fry - a man of many words

Note to self: on Gentoo postgresql configuration files (pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf found in /var/lib/postgresql/data) need to be owned by the postgres user. So if you edit them as root, reset the owner:group before restarting postgresql.