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A scene from Ireland

Projects

Ideas for Aether

I've just installed aether-1.4 for this website and made a few enhancements that I might submit one day.

They include allowing a blog to select entries from another blog based on tags in the [entry] field. Thus my page has a News section which contains all items from my front page that mention 'raid' in the entry tag.

Also a blog can show just a list of pages (or the summaries there-of), so my page is now a blog of precisely three other pages. These are sorted by modify time.

Other changes I am contemplating include:

  • Once a password has been typed in, the "Edit" and "New" links at the bottom of the page become simple links that contain the password. This way I only need to type the password once. There would need to be an easy way to forget the password of course
    BULLET - Almost all my aether usage is using it as an error document, so the meaningless "me" doesn't appear. But when I edit a page it has to use a real URL, as you cannot post to an error document (I think). The "post" should pass in the preferred prefix so that when I come out of editing, I am back in the error-document space. (Does that make sense to anyone but me).

vpatch design notes

In my Linux kernel development work, I often apply patches to files that have changed since the patch was created. Sometimes these patches fail to apply for trivial reasons.

About a year ago I wrote a program called to help apply these patches, and it has been very useful. However the solution isn't perfect. The problem is that I cannot see what is going on.

When I apply a patch that fails, I would like to be able to see exactly why it failed, and what wiggle would do to fix it. But to do that I currently have to grovel around in various files. I would be nice if this was more automatic.

What I am envisaging is a new patch application tool. Let's call it vpatch.

Whitelisting email

I have been following SPF for a while and have been thinking through the whole junk-mail control issue.

I have come to the conclusion that the only viable long-term solution is agressive whitelisting.

I have been having thoughts about setting up a local service to support whitelisting.

Aether now my home page

I've taken the plunge and made aether my home page.

This required a few modifications to aether so that it could appear as though aether controls the whole name space, but so that pre-existing links still work. You can find the patch I used at , either in the applied directory if it is still applied to my source, or in the included directory if it has been included unstream.

I hope to eventually move all the content which sensibly can be moved into aether across into aether. Until then, my original home page is still available.

SPF looks like it is worth supporting

With my Email administrator hat on, I have been looking at SPF lately.

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and is a mechanism whereby the owner of a domain can advertise that domain's policy on how it sends mail.

When an MTA recieved mail claiming to be from a particular domain, it can queries that domains policy and then make a determination on how likely it is that the from address is authentic. This information can then be used as input to a local policy on dealing with junk mail.

Aether for blogging

Well, I've been thinking for a while that I should do something more interesting with my home page, and while I was flipping through the latest fresh meat I discovered Aether which claims to be both simple and competent at managing web pages and blogs. So I though I would give it a try.

My Debian notebook already had python installed, so I followed the instructions and it just worked, except that I needed to remove group-write permission before apache would run it setuid as me.

Whether this whole 'blog' idea will actually work for me I have no idea - I have a tendancy to get excited about something for a while and then loose interest. If that happens here, I guess it isn't meant to be.