Lackhead.org

Hello blogosphere!

Today’s adventures in How-The-World-Sucks is brought to you by Microsoft, the evil-doers of the computer world. The latest example of how corporate greed is destroying America came across my plate after a few friends, who use Hotmail for their email provider, mentioned that they were not receiving email from me. Given that this was multiple people, I figured that there might be something wrong with my email setup. I just so happen to have a Hotmail account (that I never use) and I used that for my testing. Once I started poking around, here’s the evidence that I gathered:

• Email sent from my personal domain would not be delivered to hotmail.com email addresses. However, I could reply to email messages that originated from hotmail.com, just not send new email to Hotmail.
• Email sent from my work (a domain I help administer) to hotmail.com email addresses would go through, but it would take upwards of 3 hours for email to come through, and they would appear in my Junk folder, marked as spam.
• Email sent from my Gmail account would go through immediately.
• Email sent from several domains run by friends of mine would either never get delivered, or would take ages and ages and then finally appear in my Junk folder.

Weird. According to my mail server logs, and those at work, the email messages destined for hotmail.com addresses were delivered to Hotmail’s servers without any errors, and according to the SMTP protocol Hotmail is then required to either deliver the email, or bounce it back (neither was happening). Now, in today’s spam-filled world this is not always the case, so I was going to give Hotmail the benefit of the doubt for now, and try to figure out what was going wrong. I started poking around on the net, and found zillions of references to people that were having awful problems with mail delivery to Hotmail. Some mentioned issues with Microsoft’s implementation of SPF SPF, so I removed my entries from DNS, with no change in functionality (yes, I waited for DNS caching to time out). Some mentioned spam filtering issues on Hotmail’s end, the only solution to which seems to be paying a 3rd-party corporation $1400 and up, per year, to be whitelisted by Hotmail. Uh, no thanks.

Then, I stumbled across a grammatically awkward but information-rich post by an administrator who ran into similar problems. His post made me try a few things:

• I sent email from work to my hotmail.com address using Outlook and it went through immediately.
• I then configured Thunderbird, my email reading program, to set the User-Agent header to read “Microsoft Office Outlook 11″, and sent email from work to my Hotmail account, and this went through immediately. However, email sent from home with this trick did not work- email would still not be delivered.
• I then configured Postfix, which I use as my email server, to remove any User-Agent header, as well as inserting X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11 as a header (which is what Outlook does). This seemed to be the magic fix, as email sent from my personal domain would now go through immediately.

Wow. In my professional opinion, this clearly says that Microsoft is going way out of its way to make people using open source software suffer when dealing with people that use Hotmail. Just another way in which Microsoft is trying to eliminate competition for its market, not by innovating and producing good products, but by using their market share to fight dirty. Who suffers from this? We do. The people out there on the streets. Corporate greed at its finest.

The net result? Well, I strongly encourage everybody out there that has a Hotmail account to immediately switch to another provider. Gmail and FastMail, among others, would be good choices. In the meantime, I will keep my domain configured to fool Hotmail into thinking I’m a nice little Microsoft drone, using its crappy products, so that I can send email to my friends. That is, until they all switch to a better email provider.

-c

ps- For those of you out there using Postfix, here are the lines I added to my header_checks file to remove the User-Agent header and add in the Outlook header:

/^User-Agent:/ IGNORE
/^To:.*hotmail.com/ PREPEND X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11

I recently ran into an issue that, while it had a simple solution, stumped me for a while. I don’t know if said stumpitude came from my waning mental faculties or what. In any case, it took me longer than expected to track down the answer, and since there weren’t too many pages that I found out on the net that addressed this, I thought I’d at least get this down somewhere.

The issue came up on my main application server, which runs my web server, email server, and is a DNS master for one of my domains. I recently set up a virtual web server under apache, and since it was doing SSL I needed it to run using its own IP address so that I could use an IP-address based virtual server configuration. Since the machine is running Ubuntu 7.04 (a Debian variant), the ethernet interfaces are set up in /etc/network/interfaces. Here is what that file looked like before adding the alias:

# The loopback network interface

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet static

        address 10.0.0.25

        netmask 255.255.255.0

        network 10.0.0.0

        broadcast 10.0.0.255

        gateway 10.0.0.1

Easy enough to add an alias; I just copied/pasted in another stanza, identical to the eth0 stanza only with the alias set up so that it was set up as eth0:0:

# The secondary network interface

auto eth0:0

iface eth0:0 inet static

        address 10.0.0.50

        netmask 255.255.255.0

        network 10.0.0.0

        broadcast 10.0.0.255

        gateway 10.0.0.1

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I was recently sent a reference to an essay, written in 1991 by Richard P. Gabriel about the development of the Common Lisp standard. The article is called Lisp: Good News, Bad News, and How to Win Big, and while it is interesting in its own right (to those of us interested in the Lisp and Scheme programming languages), what truly stands out about this article is the section called “Worse Is Better”. Although he is talking about Lisp versus C, etc, what he touches upon I believe pervades all of academia, especially engineering. Engineering, and those with engineering brains, suffer from this dichotomy because they live in a world that splits the difference between theory and implementation. These two paradigms have similar goals but wind up working in opposition more often than not. Why? Well, that is the mystery that is probed in this article.
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Hello there crimestoppers!

Chad here. Just wanted to let everybody know that I’ve copied over some of my old web pages to my new site so that these bad boys are back online. I use the climbing pages myself, as these are fantastic articles that are always good for a re-acquaintance. And the numbers page I still get email about, even though I wrote them some 947 years ago when I was teaching at Computer Science Department at Indiana University. Anyway, here they are in all their glory. Enjoy!

• Jamming: the inside scoop on hands to fingers jamming from Steph Davis.
• Self Massage: a routine for self-massage of the forearms, that helps prevent tendonitis and other over-use injuries
• Number Representations: a tutorial I wrote on working with numbers in other bases, i.e. binary, hexadecimal, etc.

-c

This is the South Park character that I just created using South Park Studio, and online flash tool that, well, allows you to create your own South Park dudes. I call him “Monsieur Malheureaux” and he’s hiding out in Osama Bin-Laden’s cave. Kids love him!

I came across this via a movie on YouTube that used this to create a neat spoof of the venerable Mac vs. PC ads (the “where’st he beef?” of today’s generation, I guess). Check it out for yourself:

-c