Software

perlucida.com, now with extra Drupal.

Here it is, the obligatory ‘this site is now on Drupal’ post. I’ve merged my neglected Drupal based blog with the main perlucida.com site, redesigned and refreshed the content. It’s taken nearly three years.

Why so long? It’s certainly been a busy and tiring three years – I moved house, my second child was born (and preceded to spend his entire first year waking 3 to 5 time a night), and of course every time a new customer project comes along perlucida.com goes on the back-burner. But that’s not why it took so long, really it comes down to project management.

Going away from a project for a while and then coming back with fresh eyes is usually a great thing. But being forced to do it repeatedly meant that each time I picked up the project again I was seeing flaws in what I’d done in the previous batch of work. Cue constant redesigns and reworking, regular incorporation of new idea’s and generally breaking project management rules. The blocks (visible at the end of pages like this one) are one of the few elements unchanged since I designed them in 2006 – and also one of the things I like least now!

There are still some things on my to-do list, but right now this site is live on Drupal and I’m loving it.

Oh! Vienna!

I finally found a mac feed reader that I actually like. It’s called Vienna. It’s open source and free too. I had been happily using Thunderbird for my feed reading, it’s quite capable in that department, but a dedicated app is always going to be a bit more slick, and Vienna is that. The one downside was that I didn’t particularly like any of the styles available. Soon rectified though, and my shiny new ‘Perlucida’ theme is now available for download from the Vienna site. UPDATE As of March 2006 the Perlucida style is now included as part of Vienna! So no need to download the style seperately, just grab the latest Vienna version.

Classic, Netscape 4, Photoshop 4, Livemotion 1 - so long guys.

This is something of a momentous day. I’ve finally decided that it’s time to ditch Classic Mac OS on my G4. That means goodbye to Photoshop 4, good bye to Livemotion 1.0 (which annoyingly has no options for output to other vector based formats - so I’m losing some work too) and goodbye to Netscape 4. And whilst Mac OS 9, Photoshop and other applications have been deleted from Classic without much thought, letting go of Netscape 4 has been much more emotional. I can only think this is because Netscape was so much a part of the explosion of the web in the mid 1990’s, somehow surfing with Netscape 4 brings back memories of all that excitement. So, bye bye Netscape 4. It was great knowing you, we spent a lot of time together, and even though we got on less well towards the end - when CSS caused so much trouble between us - I can say we’re parting on good terms. Goodbye old friend. [Empties Trash]

A revised launchd plist for fetchmail

It turns out that my previous plist for launching fetchmail doesn't work so well after updating to OS X 10.4.2. When there is no mail to collect fetchmail races through checking my mail accounts in less than sixty seconds, triggering a series of errors: Read more »

A launchd plist for spamd

Create a file here:

/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.spamassassin.spamd.plist

With content:

File attached below.

A launchd plist for postfix

The plist I ended up with for postfix - just a modified version of the one apple provides as:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist Read more »

A launchd plist for fetchmail

UPDATE: I have a revised version of this plist for OS X 10.4.2.

Another working plist, this one is for fetchmail. You'll probably need to tweak it to match your own setup but this should get you started (the file is attached below if you just want to download): Read more »

A launchd plist for freshclam

UPDATE: This will not work well under OS X 10.2.4, Launchd doesn't like the fact that freshclam runs in less than sixty seconds and will eventually stop running freshclam. I reverted to using a cron job instead of this plist.

I use ClamAV to scan all my incoming e-mail for Virus (and these days it also catches a good many phishing scam e-mails too), installed with Fink. I couldn't find a plist to have launchd run it so I've written my own, and am sharing it with the world: Read more »