Happy birthday to me

So my birthday has been and gone, probably not the best in memory, but it happens. I did however get a new job, in dedicated security, which is awesome. We also got our new car, a Hyundai Elantra.
Anne is now crawling, and Geoffrey is talking more and more when he feels like it, saying things like thankyou, and apple, best yet has been trying to say helicopter he said applecopter.
My site is now hosted externally and backed up to my servers at home, as our power bill and the heat in (even though it is winter) in the server room was ridiculous. When I have time and more money, I will get the site back locally, but the superb performance of Google apps has really turned me towards outsourcing the hosting of our stuff, it is not like there is any data in our email or websites that is confidential.
I even found an add-on for firefox that allows me to use GPG through my google apps, so that is soon to be setup with my old morganstorey.com key.
Scary change in the world of security, see here. The good ole US of A, has decided to pass legislation that all devices that can store data coming into the USA can be copied in its entirety to their storage. This data can be kept indefinitely. I am sure this will mean that it will be indexed, anything encrypted will be brute forced and broken, and hey some senator may make a fortune when he sells it on to marketers, spammers, and the like.
The general consensus is to backup, delete then wipe your drive of pretty much any personal data or corporate data, something like eraser works well here, then simply fetch the data over some kind of VPN or secure connection from your server when you need it. People have even gone to lengths of removing their "home" hard drive, and plugging in their "traveling to the Draconian states of America" drive.
Sure their could be some terrorist smuggling in data on how to build a bomb... there could be but couldn't he/she just surf the net and find 70billion ways to do this when he gets into the country.
I can see how this is going to increase the need for teleconferencing, and reduce people's desire to take business trips to the USA. It is already happening with some companies moving their head office's elsewhere in the world.
Well Peace out all, especially the American's they need it the most.

Happy birthday Anthea

Sorry for not calling I have been flat out with work, then home to more work... lovely, but it pays the bills I'll call tomorrow I promise.
In other news Anne has started holding onto stuff and sorta standing for a second before Mummy catches her, gonna post a picture to my flickr now. Oh yeah I got flickr and youtube , and facebook . Yay I am (cringe) web 2.0.
Well I am beyond exhausted now, I had 5 hours sleep last night and have been working since 8am, so I am off to bed.
Peace out all.

Movement at the station

So I have decided to finally signup for google apps. Previously I had my DNS provider forwarding my mail to my gmail account, a temporary measure as my mail server was down. But now I see no point having my own mail server, especially when google apps is free, and has more redundancy (7 mail servers!) than I could ever offer.
I also had an issue that my DNS provider had implemented a draconian and over zealous spam filter, who checks that the reverse DNS matches the sender domain, sheesh. Other than this debacle they have been pretty good.
Problem was I have about 18months of email that I needed moved across. Sure I could just forward from googleapps to gmail, but whats the point of that. Now how to move it across. I found a nice guide here, but it needed some tweaking to run on my home server, I didn't have enough email (or money) to justify running it on the amazon compute cloud. Below is how I did it on my new Ubuntu Hardy Heron Server.

as I am ssh'd into my server, I ran screen
#screen
#apt-get install imapsync make unzip lynx
#cpan
cpan> install Date::Manip
#vim run-imapsync.sh

now type/copy and paste in the below and save it (escape+:wq)

#!/bin/bash
COUNTER=0
while [ $COUNTER -lt 10 ]; do
echo The counter is $COUNTER
imapsync --host1 imap.gmail.com \
--port1 993 --user1 morganstorey@gmail.com \
--passfile1 ./passfile1 --ssl1 \
--host2 imap.gmail.com \
--port2 993 --user2 me@morganstorey.com \
--passfile2 ./passfile2 --ssl2 \
--syncinternaldates --split1 100 --split2 100 \
--authmech1 LOGIN --authmech2 LOGIN \
--regexmess 's/Delivered-To: morganstorey\@gmail.com/Delivered-To: me\@morganstorey.com/g' \
--regexmess 's///g' \
--regexmess 's/Subject:(\s*)\n/Subject: (no--subject)$1\n/g' \
--regexmess 's/Subject: ([Rr][Ee]):(\s*)\n/Subject: $1: (no--subject)$2\n/g'
let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
sleep 10m
done

save it (escape+:wq)

chmod 740 run-imapsync.sh
./run-imapsync.sh

A bit of explanation on the changes I made, I removed a -maxage 1 from the script as that was only pulling down emails 1 day or newer in age. I also added the loop so that it would repeat the process to make sure all mail is gotten, and I added the sleep as the original article put it you don't want to hammer the google IMAP servers or they will block you.

Then just export the calendar to ICS and import on the Google apps one, export the contacts to CSV and import to the new Google apps, and just in case there are any people emailing your google address direct set it to forward to your new google apps and your done.

I also intend eventually to use some other method to backup Fionas and My google mail at regular intervals, not because I don't trust google (hey I am posting this through blogger, and get most of my news through google news, or my google rss reader), but becasue I like having backups.

This is all even more humorous, when I tell you the book I am reading at the moment; The Google Story, by David A. Vise. Ryan from work loaned it to me, and there is now a time limit on reading it as he has given his notice.

Well sorry about the long and technical post, I am starting to do them a bit more now, but well see, I am sure this blog will get back to its usual unusual ramblings.

Peace out all, especially the bright cookies at the Googleplex worldwide.

Quick Post

I post this as I go over the Sydney harbour bridge, yep got my nokia n95 mobile working on ubuntu, was pretty easy once I worked it out, config below for prosperity. Ubiquitous internets, I love the world we live in.

First my phone is plugged in via usb, bluetooth is good and all but this means I can use my phone for music at the same time.
you need to install wvidail
then run wvdial conf
then edit the /etc/wvdial.conf to the below.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 1152000
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ISDN = 0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = *99#
Username = vf
Password = vf
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","vfinternet.au";
Stupid Mode = 1

Gotta go about to go into tunnel.
Peace out all.

Hey nice set a wheels

Today we bought a new car. A Hyundai Elantra. You know you are getting old when not once in a car sale conversation power or speed come up. It was all about saftey. I will say one thing the salesmen at Hyundai in Pennant Hills do a damn good job, they had has a pegged and sold on every feature they suggested.
So in two weeks we should have some new wheels, with more room for the little ones, and a bit more power and fuel economy for us. We plan on keeping it for as long as possible which is why we went the new car, and a 5 year unlimited Kilometer warranty really got us.
In other news I am really liking admining my new server. It is so easy now to admin apache and bind. I didn't even get around to installing a web admin package everything by hand is easier. Heh and again deny-hosts did its thing and blocked some compromised zombies, or script kiddies. People really need to program there bots better, trying username: "root" and password: "password" repeatedly till you are blocked is about a smart as piece of granite.
Peace out all, even those on the darkside; the botmasters.