One of the nice things about Postie is that it lets me bypass the still-problematic editors in WordPress, which frankly are a pain in the ass sometimes. Posting of code segments like the bit below is really a headache in WP so far, because it will merge all of the lines into one long line; the only way to force it not to do that is to put blank lines between each line, which doesn’t readily lend itself to copying and pasting. I think it’s the editor taht tries to do some kind of cleanup before writing to the database, but it’s broken in ways I haven’t had time to investigate fixing yet.

So, as an example, here’s a quick code snippet that details the installation process for Postie, generic and simple. The code is wrapped in a <pre> tag.

wget http://www.economysizegeek.com/wp-filez/postie-0.9.9.2.tar.gz
tar xfz postie-0.9.9.2.tar.gz
cd public_html/
mkdir wp-filez wp-photos
chown nobody.nobody wp-filez wp-photos/
chmod 700 wp-filez wp-photos
mv ../../postie wp-content/plugins/
chown -R nobody.nobody wp-content/plugins/postie

The normal WordPress editing process would have mangled the shit out of that, but Postie pulls it straight in without any modifications, which is what I want. And this message itself is being typed into a plain text file with Emacs in a term window, no wrapping, and sent to the gateway like so:

mail -s "[comp] More Postie posting joy" address@obscured < foo.txt

Life is good. Thanks, Postie.

If you can read this, then Postie is working like a charm, and I’m way psyched. Postie is a replacement for WordPress’s rather poor email-to-posting system, which works but is very bare- bones and ugly and not terribly smart. Postie is a good deal smarter, and allows things like posting images via email, banning certain kinds of attachments (like smime.p7s, my digital signature), posting in either HTML or plain text, attaching files, and setting subjects and yeah, lots of cool stuff.

I was going to hack this myself, but I’d say that Postie right now does everything I want it to, so all props to Dirk Elmendorf. Great work, Dirk, and thanks for sharing it. :)

A friend decided to make the jump from Windows to Mac tonight, after a lot of trepidation.  This statement fell out of my mouth (ok, fingers) and I was kind of amazed when it landed.  I think this sums it up better than anything I’ve ever written.

My fundamental perspective on Apple still stands: the things that suck the most about Apple suck WAY less than the things that suck the most about Windows, and the things that rock hardest about Apple rock WAY harder than the things that rock most about Windows.

That said, and believed, I haven’t lost the feeling I’ve had for about 8-9 years now, which is that I’m gradually on my way out of enthusiastically keeping pace with closed-source technologies as corporate interests continue to handcuff computers with expensive legislation that makes them into appliances that are only allowed to do a small subset of what computers could originally be used for, which was: just about anything a programmer was smart enough to come up with. The next version of Windows will have DRM out the woz and wired all the way down to the CPU level, and the minute Apple sticks one toe in that pool with Mac OS, I’m gone.  I’ll run Linux on old hardware and write my own fucking software, because it’ll be the only stuff I can trust.

That’s a completely different rant for another time, though. OSX remains the greatest operating system ever built and using my mac is still a joy, as it has been for me for over 20 years.

I keep up a Fedora Core 4 partion on my evil PC, just so I can keep an eye on the march-towards-Linux-for-everybody prize, and I deliberately do a joe sixpack "Install Everything" process, just to see how well it works.  Not so well, is still the sad verdict.  I know, complaining about something free and all, but still – when you say "update everything" and you get this, well, it just shows that we’re still a long way for a drop-in replacement for Windows.

RPM cross-dependency hell.  This is the main reason why RPM sucks, and why simple one-click installs, at least for Fedora, are not ready yet.  It has to be brain-dead simple to install and keep a system updated; until it isn’t, it won’t catch on.

(Of course, maybe Linux is better off NOT catching on, and remaining the province of people who can either fix problems like this, or burrow deep into Google and find out what the problem is and apply someone else’s solution… but that’s a different post.)