Ian P. Christian's personal blog

Filtering Postini tagged mail with Sieve

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:57:07 +0100

The headers Postini's anti-spam system adds to emails are quite hard to filter on, as you need to compare part of one header to part of another. Here's a little snipped that works with dovecot 1.2's sieve implementation. I don't actually use this myself anymore, but I'm posting it here for anyone else struggling with the problem.

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sfServiceDefinition - a brief introduction

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:21:58 +0100

Fabien has already introduced the symfony service container, and will be shortly releasing a post covering more of it. I was keen to get my hands dirty, so I've dived into the code and got a quick example working.

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YAML in PHP - fun with sfYaml

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:14:49 +0100

In a recent post about Symfony components - Fabien wrote about how the Symfony project (yes, that's right - a capital S now!) will be releasing more and more components. In this post I introduce sfYaml, a YAML parser for PHP - building on my previous blog post about routing.

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Playing with symfony routing - without symfony

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:32:43 +0100

symfony 1.2 was quite an improvement over 1.0, one of the most important changes was improved decoupling between components. In this article we're going to put this to the test and have some fun with sfRouting.

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Rate Limiting SOAP client in PHP

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:28:23 +0000

I've recently had the requirement to rate limit SOAP calls to a remote API, so having done the work I though I'd document it here.

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Using the 'classmap' with SOAP in PHP

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:36:29 +0000

I've recently done a little bit of SOAP work whilst spec'ing out a project for work - and I noticed that the PHP manual page for SOAP a mention of the 'classmap', which isn't documented so well. I thought I'd put an example here to show it's usage.

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Pirate Duck Update

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:14:04 +0000

As you should be aware from my previous blog post - Bring Back Pirate Duck - one of my ducks is missing. This morning upon returning I found a small padded envelope addressed to 'Mr Ian P Christian - Duck Master".

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Selecting a random database row

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:20:20 +0000

I recently wanted to select a random row from a database, it seemed like a pretty trivial thing to do - but as often the case, it's not as easy as I first expected it to be!

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STOMPing with PHP - intergration with ActiveMQ

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:35:57 +0000

In a previous post, "Playing with ActiveMQ using Maven", I showed how to produce and consume simple messages using Java. In this short post I show how to access these messages from PHP using STOMP.

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Playing with ActiveMQ using Maven

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:07:37 +0000

In this post I demonstrate how to get started with ActiveMQ. This is very much a simple beginners guide, and shows you just enough to get a message traveling between 2 separate applications.

I've separated the example up into 3 sections. The 'producer' section will create test messages on a queue, the 'consumer' will consume them, and the final section, 'mq', will host the ActiveMQ instance. It would be possible to do this in a single application using an embedded broker, however I think it's useful to demonstrate them separately, as potentially the components could be on separate machines.

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Bring Back Pirate Duck

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:23:37 +0000

I took 2 days away from work last week, and upon my return I noticed that one of my ducks from my desktop duck collection was missing. Shortly after my discovery, I received an email with a subject line of 'we have your duck'.

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Cacti and Exim - a (mostly) complete guide - Part 2

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:53:56 +0000

In Part 1 I covered getting Exim statistics into SNMP. In this part I'll walk though setting up cacti so that it can monitor your exim server.

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BeBook 2

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:16:23 +0000

BeBook have sent me exclusive pictures of the new "BeBook 2". The new device seems to be a significant improvement over the first BeBook.

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Cacti and Exim - a (mostly) complete guide - Part 1

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:08:01 +0000

I recently had to set up monitoring for a new Exim MX server at work. I wanted to make exim statistics available over SNMP such that I can easily hook it into cacti and nagios. Having recently been though the whole process from beginning to end, I thought I'd take the time to document the process, so that others can not only download and use my scripts/templates - but also modify it to suit their needs and learn some cacti whilst doing so.

Download my script and template: - exim_cacti_v1.tar.gz

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Connecting to the Internet via bluetooth using a Nokia on OS X

nospam@example.com (Ian P. Christian) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:49:46 +0000

I recently got a new MacBook, thanks to my employer - Timico. Believe it or not, my previous laptop I ran Windows Vista on - and despite Linux usually being my OS of choice, I got on well with Vista. For me, things 'just works', and on that list of things that 'just work' was Nokia's 'One Click' internet access tool included in the Nokia windows software. This tool makes it dead easy to connect via bluetooth, it really was just a matter of selecting your network provider, and clicking a button.

I typed a few things into google to try to figure out how to get OS X to connect via bluetooth over my N95 or E71 mobile phone. I found all sorts of confusing articles suggesting I needed to download scripts and place them somewhere, and jump over a few hurdles. Frankly, I couldn't be bothered to mess about with that kind of thing, I wanted things to just work like they did in Windows.

Despite the confusion caused by the various articles on the internet, it's actually surprisingly easy to setup - so I thought I would document it here for others. Simply go to the bluetooth menu, and select to 'Set up a bluetooth device', follow though the obvious settings. The last step in the wizard has a tick box labeled 'Access the Internet with your phone's data connection'. Ensure it's ticked, and click next.

These settings are for Vodafone contract (PAYG is different apparently) in the UK, a quick google of something like 'GPRS settings <country> <provider>' should allow you to find the settings you need.

Username	web
Password	web
APN	internet

Save these settings. I like to have 'show bluetooth status in menu bar' and 'show modem status in menu bar' selected, that choice is yours. It is now as easy as going into network preferences (or using the menu status in the menu bar) and clicking 'connect bluetooth' to connect to the internet. This works perfectly for me in OS X 10.5.6.