Archive for September, 2006

Mutt with SSMTP

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Here is how you set up Mutt without a working sendmail or exim installation. Most linux boxes I work with already have some kind of mail transfer agent installed by default, so I never really had to do this. My cygwin install on the other hand only had a bare bones, minimalistic ssmtp application that forwards emails to an SMTP server. This is in fact perfect for my needs. Here is how you set it up.

First you tell mutt where is your MTA – add this line to your .muttrc:

set sendmail="/usr/sbin/ssmtp"

You may need to configure your ssmtp to send out the emails properly. Here is what you should have in /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf:

root=username@youremail.com
mailhub=smtp.yourisp.com
rewriteDomain=youremail.com
hostname=youremail.com
FromLineOverride=YES

Note that mailhub is the address of the SMTP server provided by your ISP. For example, in my case I would use smtp.comcast.net as mailhub, but and terminally-incoherent.com everywhere else.

SSMTP has an annoying tendency to rewrite the From line as it sends out emails. In my case it ended up being my_local_username@mydomain.com instead of myemail@mydomain.com.

To prevent this put this line into your /etc/ssmtp/revaliasses:

local_username:myemail@mydomain.com:smtp.myisp.com

This should do it. Enjoy! :)

Can you see me now?

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Check out the sidebar! It’s a live webcam link! You can now see me pick my nose, and bite my fingernails in real time. Wohoo!

I’m not streaming or anything – just uploading an image every few minutes. Naturally, since I’m not here most of the day the cam will likely be off during work hours. You may catch fresh pictures in the evenings. Enjoy! :mrgreen:

Btw, if you are interested, I’m using Dorgem to capture the images.

Distractions

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Lately it has been difficult for me to work on my school related projects at home, because of constant interruptions and distractions. I also can’t really do much research related stuff when I’m at work, because they usually make me do other things when I’m there (crazy, I know). So I come here to school and shut myself in my little office to get some quiet time just for my research…

And all I can think about are all the cute girls walking all around the campus. All I have to do is to get out in front of the building, and I’m surrounded with hawtness. Seriously, they are all over the place this semester. I’m going to miss this once I graduate. But right now, it’s really not helping me to concentrate on reading all these cryptic research papers. Sigh…

I just hit up bloglines to take a break and clear up my head, and I get another batch of distractions – things like Assassin’s Creed gameplay video. I think the best way to describe this game is Hitman meets Price of Persia meets Oblivion. Or something among these lines. It looks totally awesome, and distracting as hell!

Sigh…. And now back to Nonnegative Matrix Factorization papers…