scientia potentia est

As you probably are aware of Mailinator is a fantastic useful service which allows you to use any email address on the fly when needed. Simply make a random one up e.g. like CoolService@Mailinator.com and start using it without previous registration.

This is great for registering on websites where you really only want to get in once and perhaps do not want to visit ever again, but still are forced to validate your email address. It may also be useful for sites which you do not trust sufficiently to provide them with your real email address at the risk of being spammed.

Mailinator also started supporting alternate domains (even alternate inbox names) instead of mailinator.com since some websites started blocking registrations using it. The fact that you have to work around such nuisance before using a site obviously shows that something is not right on the site, but that is for another post…

Today, while reading about importing a GEDCOM file into my genealogical tree at Geni, I stumbled on this little Gmail trick which I tried and it worked flawlessly.

Apparently you can add a “.” (dot) somewhere within your Gmail username, or even append a “+” (plus) along with additional characters, and it will all reach your inbox. A few examples will make it more clear. Let us suppose that your email address is RickDangerous@Gmail.com:

• Rick.Dangerous@Gmail.com
• Ri.ckDangerous@Gmail.com
• RickDangerous+IsCool@Gmail.com

In the above cases all recipients would be valid and emails sent to any of them will be received by the same person, namely the owner of RickDangerous@Gmail.com.

This is not exactly Mailinator but it allows you to use different email addresses but without the hassle of having to set them up beforehand. As an additional benefit those emails received will be kept totally private in your inbox versus Mailinator where anyone that knows the email address will be able to read them.

If you are interested in using a great and easily pronounceable  .mobi domain I have the following domain name available for rental or sale:

kalabassa.mobi

I purchased the domain name when I was working on my FSBO property portal a couple of years ago and had not yet decided the definite name of the site. As I was interested in expanding the site to a mobile user base I went for the .mobi option too.

The domain name itself does not mean anything, although it bears a similarity to the word pumpkin translated to some Romance languages.

However, I never got to use it as I finally went for one of my other options instead, which term-wise was more related to properties, houses, homes, etc., making it a better choice, namely tudomo.com (derived from the Latin term domus).

All offers are considered. Payment via Paypal.

My brother sent me this amusing copy of a forum thread where the original poster does not really seem to get the right solution he asking for.

Check for yourself.

I came back to the computer earlier today and found one of my servers to be unresponsive. The front-end of one of my bittorrent hosting boxes did not load so I tried some of the other websites hosted on the same box. None were loading.

Luckily accessing via SSH worked fine and revealed that Apache had died for unknown reasons at some point from yesterday onwards. Trying to start Apache was not possible since it could not bind to the socket at port 80. I had already checked for any remaining PIDs from the previous httpd process, so I started worrying about a possible intrusion or some root-kit binding to port 80 instead of Apache.

I started running netstat to reveal the listening ports but unfortunately the process information field was empty for this particular process in question. A quick search showed how lsof could also be used to display the name and pid of the listening process on any port number. In my case I typed:

lsof -i :80

This displayed a couple of known Python orphaned processes that belonged to the original and defunct httpd process. Once killed Apache was started with no issues.

After all, nothing dramatic!

When posting last time I realised my example images had a little white border around them. For other occasions it may have been nice but this time I needed it without any borders.

Another example below, left with white border and right with no border:

To remove that automatically added border when you submit your post using WordPress do the following:

1. Open your post for editing.
2. Click on the image in question and select the Edit Image option.
3. Click on the Advanced Settings tab on the top.
4. Insert a 0 (zero digit) in the Border field under Image Properties.
5. Save.

Pretty simple stuff but thought I would share it in case someone else was looking for a remedy.

Lately I have been working on improving my consultancy’s website towards a more showcase based look’n'feel. I had to post a photo of myself so I first decided to use my Gravatar image. As you can see below it looked a bit dull with square corners, so instead I changed the photo to round corners:

Indeed nicer, no? Gravatar should definitely offer rounded corners as an optional feature.

Thanks goes to RoundPic for providing an easy way of quickly rounding the corners of any photo or image.

Yesterday eve I had to add a laptop to my network which is using MAC address filtering. The laptop ran Windows Vista and I tried to locate its MAC address by using the good old ipconfig within a command prompt. This gave no results as apparently the network details only get listed once an actual network connection is made. As you probably have realised this is a catch-22 situation as without the MAC address registered on the router I was never going to make a network connection in the first place…!

Actually the weird thing is that the MAC address is normally on a sticker on the bottom of laptops, but in this case there was no such sticker.

Google as in most other cases provided a quick fix by pointing me in the right direction. There is a command specifically for this task named funnily enough: getmac.

Writing my earlier post about the textarea issue I initially ended up with a funny looking post. It was due to the examples of HTML code included in the post not being parsed properly. Apparently I had been writing my post in HMTL mode instead of Visual mode and all the HTML code was parsed as “real” code.

The code was wrapped in <code> tags, instead of the usual <pre> tags which keeps the code looking as expected.

If you are neither certain of the exact uses of each of these two tags I suggest you read this documentation page for a quick overview of the differences along with other usage hints.