September 2007 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

Middle click your urls again in Firefox 2

One of the really useful features of Firefox in the past was the ability to click the middle mouse button anywhere on a browser page and have the URL in the clipboard load in that window. For some reason it stopped working some time back and I don’t know why. Here’s how to enable it again if your Firefox has stopped obeying your middle finger.

Open “about:config” in a new browser tab or window.
Search for “middlemouse” and find “middlemouse.contentLoadURL”. Set it to true if it’s false.
If that preference isn’t there, create a new one by right clicking and creating a new boolean value. Type “middlemouse.contentLoadURL” into the box and press return.
A new value, set to true by default, will be created.
Now try copying a URL and middle-clicking it anywhere on this page. Try http://ocaoimh.ie/ for good luck!

Google Reader's improved subscription notice

One of the first things I did when I started using Google Reader was finding the bookmarklet to make subscribing to feeds easier. Unfortunately the first few times I used it I didn’t realise I had to click the “Subscribe” button in the Reader interface. It was hidden away in the top right of the page. I was too busy looking at the feed contents to notice it.

Tom and others have pointed out that Reader added a search feature but this “You are not subscribed yet” warning is a nice usability improvement that I haven’t seen anyone mention yet.

Luciano Pavarotti has sung his last

Luciano Pavarotti died in the early morning of September 6, 2007 at home surrounded by his wife and four daughters.

I got a bit of a shock this morning looking through my feeds when I saw Pat’s post that Pavarotti died. The Wikipedia page on him has already been updated with more details. A sad day for his family, friends, fans and the music world.

Charity photography exhibit starts today

If you’re not subscribed to my photoblog, In Photos dot org, you might have missed the announcement about the exhibit. Mallow Camera Club (no, we don’t take photos of candy, cookies or biscuits, Mallow is a town a few miles from here!) will be exhibiting a number of photos in Mallow Town Library for three weeks starting today.

One of the Club’s members, Sean Riordan, is heading out to South Africa shortly as part of a group from the Niall Mellon Township Trust helping to build homes for the poor in that country. All the photos on exhibit will be for sale with all profits going to help fund Sean’s trip and the good work he’ll do in November.

Your one week’s hard work will change the lives of generations of some of the poorest families in the world. Over 200 families will move from a one roomed shack measuring 3m x 3m to a house with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. Most importantly, these houses will have running water, electricity, and sanitation – facilities we take for granted in our everyday lives.

One of my photos, this one of Brendan O’Carroll outside the Opera House in Cork will be on show and for purchase too. It’s not exactly like the one shown here. It’s a portrait with a tighter crop and better. I’ll be there tonight at 6pm to see how things go. If it’s bought while I’m still around, I’ll sign my photo for you. You never know, it might be valuable in years to come!

So, here’s me asking for everyone to give this a plug, especially if you live in Cork or some of your readers live in the locality. Come on Donal, Ryan, Tom, Damien, Adam, Gamma Goblin, Conor, Will, Mel, Haydn, Mark and everyone on Cork Blogs .. Giz a link and a plug, please! 🙂

Is your eAccelerator cache dir still there?

While looking through this WordPress performance post I realised that eAccelerator might not be running properly on this blog. For some time I’ve noticed this site hasn’t been as quick off the mark as it used to be. Dare I say it, but it was even a little sluggish!

If you’re not familiar with it, eAccelerator is a PHP accelerator. It caches PHP bytecode and performs optimizations to make your PHP site run a lot faster.

I verified that eAccelerator was loaded and then checked my php.ini configuration. Sure enough, the eaccelerator.cache_dir directive was set to “/tmp/eacc/” and that directory was deleted the last time my server rebooted.

A permanent fix is to change the location of the cache dir. Put it anywhere the webserver can read, but don’t put it in /tmp/.

While you’re looking at eAccelerator, upgrade to the latest version, especially if you’re running PHP5.

gmail: no third-party DSNs

Be careful if you forward email to a gmail account. Gmail doesn’t like receiving mail delivery status notices or reports. This server filled up overnight with tens of thousands of email reports bouncing back and forth between it and gmail. If you emailed me in the last 24 hours and I haven’t replied, I may not have received it (yet).

postfix/cleanup[12107]: 9FE58326C1: reject: header Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status;??boundary=”A507733AD3.1188834275/mail.ocaoimh.ie” from local; from=<donncha_@_ocaoimh.ie> to=<xxxx@gmail.com>: no third-party DSNs

I really haven’t had any luck with email recently …

How I fixed everything

First of all I disabled the forward to my gmail accounts by moving .procmailrc out of the way.
Then I deleted a lot of log files to make more breathing space for everything and watched the mail spool into my mail file.
That was taking too long so I shutdown Postfix and went into /var/spool/postfix/ and into the active, incoming and maildrop folders where I moved every file with the string “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender” out of the way:

for i in `grep "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" * -rl`; do mv $i /tmp/xxx/ -vi; done
After restoring the .procmailrc, I restarted Postfix and lots of legitimate email started flowing again!
I added the following recipe to my .procmailrc which I hope will stop bounced messages getting to Google:

:0: * ^Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender POSTMASTER.txt

What caused the problem in the first place? A bounced email from Yahoo. Someone left a comment with a fake email address, subscribed to the post and when another comment was left on that post the subscription email bounced. It’s worked before fine so I’m not sure why Google are complaining now! Over 2GB of bounced mail. My poor server.

Update! It happened again but I stopped Postfix at 9.5MB free on the filesystem and this time I found out what went wrong. I implemented these Postfix rules Justin blogged about without running Spamassassin. Well, I used to run SA but then when I started using Gmail I stopped, which is probably why I didn’t see this earlier. Not Justin’s fault, my own for playing with fire!