Author Archives: Donncha

Robbie Williams: music piracy to be a great idea!, and lots more good stuff at Electric Banana!

Owen Kelly got a response from Simon Coveney about the zero tolerance speeding policy of the Gardai.

I listened to a debate on the zero tolerance approach… and the Garda interviewed assured the listeners that there would be indeed some tolerance shown…I think the Gardai may be somewhat foolish to try and implement a strategy that may be unworkable.
I was not aware that the Gardai in Ireland did not have to prove that their laser or radar guns were in good working order on a regular basis… …and so I too will raise some of the issues that you have pointed out through Parliamentary Questions when the new Dail begins.

Well done Owen!

Last Yankee war widow dies

One of the last living links with the American Civil war of the 1860s has been broken with the death of the last known widow of a soldier who fought on the Union side.

Pictures and updates on the Dublin Spire available at the Stunned Weblog. The last piece should be put into place sometime this morning!

John Burkhardt rants about SUVs. I’d hate to be driving a motorbike on the roads..

:: phpPatterns() – Extending PHP Classes with Overload

ScrappleFace – good reading here!

idleworm: games – gulf war 2 – bit long winded but you get the idea..

malec.wmv – not exactly the slashdot-effect, but darn close – hehe, good movie. What happens when someone drives around backwards?

OTRS::Email Management::Trouble Ticket System

OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries. Do you receive many e-mails and want to answer them with a team of agents? You’re going to love the OTRS!

We’ve been running OTRS for the past week. It’s excellent. Many of the email addresses on our website now feed directly into OTRS. Almost everyone here has embraced it and the migration has been fairly painless.
Installing it was mostly painless, except for the usual problems with downloading Perl modules (when CPAN isn’t configured and I CBA configuring it!), and minor configuration problems.
Integrating Spamassassin with it was harder. Here’s the procmail recipes I added to /opt/otrs/.procmailrc

:0fwc
| /usr/bin/spamassassin -P -a
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes.*
! myusername@mydomain.com

Now all spam going into OTRS gets sent to my email account. Occasionally a non-spam email is marked incorrectly and if so I’ll just bounce or forward it back into OTRS. (It hasn’t happened yet, Spam Assassin is good!)
This is much easier than creating an incoming_spam queue and checking each mail inside otrs. Most mail clients make it easier to delete lots of mails quickly. OTRS doesn’t unfortunately.
There’s a demo of OTRS on their website so take a look at that. It’s well worth it!