Lately, I've been working a lot with mail scripts, which may use PHP's mail() function, or in some cases may even talk directly to sendmail.
In order to make sure I don't accidentally email any customers, I use Rob Allen's script to reformat emails so they always go to my mailbox, and nowhere else.
I've recently been getting warnings on my iPhone and iPad telling me that my email server is using a self-signed certificate. Now, normally this wouldn't be a problem, I'd just tap the button to "Trust" my certificate and carry on. Strangely, there is no longer an option to do this. I'm not sure when this changed, or if indeed it has changed.
There are a bunch of folks discussing it on the Apple Support Forums, with various fixes and workarounds, none of which worked for me. I did, however, find a way to fix my particular problem...
I have two Macs, and I tend to store most of my video files on the Mac Pro as it has much more drive space available. I also use Plex to stream videos to my MacBook which gets connected to the TV. Plex is a rather elegant solution, sporting an automated media library with images, synopses and more. There's also a remote app for iOS devices, allowing you to browse the libraries and start shows/stream them to your iOS device. Very smart.
On Monday afternoon, I upgraded my work machine's Linux install to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). I've been working in Windows mostly for a the last few months, and keeping all my MySQL data in a TrueCrypt volume as sometimes I need to hold customer data, and we can't store it in plain text.
I've previously written about absolute and relative paths in web development, and this follow-up post is here to show the method I've been using to get around the problem.
The secret sauce is the old HTML <base> tag. Simply
output this in the <head> section of your template,
with the href attribute set to the full URL of your site's
root, then you can use a simple helper function like the one below to
build full URLs in your javascript!
I've been working on multiple computers for some time now, and there's one problem that keeps cropping up now and then, and sometimes when going from development to production, or when a folder changes name... Whatever.
The problem I'm talking about is relative/absolute paths in non-server-side processed files. For example, creating an AJAX loading image from a JavaScript file. What path should you use? "/images/file.gif" will point to the root, and "file.gif" will look in the current directory. The script doesn't always know the path relative to the current document, and it won't (easily) know what directory the images are in from the docroot. So what to do in this case?
I've spent some time today looking for a service that lists all the spam bots on twitter and allows you to automatically block them all. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to find anything remotely like what I'm after, so I thought I'd start up a (horrendously basic) blog, and try to spread the word to see if anyone else had any feature requests before I start building it.