On a related note, is it ethical to use a third party’s DNS servers for recursive lookups without asking first?

I have hopefully fixed the issue in the 3.x branch of Cricket Moods.  I haven’t tagged a new 3.7 release of Cricket Moods because, frankly, I don’t know if these changes break anything.  I tested the changes on one Blog running WordPress 2.6.  So, before I tag and zip up a release, it’d be great if some folk² could test the new plugin.  Grab the file from the Subversion repository.

To fix any old duplicated moods, remove all moods from the affected post, save the post, add the moods again, and save the post.

1. A bug.
2. guinea pigs

As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, the core functionality of the plugin is finished.  That’s all well and good if you like to hammer on your database by hand to get things done, but not so good for most people.

The Problem

The truth is, I’m bad at UI design.  Show me a mockup of what you want, and I’ll whip out the code to make it work.  Unfortunately, when it comes to designing it myself, I freeze up.

Also, I want to AJAX-ify the UI to some degree.  For example, I’d like the mood postbit creation process to be more elegant than Cricket Mood’s current two-text-box approach.  I’m thinking something drag-and-drop powered.  For some reason, I find the documentation for jQuery and script.aculo.us very confusing, so I’ve never learned how to use them.

The Bottom Line

I’m not mentioning all this to defend myself or to garner sympathy from readers.  I’m mentioning it because I have identified these two areas (UI and JavaScript) as things I need help with.  I need some creative folk to work with me to finish this plugin.

The Solution

In an effort to accelerate the development of PostBits, I have registered it as a Google Code project.  I urge any interested parties to take a look at the code and contact me if they’d like to help.

As a final note, I should mention that, in its current state, the plugin should not be installed on a live blog.

I recently purchased a new motherboard as part of a system upgrade. I figured I’d give the on-board HD audio chip a shot. I will admit that it has improved since I bought my last motherboard that still had an AC97 audio chip. If I were just listening to music through my speakers I’d probably have trouble telling the difference, but it’s easier to hear the quality difference when I use my headphones. When listening Float On by Modest Mouse through the Audigy, I can tell that the bass hits a little harder and the treble isn’t quite as shrill. When listening to some Penguin Cafe Orchestra through the motherboard, the strings sound hollow–they lack midrange.

In any case, I’m still not sure I’m comfortable having to use ALSA’s dmix software mixing plugin when playing audio from multiple applications. Hardware mixing FTW!

1. Complete bullshit.
2. I’m talkin’ ’bout the first generation

There’s not one single package you can install called “mail-server.” You need both an MTA (to handle receiving mail from other hosts) and an MDA (to handle delivering mail via POP/IMAP to users). Lessee, for MTA I can choose from Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and Qmail (which has at least three different forks). For the MDA, I can choose Cyrus, vpopmail, courier, some others I can’t think of, and Dovecot (the newest of the bunch which looks promising).

Setting up the MTA is the beyotch, I think. Whichever one I choose, it has to be set up to accept mail from multiple domains on a single host. The original idea behind the oldest MTAs, like Sendmail, Postfix and Qmail, is that every email address is a user with an actual shell account on that box. They basically assume that the box only has one domain attatched to it (which also happens to be that box’s hostname). It seems rather hackish to get virtual domains set up on those. I think Exim is a little newer and actually has honest-to-god support for vdomains. I just seem to have trouble understanding the documentation; it’s extremely technical.

This sever has Plesk installed, which uses Qmail and Courier. It’s hacked together like a 1988 Mexican car trying to cross the border, running on duct tape and wishes.

I think I’m mostly frustrated by my inability to find a source of easy to understand documentation explaining how to properly configure these applications for my needs. Hmmm… as if someone should have specifically written a HOWTO just for me.