John Hobbs

1. Thursday Quote: Ed Nather
2. Thursday Quote: Justin
3. Thursday Quote: David Thornburg

I did some tinkering with an Exim server today, and it’s been probably a year at least since I las touched one. Found an invaluable cheat sheet at http://bradthemad.org/tech/notes/exim_cheatsheet.php but it’s not terribly printer friendly.

I knocked up a more printable one for myself with Abiword, hope it can help you too.

• exim_cheat_sheet.pdf (53k)
• exim_cheat_sheet.rtf (14k)

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I’ve been reading Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality and looking at my Github account.

I start so much stuff and most of it just wastes away, partially complete. I think this is the same reason I haven’t shipped any web apps, or anything beyond basic consulting work really.

No more. I’ve started making lists, letting things steep and trying to only do a few things at a time, and do them until they are done.

And it’s working, sort of. Recently I’ve started and completed the following:

• MarkedUp
• MkLst
• No PEAR Crypt_Blowfish
• PanoramAh
• UserPing for WordPress
• Konami Unicorn Blitz

Now, none of these are huge projects, but they are done.

Totally done, feature complete as far as I am concerned.

That feels good. You should try it if you don’t already.

Related posts:

1. MarkedUp: The Power of Python
2. PanoramAh: Version Two
3. PanoramAh: A jQuery Panorama Viewer

I’ve been trying to get Sphinx search running at work and I’ve been stymied by needing to get data out of a many-to-many table. This has to be a possibility, why can’t I find a reference to it, and I’m not much of a DBA to begin with.

Turns out it’s not that hard, it just takes an SQL construct that I’d never seen before, GROUP_CONCAT. Once you have that building block, it becomes pretty easy, but without it, it seemed insurmountable.

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SELECT
    posts.id, 
    posts.title, 
    posts.body, 
    GROUP_CONCAT( tag.name SEPARATOR ', ' ) AS tags
FROM posts
LEFT OUTER JOIN posts.id == post_tags.post_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN post_tags.tag_id = tags.id
GROUP BY posts.id;

This highlights a flaw in my autodidact education. If I just glom together from the internet, and something isn’t mentioned (or is only mentioned tangentially) then I don’t even know I don’t know something. Interesting problem to have to work around.

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“There is no surer way to flush out software bugs and configuration errors than to do a sales demo.”

- Eric Hellman
Pick this Nit: Null Path URIs and the Pedantic Web

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1. Thursday Quote: Jonathan Edwards
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3. Thursday Quote: Ed Nather