Clouds in my coffee | Brian Hare's personal blog.

CAT | Software

Aug/10

14

Instant Messenger Online Status Indicator

http://www.onlinestatus.org/ no longer works with MSN, and this stinks. Hopefully, I can make an online status indicator that works with MSN and all the other major IM providers. It would use open source libraries and be similar to how meebo basically connects and checks for online status. Users might have to add a certain MSN to their buddylist until it will work for them, the site wouldn’t be like a “am i blocked” site but more of one for websites to show their users if they are on MSN.

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Aug/10

14

Google SMTP, MSMTP, and PHP

I use Google Apps Standard Edition on every domain I own. Google Apps Standard Edition is free and will allow your own domain to have a Gmail SMTP, giving you and your users an email interface similar to GMail.

The benefit you get with Google app’s mail is you don’t have to go through the complicated mess of setting up mail servers, users, passwords, web interfaces, all that. You simply tell Google to do all of it for you. Best of all, you get all of Gmail’s features for your own domain. Almost no free or perhaps even paid for mail server can offer that kind of functionality. I normally just forward that domain’s email to my personal Gmail. That I make a filter to mark that domain’s emails with a special tag so I can sort through it. I also setup my personal Gmail to use the domain to send mail from.

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Aug/10

13

Free Yahoo Account POP3 Access

I have a Yahoo email that I would like to check more often. Currently, all my emails that are worth checking are all integrated into Gmail’s Mail fetcher feature (Details here). The downside to this feature is that it only checks POP3 accounts. Typically, this is not a problem because POP3 is more popular than IMAP.

However, Yahoo doe’s not allow free POP3 access to their standard free accounts. You have to subscribe to their plus package which is $20 a year. There is a work around though, if you’ve had your Yahoo account for long enough – you can simply change your location settings to Asia and it will allow you to enable the feature (How to enable POP3 on Yahoo, using Yahoo Asia) . However, I read as of September 2009, this is no longer the case for new accounts (I tested this, and I was able to enable POP3 on an account that was over 10 years old).  It just go happens the account I need to check was made since then, and I have confirmed that even changing my location Yahoo Asia, there are no POP3 options to turn on.

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Aug/10

12

WordPress Password Bug

When trying to create this blog, WordPress kept telling me it could not connect to the database. That I supplied the wrong username or password. I double checked everything and even SSH’d into my server and was able to connect  to MySQL using the exact same password.

As it turns out, the install.php file does not correctly encode the single quote character ( ‘ ) in  the database password. This is probably related to the fact that by default they use single quotes as separators for the PHP define command, so I assume something is not clicking.

You would think popular software package such as this, they would be able encode and decode any character.  After all, they even mention that special characters should be used with the password

From the add user page:

Hint: The password should be at least seven characters long. To make it stronger, use upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols like ! ” ? $ % ^ & ).

When I get some time on my hands, I’ll dig a little deeper and see if I can resolve this issue for them. I’ll update this post if/when I do.

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