I have been in­stalling qmail servers for a while.

I start­ed by us­ing Bu­ruce Guenter's un­trou­bled qmail+­patch­es RPM set, which was good, but he seems to have aban­doned them.

In the last year or so, I have kept work­ing on them, and now they are some­what more heav­i­ly patched.

I have added:

• quo­­ta (bounce over-quo­­ta im­me­di­ate­­ly)

• re­al­r­cp­t­­to (bounce im­me­di­ate­­ly un­ex­is­­tant ad­­dress­es)

• tarpit­t­ing (add de­lays over n re­­cip­i­ents)

• er­rno patch (to make it build on RH 9 or lat­er)

• smtp au­th+tls (well, smtp auth and TLS ;-)

And mis­ce­la­neous changes to the de­fault con­fig so that, for ex­am­ple smtp­suth sim­ply works by de­fault.

I think this is prob­a­bly the eas­i­est way to in­stall a tra­di­tion­al mul­ti­-UID qmail on Red Hat-­like sys­tem­s.

It has been a lit­tle (not too much) work, be­cause when you pile patch over patch over patch, usu­al­ly the third one does­n't ap­ply, and this patch­set has 22 patch­es in it.

But... the qmail source is pret­ty clean for C!

I think I am go­ing to put it on sf.net or some­such.

For no par­tic­u­lar pur­pose, ex­cept that it made me laugh loud­ly on a train:

`[he] tried to mask [the smell] with all the spices and aro­mat­ic gums of the East. The place was all a-­dan­gle with small charm­s, clev­er­ly made in the shape of trees, im­preg­nat­ed with rare per­fumes.`

One of the themes of the book is that ev­ery­thing start­ed in the 17th cen­tu­ry, you know :-)

I saw these three movies in the last 48 hours or so.

Du­plex: it's dum­b, dark, and the end cheat­s.

Some­thing's got­ta give: If I were Di­ane Keaton, I would have tak­en Keanu. If I were Jack Nichol­son, I would­n't have dumped the daugh­ter. How­ev­er, the con­cept is cool, and Di­ane looks damn good.

Now, the sight of Jack Nichol­son's butt was com­plete­ly un­nec­es­sary. Now I am so self­-­con­scious I am go­ing to buy a robe. I nev­er imag­ined any­one could look so bad, and I need to make a habit of hid­ing my body be­fore it all falls down.

Lost in trans­la­tion: I want to mar­ry Scar­let Jo­hansson's char­ac­ter. I doubt Mrs. Jo­hans­son her­self would be half as much fun, al­though she is ob­vi­ous­ly just as pret­ty.

On the oth­er hand, I want to say, make it Sun­to­ry time. Now, to the right, with in­ten­si­ty. More Roger Moore!

If you have not seen it, the above para­graph makes no sense. If you did: I want to be him, too. On­ly younger. And mar­ried to her.

I quite liked the movie, even if my date did­n't (she says, and she is right, noth­ing hap­pens in it). Had the movie had a plot, it would be amaz­ing. What is there is good enough it even sur­vives the plot­less­ness as good.

I sug­gest Jer­ry Bruck­heimer hires Sofia Cop­po­la. Al­though he has the worst imag­in­able taste in di­rec­tors (the wrong Scott broth­er! Michael Bay!), he re­quires all his movies to have a be­gin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end­ing, and that the end­ing be dif­fer­ent from the be­gin­ning.

So, if Jer­ry wants to be­come a We­in­stein-­like fel­low, and he keeps those re­quire­ments, eas­es up on the ex­plo­sion­s, and forces Sofia to hire a writ­er (if at all pos­si­ble, the one who wrote "Ac­tion!" with Jay Mohr?), man, that is go­ing to be an ac­tu­al movie, in­stead of just 2 hours of film.

Oh, you may say, Rober­to is crazy! Sofia Cop­po­la is art­sy! Bruck­heimer is crass!. There is such a thing as too art­sy, and def­i­nite­ly, there is such a thing as too crass, but, sur­prise! There is such a thing as not art­sy enough, and, worse of al­l, not crass enough.

Nowa­days, movies fall ei­ther on one side or the oth­er, ex­cept for some film­s, very few, van­ish­ing­ly few. I pro­pose ex­ogamy, be­cause the in­breed­ing of the art­sy and the crass tribes is killing them.

Com­ing soon (not re­al­ly): why Kiarosta­mi should di­rect a Taranti­no scrip­t.

I am a fast read­er. Not that I read spe­cial­ly fast, but I read hours and hours, and that way books pile around my bed, un­der the bath­room's sink, in­to clos­et­s, and on ta­bles, and I have read them.

I hve read the Dune se­ries in a week. The whole works of Hein­lein in 20 days. The Lord Of the Rings (and The Hob­bit) in a long week­end.

I have been read­ing Quick­sil­ver for a week now. I am not even 30% done.

Quick­sil­ver is al­most 1000 pages long. And they are not the eas­i­est pages, ei­ther. I feel like I'm drown­ing in it, I am be­ing slapped by it, my mind is be­ing raped by a book.

I like it.

My uni­ver­si­ty ex­pe­ri­ence was study­ing math­s, so I am more like­ly to en­joy this book than most, though.

When you are sur­round­ed by sci­ence, if you have even a lit­tle of his­toric sense, you have to won­der: how can it be that I, a rea­son­ably in­tel­li­gent 20th cen­tu­ry guy, have been get­ting an ed­u­ca­tion for 20 years, and still am quite ig­no­ran­t, even though I am con­cen­trat­ing on a sin­gle field?

Well, af­ter that, if you ev­er try to do any orig­i­nal sci­en­tif­ic work, you have to imag­ine that those who cre­at­ed mod­ern sci­ence were much bet­ter than you. Their lifes were short­er, uglier, and they did­n't have the book­s, yet they fig­ured out a huge amount of stuff.

Usu­al­ly, there's a mit­i­gat­ing fac­tor in that the sci­ence they made is sim­pler than the sci­ence to be made now. That does­n't work for one guy. Maybe two.

That one guy is, of course, New­ton. And the oth­er is Leib­nitz.

If some­one in­vent­ed Leib­nitz for a nov­el, it would be sil­ly. In­vent­ing New­ton would be pre­pos­ter­ous. So, how come al­most noone both­ered mak­ing them in­to fic­tion­al char­ac­ters be­fore?

In tak­ing that step, Stephen­son shows ge­nius.

I would write all this book brings to mind, but this blog is too small to con­tain it.

Yup. A friend of mine just gave me a new one a cou­ple of days ago.

His name is Gan­dalf (ac­tu­al­ly, I call it Gan).

What colour is he?