Chris introduced me to Cloud Cult, whose latest album (released last year), is amazing.

Here’s one of the songs that I’m especially hooked on:

• Cloud Cult – What Comes at the End
  

Paul Robertson‘s epic video-game inspired sprite-based animation is amazing.

Last year, I set up an “ISP-level” mail system for myself. Well, it seemed to me like I had some pretty common requirements: being able to handle mail for multiple domains without having to create UNIX accounts, and secure logins. Despite “email” being 30 years old, however, it turned out that there was no simple package that I could apt-get to install this. Instead, I ended up almagating various tutorials/packages for my Postifx w/ SASL + Courier IMAP w/ SSL + MySQL configuration.

One piece I wasn’t able to set up, however, was virtual user mail filtering. I banged my head until finding out there was just no way to do procmail delivery w/o an associated UNIX home folder. After which, I moved on to looking at how maildrop might work, but after many fruitless hours I gave up.

Recently, I decided it was time to get it working, no matter how long it took, and after a few hours of hammering away, I finally have gotten it done.

• If you have a setup like mine setup except for maildrop, this is the clearest tutorial.
• If you’re running Debian, you’re going to need to compile your own Maildrop w/ MySQL support enabled. Note, that Maildrop 1.7.0 is the last version that has built-in MySQL support; after that version, Maildrop switches to using Courier authlib for connecting. I have the authlib stuff set up for my IMAP/POP, but I couldn’t get Maildrop to connect properly!
• test your maildrop setup separately as root:

  maildrop -V 10 -d user@domain.tld < test.eml

• If you get an maildrop: signal 0x0B error, use strace to see what's going on. Maildrop segfaults on bad configs. Also, be sure to turn on MySQL logging to see what query maildrop is actually performing

I’ve put up a page that I’ve threatened to do years ago that randomly rotates old posts. It’s augmented by other automatically generated feeds (by products of my daily actions). While the latter is a widespread practice, I think as more and more blogs accrue years of backlog posts, that we might be seeing more and more designs/mechanisms to surface them.

In fact, it’s only after implementing my own random post rotator that I’ve realized just how compelling this is on a personal level – it brings back a sense of serendipity and self-discovery, and also gives a new context for accomplishment. (4000+ posts over the past 7 years!)

My in-progress redesign is focusing on ways of highlighting and integrating the various streams and non-blog projects I’ve been working on, but I think the random historical posts will stay, especially as I experiment with adding new ways to interact with them (rating, tagging, favoriting, commenting, addendums, related posts)

It took all day to compile, but I have Filelight running on my Mac thanks to Fink.

This year was my seventh SXSW, and it was good.

If you’ve read much of my blog, you’ll know that I tend to shy away from going overboard on the personal introspection here. At a sub-conscious level, perhaps it’s a carryover of New England sensibilities towards mawkishness, or maybe, my reflexive aversion to the medium’s early tendency towards extreme navel-gazing. My conscious rationale has always been that capturing my behavior and external interests would both be more relevant to others and also in the long term, give me more self-insight than any extemporaneous analysis.

That’s a wordy way of saying that I don’t get too personal in my posts. That isn’t however, to say, that my blog doesn’t serve as a marker for points in my life. Usually, when I look back, the gaps reveal those just fine, but sometimes, I find myself wishing I had been just a bit less economical, and more diaristic.

SXSW was very different for me this year. It wasn’t just the conference itself: the signficantly larger crowd, the new faces, the shifted focus, the tone (if you sat and listened, you could hear the difference in the air), but it was me and my role as well. Beyond the changes in job and the relocation, my experience was reframed by the new responsibilities I had, sitting on a panel, hosting a party and representing a new organization.

I don’t think fully I appreciated the luxury of just being able to sit down with old friends that I’m lucky to see maybe once a year. Maybe I’m just turning into a softie in my old age.

(I started on that recap but couldn’t really be motivated to do a blow-by-blow. I spent the first half of the weekend very stressed out by panel and work stuff, but ended up relaxing Sunday night and having a great time after that. As far as panels, there was no Hamptons Inn continental breakfast to get me up every morning, so I missed a couple of 10AMs, but my in-conference experience was pretty good – I based my panel choices mostly by the panelists I knew, or knew were insightful/entertaining in the past. The best session I was at was Daniel Gilberts. Chatting with Andy afterward, we both agreed it was better than any session at ETech. My biggest disappointment was that I had no idea Why, of Why’s Poignant Guide was speaking. I really hope they put that podcast up. Also, worth listening to is the Bruce Sterling podcast. He takes it in a different direction this year.)

For my last night at SXSW this year, I skipped out early on the closing night parties and caught the Comedians of Comedy show at Emo’s. The line was a bit intimidating, but it turns out that this was definitely the right decision. (standing for so long was leg-numbing, but the Emo’s Sparkleberries helped – yeah, what can I say, I fell off the horse there)

Sure you know Patton Oswalt is gonna rock, but the rest of the lineup was great too. I really dug Flight of the Conchords, but a special googlejuicing shout out goes to Aziz Ansari, fucking badass (see also), who just won Best Standup at the Aspen Comedy Festival, for bringing on the east-coast nerdcore in full effect [mov].

(Some more SXSW recapping should be coming, but definitely not anything as involved as last year)