Rand Wacker

Where We’re Bound: Tip for Burning in iDVD to External DVD Burners

The following is an announcement I posted to a number of email authentication discussion lists earlier today. Its an important release by our company and an important step for the evolution of email. Its also one of the things I’ve been working my butt off on lately. =)

As part of our broad-reaching effort to spur the testing and eventual broad adoption of sender-based email authentication to address fraud and spam in email, Sendmail, Inc. is releasing an open source implementation of the Yahoo! DomainKeys specification for testing on the Internet.

This implementation, part of the Sendmail Messaging Integrity program, utilizes the milter interface to plug directly into the sendmail MTA. To speed the adoption of sender-based messaging authentication schemes, Sendmail is aggressively testing these implementations in the Pilot Program. The goals of this program are to:

* Deploy and test milter-based implementations of sender authentication schemes like DomainKeys and the evolving merger of Caller ID for Email and SPF.
* Encourage diverse user communities to thoroughly test different sender authentication approaches using real-world use cases.
* Develop additional testing scenarios based on feedback from program participants and like implementations of sender-based messaging authentication.
* Share and publish results in a community forum purpose-built to share ideas about email authentication.

Sendmail is actively seeking participants and feedback for this Pilot Program. For more information about how you or your organization can get involved in piloting the next generation in fraud and spam protection software, please visit:

http://sendmail.net/

The milter for testing Yahoo! DomainKeys can be found here:

http://sendmail.net/dk-milter/

More information on DomainKeys can be found at:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys

Microsoft’s specification for Caller-ID is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/privacy/spam_callerid.mspx

The SPF web site is located at:

http://spf.pobox.com/

Guide to Springfield USA

I’m a little peeved at the developers of ecto (a quite nice blogging client for OSX). It turns out that whenever you add a new blog to post to, the default settings include a ping to technorati, weblogs.com, and blo.gs. They say that this is default behavior in Moveable Type but that is patently untrue, you have to explicitly enable that kind of behavior in MT.

So this really bit me at work before I realized it. Since we’re doing some extensive blogging on our corporate intranet right now, ecto was going ahead and pinging external public web sites about entries going on to our internal proprietary system.

UPDATE: Adriaan has mailed me back in response to my queries and explained his reasoning, and said he will remove the default behavior in the next version. I’m very happy about that, and glad I paid for the product a while ago.

Bwahahahahahah!

Bush election campaign ran from Noida call centre : HindustanTimes.com

The political split in the US over outsourcing notwithstanding, till very recently the fund-raising and vote-seeking campaign for the Republican Party was done partly out of India. And this was handled by two call centres located in our own friendly neighbourhood in Noida and Gurgaon.

Andy Kaufman Returns

Hoax or not?

From the good people at Freshly Squeezed Software, a very good collection of Beta Testing Do’s and Dont’s. This intrests me purely because in some capacity I am in charge of running Beta programs at Sendmail. Even though there is a huge difference between betas for enterprise vs. desktop software, this is an excellent list of points. Some of them apply across all betas, and some to smaller packages…but some day I hope to write the latter.

-Rand

A useful tool for OSX would be a simple little app which you could drag a file on to (Word, Powerpoint, Graffle), and it would automatically print that file to a PDF. Since PDF creation and viewing capabilities are very well supported in OSX natively, I really don’t want to spend the $99 or so for Adobe’s Acrobat Standard (which is usually much slower and buggier than Apple’s implementation).

I searched Google for an scripts or apps to do this and mostly found things that could merge multiple PDFs or automatically convert only Postscript files. Anyone have any pointers?

FTPeel

Simply Powerful FTP, SFTP, and FTP-SSL!

And I’m a fan of bad action movies…Gladiator, fantastic. Pirates of the Carribean, hilarious. The Mummy, an all-time favorite. Troy was just aweful.

I hope they bring back Mystery Science Theater 3000 just to make fun of that damn movie.

Great quotes so far about the movie (feel free to add your own):

Boredcast Message from ‘brain’: Mon May 17 11:52:12 2004

she’s beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships
but not enough to list on the poster

Boredcast Message from ‘randal’: Mon May 17 23:00:19 2004

man, the budget for hot curlers and chest waxing in that movie
must have been HUGE…for the men…