December 2003 Archives

After thoughts of killing off the Exchange server earlier this month, a cruel twist of fate has brought us a copy of Small Business SharePoint technology that has almost no application for an independant consultant. Unfortunately this and several other features sound cool as heck, so they'll probably at least get tried out.

SAProxy that came with Bloomba will probably get purchased anyway. Between that and Cloudmark SpamNet, and the blacklists on the mail server, I've cut down to about 1 SPAM in my IN box in the morning. For anyone who's counting, that's between 0.9% and 0.6% false negative, and the only false positive so far had the GTUBE, [Generic Test for Unsolicited Bulk Email] in it and was a test.

I have this client who takes pictures of cows, and I was showing her some of my buddy here. And it occurred to me we could all use a little levity after the year this one has been. So everybody lighten up, got it?

Besides which, I have been at this blog thing almost one whole year now, and it's the first time I showed a ubiquitous dog picture.

Michael Peters from http://www.venzia.com/, a module CGI-App written by Jesse Elerbaum. I have used CGI-App in some projects and it provides and object oriented approach that allows me to focus on what I want my web application to do, instead of the mechanics of the web.

The name of this project, no matter how silly, is actually an apt description of the project. CheesePizza provides the metephorical foundation for a website application by providing the elements that are always present in web applications. Things like crust and sauce and cheese, to say nothing of user authentication, profile editing, database connections and my personal favorite module names, CRUD and MultiCRUD. (Who could be without modules named ... )

It looks like they are providing me with even more ability to focus on what I want my web app to do. I look forward to using this and recommend that perl developers check it out.

Email is my life. If you do business with me, you know it is the fastest way to get in touch with me, and in the long run, I will get to the bottom of it if you send me an email. (If you call me about something I am very likely to forget it within 24 hours.)

I mention all of this to explain the next outrageous thing, which is that I think it's time to give up my dedicated Exchange server. By dedicated I don't mean a single box dedicated to serving Exchange. I mean and Exchange server more or less dedicated to serving just my mailbox.

I need search features, and big time antiSPAM featrues. On the Unix side I am familair with spamassissin, so I decided to check out SAproxy. This comercial application allows me to use just about email client and have the program run some sophisticated analysis of my mail to determine which are SPAM.

Bloomba is the companion email client that makes it easier to "train" SAproxy to be even better at recognising SPAM. Bloomba and SAproxy support "white lists", so I can allow mail through from people I know.

Bloomba's primary claim of superiority is its ability to quickly search through a lot of mail or contacts and find the relevant information. I can't confirm or deny this at the moment. I did think the Smart Groups feature was nice, you can configure it to check your favorite RSS feed for recent updates.

Plus, it is one of those words that's just fun to say.

For $5 per machine per month, Progeny Transition Services is offering a service to provide extended updates for the 7.2 and 7.3 platforms. We think this is a good value, in line with what RedHat previously charged for RHN support for the products. I wish I knew more about this new company. The only thing I do know is that the guy who founded Prgeny is also the creator of Debian Linux distribution.

If you don't know what Debian is, that may not be as meanignful to your company. Interestingly, JSW4.NET has always has always taken the position that Debian is cutting edge really free OS. (Free as in Beer AND as in Speech, in this case.)

If you've been reading AdvisorBits regularly, you'll know that RedHat has announced end of life on their product with the highest market penetration, 7.x. They also announced ond of life on 8.0 and 9; the thing they hope will happen is that we'll all freak out and buy their enterprise product. In case you don't speak Sales, "Enterprise" translates from Sales (Salesesse? Saleish? Saleven?) into English roughly as "Give me all your money now."

Some of us want to see the value and explore the alternatives to shelling out an extra few grand every year. Until recently we were leaning towards upgrading to the Enterprise Server (Redhat ES), but now we have a choice. And that's a load off our minds.