Brett Hutley's Blog » technology

Emacs cmd-key on Mac

brett — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:38:15 +0000

Emacs on my Macbook Pro uses the "alt" key (the one to the left of the "cmd" key) to be the Alt (meta) key when doing things like Alt-Backspace to delete backwards by word. This is quite annoying for me as I naturally try and use the command key for this. To fix this put the following in your .emacs file.

 
(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)

Citizen Journalism, social networking and reputation

brett — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:07:22 +0000

Bill Thompson has posted a thoughtful article over at the BBC about the changes that social networking is making to our standards of social interaction. He discusses his own tweeting and live-blogging at conferences, and then talks about the news updates that were tweeted by Tearah Moore during the Fort Hood incident.

Obviously these are two examples that illustrate both the good and bad sides of citizen journalism. The good being closer interaction with the audience, potentially closer exposure to events as they are unfolding and the speed at which events are reported. The bad being that there is no controls over the quality of the information being reported - it may be true, it may not. Also, citizen journalists may unwittingly or deliberately trample over the rights of the people being reported on.

I think that reputation is the panacea for the problems described above. Journalists have a reputation to consider when they are reporting. This keeps them focused on reporting the facts and ethically constrained (obviously something has gone horribly wrong at Fox News). As online reputation becomes more of a consideration for Joe or Jill Plumber, hopefully it will mean they too will be more concerned with "getting it right", as far as their tweets, blog posts, and Facebook updates go.

Getting Postfix sending email on your Mac

brett — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:23:18 +0000

I have recently been setting up my MacBook (running Leopard) to send email using the local email delivery system, i.e. Postfix. This means modifying the default installation to relay email through my ISP/email service - in my case; FastMail. I use FastMail because they have a nice secure email setup with both IMAP and SMTP access encrypted using SSL, but the instructions below will also work with Google Mail. The advantage of having your Apple Mac set up like this is that it enables command line scripts and various unix programs to send email. In my case, it allows me to use Mutt and Emacs as my email client.

The first step is to modify the main.cf file in the /etc/postfix directory. Use your favourite editor to do this, but you will need to sudo in order to modify the file. If you are using vi, type 'sudo vi /etc/postfix/main.cf' in a terminal window. Then search for a commented out "relayhost =" line and add the following:

relayhost = [mail.messagingengine.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options =
smtp_sasl_local_domain = yourdomain.com
#smtpd_sasl_application_name = smtpd
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
smtpd_pw_server_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_use_tls=yes
smtp_tls_security_level=encrypt
tls_random_source=dev:/dev/urandom

Now I am relaying my email through the server mail.messagingengine.com and Postfix will attempt to connect to the server on port 587. The square brackets around "mail.messagingengine.com" tell Postfix not to do an MX lookup on the name, but just got to that IP address. You will want to modify these values to suit your ISP/email service. For GMail you can use the line:

relayhost=smtp.gmail.com:587

The next step is to create the file "/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd". This file contains the information you need to use to authenticate yourself against the relaying mail server (in other words, your GMail username and password). Add the following lines to the /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd file:

[mail.messagingengine.com]:587 *username*:*password*

Or if you use GMail:

smtp.gmail.com:587 *username*@gmail.com:*password*

Remember to replace *username* with your actual username and *password* with your password.

From the Terminal command line, run the following commands:

sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
sudo chown root:wheel /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db
sudo chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db

These commands create the "/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db" file from the "/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd" file, and then change the permissions on the file so that they can only be read by the root user.

Congratulations! You should now be good-to-go. Try sending an email from the command line by typing "mail -s 'Test Email' yourname@yourisp.com" at the command line. Type some words and then type "Ctrl-D" to finish. You can monitor the log file at /var/log/mail.log in order to see what is happening, and use the "mailq" program to see the state of the mail queue.