Hokie Hope: support VT tomorrow

Join us for Hokie Hope day – wear your orange and maroon on Friday (tomorrow).

And on the same note, many of you know that I pin-up quotes that I find to be inspiring next to my desk at work.  I’ve added a new one…

"We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile.
We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to know when to cry
and sad enough to know we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy.
We know we did not deserve it
but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS,
but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army.
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory;
neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized.
No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokier Nation embraces our own with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds.
We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid.
We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be.
We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail, we will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech."

– Nikki Giovanni, April 17, 2007

Long SPF record

We recently added a new IP range for our San Antonio data center to our SPF record, which many  of our customers’ domains reference.  This however increased the string length to 134 characters, and tinydns splits the string when it is larger than 127 characters.  So our SPF record looked like this…

emailsrvr.com txt "v=spf1 ip4:207.97.227.208/28 ip4:207.97.245.0/24 ip4:204.119.252.0/24 ip4:206.158.104.0/22 ip4:64.49.219.0/28 ip4:66.216.121.0/" "24 ~all"

Technically this is okay, because receivers are supposed to concat these multiple strings together.  However, apparently not all SPF systems are this smart.  Including the popular SPF checker at DNSStuff.com.  So we are changing it to make these systems happy.

There are two IP ranges that we no longer use, which we are taking out of the record… putting the new string length at 92.  But as we grow I am sure we will approach 127 chars again.  At that point we will probably break our SPF record into a nested set of includes, like hotmail does…

Top: hotmail.com txt "v=spf1 include:spf-a.hotmail.com include:spf-b.hotmail.com include:spf-c.hotmail.com include:spf-d.hotmail.com ~all"

Example include: spf-a.hotmail.com txt "v=spf1 ip4:209.240.192.0/19 ip4:65.52.0.0/14 ip4:131.107.0.0/16 ip4:157.54.0.0/15 ip4:157.56.0.0/14 ip4:157.60.0.0/16 ip4:167.220.0.0/16 ip4:204.79.135.0/24 ip4:204.79.188.0/24 ip4:204.79.252.0/24 ip4:207.46.0.0/16 ip4:199.2.137.0/24 ~all"

What a terrible day.

Thanks everyone who called and emailed today to check in on us.  I appreciate your concern… All Webmail employees are fine.  Early in the day Marisa checked in with all of our part-timers, most of whom are Virginia Tech students, and everyone is accounted for.

Being located in Blacksburg and with our offices actually on VT-owned land, this event obviously hits close to home.  Many of us at Webmail are VT grads and we all frequent the campus for various activities – and we all call this place home.  Most of us already know somebody who has been directly hit by today’s events.

It is hard to find words for today.

Songbird

After wasting way too much time yesterday, Songbird is my new media player.  Mike Arrington has written about them a couple of times, but I didn’t think much of it at the time when I read about it.

Songbird is pretty slick.  It has a very similar interface to iTunes.  It is built using Firefox’s framework and uses your OS’s native playback libraries, so it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows… with Linux it requires the gstreamer packages.  Reading the comments on their blog, I see that a lot of Mac users are even starting to dump iTunes in favor of Songbird because it can do a few web2.0-ish things that iTunes can’t do.  The backend is SQLite rather than XML, so it should scale better than iTunes too.

I also had to install plugins for iPod Device Support and the iTunes Library Importer.  It’s pretty cool that the Apple stuff is all plugins, because not everyone needs that bloat.

So I put it to the test…  First, I had it scan my external hard drive for music.  I stepped away to make some lunch and when I returned it had successfully imported 8069 out of my 8225 songs (the missing files were due to the fact that it can’t decode Apple DRM files (.m4p), but I will come back to that).  Then I realized that I shouldn’t have imported my music this way because when I ran the iTunes Library Importer to import my playlists, my playlists didn’t point to the right files.  So I deleted all of the songs from the Library and started over.  Deleting maxed out the CPU for about 20 minutes, but thats okay… iTunes probably would do the same.

Now, to get the iTunes library to import properly, I first had to change the file paths in "iTunes Music Library.xml" from Windows-style paths to Linux paths…

OLD:
file://localhost/E:/Music/Flogging%20Molly/Alive%20Behind%20The%20Green%20Door/05%20Laura.m4a

NEW:
file:///media/EXTERNAL/Music/Flogging%20Molly/Alive%20Behind%20The%20Green%20Door/05%20Laura.m4a

Then I ran the importer and it worked perfectly… again excluding the .m4p DRM files.

Now to get the DRM files unlocked and imported I used this… http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1553

And as for syncing the iPod… I just plugged it in a few minutes ago and it appears to be syncing.  If something fails horribly, I will update this post.  Otherwise you can assume that I am now a happy Songbird user.

Linux media players, iPod…

This morning I have decided to port my iTunes library over to my new laptop.  Since I no longer run Windows on any computer, I need a new media player for Ubuntu which can keep my iPod synced.  I mostly have mp3 and mp4 files, but I do have several Apple DRM songs that I don’t want to lose.

Any suggestions?