Rick Wang's Weblog

I spent some time today trying to get fetchmail to work, but ran into some snags. I remember fetchmail fondly from my days using Slackware Linux, in order to pull mail from the ISP server and UCSD's mail servers onto my local network. However, when running fetchmail under Debian, I found that postfix was rejecting the mail once fetchmail tried to pass it off. This was because fetchmail tries to deliver to user@localhost rather than user@disasterzone.net as it was configured for. In order to fix this, I had to change this line:

original /etc/postfix/main.cf
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain $mydomain

revised /etc/postfix/main.cf
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain $mydomain localhost

After restarting the postfix server, it now recognizes user@localhost as a deliverable address, and handles the mail properly. I wondered why localhost was originally omitted? I ran a few open relay tests, but saw no problems. Once this was all working, I went ahead and created my user .fetchmailrc. It is important to chmod this file 600 when putting the password in, to prevent others from viewing the password. Alternatively, one can omit the password and let fetchmail prompt for the password.

.fetchmailrc
set daemon 6000

poll imap.aim.com proto imap
user myusername with password 'mypassword'
ssl

poll pop.gmail.com proto pop3
user myusername with password 'mypassword'
ssl

With everything in place, I pulled all of the old emails from AIM and Gmail onto disasterzone.net's mail server. As far as I can tell, my emails only go back to late 2006. I'm not sure what happened to the other mails. It is probable I forgot to back up the data when decommissioning my old mail server.

Participants: part Meetup.com group, part solo
Location: San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 10 mi (hike)
Elevation: 2400 to 4900 feet
Terrain: Suburban, Shrubland, Foothills, Mountain

After two botched attempts at using the tagine, burning on the bottom, I decided to try the oven method. The tagine claimed to be oven safe, so I figured it was worth a shot. I decided to try chicken marinated in soy sauce and tangerine, for a change of pace from the ras-el-hanout and preserved lemons taste. I kept it minimalistic with the intent of isolating the cooking method from the melange of spices typically used. Anyways, after an overnight marinading, I stuck it in the tagine, and the tagine into the oven pre-heated at 350F. I was not sure how well the moisture would keep in the oven, so I added enough water to bring the liquid level to half of the chicken.

The results were that while cooked, the chicken did not brown on top as much as I would have liked. I think I could have gotten away without adding extra water at the beginning. This probably would have reduced the moisture level and helped it brown. Also, the soy sauce taste totally overpowered the tangerines, so I would use more tangerines next time. Overall, it was tasty, but tasted no different from normal soy sauce chicken. Finally, I think the tagine can take higher temperatures than 350F, as I did raise it briefly to 375F without problems. I think 400F might be a better temperature to try next time.

I felt like trying a vegetarian tagine today. For this one I used potato, onion, squash, preserved lemon, tomatoes, raisins, spices, salt and olive oil. This is my second attempt using the tagine I received from my sister, as the first one had to be aborted due to burning on the bottom. Sadly, this one burnt on the bottom as well, but finished cooking anyway. The results were rather disappointing, mostly watery except the bottom, where the remainder of the flavor was overpowered by the burnt taste. The one package of raisins did not impart enough sweetness, and the only flavor that survived overall was the preserved lemons. I know it should be possible to make a vegetarian tagine that tastes great, but this isn't it.

I decided to try Reinhardt's 100% whole wheat bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, with some buttermilk to soften the whole wheat taste. However, without a machine, I mixed by hand and had serious problems kneading the dough with the ratio prescribed. I ended up having to add nearly 1.5 cups of additional flour in order to get it to stop being a gooey mess, and I believe this ruined the recipe. I got no oven spring after the proofing step, despite a nice first rise, and a nice rise during the proof. I wonder if the plastic wrap I used during the proofing choked off airflow and killed the yeast? It was really weird that I got no oven spring despite passing the windowpane test after kneading. Anyway the final taste of the bread was really boring, but I suspect this is due to my mistakes in trying to follow the instructions.

Participants: part Meetup.com group, part solo
Location: San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 8 mi (hike)
Elevation: 2100 to 3400 feet
Terrain: Suburban, Shrubland, Foothills, River

So there I was, chatting away on IRC on a rainy day, when I noticed an email from amazon.com had crashed policyd-spf. Alarmed by the loss of potential mail, a quick google search revealed this was a known problem (bug #499504). Reading through the thread, I determined that I had the same problem and proceeded to install an updated version of python-dns from etch-backports:

apt-get install etch-backports python-dns

While looking at backports.org, I was rather disappointed to learn that etch-backports was discontinued as of today. This means at some point, I have to upgrade pain.disasterzone.net to lenny.

Participants: solo
Location: Angeles National Forest, CA, USA
Distance: 20.5 miles (bike) + 10.25 miles (hike)
Elevation: 1500 to 3400 feet
Terrain: Suburban, Shrubland, Forest, Foothills, Mountain, Ridge

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth!

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Participants: solo
Location: Rancho Cucamonga, CA, USA
Distance: 13.5 miles (bike) + 4.5 miles (jog)
Elevation: 1350 to 2200 feet
Terrain: Suburban, Shrubland, Stream bed

Participants: 9 people, Inland Empire Trail Freaks, led by Nathan
Location: Angeles National Forest, CA, USA
Distance: 8.4 miles (hike)
Elevation: 4600 to 5000 feet
Terrain: Mountainous Forest

It has been over three months since I got back into outdoors activities. It started with the Cucamonga Duathalon Training Route I plotted out on Google Maps in order to get myself in shape. The original intent behind the outdoor activities was to restore the high levels of energy I experienced from jogging trails such as Black's Beach/Torrey Pines while studying in La Jolla. The secondary intent was to be able to view the natural wonders of my home state with the same sort of reverence and enjoyment I experienced while traveling in 2008. Other than a brief recess in December to play heavily discounted computer games on Steam, I've been pretty good about exercise and hiking in particular.

After having done so many hikes and having next to no pictures to keep track of them by, I was inspired by Dan's hike log to begin my own form of recordkeeping. However, instead of a table, I decided to keep track using my existing blog. I renamed the "Outdoors" category to hiking and plan to keep record of hikes and jogs. After all, one person's jog is another person's hike. While the standard definition of hiking pertains to wilderness and countryside, I am going to include urban settings in this category as well. In order to contain the same kind of information as Dan's hike log, I have to standardize my entry body to include some pre-defined fields. Doing this in a consistent manner would allow me to export a similar table with some Python & MySQL work on the blog's database. The name of the hike (title) and the date already exist as fields for each blog entry. For the others:

<usual serendipity media image object.... alt="trail map"/>

Participants: solo -OR- with x,y,z

Location: Locality, State -OR- Region, Country

Distance: x (bike) + y (jog) + z (hike) (include units!)

Elevation: low elevation - high elevation (include units!)

Terrain: arbitrary string (rocky desert, mountainous forest, grassy hills, urban etc.)

...

main body of text

...

additional entries from media library, if any

With this in mind, it is time to write today's entry and edit the previous entry. I may eventually ret-con previous hikes, especially the more memorable ones from the 2008 travels such as Reykjavik and Kilarney.

Major headache today trying to install latex on disasterzone. Firstly, I found that the tetex package I was used to was no longer supported, so I had to install texlive instead. It has been a while since I last touched a latex document, and it seems tetex had been out of commission since 2006. After attempting to install texlive, I ran into a bigger problem. The default package for etch was not working. After much debugging, I learned that my problem was similar to the fmtutil bug mentioned in this bug report and again in this bug report. Apparently there is a bug where a warning is misinterpreted as a fatal error, stopping apt from installing the package correctly. At the time of this post, the fix for this bug had been accepted but not actually merged into the main repository. As per these instructions, I added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian oldstable-proposed-updates main contrib non-free

I then installed texlive with the following command via sudo:

apt-get -t oldstable-proposed-updates install texlive texlive-latex-extra

Hopefully the proposed updates get merged into the main repository soon, and other people can avoid dealing this problem.

After getting many spam emails with forged sender addresses, purporting to be from my domain, I decided to take action today. I see that there are several ways of addressing forged sender addresses, and I mainly looked at SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Both looked promising but SPF looked easier to implement. I read up on the related material at OpenSPF to get a better idea of what was going on. It seems that I had to include a TXT field in my nameserver to specify which IP represents the disasterzone.net domain. Once that was set up, I used the testing tools linked at the OpenSPF site to verify the nameserver modifications were correct.

The second step was to set up my mailserver, in this case Postfix, to make use of the SPF information. This required the package "postfix-policyd-spf-python", which was not available for Debian etch, so I had to learn how to access etch-backports. Thankfully, it was available in backports, and I followed these directions to configure. For some reason, python-yaml was not available, so I could not test whether things were working. Instead, I tailed the mail server logs and kept an eye on it to see if the SPF checking was working. With the large amounts of spam hitting my mailserver, it was only a few minutes before I saw the first successful rejection of a forged sender address.

Since beef tri-tip was on sale at $2/lb, I decided to try using it in tagine. I stuck in a bunch of other vegetables: yams, onions, carrots and eggplant, the tri-tip cut into chunks, the spices, preserved lemons and a dash of orange juice. I put it on low heat and went on a 10 mile jog. When I came back there was a lot more liquid than I had expected, but not so much that it became a stew. It tasted fine except the meat was a little dry despite all the moisture. I guess the lack of fat content in the tri tip really shows. Pork belly, despite its unhealthiness, would have worked better. I did another palak paneer yesterday, which was more of my desired level of spiciness, but did not bother taking pictures since it would have looked the same as the previous entry.