I had to send out an email newsletter at work today. A newsletter that had to be sent to thousands of email addresses, many of which were dead. How do I know this? Because Thunderbird wouldn’t let me send the newsletter until I fixed my mail list. Unfortunately this mailing list has thousands of email addresses and I wasn’t about to sift through them manually.
After doing some searching, I found an addon for Thunderbird 2 called Thunderplunger, that lets you validate single addresses and full address books by simply right clicking them and choosing the validate option. Unfortunately I have Thunderbird 3.0.4 on this machine, so I ended up installing Thunderbird 2 in an Ubuntu virtual machine I had running. After installing the addon I ran the validation and after a few hours I got a list of email addresses to remove from my mailing list. It even gives you notes on what happened when trying to validate, for example “Domain does not exist” etc. I assume that the time it takes to complete depends on the number of addresses you have to validate, so times may vary.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, do give it a try!
There’s been a lot of banter in the blog-o-shere and on social networks recently regarding President Obama’s decision to cancel and/or ban a White House service for the National Day of Prayer that was signed into law in 1952 by former President Harry S. Truman.
One of the comments I’m seeing most of is with regards to the “most powerful man on the planet” and the “message” that he is sending. What? I don’t get it. What is this so called message that conservative Christians are so pissed about?
Isn’t the Separation of Church and State built into our Constitution? Obviously, President Obama is merely upholding what was set down in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers. The message that should be taken out of this is that the United States of America does not endorse any particular religion, but YOU can and should worship how you please, which is how things are supposed to be.
Several days after the rumor that the President had canceled/banned the National Day of Prayer came out, it surfaced that the rumor was-just-a-rumor. While the White House service was indeed canceled (as it was last year), President Obama did make a statement that he would be making a proclamation for it.
You still have your day of prayer, so I ask again. What is the big deal?
Posted in Politics
|
Tagged Obama, religion
|
Recently, I’ve been involved with getting a new JETAA chapter started here in Japan as their webmaster. For those that don’t know, JETAA stands for Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme Alumni Association.
I was introduced to the guy trying to start the chapter a couple of weeks ago and after meeting with him and another JET alum, we worked out what we would need to get started on the chapter’s website. We settled on four domains, three of which would redirect permanently to the main one www.jetaa-tokyo.org. I was able to register all four at what would seem to be Japan’s most well known domain registrar.
With the domain names out of the way, we needed to find hosting. Web hosting in Japan can tend to be a bit on the expensive side if you come from the US or maybe UK where good hosting can be had for $10 or less a month. Eventually we settled on a bilingual host (also hard to come by here) called Tsuakeru.net which was recommended by some of the expat community in Tokyo.
They seem to be pretty solid, but I have to admit that like my title says, I’ve been spoiled by great web hosting [from the US]. Before we made an account at Tsukaeru, I had offered to use my own shared hosting with Dreamhost as a temporary solution. The Dreamhost custom control panel is straightforward with everything laid out in an easy to understand manner. You can park/redirect domains straight from the control panel, meaning there’s no need to make a separate hosted folder for each domain and muck around with .htaccess files. They even off SSH with the full range of tools such as tar and wget, which even allowed me to setup Drush!
Tsukaeru.net on the other hand—while fairly solid—has a long ways to go. Tsukaeru uses the Plesk Control Panel, which did take me sometime to get used to and at least to me seems overly complicated; even cPanel is loads easier to work with. They also don’t offer the same conveniences offered by Dreamhost. I had to make different hosted folders for each domain I wanted to redirect and use a .htaccess file to do a 301 permanent redirect. Database creation is a pain requiring long database names/usernames/and host addresses. SFTP and SSH also required the same long host name and only offered very basic tools such as copy and move, meaning I have to login with an FTP client to transfer files and wait as a new connection is made for every-single-file. Talk about slow.
Hopefully one of these days Tsukaeru will add the full range of commands that makes SSH so useful; of course by that time we may have already out grown our shared hosting and moved on to a VPS either with them or with another company.
Recently I decided to markup and design an online resume for myself. Partly because I need to start building a portfolio and figured why not start with a resume since it would be useful, and partly because I needed motivation to practice.
While looking for inspiration, I came over some resumes marked up in hResume; a microformat of various classes for semantically marking up your resume. I’ve been working with it and though it was confusing at first, I think I’ve gotten the hang of it. I think the hardest thing about hResume is that its comprised not only of its own classes, but it also makes use of various other microformats.
Emily Lewis of A Blog Not Limited has written up a great, detailed post about hResume as part of her series on microformats. I highly recommend looking over it if you’re thinking of marking up with hResume, because she does a great job of explaining and clearing things up.
Also, checking out the examples on the hResume Wiki with firebug helps a lot as you can see how different people have implemented hResume.
