If you’ve tried out several wiki engines, you have probably noticed that the developers of each of them have invented their own wiki markup language. I guess no-one has a problem with that. It’s a free world after all. However, all these different versions of markup languages easily become a pain when you have to submit content to several different wiki engines. For instance, Wikipedia, various popular bug trackers, wiki engines dedicated to projects like Ubuntu are all very popular wikis, but, unfortunately, the contributor has to learn several different markup languages to be able to submit rich content to all of them.
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I still haven’t figured out whether it happened because of pure stupidity, temporary brain malfunction or low caffeine concentration in the blood, but a week ago, by mistake, I wiped the MBR of my primary desktop’s hard disk and also (because, you know, the MBR alone is never enough!) the boot sector of the first NTFS partition, where all my personal data was, while messing around with the install-mbr utility early in the morning.
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It seems there is an issue with the Spamassassin FH_DATE_PAST_20XX test. This test checks whether the email has a date in the future and, if this is the case, raises the message’s score. Apparently, this test is falsely triggered by all emails that have been sent in 2010, producing several false positives. Since, I do not have much time to investigate this issue and to follow the news, I decided to inactivate it until I am certain it has been resolved.

[Update: It has been resolved. Update you SA rules]
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I wish a happy new year to all, full of happiness, health, creativity and peace of mind.

During the last six months, running a CentOS server as a guest in Virtualbox or VMware has been as common for me as running a web browser. This is because I’ve constantly been trying to streamline the server configuration and utilize new technologies or techniques attempting to get better performance or just make it easier to maintain. The only issue I had to face during all this time was the high CPU usage on the host, which in some cases exceeded 40%, even when the guest (CentOS server) was in idle state. At first, I had thought that the host’s operating system, Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate), was somehow incompatible with Virtualbox/VMware.
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There has been much controversy lately about Sun’s acquisition by Oracle and how it will affect the future of the widely used open-source RDBMS, MySQL.
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Mozilla has announced the general availability of version 3 of its popular open source email & newsgroup client, Thunderbird. Thunderbird has been my desktop email client of choice since its early stable releases, both in Linux and Windows. Actually, the only programs I’ve ever used for email and newsgroup management are Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird and Novell/Ximian Evolution. Out of those 3, Thunderbird, although not a strong candidate when it comes to performance, ranks 1st, since it offers the best:

1. security
2. reliability
3. backwards compatibility
4. extensibility

A few years ago, I had published an approach on how to organize mailing list messages using Evolution. The same tips and tricks apply to Thunderbird, so those of you who deal with many mailing lists might find that old article interesting.

The highlights of the new release include:
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During the last weekend, I made some changes to the website’s feeds. It seems that, after 4 years of blogging, I have finally made up my mind about what is needed and what is unnecessary regarding the syndicated content on G-Loaded.
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I’ve been looking for a pure python implementation of the ping command. Now that I found one, I am not sure if I want to use it, as it has a restriction: only privileged users can ping other hosts. I’ve used the ping command successfully as a normal user on all operating systems I have tried and never had an issue. Currently, I do not have the time to investigate this limitation, but, judging by the exception I get, it has to do with the creation of the socket through which the ICMP packet is sent. The normal user does not have the required privileges to create this socket.

[This post has been updated]
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setenforce is a command line utility that is used to switch the mode SELinux is running in from enforcing to permissive and vice versa without requiring a reboot. Lately, I’ve started experimenting again with SELinux on a live system. The default targeted SELinux policy, as usual, needs some adjustment to work with a custom server configuration. So, I created some custom policy modules and loaded them onto the live system in order to test if my “allow” rules were effective.
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