My Gmail experiment

Not too long ago, I decided to experiment with using Gmail as my main mail client.

Using Gmail as my primary email client

Lately I’ve been using a lot of different computers, at home, at work, and at relatives’ houses. In the past, I’ve used mutt for email, because it’s simple, small, and does everything I want in an email client (PGP integration, can run on the server, and so on). However, most of the computers I’ve been using lately are Windows boxes, and while I could carry a copy of Knoppix with me everywhere I go, I don’t think that would be appreciated very much. I could run mutt in a screen session on my main server, but since I use PGP to sign all my messages, I don’t want to keep my private key on a remote server. Other than that small hitch, though, running mutt in a remote screen session is practically the perfect solution.

html-encode

I had a need for a simple script to do HTML-encoding from the command line, so I wrote this simple Perl script. It relies on Gisle Aas‘ HTML::Entities module, which many Perl installations will already have (it’s a prerequisite for almost every application that does HTML encoding or URI handling).

How to build the Apache of your dreams

Apache began as a series of patches the NCSA’s httpd. After httpd’s lead developer left NCSA and active development of httpd began to stagnate, programmers from around the world found they needed a central repository to maintain the body of code and patches that had accumulated. A group of these webmasters banded together, and, with machines and bandwidth donated by HotWired, set up an informal coalition to direct the the development of this new server. Dubbed Apache (“a patchy server”), it quickly became the most popular server on the Net after it’s birth in April 1995, at version 0.6.5.

bashlib

bashlib is a shell script that makes CGI programming in the bash shell easier, or at least more tolerable. It contains a few functions that get called automatically and place form elements (from POSTs and GETs) and cookies in your environment. It also contains complete documentation on how to use these variables and how to set cookies manually.