My first package submission was finally completed a few days ago with everything from ticket overload, personal issues to my US trip making sure that I had little time to get things done on time. I had started this in the first week of December and it took all of 2 months and some days to get my stuff together and put out an rpm package for gource. It is finally done now and you can install gource on your Fedora 12 box (or later if you're nutty like me) with just a

~# yum install gource

I've built gource only for F-12 and later since F-11 does not have the required version of ftgl. That is OK I guess since F-11 is way too old anyway ;)

I've been in the US for a week now. I've reached Raleigh, the final destination in my short trip in the US. I'll be here for another week before I go back /home. I was in Westford last week and in Boston over the weekend.

I was in Westford to get trained to support Red Hat MRG Messaging. The upstream for this is the Apache QPid Project. This seems to be a very promising product, especially with its speed of messaging. The training was fun and I got to meet some really cool people here, including fellow GSS geeks Ryan Mitchell and Andrew Blum. I got a chance to interact with the qpid hackers too, which was really cool. I attempted to dig a bit into the code to understand some random stuff, but haven't made much headway since.

I left for Boston on Friday and spent the weekend there. I only had enough time to visit the Museum of Science and the Aquarium. We managed time pretty badly though; we could have squeezed in some more. I met up with Philip for lunch today at an interesting place called the Toro in South End, Boston. You gotta go there to try the bone marrow tapas. It was awesome.

Waiting now to get to the mother ship, the GSS headquarters tomorrow; a chance to meet people who I work with across the oceans and across time zones.

Warning: This is a bit of a rant, so read on only if you're in a bad mood and want someone to cuss at (either me or the entity I'm cussing at ;) )

I had recently bought email hosting services for my Mom from Net4 following decent service on the domain and web hosting front. It was a stupid decision. Net4 support for email pretty much sucks. Maybe I have only been lucky with the web hosting support too as I did not have to deal with morons for the most part. For the last two days I haven't been so lucky.

I noticed the problem soon after the email hosting got activated — emails that I would send to any gmail accounts would go into the spam folder. I ignored it in the beginning mainly because I wasn't interested enough to look hard for what is wrong. But recently mom started complaining about it since her customers were not getting her emails. So we opened a ticket with Net4. For good measure, I also called so that I get immediate feedback. I was told to attach a sample email that went into spam. I did that. The support person then closed the ticket the next day asking for a sample email. Interesting.

So I open a support ticket once again and this time I try to do some research on why gmail may be doing this. I noticed the following header:

Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: xx.yy.zz.aa is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mom@example.com) client-ip=xx.yy.zz.aa;

So I look up google and come across this article on SPF records. Apparently, net4 ought to be adding an SPF entry for my domain associating it with their mail servers. This entry will lead to the Received-SPF header being "pass" instead of "neutral". This is something that gmail takes into consideration while filtering for spam. While I realize that there may be other matters (email content, subject, etc.), all those factors do not come into the picture with my sample email. This seems to be the only missing link since my domain, mail server, etc. are not blacklisted either. I mention it in the support ticket and again attach the sample email. The ticket gets closed again with a request for a sample email. WTF?

I call up and ask the support tech. I try explaining about SPF and how that might be affecting things and he goes all ballistic (not figuratively, he's positively shouting) on me saying that this is on Linux and it does not work the way I am saying. With my ego hurt, I shouted back saying that I work for a Linux company :P

We end the call with the tech telling me that I am only throwing keywords around without knowing anything about it. He asks me how I would fix this and I admit that I don't know right away but I can do his job and look it up. He then bullshits me about how it is "the pop3 end which marks the spam with either SPAM tag in subject or moving to a spam folder" and so on. According to him SPF is something different and there is nothing wrong with it. He ended it saying that I was being an ass and that he will escalate the issue.

No, there is no hope. The last two issues were escalated too. Apparently everyone at Net4 is just a bunch of incompetent fools. Either that or those who aren't are eyeing management positions since that is the "way up the ladder". Or they're on their way out.

I think I need to be on my way out of this service. I may not get a refund this time but I can surely make sure that I don't renew my services with them and definitely not recommend their services to people I care about.

I finally got myself to start working on the pjpdns stuff and the cdb vs tinycdb question resolved itself pretty soon as far as pjpdns is concerned. Some functions and their arguments (cdb_findnext, cdb_findstart, etc.) have changed in tinycdb due to which pjpdns would not link against it as is. I would have to patch it to get it working.

Of course, being a lazy bum, I took the easy route and linked against my fork of cdb, which worked. Here is my fork of pjpdns with the changes. There are still some things that can be trimmed out in pjpdns as a result of this. There's also the entire "unlicensed code" thing I need to sort out since a lot of code in the original cdb does not have any license.

There are also a bunch of other changes I made to pjpdns, which included removing some auto-generated cruft from the repository and adding a bit of autotools candy so that any future autotools related changes don't result in git-log spam.

PJP had given a presentation some weeks ago on what would probably end up being pjpdns. One of the problems pointed on on his review request for inclusion of djbdns into Fedora was that it included code for cdb, which exists as a separate package and hence should be dynamically linked to instead. Someone even pointed out that (s)he had autotoolized cdb but did not respond to any further requests for more information.

I figured it was something I could do, so I went ahead and ported cdb to gnu-autotools. Here is my cdb fork. There is still some code which is unused, but I haven't really bothered to update in much since the time I found tinycdb, which seems to be maintained too. So my next project is to try and get djbdns to either use tinycdb or if that fails, my cdb fork.

I wonder how I can license the cdb fork though (if I decide to distribute it at some point). A lot of code is unlicensed, which is why (according to wikipedia) the tinycdb fork was written in the first place.

Oh, and let it be recorded officially and publicly that if pjpdns goes live, it was me who misread djbdns during the beginning of the presentation as pjpdns. Yes, that is my desperate attempt at being relevant to something completely unrelated :D