People : Email too Old?

Today I had the issue of someone calling me, repeatedly, and I asked them to simply drop the information in an e-mail (my well published e-mail - it's right there on the right of this page, and they had it right in front of them).

Their reply however stunned me.... "Don't you have twitter?"

My reply... "Yes, but not for this, email it me."

"Can't I send it you over whatsapp?" They persisted.

"No, just e-mail it me, it's a PDF or something yes?"....

They continued "So, how about through the cloud?"

"Just e-mail it me, as an attachment!" I was getting exacerbated with them at this point.

"But" they began "but e-mail is so old".

I felt like ripping my hair out, there were reasons for this request, firstly I could get their return information, second the attachment was over 35mb and finally I didn't want to have any complications about where to send the information.  They had my e-mail address right there, right in front of them.

The net result, so far, however is nothing has arrived, no sign of it... I'm tempted to phone them back and point this out, but I can't be bothered... Phones, like me, are so last century after all!

Pet Hate of the Day

I've got a pet hate for the day, when I message anyone, before, during and after I try my utmost to get their name right, on the phone that's hard sometimes you ask them to spell it, or you look them up on the company website, or websites.

E-mail makes this easier, when someone has already contacted you, or there's an internal company address book you have their name right there, right in front of you...

Bob, might very well e-mail you, but you can see they're Robert... Stewy might send you a meeting invite, but you know he's Steven...

So why the fuck is it that my name, Jonathan, gets totally garbled... I mail and talk to people as Jon, I just sent a mail and signed it off "Jon".  That's permission for the other end to engage me as "Jon"... So when I get "Jonathon", "Johnathan", "Johnathon", "John" or even "Jonefan" it winds me the fuck up.

You have my name, you have how I've presented it to you, I'm not so mental that I don't know how to spell my own name, grrrrr

Ubuntu Server - Automatic E-mail of Status upon Boot

As the multiboxer project has grown, I now need to support multiple bug reporters (I have three helpers now, if you've not donated yet and joined in you're missing out!)....

So with the new bug reports I'm looking at establishing a server at home, with a private IP and allowing the helpers to post their tickets there.  The trouble is, the loft man lab, where the server is stationed, is serviced by wireless only.  The signal strength is good, and I'm not going to throw a cat-5-e cable up there because I've spent too much time fixing walls and removing old dead telephone cables as it is.

The server is a Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS box, and when it boots I want it to e-mail the testers, and me, its IP Address.  This way I don't have to faff about with dyndns (as much as I love them, their usage terms are a pain in the arse for free users now-a-days) or any other dynamic domain name service.

Now, the IP mailing just needs to send the interfaces information out, through a few tricks the IP of eth0 is the router outbound IP, and I've carefully opened port 80 for them to chat to it over the web...

So, to set this all up... We need a script to wait an amount of time, then get the adapter information, and then e-mail it...

sudo nano /usr/sbin/bootmail.sh

The script then looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

echo Waiting...

sleep 30

echo Getting Interface Info

ifconfig > /tmp/ifinfo.txt

file=/tmp/ifinfo.txt

echo Sending mail...

function mailalert(){

  echo Calling Mail...

  sendmail -F "noreply@Git-Server-VM" -it << END_MESSAGE

To: user1@gmail.com,user2@gmail.com,xelous@hotmail.co.uk

Subject: Multiboxer IP Update

$(cat $file)

END_MESSAGE

}

mailalert

echo Complete

You can look at this yourself in detail, I'm noting it for reference myself...

You save this file and then have to allow it to execute:

sudo chmod +x /usr/sbin/bootmail.sh

And finally we need to add it to the boot script, so its run as the server comes up...

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

And before "exit" at the bottom add:

/usr/sbin/bootmail.sh

Reboot your server and you'll now get an e-mail of the IP interfaces sent out...

I may later improve the script to add the bug reporters to a known user group, use echo & cat to output the members of that group into a file, and use that list as the "To" field.  But for now, with the happy few of us, this will do.

Now, I would have previously (as you can tell by my older blog entries) used Subversion.  However, I'm managing this project with Git, so I may also now set up the Git on this server, and put a centralised copy of the code onto it, securing it with SSH... Pretty sure there was a good tutorial on setting this up on a server in a recent Linux Format...

Hotmail Continues To Grate

The new Outlook mail, replacing Hotmail, which I've mentioned before on this very blog, continues to be an absolute pain in the arse...

It was working about two hours ago, now look at it...

Just look...

What use is this?

The fonts are screwed  up, icons missing, the panels overlap and you can't see what's going on... I'm seriously tired of how bad this Outlook system is.

Oh, and before someone says "Oh you're not using IE, that's the problem"... This is how it looks from IE... Even worse...