Articles
IRC, My Way
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time. I have a rather complicated setup involving multiple layers, but the end result is amazing. I maintain a 24/7 presence on the internet -- on multiple IRC servers and instant messaging services -- and I can send and receive messages from any computer or device I happen to be using at the time.
From any SSH client, I can seamlessly pick up my IRC session where I last left it, regardless of where I started that session. Similarly, I can connect with my phone's IRC client, get a short backlog of recent conversations, or answer pending private messages. When I'm not already engaged in a conversation, I get near-instant notification on my phone and desktop, allowing me to respond at my leisure and from any location. I never miss a private message because I was connected from the wrong place, other users always see a single nick, and I get a central, searchable history of every channel and private message.
With this sort of setup, I gain a lot of freedom -- to deal with conversations on my terms -- and convenience. It's served me well for a couple years, and I've enjoyed IRC much more since putting it all together. For each layer, I'll detail the tasks it covers, the software I've chosen, and give a copy of any configuration files or options needed to replicate my environment.
Favorite Android Apps
This past Friday, I bought the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and I absolutely love it. The new Honeycomb interface looks amazing, and is quite an improvement over what's available on my Nexus S with Gingerbread. I love that the back, home, and task switching buttons are now rendered on the screen instead of having hardware buttons, and combining those buttons into the notification and status bar means you don't even lose screen space compared to previous versions. The new application switcher looks really nice, but does seem to have some odd behaviors, like not showing the browser that I just switched away from, or seemingly choosing at random whether to display the list from the top instead of from the bottom where you would expect.
There are a lot of applications that don't yet take advantage of what's offered by the Honeycomb APIs, but still tend to work really well. It mainly depends on how well the author designed the application to scale with the user's screen size and density. An example of doing it wrong is the official Facebook app; it's still usable mind you, but it certainly looks dumb in process, showing the main menu as a large grid of tiny icons with massive amounts of whitespace between them. It would have gone a long way if they had simply scaled the images to fill the screen.
I've been meaning to write about some of my most cherished apps, and seeing them in new form has given me an even better reason to get to it. Some of them really only work well on a phone, and others have only gotten better than ever when given a tablet form factor to call their own. So in no particular order, here are my favorite apps for Android. All prices are rounded up from Market estimates at time of writing, and all screenshots are taken from my devices:
Mail server using Postfix, Dovecot
I know there are an inordinate amount of posts out there showing you how to configure a full-stack mail server. They always target a specific Linux distro, and blast through the whole process, without actually telling you why you're doing any of it, or how it all works. How do you know what to modify to fit your own configuration that way? How do you maintain a stack like that when you don't know how all the pieces fit together? Why should these tutorials expect you to patch and compile core components from source?!
So I'd like to take some time to fix those problems, and discuss my own full-stack configuration, and how it all works.
