unsigned long geek = random();

Recently I’ve been trying to customize my vim configuration to try and optimize it for software development. Although I’ve been using vim for many years, I’ve always used a configuration that’s very close to vanilla.

Yesterday I installed Tag List, a plugin that displays and allows navigation to the various tags in the currently edited file(s). It seems to work very well, and supports most languages, thanks to Exuberant ctags.

The screenshot below shows it in action editing some Python source.

459×530 pixels 58.7 kB

Today, in an attempt to reduce the amount of spam that gets received by my mail server, which runs Postfix, I implemented greylisting, courtesy of postgrey. I can’t disagree with those who say that greylisting misuses other’s bandwidth (for the unnecessary retries of legitimate mail), but perhaps that’s a small price to pay.

Another change I made today was to enable certificate-based relaying. It’s the perfect answer for those who need to relay mail for users with dynamic IPs in scenarios where a password-based solution isn’t ideal (for example, when the relay needs to authenticate another MTA rather than a user). There are quite a few guides describing how to setup certificate based relaying, but Petri T. Koistinen’s one is one of the better ones. Small tip – make sure to use the correct CA certificate (the one actually used to sign the client certificate), otherwise relaying won’t work and postfix will spit out errors like the following:
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=27:certificate not trusted
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=21:unable to verify the first certificate