Monthly Archives: March 2005

Restarting fetchmail automatically

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I use fetchmail (in daemon mode) to pull down mail from a POP server to my local box, where I then serve it up with the Courier IMAP server. Problem I had was when my box rebooted, fetchmail could not automatically restart because it needs a password to proceed (I don’t want to store the password in my .fetchmailrc). My solution was to add the following to my .bashrc:

if [ -x "/usr/local/bin/fetchmail" ]; then
  if ! killall -0 fetchmail 2> /dev/null; then
     echo "killall -0 fetchmail failed - starting fetchmail..."
     fetchmail
  fi
fi

Remote XUL is a pain

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I’m struggling to get a remote XUL app working that uses a dont-build-content tree XUL template with a remote RDF datasource. The problem is that Mozilla’s security model is just too restrictive in terms of what remote XUL and JavaScript can do. An extension could do this no problem, but I can only get the remote XUL to do what I want if I change the browser’s security settings (which I can’t ask users to do) or use signed JavaScript (which sounds like a royal pain in the butt). More info at these forum threads:

appcasting

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I had the same idea espoused in Robin Good’s post about appcasting. I experimented with the idea using this post on my blog. This was a lame example as my search sidebar extension is only 11KB, but it was a proof of concept – certainly the concept is more interesting when applied to larger files like Linux ISO images…

I think we are on to something here with the idea of distributing software using RSS enclosures.

In fact, I am been very underwhelmed by the quality of the podcasts that I’ve found – I’ve found them completely boring and useless – but I could definitely appreciate getting the latest Knoppix ISO automatically overnight using this technology.