Failure is the Key to Success

I have been watching the live feed from www.wwltv.com an online tv station for New Orleans, Louisiana.

There are also still photos relating to the hurricane.

I had a couple of problems with the SquirrelMail client that I installed. It kept logging the user out after a couple of minutes, very annoying if you are in the middle of typing an email. I checked all the suggestions for preventing this. One of the suggestions was to turn on the refresh of the folder list and set it to something like 10 minutes. This was already on and set to 1 minute, however changing the refresh to 2 minutes fixed my logout problem.

I found today that the luggage cover on my V70 has been broken. I haven’t need to use the boot since I had the MOT and brake fliud changed at the beginning of the month (link), so I hadn’t realised. The cover is like a roller blind that is attached to the car behind the rear seats. When I took it out of the car to see why it wouldn’t rewind, I found that the ends are broken inside. Looks like I will be ringing Pilling Volvo on Tuesday to complain. I won’t be taking my car back to the Milton Keynes dealership again, there have been too many issues.

I was looking at adding a webmail client to our existing home email server, Jana Server, but didn’t find anything that I could work with. Jana Server has been a good product, acting as a proxy server, when we were on dialup many years ago, and more recently as a POP/SMTP email server. However to provide good webmail functionality, we needed a IMAP mail server.

After looking around and trying a few products, I settled on SquirrelMail for the webmail client and hMailServer for the mail server. The hMailServer installation and configuration was straight forward, integrating into my existing MySQL database. The SquirrelMail installation seemed to be fine, but on log on kept repeating ‘Unknown user or password incorrect’ despite the correct credentials being entered. On further investigation, my PHP installation was missing 3 of the required extensions, gettext, ldap and imap. That will teach me to read the requirements first! I configured the php.ini file and could get gettext and ldap working, but could not get imap to load. After about 3 hours, I finally found the answer on Experts-Exchange . I had to create a copy of a Windows dll with a new name. Thanks Michael701.

Once I had sorted my PHP problems out the SquirrelMail installation was also very easy.

A few weeks ago, following the demise of our last tropical fish, we gave the tank a thorough clean. Today we have just added half a dozen Zebra Danios, we’ll see how they are in a couple of weeks and then start increasing the population.

I realised that I was running out of disc space for my pictures and audio files, so Tuesday I bought a 120GB drive to increase the storage on that computer. It arrived today, and is now installed, formatted and working. I’m now busy moving files from one partition to another. All I have left to do now is work out how I’m going to backup all the additional space!