Max Manders

I had cause to use the glossaries package in LaTeX today to take care of all my glossary management needs.  The idea of being able to create an external file to define all of my acronyms and definitions, and then include them as required in a separate section that is automatically included in a table of contents is very appealing.  Unfortunately, the glossaries package isn’t installed as part of the Ubuntu texlive-latex-* packages, nor is it separately installable via Aptitude.

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While there are plenty of MTAs out there, I find it quite handy to have SSMTP installed locally; it’s quick to install and configure and lacks some of the overhead of a more enterprise MTA such as Sendmail, Postfix, Exim etc.  The following assumes you have a “Google Apps for Domains” user account — ssmtp_user@domain.com — through which you will relay all email.  Additionally, the steps below work on Ubuntu 10.10, similar steps should work on other distributions.

Install SSMTP

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

Edit configuration in /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

# Backup the original first
sudo cp /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf.out
# Truncate the file and add the following
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
hostname=ssmtp_user@domain.com
root=ssmtp_user@domain.com
AuthUser=ssmtp_user@domain.com
AuthPass=
UseSTARTTLS=yes
UseTLS=yes
FromLineOverride=yes

Edit revaliases map in /etc/ssmtp/revaliases.conf

# Add a line for each local user who should be able to send email
root:smtp_user@domain.com:smtp.gmail.com:587
max:smtp_user@domain.com:smtp.gmail.com:587

Send Email!
You should now be able to send email, e.g. from the shell using

echo "Testing" | mail -s "Test Email" someone@example.com

In order to facilitate testing of websites in different browsers, Microsoft have released what they call their ‘Application Compatibility Virtual PC Images‘.  These time-limited V12n solutions are great for quickly bringing up a VM for a particular version of Internet Explorer but they are built for Microsoft’s Virtual PC (VPC) software.

I work predominantly with Linux and use Virtual Box as my V12n application of choice.  Later versions of Virtual Box support VPC’s VHD disk image format.  This means it’s possible to run these VPC images under VirtualBox, but it involves downloading and extracting files from the win32 executables; downloading drivers for the ethernet adapter and other time consuming steps that I’d rather not repeat every time my IE VM expires.  I’m a programmer, therefore I’m lazy and don’t like doing things more than once; I’d rather script something to do it for me.  In keeping with this virtue, I’ve written msie2vbox to automate this stuff for me.  It’s on Github with a GPLv3 license.  There’s some outstanding todo items but it does the job for me, and I thought it might be of use to others.

Revision control systems serve their purpose well for managing codebases, but they can also be used to good effect for configuration management.  I’ll discuss how I’ve used Subversion to manage the configuration of my home directory.  The same goal could probably be achieved just as easily with Git.  While I use Git and Github for personal projects, I have employed this solution at work where we use Subversion.

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