Paul McCormack’s Web Site

I fitted a new cat flap to our laundry door last night and we have propped it open to allow the cats to go in and out at will as they get used to their new door. I had to close and lock it in a bit of a hurry today as I walked past the patio door on the upstairs decking and saw a large snake basking on one of the patio chairs. Harriett was sitting on the rocks at the far end of the patio unaware that she was potential lunch for our visitor!

As soon as I secured the house, I grabbed the camera and took a few photos. After returning from work, the snake was still sitting on the chair. Deborah watched from the safety of the rumpus room sofa whilst Welly barked at it! It is clearly in no hurry to move and as I write this at almost 10pm, it is still there!

The snake is a Diamond Python. It’s about 2m long which is typical of this species although they can grow to 3m. They are not venomous, but have a nasty bite (apparently). We’re a bit worried about letting the cats out as they will eat rodents , small birds and even possums so I reckon they could have a go at a cat if they were hungry.

Hopefully it will have gone by the time we get up tomorrow so that we can let the cats enjoy their new door.

I have held my Cherished Transfer number plate on a Retention Certificate since I sold my Saab 9-3 Convertible in March 2006.

It is now clear that Deborah and I will not be returning to the UK at any time soon and therefore, it is pretty pointless keeping this number plate.

It was great fun to own “Big PMC” since I put it on my first car at the age of 21. I have even considered purchasing the same “rego” in Australia!

The plate is for sale through National Numbers for about £1,500. If you want to make me an offer, then please do so via the Contact page.

Update: Sold!  Sorry you missed out.

Having recently set up Asterisk, I was a little unhappy about the default installation of a MySQL server on the trixbox server and creating the databases there.

I have a separate MySQL server (with phpMyAdmin) and I didn’t want to have to think about backing up and maintaining another one, so I did a bit of Googling to find out how to migrate FreePBX or trixbox databases to another server.

The results were a little disappointing, with only vague references about how to go about doing it, and they seem to discourage it. Boring!

Here is what I did:
Read more…

We had our 20-week ultrasound on Wednesday of this week which is exactly half way through the “standard” 40-week pregnancy.  Happily, we have been told that our baby is perfectly normal and healthy.  My Mum and Step-Dad are staying with us at the moment so Mum was able to come along to the ultrasound and see the baby jiggling and wiggling around.

We chose NOT to find out the gender of the baby at this stage to avoid family and friends trying to catch us out!  You will find out straight after we do - around 3rd July if all goes to schedule.

Debs is now able to feel the baby moving around and kicking.  He didn’t like the curry that we went out for last night … (I said “he” just then, but you can’t catch us out remember) … and was kicking like crazy afterwards.  We have been listening to her (!) heartbeat on a hired ultrasound machine, but now that Debs can feel movements we’re going to send it back.

Before we send it back though, we thought that we should record a bit of the sound.  So, if you follow the link below, you will hear an MP3 of three things:

1. Blood passing through the placenta (sounds like wind blowing through trees) - 5 seconds
2. Deborah’s heart beat (about 70 bpm) - 13 seconds
3. Baby’s heart beat (about 130 bpm) - 45 seconds

Click here to download / listen (726kb download).

Postgrey is a very simple, but apparently effective spam fighting tool that looks at an incoming mail message as it is sent to the server. Before accepting the full mail, Postgrey checks to see if the combination of the source, sender and recipient are recently known. If they are then Postgrey accepts the mail.

If they are not, the mail is temporarily rejected, that is grey-listed (hence the name Postgrey) as opposed to black-listed (always blocked) or white-listed (always allowed). Legitimate mail servers will retry after five minutes and the mail will then be accepted. After receiving 5 messages in a 35-day period the mails become trusted (added to the white-list) and are no longer delayed.

The idea is that spammers can’t be bothered to waste time trying to resend messages so they give up, knowing that people running Postgrey will also be running other spam filters, so their messages will probably be trapped anyway.

The advantages for people running Postgrey are

1. Spam is rejected before it is fully received, saving network capacity and usage allowances
2. The overhead on the spam filter is massively reduced as less is accepted and filtered
3. Users are less likely to get spam as the server has another level of protection

I thought that I had been running Postgrey for a few months, but I have just realised that I had not set it up properly and it was being bypassed. I have now rectified this and can see that it is working properly.

The only down-side is that mail will be delayed for at least 5 minutes from senders that are not yet on the white-list, but I can live with that if you can.