Archive for October 31st, 2005

Ordered me an iPod Nano

By
Andy
 – October 31, 2005Posted in: Hardware

I´ve been ill all weekend so I didn´t set my alarm this morning (it´s Monday) to see how I felt before going in to work. As it turned out I woke up in time for the 9am bus and felt not too bad so headed in. I did want a fairly easy day though as I was only feeling about 50%.

 
I got into town and thought I´d kill some time by goign and buy myself an iPod Nano from Dixons. Found the display case with the white one in and it does look as good in real life as in the ads. I grabbed a sales assisstant and asked for one of the black ones. "We´ve got none in and we don´t know when we will have any". So much for my plan of getting one quick by getting it in town.
 
I got into work and hit the online shops. Some had them "available 1-2 weeks", some now but expensive and some not at all. I was grumpily putting more vague searches into Google and thinking that I´d have to wait a couple of weeks for my new iPod when I thought I´d hit the Apple Store sponsered link and find out how much they were "Officially".

 
As it turned out they were exactly the same as it would have been from Dixons. Not bad. I placed an order and it should be sitting on my doorstep in a week (not litterally I hope, I live in an alley).
 
I celebrated by shoving a fresh 512 meg on music onto my Shuffle before I pass it on to someone a little less geeky than me next week.

Stupid PHP mail function and mass mailing

By
Andy
 – October 31, 2005Posted in: Email & Spam, Web Development

We´ve just done a mailing out to 13,000 receipients using a custom php script I wrote that goes and gets a bunch of email addresses from the database and then loops through them and calls the php mail() function. It all seemed to be working well until we started getting feedback from some of the people on the list saying that they were getting up to 11 copies of the email.

 
This seemed very strange since I´ve used this script many times without any problems so I decided to get down to the root of the problem. Luckily I had put in some error checking so I went to the database to see what was going on. Long story short, the php bit was only being run once for each email address, including the mail function. For some reason though, sendmail was pushing out more than one copy of the message.
 
I decided to hit google and see what I could find out there before I started messing around with scripts and testing different server configurations. After a bit of searching I found out that nobody really knows what might be causing it. Some reckon it´s sendmail pushing up the server load, some reckon it´s php´s mail function not receiving "true" variables from sendmail.
 
Either way, since there´s no definate answer I´m going to start running some tests and see what I can come up with myself.

Gmail is spam?

By
Andy
 – October 31, 2005Posted in: Email & Spam

Well, No. As an internet company I think Google rates as my "Most Trusted" so I doubt that there would be spam coming from a valid Gmail account.
 
There is the other point that the email that got shoved into my Outlook Junk Email folder was from me! It was a quick mail I sent myself before I left for work and if I hadn´t decided to have a quick browse of the junk while I was waiting for something to burn then I never would have got it.
 
True, the stuff in the email was "gibberish" (stuff about 302 ErrorDocument rewrites…), but it was still a valid email. Oh well.