Sometime a month or two ago, sending email to my family stopped working. My emails vanished into the void and were never heard from again.

I figured my SMTP was set up incorrectly so no big deal, I used another (gmail etc.). Recently I got around to looking in my logs and I discovered:

Jul 23 17:06:49 ffclassic postfix/smtp[30408]: 73B3C4654756: host mx2.comcast.net[76.96.30.116] refused to talk to me: 421 IMTA24.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net comcast Reverse DNS failure : Try again later

Well that's no fun. I guess Comcast doesn't like talking to mail servers without reverse DNS set up properly. So now I fixed it (hopefully, we'll see in 24 hours).

These are the joys of running my own server. I had the option from my host of getting CPanel or its equivalent, or setting up everything by hand, so I chose by hand. The bad thing is that I have no idea what I'm doing. The good thing is there's no better way to learn than writing all of your config files by hand.

In Linux when I use SSH I usually pass the host and port and username on the command line and then type the password when prompted. (In those rare cases I don't use certificates to log in without a password.) In Windows, PuTTY makes you pick a host and port and then prompts you for the username AND password.

This leads to unpleasant results. I'm so conditioned to open SSH and type my password at the prompt and hit Enter that I often end up typing my password as my username in PuTTY. Bad.

I've sometimes opened webpages that have some stupid Javascript bullcrap that tries to auto-focus the username field in a login form. But if you're a fast typist (and mouse-ist) like I am, you can focus the field, type your username, and hit tab to get to the password field before the long-loading Javascript bloat has a time to load and run. Which can result in auto-re-focusing the username field, which if it happens at just the right instant, results in my typing the password into it and pounding Enter before I have a chance to notice what's happened. Bad bad bad.

I use a computer far too often to have time too read every prompt, which leads to bad things. Anyone who's used to flying around an interface at light-speed by instinct and repeated learned behavior has experienced this kind of thing I'm sure.

This is horrendously bad because these programs often log the usernames of login attempts in plaintext in logs that lots of potentially evil people have the ability to read. The logs don't usually log the passwords of login attempts, but if you type a password AS a username, oops, you're screwed. Thankfully I'm root on most or all of the machines I ever SSH to, and I can go into /var/log and erase my mistake from the logs before anyone can see. But that doesn't help for web pages I don't know. And I wonder how often this kind of thing happens to other people. I wonder how many people who aren't familiar with computers accidentally send their password as their username to a bunch of websites.

After all the effort we go to to try to secure computer applications, these kinds of stupid human factors can still so easily ruin everything.

:perldo s/something/other/
E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version

In spite of my previous actions which I thought led to a successfully non-gimped Vim install, it turns out that I actually ended up getting rubydo to work AT THE EXPENSE of perldo.

Apparently what I actually needed was vim-full. Installing vim-ruby and vim-perl doesn't work. One shadows the other. They must both provide the same files. But stupid apt never told me there was any problem.

In fact right now I have vim-perl, vim-ruby, AND vim-full installed. I just uninstalled vim-perl and reinstalled it and it let me do it, but I have no idea what it did. It didn't affect my ability to use perldo even when vim-perl is uninstalled.

When I do aptitude show vim-full it says

...
Conflicts: vim-gnome (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-gtk (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-lesstif (< 1:6.4-001+3),
           vim-perl (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-pyt<span></span>hon (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-ruby (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-tcl
           (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-tiny (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-common (< 1:6.4-001+3)
...

Apparently "Conflicts" does not mean "Prevents you from installing them all at the same time". Thanks Ubuntu.

EDIT: No, the current vim-perl I'm installing is version 1:7.0-164+1ubuntu7.1, so it doesn't conflict. But it still doesn't seem to do the right thing.