It is CarFree DC Week. That is all. (via)

TheWife’s sister was in town for a very brief visit this weekend. The four girls spent Saturday at the zoo, enjoying the lovely brink-of-fall weather, while I did some spray-painting and a purge’n're-arrange grind on my office, followed by a sort’n'purge in the garage. That latter bit culminated in a “free junque” mail to the neighborhood list; a version minus the stuff already taken is going out on the internal “discussion” list at work today. A trunk load of stuff was dropped off for donation Sunday afternoon; another trunk load will go out some time this week or next weekend at the latest. My office is still a bit of a disaster area, with tons of piles here and there waiting to be sorted through — but there’s a plan as to where everything goes, and I think the end result is going to be more open space and a more productive environment — more mentally “quiet”, lots less stuff clamoring to be looked at. Pictures once I get done, again hopefully by next weekend.

In more “meta” level news, TheOlderChild seems to be settling into and enjoying school. I need to come up with a way to discuss some of that stuff in a more anonymous environment, but in general things are going as well or better than expected. TheYoungerChild started crawling about three weeks ago and is currently trying extremely hard to walk — she pulls up without difficulty, and stands easily as long as she keeps one hand on something. However, she’s not quite up to no-hands standing yet, and she’s got a little scrape over one eye to prove it. It looks like she spent her weekend brawling. (”The first rule of Walk Club is don’t talk about Walk Club.”)

Personal meta: I sent in my PPW registration this morning; that thing is coming up fast. Holla back if you’re going to be there.

Speaking of coming up fast, it’s time to start herding kids towards the car to get them to school…

So incredibly far behind on things that I’m starting to wrap around to being caught up — or at least that’s what I keep telling myself is going to happen.

• Preparation for Parenthood — potentially relevant for some, I am given to understand. Numbers 5 and 9 are fully in effect around these parts lately.
• Six keys to understanding CSS layouts — one of these days I’m redesigning some crap…
• Distributed administration using SSH — in my perfect world this whole article would be replaced with a mechanism that caused your web browser to punch you in the face until you were unconscious, and then write “use a real configuration management system dummy” in permanent marker on your forehead in backwards type so you’d see in the mirror in the morning until the message sunk in. Unfortunately we are not yet in my perfect world.
• Speaking of software and pain, here’s JWZ on CDDB. On my endless todo list: finish the writeup about my obsessive-compulsive CD rip/media file tag’n’store system.
• AskMe on shaving whole head — contains useful links; I took my beard off about two weeks ago and am currently enjoying a mostly hair-free skull, but maintaining that state isn’t helping with the “no time” issues.
• A graphic illustration of American political realities
• pler — the DWIM perl debugger
• PerlySense — stuff for Perl/IDE integration. I swear I saw a nice article about this on PerlBuzz but I’m not finding it now. Drop it in the comments if you know the link, kthx.
• Strap on the tin-foil beanie and check out this stock forum thread about the “bin Laden” trades that were apparently recently made. Good for tickling your paranoia if nothing else. Here’s more on the same thing, in the same vein.
• Black Hats on OpenID
• Git on MacOS X

I’ve got another 50 or so things to pass on but it’s time to start getting the kids moving towards (pre)-school…

Mailing List Management Software

I needed to set up some mailing list management software recently. I considered Mailman. JWZ’s Mailman Considered Harmful walked me back away from that and got me pointed towards SmartList. While trying to find out if anybody other than JWZ was actually using SmartList, I ran across an advogato diary from 2003 which got me pointed to Minimalist. Happiness ensued.

A couple other mail-related links

I set up the mailing list software on a new VPS I have at Slicehost (who I highly recommend, by the way). I don’t really have anything terribly important migrated over to that server yet; part of the mixed joy and curse of a VPS is that you end up doing a lot of stuff that gets taken care of for you in a shared hosting environment, and doing that stuff properly takes time. Mail for some of my domains is routing through there now, however, which means that spam is getting routed there too. I was having a fairly bad time of it until I added Postgrey to the mix. At that point the amount of spam making it into inboxes slowed to a trickle — most days, I get none at all and usually what little makes it past Postgrey is flagged by SpamAssassin.

I also wanted some visual check on what the mail server was doing, so I installed Mailgraph. I had to tweak the code a bit to get it to look like I wanted, but eventually I ended up with some nice graphs.