First Post!
Saturday, July 14th, 2007Well, I’ve long wondered what it would be like to blog so here I am with my lightly loaded webserver, spare MySQL server and a little extra time on my hands. I’d like to expand my website beyond my little business portal which I created years ago. I’ve created several personal tools and projects over the years and recently I received a request for support on a tool - mailparser - which I wrote in 2004. Mailparser is a tiny C program that works in conjunction with QMail and Spamassassin to discard all messages flagged as spam.
Really its a simple intersection of the abilities of tee, cat, and grep. If a matching line is found in the headers then pipe to /dev/null, else to stdout. Since it’s several years old and I wrote it when all I knew was C I’m sure it’s not perfect but i’ve been using it successfully since I wrote it. Now a guy emails me and lets me know it’s still delivering spam, only truncated. I suppose it’s a lot better than eating valid emails!
Its kinda exhilarating to help someone with something I wrote. I had no idea anyone was actually using the tool. Now I have a slim view of what OSS developers deal with. I’ve considered starting up some OSS projects but I can’t think of anything useful. Now that I’m a lot better with C, Perl, PHP, and SQL I suppose I finally have the ability to create something worthwhile not to mention my working subversion repository.
I have everything I need to make something neat and useful, but now what?