Today marks the end of an era. My 11 year relationship with my 528i is finally over after almost 150,000 miles together. It's got to the point where it's starting to cost money; it needs a service, some new tyres and a few other bits and pieces. Plus I need a car I can rely on for the 70odd mile round trip daily commute.

It's been emotional!

Fingers crossed my broadband should switch over tomorrow. In the meantime I've been looking at alternative providers for my Dad. He lives about 3 miles from the exchange and his line tests indicate a maximum speed of about 7Mb on ADSL2+. Found a deal with Be that's half price for the first 12 months on their budget, upto 8Mb service:

https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/halfprice

Worth a try..

I've been looking at methods for secure IMAP connectivity using courier-imap. I need a certificate along with a full set of parent root certificates. I've already got all of these along with the private key in a java keystore that I use for authenticating Tomcat/Catalina hosts. So instead of creating the pem file I needed from scratch I looked around for methods of exporting what I already had.

After some trial and error I came across

http://sourceforge.net/projects/portecle/

It provides a Java based GUI that I pointed at my keystore file, provided the password and up it all came. I was able to export the private key as a .pem with all of the tiers of authority in single text file. Perfect.

To get the pem working using courier-imap I created a sym link to imapd.pem. in the courier-imap shared directory. Restarted the courier-imap service and away we go.

If you want to test an imap certificate try:
# openssl s_client -connect hostname:993

(Port 993 is the standard IMAP over SSL port)

I ordered a fridge last night from Tesco. It's a Whirpool ARC900 under counter fridge to go in the pantry in the kitchen.

Quidco tracked my purchase so that should get me 3% back. I also used about a hundred quid's worth of Tesco Clubcard vouchers so it didn't work out too expensive.

For as long as I can remember I've used Mutt in an ssh session as my favourite mail client. It's quick, fast and accessible from anywhere that I can get a shell session. I've always had a problem with the display when I'm running under GNU Screen in that the display corrupts when spurious characters appear in subject lines. I've experimented with different term settings but to no avail. I think that I've now cracked it thanks to this article:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2007-December/048059.html

I've been trying to fix the issue on the command line. Instead I should have been looking at the outer shell; setting the character set translation to UTF8 in putty has made everything look beautiful. Thanks Steven Haigh netwiz at crc.id.au!