Browsing all posts from January, 2009.

The four types of dog vomit

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TOTALLY off-topic, and the last thing I’d usually write about, but I found this recently while trying to diagnose my parent’s jack-russell terrier, Browser.

Snippet from The Glittering Eye follows:

It’s an oldie but a goodie. I don’t know the original source of this but it’s pretty wellknown to dog lovers.

YELLOW URKA-GURKA

Dog runs around the house and hides under furniture while making a prolonged ‘uuuuurka-guuuuurka, uuurka-guurka’ noise. (This noise is the only thing guaranteed to wake up a true dog lover who is hung over from a post dog-show celebration at 3:30 a.m.) After mad scrambling to capture the dog and drag him outside, the episode ends with an inaudible ten yard slimy yellow froth from the living room rug to the back door.

BLAP DISEASE

Dog exercises hard and (a) eats large mouthfuls of snow (winter Blap Disease) or (b) drinks a bucket of water (Summer Blap Disease). Within two minutes of returning inside, the dog spews out large amounts of clear slimy liquid while making a distinctive ‘blap’ sound and a sharp percussive noise as it hits the linoleum.

GARKS

Dog suddenly clears his throat with loud and dramatic ‘gggaark, gggark’ noises generally followed by prolonged ‘iiiksss’ and then loud satisfied smacking noises. There is nothing on the rug. Don’t investigate, you don’t want to know.

RALFS

Apropos of nothing, the dog strolls into the dining room and waits till the innocent dinner guests are all watching him. Then, with a single deep gut wrenching ‘raaaalff’ dislodges the entire weeks’ contents of his stomach on the dining room rug.

Variation: Then he eats it.

In all the above events the dog is entirely healthy and indeed deeply pleased with himself.

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Does your ISP block port 25 (SMTP)?

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If you’re like me and are fortunate enough to have your own external SMTP server (which is just about anyone with dedicated or VPS web hosting) here’s a simple but really neat trick….. configure your SMTP service (exim, postfix, et al) to listen on port 587 as well as port 25….. according to the IETF, port 587 is officially reserved for SMTP anyway! Most ISPs cruel enough to block port 25 probably won’t block port 587. And hey, if they do, use a different port…. 26, 8025, 8587, just make sure it’s not something used by another service.

The other side of the equation is your mail client….. alter your SMTP settings and change the port to the new one you specified in your MTA config. It’s possible (I’ve not tested it) that using SSL or TLS may yield positive results too…. I’m not sure if this particular nameless ISP (run by a monopolistic behemoth telco in Australia, hint hint) blocks secure SMTP or not, but I might give it a try and swing an update to this post with my results.

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