Here is my proof of concept, just for fun: Reggae Song Lyrics Generator, check it out :)

Several e-mails sent through those mailing lists are now “flagged” with the following warning:

This message may not have been sent by:

sendername@gmail.com Learn More Report Phishing

I currently have a couple of mailing list hosted by my personal server: due to the popularity of Gmail, this systematically displayed message is quite annoying, and tends to “alarm” some users of the mailing list.

If you are hosting a mailing list in your server, and you experience the same issue, here is a simple solution…

As Google recommends in the Gmail support section, you can create an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to your domain, so your mailing list will be authenticated.

To create an SPF record for your domain, access the Control Panel (e.g. CPanel) provided by your Hosting Company:

1. Go to the section where you can edit the DNS (e.g. In Cpanel, “DNS -> Advanced DNS zone editor”)
2. Add a new TXT record where the record name will be yourdomain.com. (NB. Do not add any www prefix, just the domain name and don’t forget the . after your domain name, it’s important!)
3. In the TXT Data field, write: v=spf1 ip4:123.456.789.000 ~all (don’t forget to replace the IP in this example with your real IP)
4. Leave the default value in the field TTL

(Needless to say/repeat, replace yourdomain.com with your domain name, and 123.456.789.000 with the IP of your server).

That’s it. There are different possible values you can add to your SPF record, they may be more or less “permissive” (e.g. emails sent just from some subdomains etc…). However the aforementioned example should work for everyone, if you need something more specific then start from here and follow the links.

It may take a while to have these changes to your DNS propagated worldwide (up to 48 hours), then, once the SPF record in your domain is active, the email sent through your mailing list(s) won’t display any more the phishing warning in Gmail. That’s it :)

How to check whether your SPF record works correctly?

• Go here, for example: http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html

• Write your domain name in the field “Domain name:” (do not put any www., use just the domain name and the extension e.g. yourdomain.com) and press “Get SPF record (if any)“.
• If the result is positive you’ll have a response which will look like “The TXT records found for your domain are:” etc… (the page will also display a validation of the record). Otherwise, you’ll obtain this error “No type SPF records found.” (This may mean that there is something wrong in your SPF record, or that your DNS are not propagated yet).

There is also a way to check whether your SPF record is active and works properly. You can enter Gmail and give a look to the headers of the emails sent through your mailing list.

The headers of the e-mails sent to a mailing list whose domain doesn’t have an SPF record, report a section similar to this one:

Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 184.154.xxx.xxx is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mailing-list@yourdomain.com) client-ip=184.154.xxx.xxx;

While an active SPF record in your domain would produce the following header:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of mailing-list@yourdomain.com designates 184.154.xxx.xxx as permitted sender) smtp.mail=mailing-list@yourdomain.com; dkim=neutral (body hash did not verify) header.i=@gmail.com

Thus avoiding the annoying Phishing warning in the Gmail webmail interface.

"I just feel old and tired of all this: I think it's time to retire"

AB: Thank you for being with us today, Mr. Explorer 6. How are you?

IE6: I’m glad to be here, Alberto. I’m fine, just a little bit tired.

AB: Tired? You are just 9 years old! You’re still a kid, you should have plenty of energy!

IE6: Well, you know, browsers’ age is not equivalent to humans’. If you consider how fast technology is evolving I already have more than 80 human years.

AB: Really?! I didn’t know that! And you are still working full time, that’s astonishing… Congratulations!

IE6: Thanks. Yes, actually I’m still in business and still have a good share in the browsers market. In 2009, for instance, 15% of the people who visited your website came through me!

AB: This is definitely a relevant percentage! I didn’t know. How is this possible? Why people are still using you and not, for example, your son IE7 or your nephew IE8?

IE6: This is probably due to machines who still run old versions of windows, such as Windows 2000, and cannot upgrade to my most recent releases.

AB: Anyway, that’s not a good excuse: I apologize for being so straight… but there are so many browsers out there that could replace you… so why people don’t upgrade?

IE6: I appreciate your frankness and I agree with you. Anyway, I’m mainly talking about companies, governmental institutions, schools and universities… Sometimes system administrators are just too lazy to perform an upgrade.

AB. Damned system administrators, it’s always their fault… Anyway, it’s good for you, isn’t it?

IE6: Well, at first I loved the idea of being still on the market. But now, to be honest, I start to feel old, sometimes I don’t even have time to sleep. My wife keeps telling me I’m working too much and moreover several important big companies seem to have already cut back on my support.

AB: Are you referring to Digg, Youtube and Facebook?

IE6: Yes, and many more. Last week even Google announced that my support will be discontinued from March 2010…

AB: Oh, what a bad news… What was your reaction?

IE6: They literally broke my heart! They have no respect for old men, they could have called me at least to say goodbye after so many years… [A tear drops down Mr. Explorer 6's eye - AB]

AB: Ehm… I see… So what are you going to do now? Are you planning to fight and increase your competitiveness in order to cope nowadays young browsers?

IE6: Competitiveness!!?? I just feel old and tired of all this: I think it’s time to retire… [Blows his nose -AB]

AB: Retire? Are you serious?

IE6: Absolutely. I had my moment of glory, now I can retire and spend my last years enjoying life and good food…

AB: It’s not such a bad perspective, is it? Are you planning to move on after your retirement?

IE6: Well, actually I was thinking to go to Florida but they told me that there is this lake in Italy called Lake Como, they told me that also George Clooney has a house on its shore. Apparently Italian food and wine are delightful!

AB: You said it! I’d really recommend you to move to Italy if you enjoy good food and wine!
Thank you very much for the interview Mr. Explorer 6. We wish you all the best with your new life!

IE6: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

For this reason, I decided to dedicate one minute in writing “yet another text to md5 converter“, which I can use in my own server!

Nothing special, just a few lines of PHP code, ut prosim!

<?php
echo '
<h1>Text2MD5 super simple converter</h1>
<p>Type a word or a sentence below:</p>
<form method="get">
 <input name="string" type="text" id="string" />    
 <input type="submit" value="Convert to MD5" />
</form>';

if (isset($_GET['string'])) {    
$str = $_GET['string'];
echo '<p>The MD5 hash of <strong>'.$str.'
</strong> corresponds to:<br /><strong>'.md5($str).'
</strong></p>';
}
?>

Download md5-convert.php – Try it online

If you work in a firewalled environment (your university, your company, etc…) that allows you to use your e-mail client in order to download your emails through POP3 but not to send messages using the standard SMTP on port 25 (the standard port used by SMTP services), you can try the following workaround…

In most cases many institutions block port 25 in order to avoid possible spamming from their network, however these networks usually allow to use port 465 to send e-mails via SMTP from any client through a secure (SSL) connection.

If you have a Gmail account you can simply configure Gmail SMTP in your e-mail client using the following parameters:

Server: smtp.gmail.com

Port: 465 (SSL)

username: youraddress@gmail.com

password: your gmail password

If you send emails from different addresses through your e-mail client, they will be overwritten by default with your Gmail address which will appear in the “from” field, however you can avoid this by adding your email address as “another address you own” in Gmail. To do this just go to Gmail website, login and go to Settings -> Accounts -> Add another email address you own.

You will be able to send email from yourname@yourdomain.com throught your favourite email client and a secure connection to Gmail SMTP on port 465, possibily bypassing firewall blocks on standard port 25.

The "Flashlight" effect

OmniDazzle is a piece of software for MAC OS X which provides a set of fun and useful enhancements that help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create visual effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer.

It’s easy to use and it features several effects, such as a flashlight or nice footprints which follow your pointer: these may give a creative touch to your slide presentations and can be useful while recording screencasts…

OmniDazzle is free and can be downloaded from the official web page.

An example of YellowJug font

Some years ago (2003) I designed a typeface and called it YellowJug (the name was inspired to a painting by Pablo Picasso).

Because of its mixing of capital and small letters, YellowJug font is not meant to be used with long texts. It is particularly suitable for short titles and slogans, as well as web animations and menus.

YellowJug font is free and released under Creative Commons (By-Nc-Nd) license and is available both in true type and open type flavours (the open type version is recommended in MAC OS X systems).

Download now YellowJug font!

Just for fun, you can also see the original handwritten glyphs I designed and eventually vectorialized.

A common solution in order to use freely typefaces while designing a web page, is creating graphical representations of the text content;  this solution apparently works well, however it is not efficient and not easy to update when the text content changes, as each text must be written or modified manually through an image manipulation software.

For this reason web designers normally use a narrow range of fonts in their web pages and usually adopt web-safe fonts.

Nevertheless, there are some interesting alternatives. Facelift is an excellent solution in order to use custom fonts in your web pages writing simple text while not dealing with images creation and updating.

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) to <span> elements and everything in between!

Give a look to these examples!

Facelift is free software released under GNU/GPL license. It requires a quite common web server configuration (PHP along with GD libraries with freetype and PNG support enabled) and can be freely downloaded from the official web page.

Podcast Generator is free web based podcast publishing script written in PHP: users can upload media files (audio-video) via a web form along with episode information and automatically create podcast w3c-compliant feed including iTunes specific tags.

Podcast Generator is an open source web based software I developed as part of my final degree project in 2007 and I am still maintaining.

To give a look at Podcast Generator, visit the official website: http://podcastgen.sourceforge.net

After a long pause, I restyled Yellowjug.com and decided to adopt WordPress along with a very simple and clean theme.

I’ll periodically post here some commentaries about the issues I’m interested in, writing either in English (I apologize in advance for inaccuracies you may find) or in Italian (my native language!).