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May OVSAGE Meeting at Pythian

Hi folks,

A quick note to say that The Ottawa Valley System Administrator’s Guild (OVSAGE) is holding its monthly meeting on Thursday May 20, at 7pm at Pythian’s Ottawa office in the St. Laurent Centre (Suite 261), just steps away from the Rainbow Cinemas (office entrance at the top of the escalator).

This month we will continue the OVSAGE’s Linux System Administration course. The first part of the meeting will cover installing and configuring the Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server. The second half of the meeting will be devoted to securing connections. Detailed notes for previous course sessions can be found on the OVSAGE website. Note that you need to be a member to access the previous sessions.

The meeting is free and all are welcome to attend. Hope to see you there!

Testing Thunderbird 3: What to do if it ‘shreds’ your threads

I use Mozilla Thunderbird at work for reading my email and, since Mozilla Messaging is approaching the release of Thunderbird 3, I decided to give the latest beta a try. I’m an Ubuntu user (8.04 “Hardy Heron” on my workstation) so I sought out a PPA for development versions of Thunderbird, and came across ubuntu-mozilla-daily. I added the repository to my apt config and you can too, here’s how:

Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list using your favourite editor. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Sending Timezone-Aware Email with UTL_SMTP

I’m back again with another in what I hope will be a long line of “Quick Tips for Newbies” series.

At The Pythian Group, we have employees all over the globe, from our headquarters in Ottawa to regional offices in Boston, Prague, India and Sydney, and a few scattered remote workers in Seattle, Paris, Kiev, Brazil, South Africa and Wisconsin, among other places. In other words, we are spread across multiple timezones, and since it wasn’t too long ago that everyone was in Ottawa, this is something that still presents little quirks.

One such quirk involved email generated by one of our internal Oracle instances—via a stored procedure that used UTL_SMTP to send the messages—did not have timezone information in the “Date” email header. As a result, they would be stamped with the hour in Eastern timezone (Ottawa time), but the mail clients would think that hour was local. Depending on where you are relative to Ottawa, this could be many hours in the past or future. Of course, this wouldn’t be noticed if you were in Ottawa or even Boston, both in Eastern. For the rest, it was at the very least, an annoyance—but one that is easily fixed.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

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