Tobias Schlemmer’s Website

I haven’t been able to send e-mails through my local mail client since today. I received an error message which guided me to this Swisscom webpage. Swisscom blocks all SMTP connections on port 25 if they don’t connect to a Swisscom mail provider like e.g. bluewin.

Swisscom has started operating an additional spam filter on the DSL network. This filter now also checks e-mail from free e-mail providers such as GMX, Google Mail and Hotmail if the e-mail is sent from a Swisscom connection … As a result of the introduction of the new spam filter, e-mail that is sent with SMTP authentication via port 25 can no longer be sent.

So I changed the SMTP port in my mail client from 25 to 587. But the server didn’t accepted the port. Thanks to rinetd a port redirection is installed in a few seconds and everything worked fine again.

So I hope spam gets less in the future and the trouble for other people (who may have more problems like me with this huge change) pays off.

Last weekend I upgraded my 3 year old PC (Windows XP, Core2Duo E6600, 4GB Ram, Nvidia 7900GS) and put in a new SSD hard drive (Samsung SSD PB22-J MLC, 128GB) and installed Windows 7 (Professional 64bit, English) on it.

The SSD is nearly 3 times faster than my old Western Digital traditional hard drive. But some people say that the speed gets worse by the time. So we will see.

I skipped Windows Vista, but Windows 7 RC impressed by his performance and stability. And Windows 7 does too.

• It recognized all hardware and installed actual drivers.
• Booting and shutting down are extremely fast.
• Working on the desktop is real fun.
• There is so far only one program which didn’t worked, so I installed the Windows XP Mode and now it integrates seamlessly into the Windows 7 desktop.

In conclusion, I have to say that it feels like an new PC.

I’ve tried Ubuntu as an alternative to Windows for three months. So I switched my main desktop PC from Windows XP to Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) last weekend. I’ve found some little problems and solutions I would like to share with you, in case you are thinking about switching too. It would like to start with some helpfull links:
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Last week, I informed the Seagull developer about an important security issue. The new Seagull 0.6.0RC3 contains a fix for this hole. For more informations visit this article.

Seagull is an object oriented framework written in PHP that focuses on best practices, clean code and reusable components. The core libraries are free for you to use in your own projects and a number of modules developed by the community are also available.

Als ich gestern mal wieder meine Winamp Playliste aktualisieren wollte, bin ich gleich auf einen neuen Audio/MP3 Player umgestigen. Grund? Ich habe meine ganzen Daten, außer dem OS und der installierte Software, auf einer externen Festplatte. Und beim Laden in Winamp wird die kompletten Titelliste (also inklusive Titelänge) eingelesen. Nach circa 5 Minuten und 170MB Arbeitsspeicherverbrauch von seitens Winamp habe ich dann abgebrochen. Auch ein zweiter und dritter Versuch brachten keine besseren Resultate.

Anderst ist da schon xmplay. Hier hat das gesamte Laden circa 2 Minute gedauert und dabei wurde der PC kaum beansprucht (man kann also nebenbei noch locker weiterarbeiten). Also klarer Vorteil für xmplay.

Zweites grosses Plus: Leider wird manchmal die Festplatte nicht erkannt (da bringt ein Neustart des Platte Abhilfe). xmplay zeigt dies auch sofort an indem all Titel, die nicht verfügbar sind, rot durchgestrichen werden. Winamp dagegen versucht der Reihe nach jeden einzelnen Titel anzuspringen, was natürlich nicht gelingt.

Also ein Umstieg von Winamp zur echten Alternative xmplay kann ich unter Windows also nur uneingeschränkt empfehlen. Und nette Skins gibt es dazu auch (manche sehen Winamp sehr ähnlich und erleichtern den Umstieg umso mehr).