Tobias Schlemmer’s Website

Still as fast as it was 1 year ago:

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.