It's manic at Manick

In an effort to reduce spam I decided I’d look at what good Open Source Anti-Spam software was available. I require it to work with Microsoft Exchange Server.
I soon settled on Spam Assassin which is written in Perl and very well regarded in the Linux world.
So, to set this up as I have you’ll need to download and install Perl, which under Windows means using ActiveState ActivePerl.
When Perl is installed head over here for info on how to Install SpamAssassin under Windows.

If for any reason you get any errors along the lines of ‘Package not found’ while attempting the ‘ppm install xxxxxx’ commands then that’s a problem with ActiveStates repository. A solution is to configure Perl to use a different repository.
#perl on Efnet IRC soon came up with adding theoryX as an additional repository.
You can use this command from your Perl bin directory:
C:\Perl\bin>ppm repo add theory58S http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms

and you will see

C:\Perl\bin>ppm repo add theory58S http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms
Repositories:
[1] ActiveState Package Repository
[2] theory58S

now your ppm install commands should work and you can continue the install process.

Apparently IIS7 is gonna have a url rewrite filter that will be compatible with Apache’s mod_rewrite. About time.
If you can’t wait or can’t upgrade then there are other options. I needed one for a site and found a nice free one called IIRF. It’s distributed under the Microsoft Permissive License.

If you don’t have any idea of what a url rewriter does – well it’s server side software that allows the browser to request http://foo/bar/bam and receive http://foo/something/dispatch.cgi?q=bam.
This is useful for easy to remember urls and also for search engine optimisation. Go google mod_rewrite for more details.

Just spent longer than I would have liked finding out why some images on my site weren’t displaying under Firefox 3 but were fine under IE7.
According to Firebug the images were being downloaded, but they were not being rendered. So, I looked at the rendered DOM source and could see that style=”display: none;” had been added to the img tag.
I was pretty sure that none of my scripts were doing anything like that, and after searching them all and checking the CSS for quite some time I eventually tracked the problem down.
And guess what!? It wasn’t a problem at all, it was the excellent FF plugin called AdBlockPlus just doing it’s job. The image path had the string ‘advert’ in it and had therefore had the offending style tag added. It was a very simple matter to disable AdBlockPlus for my site and that was problem solved!