Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Following my previous post on how to receive UCL mail with Gmail now here is how to send mail using Gmail but with your UCL address. You have to go to settings (top right) and Accounts and Imports and then click on the button with "Send mail from another address" So here is the data you need.

Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk

Then you have to click on send trough SMTP server and enter the details

SMTP Server: pod51002.outlook.com
Port: 25
Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Password: you should know this

And you don't click on enable SSL. I am sure you can do this with SSL somehow but I don't have time to figure it out :)

Then Google will send you a confirmation code which you have to enter. Please check in your spam folder as this is where my confirmation went. But after that you can just send mail like you are using outlook.com

Getting your UCL email into Gmail


I really don't like outlook.com or this web interface to live.ucl.ac.uk So I though why don't I collect all the mail in my Gmail account so I can read it in alpine. It is quite easy to set up.
  • You first sign into Gmail and then click on "settings" (top right) then you select "Accounts and Import"
  • Then you need to click on the "Add pop account"
  • Enter your UCL address and click next step
  • This will fail and you will be asked to add your data manually
Following data is important:
  • Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
  • Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
  • Password:
  • POP Server: outlook.com
  • Port: 995
  • And use SSL
This is pretty much all you need to receive mail. I further add a tag so I can search for uni mail quicker and leave the messages on the server in the case Gmail goes down.
But that's it. Quite simple actually.

To see how to send mail trough Gmail using your UCL address see my other post: Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Need money

I have been accepted to the

2nd IEEE International Conference on
Adaptive Science & Technology

in Ghana to present my paper on Objects in the Cloud. Now I have been looking at flights and etc and on the bottom line I can't afford it. I find this quite sad that in the conference atmosphere you always need someone behind you that can sponsor you (University, Company, etc). I mean I do get expenses for many conferences when I talk but a few don't even think about setting up a grant for poor students like me. I think they are missing out and creating a rich elite which is never good. Sorry for this rant but I am quite sad that I can not go :)

Trac with lighttpd on CentOS

I spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to get trac working with lighttpd on CentOS with the standard packages from rpmforge. Like always this seams to be quite easy but then you spend ages on the little things.

First of all you need to install trac via yum which is quite easy: yum install trac
This is assuming you have lighttpd already installed


So here is the section you have to put in your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf you will also have to enable a few modules at the start most notably mod_fastcgi but please always check that you have all the modules enabled.

$HTTP["host"] == "trac.mypage.org" {

url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "/root")

server.document-root = "/var/www/trac"
alias.url = (
"/trac_prefix/chrome/common/" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/htdocs/",
)

# rewrite for multiple svn project
url.rewrite-final = (
"^/trac_prefix/[^/]+/chrome/common/(.*)" => "/chrome/common/$1",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/trac_prefix/chrome/" {
}
else $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/root" {
fastcgi.server = (
"/root" => ( # if trac_prefix is empty, use "/"
(
# options needed to have lighty spawn trac
"bin-path" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/fcgi_frontend.py",
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"bin-environment" => (
"TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR" => "/var/trac/",
),

# options needed in all cases
"socket" => "/tmp/trac.sock",
"check-local" => "disable",

# optional
"disable-time" => 1,

# needed if trac_prefix is empty; and you need >= 1.4.23
"fix-root-scriptname" => "enable",
),
),
)
}
}


There is nothing special with the paths and the rest if quite standard. The one thing to note is that I couldn't get trac to live properly in the root directory. As soon as you select a project it will error => So we rewrite the url to add "root" to the end. The rest should be pretty straight forward. There is no authentication in this example but this will follow in a further post.

Rar on Mac OSX

I just downloaded a .rar file onto my Mac and of course it didn't understand it. So off I went to google and looked for something that could extract it. I found a lot of proprietary stuff but nothing really I liked. If you are looking for a funky GUI what you probably are if you are using a Mac you should have a look at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html which seams to be a good choice. But I didn't want another program that would integrate itself everywhere and in the end might cause my computer to crash every 25 min. (The Windows application syndrome). But all this looking around took me about 15 minutes till I had the feeling to have looked at all the options. Then I fired up a good old shell and had a look what fink had to offer. And after 1 line I could unrar my file
$ fink install unrar
That was it. I still love the command line, even if I have a funky desktop.

CentOS Pulse #0905 - The CentOS Newsletter

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0905 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 4.8 release, the
Spanish CentOS community, wireless networking and contains an
interesting interview with Tru Huynh.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0905

The project team considers the CentOS Newsletter an important tool to
communicate directly with the community. It is run by the community to
collect interesting bits from the wiki, mailing list, forums, SIGs and
other sources, and put them into the spotlight.

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Happy Reading!
Marcus + Didi