Wow! I just received a message from MacHeist people – they give away licenses for Delicious Library 2 to everyone who purchased the MacHeist 3 bundle. I bought several days ago, as soon as I learnt about it on Twitter. It  includes several great applications I was already considering to buy on my own so I could not resist the temptation and bought the whole bundle for “the insanely low price of $39″.

Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline.com did a great overview of the software packages comprising the bundle.

In my personal opinion, the best applications in the bundle are:

• Acorn – powerful graphics editor, as in “PhotoShop for humans”
• WireTap Studio – the ultimate recording utiltity, as in “podcaster’s dream”
• Picturesque makes your images gorgeous, as in “wow! who did this?”
• PhoneView opens up your iPhone, as in “16GB flash drive”

There are other great applications that I am also excited about – like BoinxTV, a TV studio in your Mac, and Espresso, a fresh new web development tool – but they have not been unlocked yet. Let us wait…

By the way, they say that 25% of all sales goes to charity, and you can even choose which charity organizations your money goes to. It is a great cause – keep up the good work, guys!

Anyway, I am blown away by the Delicious Library 2 deal – it feels like getting that shiny new toy you were dreaming of the whole year under the Christmas tree in your childhood. Wow!

Quick – only 4 days left! Go get your copy now.

A short demo of hacked iPhone running several third-party apps: e-book reader, game, IM client. Very promising!  

Interestingly but Mac OS X platform has much more web browsers than I have ever used on Windows.

Let us see – on Windows I used Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox and Opera. Well, there are some other, less-known ones but I have never used them.

Now, on Mac I have used Safari, OmniWeb, Firefox, Camino, Flock, Opera and Shiira. Wow!

Some of them – Safari, OmniWeb and Shiira – are based on Apple’s WebKit engine, while Firefox, Camino and Flock are using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. Opera stands out as the only one using its own engine.

All of these browsers look very nice. There are some rough edges in Firefox on Mac – unlike its Windows version Firefox has some problems displaying Russian (i.e. Cyrillic) fonts – they just look ugly, at half the width of other characters. Strangely, but Camino does not seem to have that problem. Moreover, I prefer Camino over Firefox for its better integration into Mac OS X – support for keychains, etc.

Flock is another interesting specie – it deserves a separate post. What it offers for web and media integration is just amazing.

OmniWeb is currently my favorite browser – mostly for two features not found in other web brosers – “graphical” tabs and workspaces. Graphical tabs shows thumbnails of pages in the tab bar as opposed to just page titles in other browsers. Since I normally have anywhere between 10 and 30 tabs open at any time this is very helpful for navigating between open tabs. Workspace allows you to create sets of open tabs and window settings. For example, I have Work, Personal, Research and Social workplaces. Switching to my Research workplace would put away anything that I have open in tabs and open up my last research session, restoring all its tabs, window settings, history, etc. Very useful for focusing on specific activity. Unfortunately, OmniWeb is not free – unlike other web browsers that are available free of charge, OmniWeb costs $14.95.

Shiira is an interesting browser developed in Japan. It has something similar to OmniWeb’s tab thumbnails. I have not been able to play with it a lot.

I was troubleshooting a strange problem recently. A brand new Nokia E61i smartphone could receive but not send any e-mail. The server configuration has not changed and other mail clients are working fine, so it must be the server.

It is very basic and straightforward configuration – a FreeBSD server running Qmail with SPAMCONTROL patch as SMTP server and BincIMAP as IMAP4 server. This configuration worked perfectly until the client asked to add this shiny new Nokia phone to the mix.

Receiving e-mail via IMAP4 did not pose any problems – it just worked (sans the self-signed SSL certificate which I figured out later) but sending mail via SMTP protocol just did not work at all.

The server requires SSL-encrypted connection and successful SMTP authentication before allowing relaying mail to non-local recipients. My initial thought was that perhaps it was due some mismatch in supported encryption algorithms (SHA vs DES vs 3DES, that type of thing). After tweaking the settings a lot on the server side, and even completely disabling SSL encryption altogether I realized it is not the culprit here.

So I have enabled verbose SMTP protocol logging and this is what I saw:

2007-08-16_12:04:16.53449 53365 > 220 server.example.com ESMTP
2007-08-16_12:04:16.55913 53365 < EHLO [xx.xx.xx.198]
2007-08-16_12:04:16.55935 53365 > 250-server.example.com
2007-08-16_12:04:16.55940 53365 > 250-PIPELINING
2007-08-16_12:04:16.55949 53365 > 250-8BITMIME
2007-08-16_12:04:16.55957 53365 > 250-SIZE 0
2007-08-16_12:04:16.55966 53365 > 250 AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
2007-08-16_12:04:16.58764 53365 < AUTH LOGIN
[SMTP authentication details snipped]
2007-08-16_12:04:16.60694 Accept::ORIG::Valid_Auth: P:EMSTPA
     S:xx.xx.xx.198:unknown H:[xx.xx.xx.198] 'login' ?= 'valid_user'
2007-08-16_12:04:16.60707 53365 > 235 ok, go ahead (#2.0.0)

As you see from this log excerpt, an SMTP session has been successfully established, SMTP client has successfully authenticated to the server and the server now ready start accepting e-mails from this client.

Everything looks perfect up to this point – see what happens next:

2007-08-16_12:04:16.76834 53365 < RSET
2007-08-16_12:04:16.76857 53365 > 250 flushed

What on Earth the developers have been smoking? Why reset an SMTP connection right after the authentication? Have they read RFC-822 yet?

So, let us continue with our example:

2007-08-16_12:04:16.77749 53365 < MAIL FROM:<valid_user@example.com>
2007-08-16_12:04:16.77787 53365 > 250 ok
2007-08-16_12:04:16.82899 53365 < RCPT TO:<someone@example.org> 
2007-08-16_12:04:16.82908 Reject::ORIG::Missing_Auth: P:ESMTPA
     S:xx.xx.xx.198:unknown H:[xx.xx.xx.198]
     F:valid_user@example.com T:someone@example.org
2007-08-16_12:04:16.82922 53365 > 535 authentication required (#5.7.1)

Of course – authentication is indeed required to send e-mail to external recipients (otherwise it would simply be an open relay). No wonder the SMTP server (rightfully!) rejects the attempt and closes the connection:

2007-08-16_12:04:16.85379 53365 < QUIT
2007-08-16_12:04:16.85433 53365 > 221 server.example.com
2007-08-16_12:04:16.85445 53365 > [EOF] 

Luckily, Qmail is an open-source software, so I was able to make a trivial modification in the qmail-smtpd.c sources:

--- qmail-smtpd.c.bak   Fri Aug 24 20:32:39 2007
+++ qmail-smtpd.c       Thu Aug 16 16:18:50 2007
@@ -784,7 +784,7 @@
 }
 void smtp_rset()
 {
-  seenmail = 0; rcptcount = 0; seenauth = 0; seenttls = 0;
+  seenmail = 0; rcptcount = 0; /* seenauth = 0; seenttls = 0; */
   mailfrom.len = 0; rcptto.len = 0; tlsinfo.len = 0;
   out("250 flushed\r\n");
 }

This is essentially makes RSET command a no-op when it comes to SMTP authentication.This solved the problem for me – my client is now able to send e-mail messages in addition to just receiving them.

Still – bad developer, no cookie…