Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Censoring webmail is considered bad, especially when someone is censoring someone else’s email, and even more so when they are doing so without permission. I don’t know much about those sorts of situations, because I don’t rely on sites outside of my control to host my webmail (any more), but nor do I rely on myself to host my webmail, because the only software I’ve found is not designed for mobile phones or not in Debian yet. Failing to follow basic security practise, I exempt software which I have written myself from my stringent, Debian-based, quality control rules, and so, when I really needed a webmail service (or at least a subset of it), I was forced to write my own implementation. Fortunately the subset I required was very, very small, to such an extent that it is arguable whether what I’ve written is a webmail system at all. Basically it allows you to view on a webpage whether a person has sent you an email, and when they sent it, but no attacker could ever discover more information than this. By changing the source code you can restrict it to only consider emails based on certain criteria. In my particular case, this allows me to check if a certain special somehow has emailed me, which lets me look forward to the pleasure of reading their message when I get home.

Just like my iconic blog post “Advice for repairing a computer”, this post starts with a calamity and goes on to triumph, but whereas that post was written when I didn’t know how long and boring a PC maintenance story could be, this time I have no excuse, so I can only apologise. I will follow its example, though, in taking stock of my situation now compared to when that post was written. Firstly I will say that my computer has lasted quite well in the 2 years since that last major repair work, which means my yearly expenditure on this “hobby” is not so significant, despite the cost of the individual purchases it requires. About blogging, though, I have a second comment which is that I still find it very rewarding to keep to a schedule of 2 posts a month, but I did find myself saying to someone this week that I often have to force myself to do it. They said “If you don’t want to do it, then don’t do it.”, but that attitude strikes me as being quite short-sighted, and one that avoids responsibility and ones duties. Writing a blog may take effort, but most things of value do, and that effort is worthwhile if it helps someone (perhaps my future self) who, for instance, needs some notes on backing up and restoring a PC.