As I was setting up the Ken Goldstein Project I decided that I would set up sendmail as well. Sendmail has a reputation for being the most difficult back-end e-mail program available; difficult to configure, that is. So far my experience bears this out. For me and possibly other OS X users as well the most difficult part of setting sendmail up was determining how the system identifies its own hostname global.

The way I and others solved the problem of local host host name assignment has been to manually edit the file “/etc/hostconfig” to substitute the value manually. This is unsatisfying but it works (otherwise in that section of hostconfig there’s a directive which prompts the system to, ultimately, determine its’ hostname from the first successful DNS query it makes – which can lead to interesting results depending on whose DNS you’ve opted for). Additionally because sendmail offers so many configuration and build options it can be very challenging to correctly identify where the program obtains such data as usernames or aliases. But wait!
I promised I wouldn’t bore you with sendmail details. So that’s enough of this. But I’ve even been dreaming about it, so it’s hard to write about anything else.

Speaking of writing, Cinescape has asked me to accept a regular freelance position which I am looking forward to accepting. It’s kind of an on-line entertainment news trolling position. Somehow I suspect I am about to become a huge fan of RSS feeds.

Not that I expect studio publicity websites to provide such useful tools. Hmm. Perhaps there is a business here. Journalism people, that’s nontraditional thinking, isn’t it?

One more geek note: I used ViaVoice to input this entry, and it took a long time, presumably associated with a) my needing to learn how to use the voicerec more efficiently; b) also with the program not having been sufficiently trained up yet; and c) the inherent dictation challenge of using words like “/etc/hostconfig/” . After a bit I’ll have a better feel for it. I felt like the copy was choppy, with a fair amount of needless repetition, presumably a consequence of attempting to correct non sequitirs on the fly instead of after completing the copy block as a whole.