KaBewM.com

As the geek of my circle of friends I am usually asked questions like HD or Blu-Ray and so forth. I’ve already posted the HD/Blu-Ray question on my blog, so I figured I’d add the latest question, should I dump my current HDTV for a 1080p capable TV? As usual, it really depends.

The real answer to this question revolves around content and distance. There is no Broadcast HDTV standard for 1080p, as it uses too much bandwidth. If you primarily watch TV on your TV set, then it’s not really worth it. More important things are color reproduction (are the blacks dark grey or really black?), the upscaler (does SDTV look good on this set?), and size. That said, there are some sources of 1080p video. If you own an HD-DVD/ Blu-Ray player or play games on an X-Box 360/Playstation 3 then it may be a good idea to buy a 1080p set depending on your viewing distance. The question of size and distance then comes into play, as the further you get from the TV the less resolution you can see. At a certain point it’s not worth having the higher resolution because you just will not see it. There is a chart available here of distance and size. For example, at 1080p on a 32 inch tv, you must be closer than five feet for you to notice a difference between 1080p and 720p. Basically you need a giant TV or must be really close to your TV for the higher resolution to be perceptible.

All said and done, I’d probably skip on a 1080p set for the foreseeable future. I don’t play games, and I’m not buying an HD or Blu-Ray player anytime soon. I primarily use my TV for watching TV, and 1080p is not in that market at all for the forseeable future. I predict that in five years or so there will be an IPTV solution for this that’ll bring 1080p to the home, and I’ll re-evaluate then.

Today I released an updated SquirrelMail package for the QmailToaster. It is currently on the devel site only, although I plan to move that one to the main site fast. I will also be moving the maildrop and courier packages over. I have been testing an SRS enabled QmailToaster on one of my servers and thus far all is well. I believe I am going to put it out there within the week as an optional compile time option.

I’ve also begun writing an article about QmailToaster for the HowtoForge site. I’d really like to see major growth for the QmailToaster Project this year, and I think getting the word out will be key. I hope to be finished with my article by Friday of this week.

RegisterFly finally issued my cert for my personal domain. It took forever and isn’t a single root cert, as advertised, but at least it works. I basically pasted my csr into the support ticket and told them to send an approval request to hostmaster ‘ at ‘ kabewm.com for approval. This is not the cert they advertise, nor was it issued in the ten minutes advertised on their site. In the future I will be buying from elsewhere to avoid the headaches.

A friend of mine from the old high school days is in a band called The Jumping Jacks. I heard him perform live and was blown away. Although his recordings sound great, I much prefer the live “raw-ness” I heard in person. Regardless, I recommend everyone check out their music here: http://www.battleofthebands.com/thejumpingjacks

Show em some love!

I attempted to get a RegisterFly cert for my domain, but immediately after submitting my csr I get an error. I figured, no worries, I’ll just submit a ticket and get this taken care of asap. Well it’s been over 48 hours and not a peep out of the support site. When I submitted the ticket, I saw a note saying that typical service is within 2-3 hours but it could take up to 24 hours. Well needless to say I will no longer be recommending RegisterFly certs to anyone. The QmailToaster procedure for SSL Cert’s used to point to these clowns, but no longer. It now points to RapidSSL, a company that is fairly inexpensive but with good support and a procedure that just works.

Today I’ve released four updated packages for the QmailToaster Project. The first three were fairly minor in changes, as they were maintenance upgrades for the Courier-MTA utilities. This included the maildrop, courier-imap and courier-authlib packages. The more interesting changes were made by Alexey Loukianov, a member of the QmailToaster Community. He had released a few logging patches for SPF and DomainKeys for the main smtp server package. These patches make it a lot easier to determine where things went wrong. I have decided to include those in the next release of the main qmail-toaster package, currently on the devel site for public consumption. I will be moving this to the main site, should no complaints or show stoppers show up in a months time.

Special Thanks to Alexey Loukianov, The QmailToaster Community & Lightspeed Wireless. Without their support, the QmailToaster Project would not be moving as fast.