If you forget the car industries earlier foray into electric cars the Tesla Roadster is the poster child of the future. Celebrities conscious to promote a sensitive persona have bought hybrids such as the Prius, but ultimately they’re still tied to the pump. Then came the Tesla Roadster and it’s massive order book of celebs all willing to wait a few years for their fully electric sports car. The thing is, whilst Tesla have been arguing amongst themselves and generally only making noise rather than cars, they’ve been overtaken by a British company with a much better product.
Introducing Lightning, the small start-up that wants to convince you not to by a Tesla or Aston Martin.
What makes it better than a Tesla? How about being able to fully charge the battery in less than 10 minutes compared to the 3.5 hours of the Roadster. Or the fact the GT looks beautiful. Ok, the GT might be £120,000 but if you fancy a car that could compete with an Aston Martin you should expect to spend about the same.
Personally it’s unlikely I’d ever buy a Tesla but I’ve always fancied an Aston Martin DB9 (you got to have something to aspire to right?) but the new Lightning GT is now getting serious consideration.
It’s been a while in the making but I’ve finally ironed out most of the problems with Internet Explorer 5-8. The actual pages only took a few days to get right in Safari, Opera, Firefox, etc but typically took ages to tweak so they rendered as intended in IE.
So here’s what it looks like:
I’m not going to link to it but you can see the address (URL) in the picture. I’ve put some effort into Google and other search engines not being able to find and index the site as I don’t want ordinary users stubling upon it. Just remember a few things if you visit the site, it’s only a prototype, it doesn’t have some functionaity (such as login) and the database only contains a few examples. If you want to find some number plates search for “JMB”.
My outbound (SMTP) mailsever was always the university server. Upon graduation they disabled our accounts. This left me with the problem of not being able to reply or indeed send any emails. My web hosts Freehostia provide free accounts for hosting websites and allow you to have email addresses but charge for SMTP. You could use gmail but they change the email so everyone knows it came through them. There are a number of SMTP services avaliable but they all seemed to have their drawbacks.
Mac OS X comes with a number of open source programs buried away, emacs is one of the many that spring to mind. Since it is a unix operating system it was a fair bet that it would be possible to install Postfix but it’s installed already by default (The SMTP program for 10.0 to 10.2 was Sendmail).
It’s really easy to get a local SMTP server up and running. Simply follow these steps:
- You must be logged in as a user that is allowed to administer the system (see System Preferences).
- Download the file Postfix. Make sure it is extracted to your desktop into a folder named Postfix.
- Start the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.App) and type in the following commands:
- sudo postfix start
You should not get an error message. Now do the following steps to make sure Postfix is started when you boot up your system. Note that the first step may produce an error message (directory already exists.)
- cd /System/Library
sudo mkdir StartupItems
cd StartupItems
sudo mv ~/Desktop/Postfix .
sudo chown -R 0:0 Postfix
sudo chmod +rx Postfix/Postfix
- sudo pico /etc/hostconfig
- Find the line MAILSERVER=... and change it to MAILSERVER=-YES-. If there is no such line, then add one at the end.
- Set your mail client (Entourage, Mail, Eudora…) to use 127.0.0.1 (localhost) as SMTP (mail) server to send email and username as _postfix (or just postfix in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger).
- Postfix more or less runs out of the box. You may want to configure a static name for your host. This can be done by editing the main.cf file:
sudo pico /etc/postfix/main.cf
Thanks to David Reitter for the original article. Hosting your own mailserver isn’t without risk and the required modification of files may result in unexpected system behaviour. I don’t take any responsibility for your actions in following these instructions. Use at your own risk. Although it’s very unlikely there could be a problem.
Update: Some mail servers might treat your emails as spam if you use your own SMTP. You can check if your IP address will have that problem by searching SORBS or a similar service. Some home ISPs give their customers a dynamic IP address (one that will change). If this is the case you might be able to get round the problem by restarting your router and letting it pick up a new IP.
It seems I’ve been neglecting my blog these last few days. I do have a very important update in the shape of my Graduation from Aberdeen University! Hence forth I will be Mr John Malcolm Bain BSc (Hons) MBCS.
