Ichijo's Journal: Full Circle on the Internet

Or, The Right Thing vs. Worse Is Better.

Has this ever happened to you? You go searching around for something, and it brings you back to something (almost) completely unrelated that you've seen/done/met before.

I've been having trouble setting up Qmail under FreeBSD. I and zoarre want to replace Sendmail on our server with a better, more secure mail server. Qmail's supposed to be the best.

Installing Qmail isn't as simple as installing a package, because Qmail's license doesn't allow distribution in binary form. And it also isn't as simple as compiling the port.

There's an alternative: Postfix. It was also written by a security type, and while it doesn't guarantee security, it's able to hold its own against Qmail. So today I was searching around for comparisons between Postfix and Qmail, in particular user experiences. So typing this into Google:

+qmail +postfix +difficult

I came across an interesting article titled "Sendmail." More interestingly, it made reference to a book titled "The Unix Hater's Handbook." Apparently it's out of print, and the used copies offered by Amazon Marketplace sellers are priced at $99 for the one copy or over $300 for two other copies.

So back to Google again to see if anyone else had a copy. (eBay would have been my next choice.) Apparently, there are some free .pdf copies floating around the Internet, one of which is linked from an article titled "Unix History." The same article talks about the Jargon File, which I also like, so I took a closer look. At the top of the page is a link to an article titled "Worse is Better."

Without going into its contents (I'm saving this for another journal entry), let me just say that the article mentions a "young kid from Pittsburg named Jamie Zawinski" (initials JWZ). Is this the same JWZ of the weblog jwzrants? (I have that weblog bookmarked.) Indeed it was, and we've come full circle.

This also happened a couple of weeks ago. I was reading another weblog which linked to something which mentioned a Phil Windley. It took a minute to remember where I had read that name before. He's the sysop (okay, webmaster) of the Japan Tokyo South Mission alumni page (I served my mission there).

In the words of Johnny Carson, that's some "weird, wild stuff."