Well, I just got the trusty orb.org domain back online, and guess what? Seems a lot of people have (mis)configured their SMTP MTAs to ask me whether an address is an open relay!

Well, we can't be losing that bandwidth for nothing, so I've configured the name servers there to let everyone know that everything they have is coming from an open relay. I started by using a moist cloth to wipe the dust off my old C++ books, then got to business making a module for PowerDNS. I originally thought that writing a module that returned 127.0.0.2 to every query would be the trick, and while I got my digestion back for C++, and was very close to finishing the module, I was informed by one of the very friendly folks on PowerDNS IRC that I don't need it, that I could just use a wildcard DNS record.

So problem solved.

You may be asking yourself at this point "why would you do that to those poor folks, all their mail is going to get rejected as spam!" Well, the answer is simple. I thought about the number of ways that I could get the message out that their traffic was thoughtful but not welcome, and I couldn't think of anything better than all of their users banging on the door of the system administrator tomorrow morning saying all of their mail is getting sent to the spam bucket. It just fixes things up fast!

In the mean time, I learned a lot about Eclipse CDT. Sam Pullara turned me on to this, and I can say that this is the first time that I ever installed Eclipse in my life. It was interesting. I swear by IDEA and had a feeling that this would be something that I might learn something about, but in the end, I'm convinced more than ever that IntelliJ is blowing it. Sorry guys, just trying to be honest here. The IDEA platform is absolutely a joy to work in, but the momentum that they have there is strong. Giving away licenses for open source development is smart, but only if you don't get into the same situation that Apple got into where they were overcharging their bread and butter users and undercharging a group that would have bought the product anyway. Apple v. Microsoft, Sybase v. Oracle, etc... Marketing is as important as quality, maybe even more so. I don't think you should retract this offer to open source, but I do believe that you need to either get your marketing machine in gear, make it easier for people to write plugins and do thing like Eclipse RCP, or lower the price so more people can get religion.