Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 11

“Run Your Own Mail Server” Kickstarter Update

Pessimism is the path to happiness. Either you have the pleasure of being correct, or you are delightfully surprised.

I had hoped that the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter might bring in several thousand dollars. I dreamed that if I was lucky, over the twenty days it would raise as much as the Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter. After all, this book had been heavily sponsored. I had exhausted my market.

But Kickstarter is a discovery platform, and was worth trying.

One week into this thin...

46: The Innumerable Things I Detest

Run Your Own Mail Server is at copyedit and live on Kickstarter, so I’m working on my TLS course for BSDCan. The course is stolen from the pages of TLS Mastery, of course, because I’d rather skip the conference than actually research a new topic for a talk, so that’s what you get this week.

Of the innumerable things I detest about information technology, first prize goes to the word “security.” Not the concepts behind it, the actual word. The definition of “security” wobbles drunkenly all ab...

“Run Your Own Mail Server” Kickstarter is live!

Run Your Own Mail Server is the most heavily sponsored book I’ve written. Mostly that’s because sponsorships were open for longer than any other book. This gave me doubts about running a Kickstarter. Was I going back to the same people? Would anybody back it?

I launched the Kickstarter at 7:04 EDT today, and just had to update the banner image.

So, yeah. The people who will sponsor are not the same as the people who will back on Kickstarter. Though it occurs to me that during the backe...

45: Abusing the Protocol

Kickstarter next Monday so RYOMS has to be at copyedit before then, and my wife broke her leg last week. I’m glad an episode exists, at all.

Email uses several protocols, but only one will routinely give you fits. You control both ends of a Local Mail Transport Protocol (LMTP) connection. You can set up oddball clients to duplicate a user’s IMAP configuration. DNS, TLS, these are well-understood headaches. But the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) underlies all of email, and you can’t pos...

44: Too Much Trouble To Bother

I’m churning through the tech edits on Run Your Own Mail Server so I can get it to copyedit before the Kickstarter launches, partially because it’s more ethical but mostly because the Kickstarter description says the book is in copyedit and changing that would be too much work.

Ethics of System Administration

I have firm memories of the first time I got root on a mail server, back when the 1.544Mb T1 was the pinnacle of connectivity and my 33.6K modem thrilled me. I thought, “I can’t poss...

April’s Anguished Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of April, and the public at the beginning of May.)

Well, this last month officially blows.

I just got news that Craig Maloney finally lost his fight with cancer. Craig was a regular in our Patronizer Zoom hangouts. The guy had the usual IT cynicism, but it floated on this bed of optimism and hope. I’ve known him for decades, but he supported my work for years before that. The first entry in my title index was a tabletop RPG published in 1992....

43: A Truth Universally Acknowledged

This week’s text production is for the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter. I’m also turning RYOMS into a four-hour class for BSDCan and getting into tech edits on same. But hey, at least I’m not falling back on reading an actual published work!

Running your own mail server is not only an act of defiance against some of the largest exploitative companies in history. It is not a mere education in protocols. Email is essential to modern industrial society. By running your own email, you seize...

“Run Your Own Mail Server” Kickstarter prelaunch up

Pretty much what the subject says. The Kickstarter page is up. If you do Kickstarter and want to know when this goes live, hit the button.

Why do both sponsorships and a Kickstarter? Different people have different comfort levels with different options. Some folks want to make the book exist. Some folks want to get the book as soon as it exists. Some of you want a vague awareness that the book exists so yuo can more easily avoid it.

If the Kickstarter does well enough backers will get an o...

New Prohibition Orcs novelette out

The Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter offered a stretch goal of “I will write an orc baseball story.” The story went to backers at the end of December, and now I’m releasing it to the public. As with all my standalone short fiction, it’s exclusive to my store.

“Fair Balls” contains baseball! Found Meat! Pure orcish wisdom, shared beneath the Sun. All in the name of that darkest of arts: “reading.”

What’s a novelette? Too long to be a story, too short to be a novella. The weird midrange crap tha...

Penguicon 2024 Schedule

I’ll be at Penguicon this weekend. Come by, say hello, buy a book or heckle a talk. All talks are fifty minutes.

Friday, 26 April

5 PM: hang out in bookstore7 PM: Reading (Orcs? Tech advice column? Nonfiction? Who knows?)

Saturday, 27 April

10 AM: The Good, the Bad, and the Yikes: 20th-Century SF (panel)11 AM: How I Make a Living Writing1 PM: How to TLS when You Don’t Know TLS (my talk, given by Bagel Garrison)2 PM: BSDCan Concom Call (Not a Penguicon event, but it...