So it’s been a while – almost a year! – since I updated this site, which probably also means no one pays attention anymore, but oh well. I just thought I’d make a little post about a new service I’ve been using over the last couple of days called Jango. It’s basically personalized radio stations, along the lines of Pandora, but it’s a bit more social, and (the biggest thing for me) it works in Canada.

Each user can create a number of stations, and for each of them, you can add artists to it, control how much variety it plays, and rate songs as they play.

An interesting feature is you can search for and play songs on demand – but what happens is it shows songs that are currently playing on other user’s stations, and then tunes you into that station. The song starts at the beginning, but if you continue listening, the next song that plays is determined by the station. In this sense, “stations” are more like dynamic playlists – it’s an interesting concept.
My stations are at: http://www.jango.com/users/3393756. Enjoy!

Well finally wireless number portability is coming to Canada on March 14th. This means you will be able to transfer your wireless number to wireless another carrier, to a landline, or your landline to a wireless carrier. Transfers between wireless carriers should take 2.5 hours, transfers between wireless and landline could take up to two days, and fees for doing a transfer are left up to individual providers. I haven’t yet found out if transfers from wireless or landline to VoIP carriers will be possible, although I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.

On that note, I recently had to switch my home phone number. It’s not really a big deal since most people call my cell phone anyways, but basically Unlimitel pulled out of operating in Kingston. I am now with les.net (which has a really nice interface by the way – letting you pick and add DIDs to your account in seconds, see your balance, automatically send you a reminder when your balance is low, etc). I looked into porting my number over, but was told that I would be charged a $150 fee to port – I have to wonder if that would still be the case in a couple of days?

I’ve posted my php sendmail wrapper before, but I just noticed that Ilia Alshanetsky has written a php mail logging patch that essentially does the same thing, but from within PHP itself. This is nice because it can log the full path of the file and line where mail() was called, whereas my script can only log as much info as PHP passes to sendmail (which isn’t very much) and what it can get from the environment. The downside is since it’s a patch, it requires recompiling – my script can be dropped into any installation (PHP4/5, and maybe even 3) and just requires a simple php.ini change.

I should also point out that if you’re using this, you should be sure that you don’t “whitelist” localhost in your mail server, or otherwise people can just connect to your SMTP server locally, and send mail without requiring a username or password. If they use SMTP you can’t see what script or virtual host sent the mail either way, but at least if you require authentication you can see what account is being used if it becomes an issue.