Author: Daniel Mettler

Posted on

The meaning of blogs..

..or rather one of the meanings of weblogs:

WSJ: Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights
Slashdot: Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights

A note about the importance of mouth-to-mouth advertising, with blogs being one of its incarnations on the Internet:

NOTRE DAME USA — Ob ein Kinofilm zum Kassenschlager wird, hängt davon ab, was die Besucher der ersten Vorstellungen darüber erzählen. Das zeigte ein US-Physiker anhand eines mathematischen Modells, mit dem er den Erfolg von 44 Kinostreifen untersuchte. Demnach kann die Mundpropaganda die Besucherzahlen langfristig stärker beeinflussen als das Marketing oder die Grösse des Publikums, das ursprünglich mit dem Film angesprochen werden sollte. (Sonntagszeitung p. 81, June 19, 2005)

In English:
“Nature” article: Modellers measure ‘word of mouth’ for films
Original paper: The effect of social interactions in the primary life cycle of motion pictures

Currently, many companies are discovering blogs as an important medium to get in contact with customers and opinion leaders. And more and more consumers realize that they can actually have an impact on products and influence companies – through blogging.

In fact, blogs are “just” the beginning.. stay tuned for more information.

[Update: Related news: “The first-ever conference on measurement, metrics and standards in word of mouth marketing” organized by womma – the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (I doubt it’s the “first-ever”, though ;)]

Posted on

firefox’s deep impact

I got forwarded to this site when entering “asterisk@home” in firefox‘s URL bar[1]:

NASA’s Deep Impact

Strange coincidence, but interesting :) And excellent PR probably, considering the date of the event: 4th of July 2005 ;)

[1] Entering some keywords in firefox’s URL bar is a very convenient way to do an “I feel lucky” search with these keywords on Google. Works with most keywords (e.g. enter “Daniel Mettler” and you’ll end up on this site ;) The above redirection to NASA’s site works with “everything@home”. Amazing.

Posted on

MS feedback :)

A premiere for me:

That’s pretty cool :) I always asked myself what MS will be doing with all the many error reports I already sent them. Do they just pipe them to /dev/null? Collect them in the marketing department to do some data mining on how much more stable product xy is than product yz? Forward them to Bayer so they can send me a free pack of Aspirin in order to fight the headache these bugs are causing? ;)

Well, after all, MS seems to use these reports to actually *fix* the errors (surprised? ;). Or at least some of them ;) And they inform their customers about new patches if available.. nice reward for sending bug reports! :) Like this, the whole thing makes sense. Instant feedback, that’s what customers want nowadays.

Posted on

Postfix outgoing/outbound SMTP authentication for smtp.hispeed.ch/cablecom.ch

It afforded quite some packet sniffing and debugging to find out the correct settings and encodings.

Here are the settings for postfix outbound/outgoing/upstream SMTP AUTH, smtp.hispeed.ch/cablecom.ch and Gentoo:

To /etc/postfix/main.cf, add:

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter = plain
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd_outgoing_smtp
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous

For debugging purposes, you might want to temporarily set “smtp_use_tls = no” in order to disable transport layer security encryption. Setting “smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter = plain” is not mandatory but might be helpful if AUTH LOGIN doesn’t seem to work for some reason.

Then create a file /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd_outgoing_smtp (or whatever name you chose) consisting of the following line:

smtp.hispeed.ch login:password

where “login” is your hispeed e-mail address (e.g. name@hispeed.ch) and “password” the password for your e-mail account at hispeed.ch. Don’t even try to use the credentials they sent you by snail mail. These are only valid to setup an initial e-mail account at hispeed.ch.

Now create a postfix-readable hash database of this text file by executing:

# postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd_outgoing_smtp

reload postfix:

# /etc/init.d/postfix reload

That’s it :) You can now check whether SMTP authentication works by sending a test message to a local and to a remote recipient while monitoring /var/log/messages or /var/log/mail.info (‘tail -f /var/log/messages’ etc.). If necessary, you can temporarily increase the log level of postfix by starting postfix with the “-v” option (adjust /etc/init.d/postfix accordingly). For general debugging of SMTP problems, telnet comes handy.

Use perl to encode your login and password as base64:

$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -e ‘print encode_base64(“name\@hispeed.chname\@hispeed.chpassword”);’
bmFtZUBoaXNwZWVkLmNoAG5hbWVAaGlzcGVlZC5jaABwYXNzd29yZA==

You could also use ‘mimencode’ (or ‘mmencode’ etc.) instead, but using perl is recommended as feeding the special characters (“nul”) to mimencode is pretty error-prone. The above, encoded string is suitable for AUTH PLAIN. Note that you need to specify your credentials as “loginloginpassword” and mask any perl special characters like “@”, “$” etc. with backslashes. denotes the ASCII nul character (0x00). For AUTH LOGIN, separate the login and password, i.e. do

$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -e ‘print encode_base64(“name\@hispeed.ch”);’
bmFtZUBoaXNwZWVkLmNo
$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -e ‘print encode_base64(“password”);’
cGFzc3dvcmQ=

If AUTH PLAIN works, your telnet session should look similar to this one:

$ telnet smtp.hispeed.ch 25
Trying 62.2.95.12…
Connected to smtp.hispeed.ch.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 smtp.hispeed.ch ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.6/8.12.6/tornado-1.0; Thu, 2 Jun 2005 18:25:33 +0200
EHLO smtp.hispeed.ch
250-smtp.hispeed.ch Hello cut.dclient.hispeed.ch [cut], pleased to meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE 10485760
250-DSN
250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN
250-STARTTLS
250-DELIVERBY
250 HELP
AUTH PLAIN bmFtZUBoaXNwZWVkLmNoAG5hbWVAaGlzcGVlZC5jaABwYXNzd29yZA==
235 2.0.0 OK Authenticated
QUIT
221 2.0.0 smtp.hispeed.ch closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

For AUTH LOGIN, the login and password need to be separated and submitted separately.