Converting Fan Fiction Into Epubs

I am an avid reader. Most of the reading I do is in Science Fiction genre. Recently I revisited a great site called Fan Fiction ( http://www.fanfiction.net ). Everyday people that are fans of various shows write stories with their favorite characters in them and upload their stories to the Fan Fiction site for sharing with other fans. The area I really enjoy is the tv shows->crossover section. It reminds me of the What If? comic book series. With the stories, you can find out the answers to questions like 'What if Dr. Who met the SG-1 team from Stargate:SG-1?'. Excellent stuff.
You can read the articles online from the fanfiction.net site or if you have an ereader, do what I have started doing - download the stories as an epub file for an ereader. This makes it much easier to read on the road. To facilitate this, check out an excellent project hosted at http://fanfictionloader.appspot.com/ . Just place a link to your story and click the Download button. A short while later you will be able to download your epub from the same page. Excellent!

Mapping Samba Share on OSX

Reference: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/85454-login-script-mount-smb-drive-desktop.html#post532690

The new Lion 10.7.1 seems to have an issue with reconnection with saved credentials to a Samba share. It wants to try as the logged in user's name and not the saved credential username. Here is one workaround. Create a text file in the users /Users/username directory and call it 'smbmount.command'. Put the following in it (modifying the appropriate variables).

Quick and Dirty Server Monitoring with Python

Sometimes you just need a quick and dirty script for monitoring servers to see if they are up. I wrote the following python script and have it running from cron so that it will notify me via SMS when a server's service isn't responding. The list of hosts is in a python dictionary with the key being the hostname or ip to monitor and the value being a list of service ports to check. If a host/port doesn't respond, it emails to the Sprint messaging service which appears on my phone. Any provider that has an email to SMS gateway should work. It isn't anywhere near a full fledged monitoring system but works well enough.

GroupWise and iPhone IMAP Server Not Responding Error

Recently an iPhone user with an IMAP account setup for GroupWise suddenly had their email stop working with an error message saying 'the mail server mail.domain.com is not responding'. Since no one else was having problems, the issue had to lie with their phone. I first verified their account settings. When that appeared ok, I removed the account and re-added it (this is IMAP so nothing would be lost). When that didn't work, I logged into their account and immediately saw the issue. They had moved their 'Mailbox' folder underneath another folder. For IMAP to work, the Mailbox folder must be at the root of the user's folder hierarchy. Moving it back immediately allowed IMAP to work. I've hit this before and am sure that will be the first thing I check from now on...