Posts

Stefan Helander

Ispconfig3 monitor tab not opening when using non-english language [BUG – WORKAROUND]

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This is caused by a bug when saving the translation file concerning the langauge key for “Let’s Encrypt log”.

When the translation file for the Monitor tab is saved, the necessary backslash before the ‘ in “Let’s” is not saved into the file. The problem is described in this bug report: https://git.ispconfig.org/ispconfig/ispconfig3/-/issues/5881 but for the moment not resolved.

To workaround this problem, manually edit the file /usr/local/ispconfig/interface/web/monitor/lib/lang/XX.lng (where XX is your language). Find the line beginning with: 

$wb['Let's Encrypt log'] =

Insert a backslash like this:

$wb['Let\'s Encrypt log'] =

Save the file and your Monitor tab will work again. This must be repeated each time you edit the translations for monitor.

Stefan Helander

CSS letter-spacing bug in IE7 and solution

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A very good and scalable way to set letter spacing in CSS is by using ’em’s as it works relative to the font size. If you for example specify letter-spacing = 0.2em the letter spacing will stay proportional even though you change the font-size. You can easily set the letter spacing for the entire site in all font-sizes.

The ’em’s works exactly like ‘tracking’ which many designers work with. To convert tracking to em just divide it by 1000. That is x em = tracking y / 1000. For example tracking 200 equals to 0.2em.

The definition of 1 em is the size of the character M in the current font size. So 1 em for a font-size of 10px equals to 10px. 1 em for a 24px font size is 24px.

It is very practical to use ’em’s to specify the letter-spacing as it is proportional to the font size. For small ’em’s however, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) seems to round the values making the letter spacing appear wrong. It works alright in other browsers as well in IE8.

A workaround is to convert the letter spacing to pixels for your current font-size. The drawback is that you have to calculate it for every font-size you are using. And if you change a font-size you must recalculate the letter spacing.

The calculation is really simple. Just multiply the font size in pixels with the letter-spacing in ’em’s and you will get the letter spacing in pixels. If you have a font size of 16 pixels and want a letter spacing of 0.2em (which is equal to a tracking of 200) you do: 16px x 0.2em = 3.2px letter spacing.

Examples using 0.2em (tracking 200):

#mysize16
{
font-size: 16px;
letter-spacing: 3.2px; /* 0.2em x 16px = 3.2px */
}

#mysize24
{
font-size: 24px;
letter-spacing: 4.8px; /* 0.2em x 24px = 4.8px */
}

Stefan Helander

New year – and a little year 2010 bug

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The 200x ended and we went into 2010. So we got ourselves a little 2010 bug. It was in the spam filtering software Spamassassin. Or to be more precise in it’s rulesets.

The problem was actually discovered and fixed months ago but someone forgot to include it in the rulesets for Spamassassin 3.2.x. No hard feelings about that. Those guys are doing a great job and shit do happen. It was fixed in a couple of hours on January 1, 2010.

The problem was that all incoming mail filtered by Spamassassin was flagged with FH_PAST_DATE_20XX and given an extra +3.4 spam score which results in false positives.

Those that were running sa-update by cron had this automatically fixed as the updated rules were on the servers around noon on January 1, 2010. Those not running sa-update by cron… still have problems unless they have run sa-update manually. Saying that, running sa-update by cron might be a good idea to keep your Spamassassin rules updated 🙂 A script for doing so and getting a mail with the result can be found here.

Some FreeBSD users reported that sa-update was not able to pull down the updated rules. A manual workaround and links to details around the problem is found here.