Daniel E. Markle's Blog

For approximately the next eight weeks, Pepsi and Mountain Dew are available with sugar. Labeled as Mountain Dew and Pepsi 'throwback' (a reference to a marketing term used for football products), they are a refreshing return to what soda tasted like before the HFCS craze hit the soda industry in the mid 1980's.

I find the Mountain Dew throwback to have a more citrus-y taste with a lighter feel and less syrupy aftertaste. Pepsi throwback reminds me of what I liked about Coke, with a sharper cola flavor and again lacking a syrupy aftertaste. After drinking these more tasty products, I believe many consumers will find why so many are choosing to drink sugar-based products. Fortunately Boylan's, Jones, and other bottlers will continue to provide other flavor choices with sugar for consumers finding the switch back to HFCS in a few weeks intolerable.

When setting up Maildir in Debian 5.0, getting the generic mail applications working correctly can be tricky.

• Install the 'mailutils' package, not the bsd mailx package.


• Do not touch the mailutils /etc/mail.rc file; there are some promising looking variables here like mailbox-type but these do not do what is desired. When the MAIL environment variable is set correctly mailutils will automatically detect the maildir box type.


• Do not touch /etc/login.defs; the promising looking lines in here are deprecated.


• Edit files in /etc/pam.d, changing the pam_mail.so lines as shown (assuming ~/Maildir as the selected location):
  
  
  
  • login: default login shells
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir standard
    
  
  
  • su: set up for proper MAIL when using su; nopen does not show 'new mail' message
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir nopen
    
  
  
  • sshd: set up MAIL properly when logging in with ssh; this line probably has a noenv by default which needs removed to set this properly
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir standard