Today, since people have complained that all I seem to have eaten is fruit so far, I was taken to get a somewhat different dessert after lunch. The desserts we ate were called ‘camafeu’ and ‘brigadeiro’. They were really very sweet indeed. The camafeu had walnut in it though, which was nice.

I’m currently trying to avoid going into a diabetic coma. How my colleagues manage to eat these any more than once a year is beyond me :-)

Our latest adventure saw our hero introduced to the juice of the acerola plant by Kiko and Johan. The juice was served mixed with orange juice and the result was very tasty indeed. Here is a bit of information about the acerola fruit:

Fruits are round to oblate, cherry-like but with 3 lobes. They are bright red (rarely yellow-orange) with thin skin, easily bruised. The pulp is juicy, acid to sub-acid occasionally nearly sweet, with a delicate flavor and apple notes. The fruit is very high in Vitamin C, up to 4,000 mg per 100 g fresh weight, but typically around 1,500 mg C. Green fruits have twice the Vitamin C level of mature fruits.

Also our intrepid hero was told of the meaning of the word ‘salgado’—It apparently means (variously) ‘salty’, ‘savoury’ or ‘snack’. Yum.

Yesterday evening, after Celso and Janice took me to eat dinner at the local mall, I got back to Kiko’s (where I am staying) and Kiko offered to let me try this ‘caqui’ fruit which I had had recommended to me during the day. Once he brought it out of the fridge I realised it was a sharon fruit, although larger than any I had seen before. He looked amused at me when I said “Oh. Sharon fruit” but hey. Here is an extract from a book about fruits which talks about the ‘caqui’:

Most of the world calls them kaki; they are caqui in Spanish, or Sharon fruit in Israel. In the United States, they are called persimmons after the Algonquin Indian name for Diospyros virginiana, the native american persimmon or Possum Persimmon. The genus name, Diospyros, means "food for the gods".

This morning, while waiting for the rains to stop, Kiko offered to make me some breakfast. This included some ‘goiba’ (guava, which I wasn’t particularly impressed by) and a pretty fruit called ‘carambola’ which has a five-pointed star cross-section tastes quite a lot like grape. Also I was given some cheese called ‘minas’ which to be honest tasted faintly like the flavourless sausages you get in “Beans ‘n Sausages” cans.

Today I arrived in Brazil and for lunch we went to a small vegetarian chinese place. I ate my fill of rice and soy for about 90p and then had a slightly more expensive (perhaps £1.10) dessert made from the açaí berry. It was a sorbet with crunchy bits of cereal on top and banana slices, drizzled in honey. Yum.

For those who are not familiar with the açaí fruit, here is a bit of blurb:

Açaí (AH-sci-EE) is a Brazilian Super Berry grown in the Amazon rainforest. With more Antioxidants than blueberries, healthy Omega Fatty Acids, and loads of vitamins and minerals, Açaí is being called the most nutritious fruit on the planet.

A week ago, I wrote this and since I haven’t deleted it since then, I figured I’d share it with you all.

…is a good MLM.

Today I sat down and tried to work out how to get a better mailing list manager onto my system. I have tried Sympa and Enemies of Carlotta and found both to be lacking. Unfortunately in both cases I have been stuck with customers relying on one or other of them. I have also tried to set up mailman and been so disappointed with it that I gave up.

What I want out of a mailing list manager is not very much:

1. Virtual domains. This means allowing info@domain1 and info@domain2 to be separate lists. This needs to be scalable to hundreds of domains potentially.
2. No daemons, no cronjobs. (Or a single instance of daemon/cronjob for all virtual domains — A daemon per virtual domain is unacceptable, a cronjob which has to iterate virtual domains is acceptable)
3. Reasonable web interface. Doesn’t have to be gorgeous, but it must (at minimum) allow subscription, unsubscription, moderation and basic querying/admin.
4. Easy archive integration (or pre-integrated archiving)
5. Multiple moderator support — I have a customer who wants more than one moderator per list.
6. Easy integration with Exim4. When I say “easy” I don’t necessarily mean I’m not prepared to write strange routers/transports but I do mean that I don’t want to be needing databases or scary file formats to determine if a list exists or not.
7. Virtual domains must be separate management/administration realms.

Mailman offers almost all of that. Sympa almost offers it, but falls down by being hideously complicated to configure and use. EoC doesn’t have a web interface and also doesn’t seem to offer management on a per-domain basis. Where mailman falls down is that it would require a daemon per virtual domain or I couldn’t have info@domain1 be separate from info@domain2 — neither of which is acceptable.

Does anyone know of some free software which fits my requirements? I’m really really hating the mailman team right now because apart from the vhosting, mailman does everything I need.