2007320

Info on the programming contest is available here - and started getting interested in one bit: Thomas Phelps and Robert Wilensky, for their project, Robust Hyperlinks. Traditional hyperlinks are very brittle, in that they are useless if the page later moves to a different URL. This project improves upon traditional hyperlinks by creating a signature of the target page, selecting a set of very rare words that uniquely identify the page, and relying on a search engine query for those rare words to find the page in the future. Now, using Google search to do this, they give an example link, which is here and is supposed to find Google's page linked above about this programming contest. And it does....as the second link. But thinking further, wouldn't it be nicer if instead of 404 pages, we webmasters all subscribed to a service that allowed people to include a code in their 'a href' tags for the page? Maybe an md5sum of some unchanging feature of the page itself, so that visitors could ultimately get to a page where that md5sum was searched for in an index and gave some really automated guesses as to where the page went? And if there were none, maybe linked over the Archive.org in hopes that we could find it stored away? Posted by Greg @ 10:34 PM PST [Link]

2007319

Dell is moving toward pre-installed Linux desktops, and that can't be better news to those of us who would much rather avoid giving Microsoft the hidden license fees embedded in the cost of a new PC. I haven't bought a pre-installed operating system for a very long time, but I'm more comfortable putting together the components myself than I am in allowing a shop to do it for me. Getting a major manufacturer to ship Linux-installed or no-OS-installed PCs is a huge step to allowing individuals and businesses to control the costs of their computers as well as what operating system they choose to use. One question though...how far are we from Dell PCs installed with an Apple OS? Posted by Greg @ 11:15 AM PST [Link]

2007318

A client had a requirement...get a SOAP implementation up and running so that their merchant and credit card processing system could interact with a sub-client's website. The CC-processor made a recommendation of a complete piece of trash software that required an old version of PHP, and even in that case required that that installed version of PHP be compiled manually, rather than using a package system. In short, after seeing all the flaws in this, I went another direction and used the PHP package archive and remote installation software 'pear'....the "PHP Extension and Application Repository". Basically, with that all I had to do was go through a dependency ladder (upgraded a bunch of dependencies, upgraded pear manually, upgraded pear further automatically, then was able to install a SOAP implementation from their 'beta' repository. The PEAR commands used, in no particular order for the specific installs and upgrades I was doing: pear search [package] pear install [package] pear install [package]-beta pear upgrade [package].tgz # From a tarball package I downloaded for the manual PEAR upgrade pear upgrade [package] pear upgrade [url-to-package-tarball] Posted by Greg @ 02:24 PM PST [Link]

2007317

Anatomy of a Break In - "didn't really know much about the computer in question. I logged on. who and w, showed no one logged on but me. I checked last--nothing. Having dissected several cracked boxes before, I knew better than to really trust anything it told me. System tools are often replaced with versions that lie. I hate it when "my" computer lies to me. But I also know that crackers seldom replace all the tools, and when they disagree it's a clue. So I keep checking and rechecking. I try netstat. It shows a couple of recent connections, including an IRC port. My department doesn't run any IRC servers. Bingo." I've been there, though I admit that at the time I didn't follow all the steps this guy did. When the server under my control was hacked, it was blatant and obvious, with a bizarre overflow string in the logs and some very funny behaviour of the machine. I needed that machine up and running, and didn't have the luxury of downtime to investigate, so it was wiped and reinstalled immediately. Posted by Greg @ 08:50 AM PST [Link]

2007316

Making videogame oriented PCs - this is pretty cool, actually. I'll wait to see if they are junk (I was a TI99/4a guy, so I don't have brand loyalty) but I'd love to see these old companies come back strong. Posted by Greg @ 11:13 AM PST [Link]

2007312

Jen wants to have her brother do some movie magic on videos of Molly we've taken. Unfortunately, our camera (Panasonic DMC-FZ5) takes videos in Quicktime .MOV format, and that's a pain in the butt to work with. So I started hunting some solutions. iMovie on my Mac Mini doesn't do conversions like I'd want, so I hunted further and found ffmpegX. It's based on the very mature ffmpeg project, but definitely separated. It allows drop & click operation for conversion and so far has done very well. Conversion was simple and fast...even on the older, low-powered, G4-CPU Mac Mini I have. For more information: Flash Movie Conversion for Mac OS X Posted by Greg @ 12:30 AM PST [Link]

2007310

There are plenty of ways to do batch editing of text files in unix versions...perl, sed, vim, etc. But really, they aren't all that easy to use. Therefore, I was impressed the other day to come across rpl. I'm a bit shocked that I missed this for so long...it's a perfect solution to a problem I've had for years. From the man page: NAME    rpl - replace strings in files SYNOPSIS    rpl [-LhiwbqvsRepfdt] [-xSUFFIX] DESCRIPTION    Basic usage is to specify two strings and one or more filenames or directories on the command line. The first string is the string to replace, and the second string is the replacement string. It doesn't do regexp matches, but if you need something that serious, you're better off with perl or sed anyway. What I found really nice is the dry-run mode (-s), which would have prevented me making serious mistakes in the past. Of course, for a single file edit with lots of searches and replacements, I'm happy to use vi/vim. But if I want to do a bunch of changes, especially recursing through directories, rpl is the way to go. If you use a Debian-based system, it's likely in apt. Posted by Greg @ 11:44 PM PST [Link]

200739

I've got an old whiteboard from my previous employer. It's pretty old, no longer cleans well, and is very difficult to erase. While it's quite problematic to use, I can't stand the thought of replacing it. Firstly, they are expensive. Secondly. they are EXPENSIVE! While there are a number of whiteboard cleaners on the market (actually, there's a whole industry in cleaning them), I'm searching for a homemade solution (get that horrible pun?). This blog post talks about making your own LCD cleaner from alcohol and distilled water, but respondants talk about using whiteboard cleaner to clean their screens. Maybe the reverse is also true. Perhaps I'll mark off some parts of my board and try a clean-white-erase-write-erase cycle on each with different homemade cleaning recipes. Posted by Greg @ 09:38 PM PST [Link]

200738

Since we just moved here, didn't know when garbage day was, and had a lot of junk to get rid of, we took a trip to the landfill today. In a small town like this, landfill's aren't quite so disturbing, but it's still a bit of a blight on the landscape. They make passable attempts to get people to separate their trash, but the folks here obviously ignore that. There was cardboard everywhere, and I appeared to be the only one who was willing to walk 30 feet or so to drop off some cardboard. On top of that, in the place dedicated to cardboard, some jerk was dropping off metal curtain rods. Another guy was dropping off metal in the non-metal area, and a woman was throwing everything together. They've got a Re-Use-It centre there as well, though previously when I've seen one it's all free stuff. This place took stuff for free then charged other people for it. On the other hand, maybe that's what it takes to keep that shop afloat and prevent stuff from hitting the landfill. On an even more disturbing note, someone has a house right across from the landfill, and on the other side is a baseball diamond. I can't imagine how bad that must be in high summer. And I really hope that house doesn't use a drilled well. Posted by Greg @ 05:20 PM PST [Link]

200737

Upcoming is a conversion of this site from Greymatter to Wordpress...which means I may (am likely to) have to come up with some Apache RedirectMatch scripts to keep some links going. Anyone have experience with this? Greymatter served pretty well for a lot of years, but it's truly a hog compared with the new breeds of blogging software. It requires rebuilding just about all files for very minor changes to the site (f'rinstance, adding a sidebar link). It also has pretty much no anti-spam capability, which is sorely needed. So...this site is coming back. I think I'll spend time reviewing things once again. Maybe dollar-store purchases! :) Posted by Greg @ 08:50 PM PST [Link]

LINKS and STUFF

Aspectus - This is Illiad's (of Userfriendly fame) other project, which is like Slashdot in some ways and like a personal blog in some ways, but cooler than either. Needs more content, and more visitors, but that'll come.

RED MEAT - Oh my. I imagine there is a FBI file on the artist. I never, ever want to meet him. But I will glory in his comic strip. Brilliance and intelligence wrapped up in the tattooed skin of a circus freak and tied with a bow made of blown O-rings.

Imparte.com - Rich's site. Not going to talk about it until he says I can. But go visit anyway.