Google Launch Underwear Site (Beta) | Threadwatch.org

Google Launch Underwear Site (Beta) | Threadwatch.org:

"Google Launch Underwear Site"

:)

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - The Universal Inbox

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - The Universal Inbox: "The Universal Inbox"

Uh-oh. I've had slight problems with bloglines these past few days. I wonder, is it the end of a wonderful service, or a beginning? Things point towards end right now...

Exploring Ruby on Rails | Linux Journal

Exploring Ruby on Rails | Linux Journal:

"When I found out that my friend, Doug Fales, finally had gotten around to learning Ruby and was putting together a blog using Ruby on Rails (RoR), I knew it had been too long since I'd left the world of templating engines for satellite imagery and petabytes. It seemed that every blog I read either was proclaiming Rails as the new juggernaut of Web frameworks or was damning it as the scourge of developers everywhere. Now, I generally assume anything that's simultaneously causing so much adoration, protest and reflection must have something going for it, and rumors that Dave Thomas was putting together a book on RoR only fueled my motivation to find out all that I could as fast as I could. So I installed Rails, raced through a few tutorials, started reading the source and called Doug to get the lowdown straight from the horse's mouth."

Well, looks like I'll be giving Ruby on Rails a try. I really like Python though... we'll see after I try RoR.

Ian Bicking posted in my comments that I could wrap up the command line version of the program in Python. I'll have to look into that. The problem is that it seems like too much work. I'm not sure if all the command line quota tools work the same way. I need them to work the same way on Solaris and Linux boxes. I'll have to look into it when I get time.

When I was actually hacking the C code with the disk quota module I thought about writing a wrapper, but I needed the system to work as is. Their was quite a bit of infrastructure built on top, which I did not know much about in detail. Given the time constraints it was much easier to dive head long into C code! I'd probably write the wrapper now given what I know now.

The web app is a hobby project, and well, I'll probably go with what seems cooler to me :)

March 26th 2003 is this blogs birthday. Two years ago I began this blog, after failing to save my older blog. I actually began blogging in 2002, first on blogspot, moved to moveabletype on my personal server over a roadrunner connection. I had a habit of rebooting the system into different operating systems, and well the blog was down a lot of the times. Restarted this blog on blogspot, and have been blogging to it ever since.

Hopefully I'll be able to grow this blog further with time!

P.S. Must do a backup!

iptables

iptables rules for fedora core 2 are stored in /etc/sysconfig/iptables

If you want to add a rule this file can be edited and a rule added. I am not sure if hte file gets regenerated though, which might cause the file to lose the changes you've made. I'm not sure either way, but it works for now.

I've been blessed with the chance to have seen the rise and sometimes falls of products/memes in the software industry. I downloaded Linux in 1997, over a 14.4 Kbps connection and installed it on a 386 33 Mhz computer, with 200 MB hard drive, and 4MB of ram (I think, its been a long time). That was when I was in high school back in my home country of Pakistan. Friends laughed at me when they heard I was using something other than windows, thinking I was wasting my time. A large part of my career is now based on using and developing on Linux, and I dont think it was that much of a waste :)

I've been through the rise and fall of the dot com days obviously.

I also have been a part of the rise of the blogging/rss meme. It certainly does not seem like hype to me. I hope I am right. When the dust settles and the hype is gone, people who blog because they like to write or because they like keeping a log of what they love will continue to write. I assume this because I started blogging when blogging was a word used only on Dave Winers website scriptingnews.com. I started blogging because I wanted to improve my writing, and also create a website that would cater to my interests. I also liked writing about my hobby (its hacking computers! :)

What got me thinking about this stuff? Its this article. I just bought myself a Powerbook two months ago. Hope I made the right investment! My friends think I am crazy for spending this much money on a computer!

"And it cant even run Windows!"

:) Here is to hoping I have the last laugh, much like I did with Linux.

sed stream editor

sed_tutorial:

" sed -e '/debug/d' < log > log.sed"

Apache logs have long entries that keep causing the stats program to segfault. The entries are of IIS webdav vulnerabilty exploit queries sent by worms from already infected servers. I havent been able to successfully rewrite the rules where these log entries are either truncated or ignored by Apache. So, the above command should solve the problem. I just replace "debug" with "x90" which does the trick.

" sed -e '/x90/d' < log > log.sed"

This is basically similar to grep -v x90, where all lines are printed, except those that have the pattern specified. In this case the pattern is x90.

Any help on configuring apache to ignore those log writes will be appreciated!

Why Web Programming Matters Most

Why Web Programming Matters Most:

"By some coincidence three languages starting with P are often grouped together: Perl, PHP, and Python. It's a nice coincidence, and these are the languages I've thought about. Both Perl and PHP have had tremendous bursts of growth because of web programming."

I've been thinking of starting a programming project that is a web based application. I have been trying to decide on what language to work with. Out of the 3P's I've got the most experience with Python. I've run into a problem though. One of the things that the web based application will require is a method of accessing manipulate the disk quota settings on the system. No such module exists for Python. I could of course try porting that old module I talked about here. Which reminds me, I never finished that post, did I!

I've also been thinking about mod_python but I dont want to limit myself to one webserver. I want the code to run on the common webservers. I also want the code to be cross platform. Do I have to use PHP5? Perl?

A VC: Bubble 2.0

A VC: Bubble 2.0:

"You went to a great party, had too good of a time, woke up with a terrible hangover, and promised yourself you wouldn't do that again."

PSP Video 9 - PSPcasting

PSP Video 9 - PSPcasting:

"There are tons of videos available for download from the internet. Unfortunately, nearly all of it is unplayable on the PSP. Wouldn't it be cool if you could automatically download, convert and copy these videos to your PSP for later playback? Well now you can."

The sad tale of Terri Schiavo, minus the three ring circus

The sad tale of Terri Schiavo, minus the three ring circus:

"With no higher brain function, Terri Schiavo exists in a form of limbo - able to breath uninterrupted, her eyes move and she vocalizes. According to physicians who have actually diagnosed her in person, she displays no awareness of her surroundings, is unable to swallow, and any consciousness or personality died in 1990. Campaigners to reinsert the feeding tube have claimed that she has been misdiagnosed, on the basis of 4 minutes of edited footage, allegedly showing responsiveness. They have also claimed that Michael Schaivo is only concerned with benefiting financially from Terri's death, although it must be noted that there is little money left from a malpractice settlement, he has repeatedly turned down offers of large amounts of money to walk away, and unlike the Schindlers, he has not signed any book or TV deals. Some claim that medical advances could repair her brain damage, although the irony of these claims from such vehement critics of stem cell research are not lost on your correspondent. Despite questionable medical diagnoses from afar, in reality there is no hope of any recovery in this case. Public opinion overwhelmingly rests with Michael and Terri Schiavo, although there is some distaste over simply withdrawing her feeding tube and allowing her to die from dehydration. But as euthanasia remains illegal in the US, there is no other option."

I feel terribly sorry for Michael and Terry Schaivo. All this hype and story just seems so wrong. I doubt she would have wanted this. I would rather take the natural course, and die, rather be kept on tubes and such.

Brain.Save() - Learning styles

Brain.Save() - Learning styles

My new office is maximally distant from the coffee machine. It's probably helping to�moderate my caffiene intake (which is probably a good thing), but I find that I now lack a good destination to which to pace. As such, I find myself making short little trips about two or three offices down the hall and then spontaneously turning around and going back to work. It looks odd, I'm sure.

For me it would be smoke breaks. I know smoking is bad and all that, and I'm trying to quit. But I have no idea what I will do when I am stuck on a problem and need to think it out. As I slowly increase the amount of time between smoke breaks, I find myself pacing within my office more and more. I wonder what I'd do if I was stuck in a cube! :)

The disadvantage to having data from several different services is that if one service is down, the blog takes an awful long time to load up, if at all. Right now I have blogrolling.com for my blogroll, flickr for images, another server where I host things like resume and other docs, and googles adsense for that small advertisement on top of the sidebar. I have no idea how long this page would take to load on a dial up connection. Who still uses dialup? My folks way back home in Pakistan. Their computer was dead for the past year or so, and they didn't have time to fix it, so they dont know about the blog. Now that the computer is fixed, I'll be telling them, and lets see what they have to say.

can we upload movies and screencasts to flickr?

302 redirect hijacking

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I've done a little restructuring of my blogs. The way I had it before, I had two blogs, one on which I posted System Administration links and comments, and the other was a software development blog, in which I posted links and comments to development articles. I also had a third blog on MSN spaces, on which I had intended to post Testing/QA links but I am not working or learning that material at the moment, so the blog is stagnating. The links I posted to the two active blogs, were from whatever I found interesting or I was working on at that moment, and usually would not be that great for a blog reader. After having experienced del.icio.us for bookmarking, I've changed the way I work things.

Now this blog will contain articles written by me, or links to others articles and my comments on them. The links that I use personally are added to del.icio.us instead of my blog. That way, there is nothing unoriginal on my blog, no naked links on the blog. Though If someone is interested in those links they can always subscribe to my del.icio.us rss feed Here.

Also I've consolidated both software development and system administration articles to this one blog. I dont know what I am going to do with the other blog. Its easier to manage and grow one blog so I'll focus on that for now. If another topic of interest does come up, I can always start the second blog again.

Slashdot | Yahoo Ups Mail to Match Google's Gig

Slashdot | Yahoo Ups Mail to Match Google's Gig:

"Yahoo said late Tuesday that it will provide 1 gigabyte of storage for each free e-mail account. The current limit is 250 megabytes. The expanded storage which will be available in mid-April will enable Yahoo to catch up with online search engine leader Google"

Competition from Google has been good for consumers. Email is the best example. The whole email experience, spam filtering and so forth has been so greatly improved, and well the market seems to be thriving. The second part is the blogosphere I believe has benefitted for the better. Sure blogger/blogspot may have been lagging behind, but there is competition, and I am sure its only going to get better. I just wish google would enter the IM market. It might lead to changes in IM the way there have been changes in email.

Ford Shelby Cobra GT500 - Autoblog - www.autoblog.com

Ford Shelby Cobra GT500 - Autoblog - www.autoblog.com

Oooooohhhhhh!!!! I want one. Thats my wish list!

Symantec: Mozilla-based browsers increasingly targeted by hackers - Computerworld

Symantec: Mozilla-based browsers increasingly targeted by hackers - Computerworld:

"Between July 1, 2004, and Dec. 31, 2004, the number of documented vulnerabilities affecting the Mozilla browser and Mozilla's Firefox browser was higher than the number of vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to the latest Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec Corp released today."

Macintosh Hacker Attacks Are on the Rise

Ok, I'm a little pissed of at Symantec right now. I'm gonna type my thoughts later, when I am a little cooler. Talk about spreading FUD!

NewsForge | Zeta OS is rising from BeOS ashes

NewsForge | Zeta OS is rising from BeOS ashes:

"yellowTAB has just announced details of what is to be expected for Zeta 1.0. The list includes an updated kernel and virtual machine (VM) manager for speed increases of up to 40%, breaking the 1GB memory barrier, fixes to BFS, an NDIS wrapper that is expected to greatly improve wireless networking support, a CUPS port for much improved printer support, and a new non-destructive partition manager for easy installation of Zeta on machines that already have Windows or other OS installed. Zeta 1.0 will also come with numerous development tools, including Python 2.4 with a working Bethon (Python modules for Zeta), GNU bash 3.0, GNU coreutils (5.2.1), OpenSSH, and Bash autocomplete with Zeta-specific completion templates."

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger:

"Oh, and Dave, the whole blogosphere is an insider's club. How can you tell that? Well, when I got to blogger conferences I see about 70% Macintoshes, but when I fly on airplanes I see only about 5% Macs. That tells me that we're self selecting and different than the general population."

I dont know, Robert Scoble might have got something there. Amongst my friends I am the only one with a blog. And a Powerbook. Friends look at me weirdly when I open my bag, and pull out a Powerbook.

Dude, why'd you buy a mac?!?

(P.S. If you need to ask then maybe you should'nt be studying computer science, IMHO)
(P.P.S if you cant afford it though, thats another story... it took me a long time to get into a position where I could own a Mac of my own!)

I'm having fun posting these pictures to my blog via flickr. Now all I need is a camera to take pictures with instead of posting up screen shots :)

dare_safari_1

dare_safari_1
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Here is a pic of how Dare Obasanjo's web site looks like in Safari. I wish they would fix this in safari, its such a good browser. MSDN and Dare's website are the only ones I've had a problem with so far.

msdn_safari_1

msdn_safari_1
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Here is how an article on MSDN looks like when viewed in the safari web browser. Notice the text in the paragraph scrolling of the screen, and no scroll bars so you can see what the text is.

cigs

cigs
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Just trying out flickr

Of the Athlon 64, Outlook, and SpamBayes

Of the Athlon 64, Outlook, and SpamBayes

The solution? I added Outlook to the Data Execution Prevention list in Windows, and it stopped. For some reason, it occurred to me that the Athlon 64's NX-bit support might be causing these applications to have problems when they interact. Once I setup Outlook as an allowed DEP application, the problem stopped, instantly. Furthermore, I could now install SpamBayes, and it works perfectly. I'm still not sure why IHateSpam didn't have this problem, though.��

Bouncing Browsers - Archives - Blog - 0xDECAFBAD Blog

Bouncing Browsers - Archives - Blog - 0xDECAFBAD Blog:

"Safari seems zippy and easy on my CPU, but crashes at inopportune moments with lots of tabs open. And since the W is next to the Q and there�s no quit-confirmation in Safari, I�ve got yet another way to lose large groups of open tabs. "

I havent had this problem in Safari, and since I have found the blogthis link for Safari, well I think I'll be sticking with this wonderful browser for the foreseeable future.

Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ?

Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ?

Finally found the link I needed for Safari.

If a doctors office was IRC

This is quite amusing:

�> patient (~sick@hostpital.net) has joined #doctor
Help!
What seems to be the nature of your problem.
I�m sick. What could be the problem?
Can you be a little more specific about the nature of your problem?
LOL. Dude, you�re the expert. I�m just a noob.
?
....

Building Rich DHTML UI

Here is a screencast by Jon Udell on del.icio.us. I've been hearing about del.icio.us a lot in various blogs. I did not know how it would work for me, and I did not have the time to play with the service. But after watching the screen cast I got a nice overview of the wonderful world of social bookmarking, and well, I've registered with del.icio.us. Watch the screencast, and decide if its a service you could benefit from. I've actually been looking for this kind of a service for a while now, I just did not know that del.icio.us is the answer.

blogmap

Python CGI upload

I've been getting these emails where a friend joins a social network site, and then adds my email to those web sites. I personally have no interest in joining all these various social networks that are cropping up, but I know a lot of my friends have joined these web sites, and well, it just seems foolish to be joining these web sites. There is no tie in with any IM software, email software or anything of the sort. I am not sure what is can be done when one joins these places, but I would think a tie in with IM, and blog software would be quite easy, and should be expected.

Today I heard about Yahoo 360 and from the little I read, I got the above idea. Just tie it in with all the various tools, like blogging software, flickr like service, IM and you have a very rich social environment, which might gain some good users. I would have thought that google would have figured this out by now. They bought orkut.com didn't they. Well, they could probably tie in the users with jabber, and they already have blogger/blogspot and gmail. It just makes sense.

Update: Hmm... Yahoo 360 is actually what my idea was all about. Maybe I should read the whole article before I post.

Blizzard bans a gold rush

I stopped playing WoW and unsubscribed. Even though I barely played, I still want to join again. I played for a couple of hours every weekend, and there is still some addiction. Plus my friends are playing all the time, whenever I go to their place. Its tempting me to sign up again.

We had a problem with our postgreSQL database server causing us to have to restore a backup of the database. The backup was a simple text pg_dump. When doing a restore using:
psql dbname < dump_file.sql
we ran into problems where one of the tables was not being restored. Further looking into caused us to figure out that the table in question had a some relation, which was being created before the table itself. This caused the "CREATE TABLE" to fail, leaving us without the table. Just moving the "CREATE TABLE" entry before this relation/sequence (dont know the correct word, please advise :) caused the restore to properly happen. The database is back now thankfully.

I've been doing some python based CGI programming. Here is a test script to see if your web server will run a python script for you.

#!/usr/bin/env python

print 'Content-Type: text/html'
print
print '<h1>Hello!</h1>'


The first line is a link to the python interpreter which your web server will call to run the script.
The second line is sent by the web server to your browser. It tells the browser what kind of content to expect. I found you need the second line of an empty print statement for the rest of the script to work.
The third line is simple hello surrounded html tags that tell the browser to display the text as a header.

Keeping the noise down in your security log

I've been having problems logging into blogger the past few days. I hope they have fixed this.

One of my servers is getting a bunch POP3 TOP requests (one every minute or so) from a single IP address outside our network. Is there a legitimate reason for a user to be sending such a request?

Compiling Emacs on OS X

Business schools redefine hacking to "stuff that a 7-year-old could do"

In the 1960s the term "hacking" meant smart people developing useful and innovative computer software.� In the 1990s the term meant smart evil people developing and running programs to break into computer systems and gain shell access to those systems.� Thanks to Harvard Business school the term now means "people of average IQ poking around curiously by editing URLs on public servers and seeing what comes back in the form of directory listings, etc."

CPU and GPU, meet PPU

Some tips on interviewing for a job

Funny stuff on Auto-Link by Shelly Powers.

Firefox on a phone

Here is the SANS post on the LAND attack.

Diet coke bad for you
More on the above topic

I was already moving away from Diet Coke. The above are a few more good reasons to move away. I got the links from Halleys blog.

Blogger continues to have errors during the normal work day, when it probably is under the most load. I would have thought that one thing we blogger users would get when google bought it out was a faster system. But instead, we still continue to get a slow service, that is prone to errors. Oh well, I dont have time or the money to go to a new host that might give better performance, so I'll just complain and hope somebody fixes it.

I'm probably going to start using flickr for images that I wish to post to my blog. There is no Mac software available for posting images directly to blogspot.

Annotating the planet with Google Maps

Radical openness is the key. It�s been only two weeks since it launched and already the colonization has begun. Thanks to open XML data formats and open Web programming interfaces, people have figured out how to animate routes, create custom routes with their own GPS data, and display GPS data in real time.

Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) could have enabled these same kinds of things years ago. Its TerraServer has been up and running since 1998. But despite Steve Ballmer�s infamous monkey-dance chant, developers haven�t flocked to TerraServer. What�s Google�s secret? Web DNA and no Windows tax.

Divide and Conquer yourself

Now, read this carefully: I am not bashing Microsoft Windows. Nor am I bashing UNIX. As a UNIX system administrator with 20+ years experience, and a Windows system administrator since Windows 1.0, I can tell you that there isn't a whole lot of difference in the work-load of efficiently running either environment. Sure, there are lots of annoying details in either environment, but it takes about the same time for an expert to load and configure a system. In the old days, UNIX machines were faster to bring online because of the prevalence of decent tape drives while Windows was primarily loaded by floppy - but that's about the only distinguishing factor I can recall. In other words, customers didn't choose Windows because it was better (or worse) than UNIX; they did it because Microsoft/Intel was careful to guarantee them a consistent software experience across a broad selection of hardware. Equally important, application developers flocked to that consistent software experience because it meant their products were cheaper to develop without the headaches of version-specific differences.

This is very true. In my own personal experience, I never even enjoyed using KDE that much mainly because there are too many changes in each new iteration of the desktop (or at least it seems so to me). Instead I used to use WindowMaker, which has not changed in years. I even got comfortable with the Windows Desktop, because it has not changed much at all since Windows 95. As rarely as I use Windows, 1995 is a long time, and well, I'm used to it now. I dont know about Mac OS X, simply because 10.3.8 is the first iteration of OS X that I have a chance to really play with. And just the fact that OS X is so much like WindowMaker that I had no problem getting used to it.

I hate the fact that I need Windows to post images to blogger, but at least I can.
The picture below is of my old laptop, and one of the computers I was fixing. I took the picture April of last year, with a very crappy camera. Hey, I'm testing here!

Testing posting to blogger 

Stepwise

Stepwise

Spent the whole day yesterday, and probably a significant portion of today in "Minicom". Connected over serial port to the SunFire V100. Its been a while since I had to use this program. Brought back memories of the BBS days. Good times!

Setting up my first Sun Fire V100 system, quite a few things to get acquainted with. Its a 1U system, and no video card. I've worked with Dell servers and most of them have video. This system has a serial port/Lom. Should be interesting.

Damn, its March already! Time flies!

Solaris 10 review