Welcome to my live...

Goodbye blogger.com

2010-10-08T09:38:00.000+02:00

I desided to move away from blogger.com

Any still relevant entries will be migrated or get stored on my website:
http://rickvanderzwet.nl

You can find my blog again at:
http://rickvanderzwet.nl/trac/personal/blog

Reasons behind this choice a) I am a BSDLike person and think you need to eat your own dogfood, b) I really need more central information storage, c) like to gain more control over my content and layout.

Thanks to blogger.com for hosting my blog for almost three years.

HTC Desire blogger

2010-08-30T17:14:00.001+02:00

HTC Desire blogger

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Archive your CD collection using the CLI

2010-06-20T17:42:00.007+02:00

Yes, there are programs around called abcde which turns out to be a very handy CD ripper. And using a small while loop you can basically rip your whole CD collection automatically. Apart from inserting the CD's of course ;-).


$ sudo apt-get install abcde id3v2
$ while true; do abcde -a cddb,read,encode,tag,move,playlist,clean -d /dev/cdrom -o mp3 -V -x -N; sleep 5; done
# Now insert your CD's if your trays open and close it to continue ripping
# Press CTRL+C when done ripping

Note: The recent version of Ubuntu seems to have those 'smart' popup screen on CD inserts, tell them to do-nothing-and-never-prompt-again as they can be annoying while you continue working on your computer while ripping the CD's.

Now you are done you can make yourself a playlist in a breeze:

$ find -P . -type f  -iname '*.mp3' > fullList.m3u

And while we are working on the CLI anyway, use the nvlc (part of $ sudo apt-get install vlc) to play your music in Random mode:

$ nvlc -Z fullList.m3u

Enjoy your music!

Tomcat6 + hsqldb deployment made easy

2010-04-10T10:58:00.006+02:00

For quick and dirty development setup for an Servlet and embedded database the following steps could be used:

Tomcat 'install'

Download http://apache.mirrors.webazilla.nl/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.26/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.26.zip

Unpack zip file

Alter apache-tomcat-6.0.26/conf/tomcat-users.xml to include your favorite username/password (mine HVDZWET/FOOBAR)


<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
 <role rolename="manager"/>
 <user username="HVDZWET" password="FOOBAR" roles="manager"/>
</tomcat-users>

Start your tomcat appliance using:
apache-tomcat-6.0.26/bin/startup.sh (UNIX) or
apache-tomcat-6.0.26/bin/startup.bat (WINDOWS)

DONE!

HSQLDB 'install'

Download http://sourceforge.net/projects/hsqldb/files/hsqldb/hsqldb_1_8_1/hsqldb_1_8_1_2.zip

Unpack zip file

Alter hsqldb/demo/runServer.bat (WINDOWS):


cd ..\data
REM @java -classpath ../lib/hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Server %1 %2 %3 %4
%5 %6 %7 %8 %9
@java -classpath ../lib/hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Server -database.0 file:wk2010 -dbname.0 wk2010

Start server

hsqldb/demo/runServer.sh -database.0 file:wk2010 -dbname.0 wk2010 (UNIX) or hsqldb/demo/runServer.bat (WINDOWS)
Working HSQLDB Server with database wk2010

Unix myip

2009-10-27T12:44:00.002+01:00

Always been missing a quick way (read: UNIX CLI util) of revealing the IP currently show to the global internet, which using NAT could be quite cucumbersome to find out.

The trick below will do the trick :-)


$ cat bin/myip 
#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "`whereis curl`" ]; then
    IP=`curl -s http://rickvanderzwet.nl/playground/ip.cgi`
else
    IP=`fetch -qo - http://rickvanderzwet.nl/playground/ip.cgi`
fi

if [ -n "$IP" ]; then
    HOST=`dig +short -x ${IP}`
fi
echo "$IP ($HOST)"


$ cat /var/www/playground/ip.cgi 
#!/usr/bin/perl  -w

print "Content-length: " . length($ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'}) . "\n";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};

Poor mans (DIY) duplex printing

2009-09-27T15:15:00.005+02:00

Saving the environment is always a good thing. So using half the amount of paper needed by printing on two sides is in general always a good this. But as duplex feeding (two sided printing) printers are in general pretty expensive machines, we need some cheaper method to have two sided printing going.

The trick is use is very easy, but it requires some playing around to get it going nicely. You first print the odd pages in normal order. Move the printed pages from the output back into tray. Then the even pages in reverse order needs printing.

You first needs to play around with the paper a bit on how-to put the pages back properly into the input tray in order to get the 2nd output printed on the right side.

NOTE: When printing an odd number of pages in total (3,5,7,9,...). Make sure to remove the last sheet before putting the printed pages back into the printer else your pages will be miss-aligned.

For Mac users, please look at the attached picture on how-to select the proper output. Windows/Linux users, please post a link in the comments on how-to do this kind of stuff on your OS and I will include it.

Intermezzo

2009-09-11T07:51:00.002+02:00

I started college again, after a nicely deserved holiday period. Which brings me back to a place full of engineering minded persons, leading to the somehow funny joke, shown at the picture :-).

As I am in the middle of my bachelor thesis about programming with NVDIA CUDA, posting frequencies will remain pretty low. BTW if you wanna keep track of the progress of the bachelor thesis. Visit the briareus project page (Do you like the catchy name? ;-))

Repairing my Black and Decker A12 battery

2009-08-04T20:32:00.002+02:00

My mobile drilling machine gave up on me :-(. The battery simply stopped working and refusing to charge. I really loved the machine, but a new accu costed me roughly 40EUR almost the same price as a new drilling machine!

So why not DIY instead ;-). First I opened up the battery with revealed me 10 small batteries interconnected which each other. They are normal NiCd battery cells, with a base voltage of roughly 1.2V. I hooked up the multimeter and 3 individual batteries turned out to be dead.

Hunting for replacements was kind of a challenge. But 'the' wiki revealed it are type C NiCd Battery. Buying those is a bit more interesting, if you are interested in batched like 1000+ it's a easy search. But only a few is a bit more interesting. eurobatteries.com brought me to rescue. A actually had to buy 4/5 type C NiCd batteries (I love standards ;-)).

So opened the accu and soldered 3 new ones in, please mind the metal strips are very sharp!

Assemble it all:

And we got a working battery again :-)!

I have to admin it the costs where roughly half the price of a new one and it requires some soldering skills (and equipment) to get it assembled, but -as always- it fun todo!

Asus Eee PC + Ubuntu Netbook Remix

2009-07-10T15:08:00.007+02:00

I bought myself an extension for my digital mobile usage, namely the Asus EEE PC 1000HE. With some freaking long battery time (8+ hour) and very lightweight so ideal for long mobile use. Only disadvantage it came with Microsoft Windows XP by default. Nothing against Windows XP, but on a 10' screen with a very small touch-pad, it is not very effective. So the search started, with one basic goal, allowing myself to work more productive on the small machine, with full (or extended) functionality of the things I could do with Windows XP on it. So all hardware has to work well and also nice stuff like hibernation, Fn (function keys) and others. I have tried a number like EasyPasy (Ubuntu Eee), "Eee Ubuntu", the intel one. But not fitted my needs, due to various reasons like look-and-feel, support, resources.

So I came to the official newly released Ubuntu Netbook Remix Which is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Looks greats and works (almost perfectly).

I have to admin some tweaks needs to be made in order to get it to work close to perfectly. But it are no show stoppers.

To get the function (Fn) keys to work properly and get some better control on stuff like power settings, follow the guide of statux.org EeePC ACPI Utilities or in short (I am more of a CLI guy)

$ sudo -s -H
$ echo "deb http://www.statux.org/ubuntu jaunty main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
$ wget http://www.statux.org/ubuntu/key/statux.pub
$ apt-key add statux.pub
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install eeepc-acpi-utilities eeepc-tray
$ exit

Next install a custom netbook/eeepc kernel. No details needed to post over here. Just follow the perfect guide of array.org, but to put it on one page ;-)

$ sudo -s -H
$ wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-jaunty.list
$ mv -v array-jaunty.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
$ wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-apt-key.asc
$ apt-key add array-apt-key.asc
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install linux-netbook
$ exit

Now issue a reboot of your machine and select your new netbook kernel.

Both 2 will make your machine rock, run smoother and cooler as Windows XP, Enjoy! If you have questions or remarks, please comment I be happy to include them or answer them.

Mooie vogel plaatjes

2009-05-10T23:26:00.001+02:00

Voor fans van mooie shots van vogels is Flickr een waar walhalla. Hoewel je helaas ook hier het koren van het kaf moet scheiden. Een aanrader zijn de foto's die Ludovic Hirlimann fotografeert van vogels.

Als extra bonus zet hij er meestal ook de Franse en Latijnse namen bij, laat je vogel kennis spreken en zet de Nederlandse naam er eens bij :-)

Xerox Phaser 6125N working in mac os x

2009-04-16T23:27:00.001+02:00

The Xerox Phaser 6125N is roughly 150 EUR cheaper as it is big friend the Phaser 6130N which is 'made for the mac'. Why it needs to come that expensive I don't know, marketing is properly the buzzword. Anyways, let's check out the little friend and try to get it running on a mac anyways ;-).

First lets us find a alternative model which does have supported mac os x drivers. Our friends at OpenPrinting suggested the Fuji Xerox Docuprint 525A. Let us download the Mac OS X drivers and install them (using the regular mac os x clicks, drops).

Now add yourself the printer and make sure to select the driver yourself 'FX DocuPrint C525 A-AP v1.7' is the one you are looking for.

Now print ... ehm every piece of paper needs to inserted via the manual feeder :-(. Luckaly there is also a way to get around that PITA. Mac OS X printing is proudly powered by CUPS which allows us to select the right options.

note: don't be scared when username/password are beeing asked during setup, just provide your login credentials

Goto http://localhost:631/printers/ using your favorite webbrowser and press 'Set Printer Options' on your newly created printer

Head to section called 'Options Installed' and change 'Optional Tray Module' to option '250 Sheet Feeder'

Click 'Set Printer Options in same section'

You will see the message 'Printer example.com has been configured successfully.'

Some more settings are now available, head to http://localhost:631/printers/ again, press 'Set Printer Options' on your newly created printer again.

Now goto section 'Basic' and change 'Paper Source' to 'Tray 1 (250 Sheets)'

Click 'Set Printer Options in same section'

You will see the message 'Printer example.com has been configured successfully.' and could close the page if you like

Print again ... hoara it now feches the pages from the tray :-)

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Filmpje pakken?

2009-04-02T14:22:00.002+02:00

Volledige legale films met nederlandse ondertiteling. Laten we eens met een goude ouwe beginnen ;-)

<a href="http://www.joost.com/39lsidh/t/Austin-Powers-International-Man-of-Mystery">Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery</a>

apache httpd mod_autoindex 'missing' subfolder

2009-03-16T12:23:00.002+01:00

Also getting tried when apache httpd is not showing the subfolder of a directory indexes listing (generated by mod_autoindex), when for example the permission is denied by the means of AuthBasic. Don't know where I am talking about, maybe this example makes sense:



DirectoryRoot /usr/local/www/data
Options +Indexes

<Directory "/usr/local/www/data">
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory "/usr/local/www/data/foo">
   AuthUserFile /usr/local/www/secret/.foo-htpasswd
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "Directory 'foo' not visible in indexing of /"
   Require valid-user
</Directory>

AllowForbidden is the magic keyword we need to follow, as suggested at nixforums.org, join me...

A patch has been proposed and applied. And it it also in tags/3.2.1. But wait a minute ... no release scheduled yet, as 3.2.1 is a so called DOA

Anyways work in process, let there be a new release some day :-)

Hoe gebouwen gebouwd worden...

2009-03-13T08:22:00.004+01:00

In Leiden, NL zijn ze een nieuwe ROC aan het bouwen het leuke is dat je dit op de website kan volgen. Nadeel is dat dit beeld zo saai als wat is ;-).

Gelukkig kan je met wat creatief html code kijken de live feed van de ROC Leiden nieuwbouw vinden waarbij je dus 'echt' live kan kijken en dat is natuurlijk veel leuker om te zien!

ecards.plaxo.com expired certificate

2009-01-01T18:17:00.002+01:00

Properly the nightmare of every webadmin, as (the new) firefox does give you all kind of nasty warning enforcing some more strict ssl policy around the net

https://ecards.plaxo.com/ecard/index.php?corpUpdate=1

But one thing more worse than the warning itself and that is their support desk. Expired certificates does not seems to appear in their drop-down problem/answer sheet, resulting in all kind of odd responses like

"Please check with a different browser and system, and also check the Cipher strength on your Internet Explorer." (running a Mac OS X)

"Sorry, Plaxo ecards link is not a secure link. It is http://ecards.plaxo.com and not https://....." (occurred on redirected from logging in, which should be hopefully be https at least)

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Migration wizzard...

2008-12-13T23:49:00.005+01:00

Ough, I enable automatic logout as a security setting before actually starting the migration wizzard on the new Leopard Macbook Pro. Which leads after 60 minutes of inactivity to a really nasty error message, freezing the migration wizzard for a while. But don't worry (you own a mac so you never need to) it will take some time to recover but you will get there eventually :-)

A not so nice person...

2008-12-11T00:54:00.004+01:00

As told all in my previous post about scammers, when something bad happens to you, please tell the world.

I had the great liberty to find out when you got scammed in Europe you actually got to file a report at the police station of the country the accident happens, else they will not do anything about it.

Next the story; I happens to be in traveling (Luxembourg) at 17th of October 2008 while stopping at a fuel station to some rest and refreshments. A women comes around ,all in tears, cause she 'forgot' her wallet and she really needed to get some money for fuel as she almost ran out.

I tend to see the best of people, so I lend her some money and have here my bank details so she could transfer the money. After many thanks, she drove off .. I have never ever seen the money again. I did send her a letter ,to the address she gave me, but the letter came back undeliverable.

I did however made some pictures and also have some extra details (properly fake, but still). If you happen to know her or got some hints, please let me know :-)

Nello Frederique
2 rue des lilas
54000 Nancy

Licence plate: 162 ? ZN54
Car: Peugot

Thomson ST2030 Asterisk Remote Phone Book support

2008-12-10T01:33:00.007+01:00

Enabling the current Thomson Remote Phone Book support (windows/mysql/php), requires yet an other separate database, sigh :-(.

As I happen to have a Asterisk running which is basically already some kind of phone book, cause the phone to 'full user name' exist, the choice is pretty simple .. hacking time :-)

I only have got Thomson ST2030 phones, which are not very compliant with regards to the HTTP/1.1 protocol implementation, but they are working. Still keeps me wondering does this also work with regards to other phones?

The result of the hard work asterisk-remote-phonebook.py has documentation included in the file how to get it running properly.

Some techie stuff, It parses the asterisk config file (every time) and regex to the right entries. output them in a list or in a menu view if the number of entries exceed 32.

EDIT: Including server functionality ;-)
EDIT2: Updated link to new location

Drupal notify all users...

2008-12-09T00:53:00.004+01:00

We are working to get our new website up and running and migrated our old users into the drupal database. As we where also cleaning the database we mass mailed our users and asked them to reset their password.

To issue a 'resend my password, cause I forgot' on all our users aka reset all user passwords and notify, the little nifty script below is used, please do mind that drush is a module of drupal.


#!/bin/sh
drush --root=/usr/local/www/drupal6/sites/wirelessleiden.nl eval '
$sql  = "SELECT uid FROM {users} WHERE uid != 0";
$language="nl";
$users = db_query($sql);
print "b" . $result;
while ($user = db_result($users)) {
  $account = user_load(array("uid" => $user, "status" => 1));
  print "Sending email to: " . $account->name . "\n";
  _user_mail_notify("password_reset", $account, $language);
};

'

EDIT: Cool, blogger/blogspot includes syntax highlighting

Ubuntu 8.10 subversion ssl library changed...

2008-12-01T13:25:00.006+01:00

For all you around the globe which just upgraded their machine or installed a new fresh and shiny Ubuntu 8.10, but still has got some OpenSSL powered pkcs12 certificate. As the linux folks decided to go for GnuTLS instead of OpenSSL, they also mapped subversion against the libraries, which suddenly does not make your personal certificate work anymore, leading to errors like ``GnuTLS internal error'' (duh, why not give out a proper error message).

As hacking is not my favorite part in did not compile it manually to get it to work again, as some others did. Instead I will stick to the more constructive approach, e.g. converting your certificate to the proper style.

# Make sure openssl is installed
$ sudo apt-get install openssl

# Make our certificate conversion hidden for any other (potentially evil) user
$ mkdir convert-cert && chmod 0700 convert-cert
$ cd convert-cert
#
$ cp ~/.subversion/rick.p12 original.pk12
# Next extract certificate and key
$ openssl pkcs12 -nodes -nokeys -in original.pk12 -out temp.crt
$ openssl pkcs12 -nodes -nocerts -in original.pk12 -out temp.key
# Create new cerficate
$ certtool --load-certificate temp.crt --load-privkey temp.key --to-p12 --outder --outfile new-cert.pk12
#
$ mv new-cert.pk12 ~/.subversion/rick-gnutls.p12
# Secure whipe working directory
$ shred temp.key
$ cd .. && rm -Rd convert-cert

Hacking the aic94xx back alive...

2008-11-27T02:38:00.004+01:00

Been trying to get my software raid of the Supermicro machine to work under Ubuntu 8.10 x64 server edition, which was causing quite a few pains, the initramfs was not able to load the firmware and bailing out at the very early phase. Down here some guidelines, FYI: I wanted to end up with a system which has a mirrored OS, striped swap and striped data partition, as it is going to be a temp development box anyways:

* First make sure to disable 'SATA Raid' and 'SATA ACHI' mode into the bios as you are not going to use it anyways.

* Next while creating the partitions, first create all the partitions and set them to be 'partition for RAID' and next Configure software RAID. If you have two disks of 500GB like me, do the following. Create primary partitions 10GB, 8GB, 472GB on both disks and set disk 1 to be bootable on both. Next using the 'Configure software RAID' combine disks 1 to RAID 1, disks 2 to RAID 0, disks 3 to RAID 0. Next have md0 be ext3 which will be your '/' mount point. md1 will be your swap and md2 is going to be xfs and mount it at '/srv' to make it your installed custom 3th parties data/program dir. (Installing OpenSSH Server might become handy for the next steps)

* Next complete the install and reboot again from CD into the recovery mode, ensuring to end up in a shell at disk /dev/md0.

* You have to download the new firmware and accept the license at the scsi linux section of adaptec [1]

* Replace the file in /lib/firmware/aic94xx-seq.fw with the new one and just to be sure, also copy it to /lib/firmware/`uname -r`

* Next rebuild your initramfs with the command update-initramfs -k all -c

* Reboot your machine and you should be good to go :-)

[1] If you find yourself in trouble find the expanded firmware due to the bloody rpm format do mind to read and accept the license first and then download the expanded file at my dumping ground in cyberspace

Netbeans here we come!

2008-11-17T22:12:00.003+01:00

I have been fighting with MacVim/Xcode/Eclipse and Netbeans in favorite of my personal IDE and we have got a winner! .. Or actually two as I would like to give away prices for two categories:

* small projects development: Will be Vim -without a doubt-, it _just_ does the job, editing and doing it fast and with as little mouse interference as possible :-). Big plus, runs great in a terminal of course. Reason not to choose emacs is the fact that i do not need a terminal IDE, just a editor :P

* project development: Netbeans (how surprising :-), I really like the integrated tabbed aproch as I do not want to have all my project files cluttered all over my desktop. The buildin SCM works great and syntax highlighting and shortcut handling is well done (unlike Xcode, which developers needs to have 4 hands/fingers to simply clear the log window CMD+ALT+CTRL+R, really requires 2 hands to preform).

Eclipse is the unlucky loser over here, found it to be unintuitive, weird version and plugin naming (granberry made .. who cares all I need is a bloody version number to identify the latest version). Might be a good software IDE, but Netbeans seems to be better at first glance :P

Love to hear your rants and comments about it..

Xcode 3.1.1 Quartz Composer not working

2008-11-16T18:45:00.001+01:00

After upgrading the Interface builder was nagging about com.apple.QuartzComposerIBPlugin not beeing able to found anymore. Which for example also controls the QSView.

To fix this first uninstall the full package using the CLI command sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

Next whipe your remains of /Developer directory, by issueing sudo rm -dR /Developer

And finally (re)install Xcode using the package given. And you should be good to go again :-)

First steps of compiling on Mac OS X...

2008-11-05T16:12:00.002+01:00

Just like me old school terminal fan instead of fancy XCode user, then this might apply to you.

In order to link to the .dylib (dynamic libraries) used on Mac OS X use the commands below thanks to hint of nijm, written in reference to a program called svnauthz-validate, which I am using to make sure the authz file does not get corrupted.

$curl -O http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/server-side/svnauthz-validate.c
# Note: assuming you have installed subversion via macports
$gcc -lsvn_repos-1 -lsvn_subr-1 -lapr-1 -L/opt/local/lib -I/opt/local/include/subversion-1 -I/opt/local/include/apr-1 -Wall -o svnauthz-validate svnauthz-validate.c

Reclame attack!!!

2008-10-27T21:01:00.003+01:00

Geniale reclame van bol.com, voor het eerst vind ik het niet erg dat mijn scherm 'gestolen' wordt door een reclame uiting. Kijk even snel op http://nl.msn.com en als je hem nog een keer wilt zien, verwijder al je cookies ;-)

Keep up the good work!

Find me...

2008-10-18T10:40:00.002+02:00

I am currently 'hiding' somewhere in Europe, leave a comment if you know where I am :-) (hint, check my Flickr photos)

Flickr

2008-10-17T22:39:00.001+02:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Nokia N95 and Mac OS X, a good combination

2008-09-26T10:31:00.003+02:00

Recent firmware upgrades and software developments finally made it a workable and cool combination. As a short conclusion, it finally became mature. As information is all over the internet down here a few hints and tips to allow the experience as soon as possible! Feel free to comment if you have any other questions.

* Latest Firmware 30.x: http://europe.nokia.com/A4793070
* SMS 'JA' to 1300 to retrieve your Telfort settings after the upgrade
* Install Nokia internet radio: http://europe.nokia.com/A41107005
* Install Nokia location tagger: http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/locationtagger
* Install Nokia sportstracker: http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/download.do
* Install Nokia Multimedia Tranfer (allows syncing iphoto/iTunes via Bluetooth with your phone): http://europe.nokia.com/A4423134
* Install Google Maps: http://www.google.com/mobile/nokia_smart/maps/
* Mac OS X iSync: http://europe.nokia.com/A4299040
* Mac OX X USB UMTS Setup http://europe.nokia.com/A4372155 (you got to change to connection details to Nokia UMTS in the Advanced window of the Network Preferences
* Use iSync to restore contacts
* Internet radio might need installing twice as first attempt did result on playback errors when trying to play a station
* Change the A-GPS server to 'supl.nokia.com' as the default one does not work

True emulation...

2008-09-25T22:59:00.005+02:00

Sight even the emulation can lead to a blue screen of dead. Never saw one on the mac before though :-).

Anyway as Microsoft products are also my second nature, the fix is pretty 'simple'

Boot from the first random Windows XP install CD you happen to find

Select recover mode (R) as first choice during install

When you are at the prompt run chkdsk /r and leave it running (might take over an hour or so)

reboot (EXIT) and you should be done :-)

Cool Joost!

2008-09-18T17:14:00.007+02:00

2nd post in 24 hours, something special is going on...

Joost just launched his new website and new video watching approach instead. Totally web based, really 2.0ed. You got to install a small plugin, but you do get super cool features in return. Go check it out at Joost! If you happen to run into trouble of some kind or found a bug, free to contact Joost and I more than sure they will help you out :-)

Enjoy
Joost!

Speedtouch ST780 CLI tweaks for the use of Wiress Leiden

2008-09-18T17:14:00.004+02:00

Resently switched my router to a VoIP enabled router which comes with my IPS, but some little box called Speedtouch ST780 comes with a crippled web interface (blames to the ISP not Speedtouch).

Anyway, due to the fact: a) I am connected to Wireless Leiden trough a server which functions as a gateway. b) I do not want to have the whole home network to rely on this server.

Tweaks had to be made to work. Commands below needs to be insert via the telnet interface.

First of all the route had to be set.
:ip rtadd dst=172.16.0.0/12 gateway=192.168.1.1

Extra DNS forwarder
:dns server route add dns=192.168.1.1 domain=wleiden.net intf=LocalNetwork

Remember to save
:saveall

Unfortunately I did not find a way to get the reverse pointers to work as well, apart from sending all DNS traffic trough 192.168.1.1 and enable recursion on the box.

PS: found all details in the CLI manual

sudo and pkg_add working together

2008-09-08T10:38:00.003+02:00

Installing software into FreeBSD could be done 2 ways. The nice way using ports and the fast way using packages. The mechanism to install packages is using pkg_add. As installing software requires root privileges sudo should be the way to go for it.

But while using sudo to call pkg_add gives you an error:

[rick@davis /usr/home/rick]$ sudo pkg_add -r mysql51-serverError: FTP Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.0-release/Latest/mysql51-server.tbz: Syntax error, command unrecognized
pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.0-release/Latest/mysql51-server.tbz' by URL

This problem is caused by the lack of a few environment variables which get lost while calling it trough sudo, as mentioned in this mailing list post to freebsd-ports

They way to solve it is to call sudo with argument -E which gives you they required result :-)

[rick@davis /usr/home/rick]$ sudo -E pkg_add -r ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.0-release/Latest/mysql51-server.tbz
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.0-release/Latest/mysql51-server.tbz... Done.
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.0-release/All/mysql-client-5.1.22.tbz... Done.
Added group "mysql".
Added user "mysql".

Back from holiday...

2008-09-01T23:01:00.003+02:00

Here we are, back and fresh ready to get started again. After a week of almost no typing I find myself using 10 fingers again instead of 4 when I am stressed out :P.

Creta and Antwerp are really nice spots to say, but I have to admit it good to be back as well :-). My resits went perfect and managed to make a 100%, which set the total progress bar of my Computer Science at LIACS (Leiden University) study at exact 50%. This year finally some more challenging subjects like Networks and Human Computer Interaction and my Bachelor project. Let's see whether I could try to boost one of my favorite Open Source projects by focusing my Bachelor project on it.

Lets get loose on the ego boost and start to focus on the technical bits as I faced a interesting challenge while trying to capture and edit my vacation video's of our JVC Everio Camcorder (type: GZ-MG130E) with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). JVC decided to use the MPEG-2 standard for their low budget (remember: still a student) USB HDD camcorders and 'forgot' to include any decent software for the silver friend. To be able to decode the movies you will need to spend a few Euro/Dollar on the MPEG-2 codec at the Apple store, $19,99 time of writing Which allows to view and decode this movies. iMovie '06 was not capable of handling the camcorder, but iMovie '08 works brilliant fine, but yes you have to spend the money on the codec in order for it to get it working else it will not recognize a single second of your movies.

Ones you made your movie with iMovie '08 and imported it into iDVD you find your nice DVD chapter gone due the fact mister mac Steve decided DVD are sooo old school we have to use streaming media and stuff like the Apple TV or whatever this thing is called. But luckily smart and nice guys comes into action and provide us with lovely tools to fix this called Metadata Hootenanny, as you might recon from the name, it's open source, not very catchy ;-). But anyway it does it job really well, make sure to read the guide which comes with the program and detect and add the chapters to the created 'iMovie -> Share -> Media Browser -> Larger -> Export' file, which is usually to be found at $HOME/iMovie Projects/Project. Ones you import the edited Movie into iDVD suddenly your chapters appears again :-)

FYI: As promised month ago, here is a sample of some few French guys/group called Cova 10. Looks really promising, so when you find their CD/mp3 anytime anywhere remember me and send me a copy, thanks!

New monitor = dead pixel testing

2008-08-13T13:43:00.002+02:00

Received my new 22" LCD monitor today, but was looking for some need application to test for dead pixels. As all programs seems to be either shareware or not cross platform I decided to write my own, by just creating a simple webpage with a rotating background color. Feel free to test it at http://rickvanderzwet.nl/svn/data/develop/javascript/dead-pixel-test.html

Open Community Camp 2008...

2008-08-10T19:24:00.003+02:00

There are a few important things happening in the world this week. Crisis in Georgia is worsesome. Olympic 2008 is great, but a bit unreachable. Resits of my University exams are coming up. But one truly matters is the great Open Community Camp 2008 also called OCC 2008 happening this week in Oegstgeest Leiden.

Hacking a week with a lot of beer, is the way to celebrate the summer. Feel free and join in, plenty of space and hardware around :-)

Java 1.6 here I come...

2008-08-04T19:04:00.003+02:00

After struggling for over a few months with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Soylatte to get Java 1.6 working with it I am finally ready for Leopard. My employer moved me to Leopard in order to test various internally used applications which finally have me the chance to view the full working glory of Java 1.6 with Mac OS X.

I have to admin working really well, update Leopard to latest version, few little Netbeans tweaks in order to get it working properly (adding a new Platform) and all is going well.

Let's start finding all other hidden Gems of Leopard, so far I have not seen much which gave me the so called 'shilly a' factor.

Stukke hardware...

2008-07-01T23:58:00.002+02:00

Het geluk was niet aan mijn zijde vandaag. De iPod Nano van mijn broertje is nu definitief overleden nadat ik een poging tot reanimatie gedaan had, welke gestrand was bij het in elkaar zetten van de stukjes, waarbij een kabeltje afbrak :-(. De poging om mijn opgeblazen videokaart te redden, leverde op de koop toe een kapot moederbord op, nadat mijn test run jammerlijk faalde.

Dan heb ik enkel nog een schredder staan, waarbij 'enkel' een weerstandje vervangen zou moeten worden zal die dan wel geluk gaan brengen of zullen de ampere luchtjes me weer tegemoet treden.

Buiten alle kapitaalvernietiging ben ik ook weer een hoop wijs geworden, hierbij de tips. Zorg altijd voor een schone en nette werkplek, een vensterbank, rommel tafel en/of vloer zijn niet de goede plekken, het zorgt ervoor dat je niet lekker kan werken en dat je alles de hele tijd kwijt raakt. Als tweede, plaats nooit kracht op kleine fragiele voorwerpen, kijk liever hoe iets in elkaar zit en hoe je het beste kan (de)assembleren. Een keer te hard drukken en het is over met de pret.
En als laatste kortsluiting is echt kortsluiting en niet een 'feature'. Ik mat tussen de molex +12volt en 0volt een sluiting op de videokaart welke maar niet te traceren kan worden op het bordje. Met een poging de AGP videokaart dan maar zonder extra voeding op te starten strandde in een kapot AGP slot op het moederbord :-(.

PeanutBall is stuk :-(

2008-06-09T19:02:00.006+02:00

Aangespoord door de M&M reclame en het oranje gevoel (en een van chocola houdende vriendin ;-) heb ik een 3 tal zakken M&M gehaald en kreeg ik de must have PeanutBall bij.

Opgepompt (let op! hij mag niet zo hard), vertoond het al scheuren. Nu maar niet hopen dat dit een voorbode is voor onze jongens tegen Italië. Welke als het trouwens 3-1 wordt mij 6 Euro oplevert, draai dus even duimen voor me :P.

Anyway, mailtje naar de M&M support gestuurd, zal wel even melden wat eruit komt.

UPDATE: Helemaal _niets_, lekkere service zullen we maar zeggen :-(

UPDATE: Ik geef het op, we hebben toch verloren, die nieuwe bal kan ik dus ook wel naar fluiten

Firefox 3 download - Guinessbook of Record poging...

2008-05-30T14:10:00.002+02:00

In een poging een vermelding te halen in het Guinessbook of Records, onderdeel 'de meeste downloads op een dag'. De Mozilla Foundation nodigt iedereen mee te doen. Schrijf je hier in, dan krijg je een emailtje op het moment dat je de download moet beginnen!

Tevens een mooie gelegenheid op Firefox te promoten, want Nederlands Firefox gebruik is het laagste van heel Europa :-(

Recovering my sxipper training name...

2008-05-14T12:42:00.002+02:00

I am a great fan of Firefox and the extensions/addons are really my friends. One of my current favorites is sxipper Which is basically a smart way of automatic form filling. It saves you the hassle of having to fill all forms by hand. Sxipper will do the hard work for you, but in order to automatically fill a form, the form have to be learned by the user base of Sxipper, basically called the trainer of a Form, which gets credits (name mentioned) if you fill a form.

I have been with Sxipper since day one, while they where still in beta phase, and during the update to 2.0 I lost my trainer name :-(. Luckily support provided me with an answer, which works great:

===BEGIN SUPPORT EMAIL===
Dear Rick,

If you are using a different computer (Firefox profile) you can
import your Sxipper training name by exporting your logins from the
other computer by using Sxipper Preferences [Tools -> Sxipper ->
Preferences -> Login -> Export].

In case you lost your Sxipper account you can retrieve it using an
older version of Sxipper as follow:

1) Uninstall Sxipper 2.x
2a) Install Sxipper 1.3.2 from
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/4865
2b) In Sxipper setup: retrieve your account and finish setup wizard
3) Update to Sxipper 2.x
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4865

Note for uninstalling Sxipper 2.x:
- Your site passwords will not be touched.
- If you want to keep your persona data, you can export it before
uninstalling and reimport after step 3. (Tools -> Sxipper ->
Preferences -> Form fill)

We are sorry for the inconvenience and looking into providing a
simpler way to do this in the future.

Best regards,
Roger
===END SUPPORT EMAIL===

Sleepy macbook pro battery...

2008-05-03T14:41:00.003+02:00

Just came back from holliday (check pictures at flickr turkey 2008 set, not all ready yet) and my 17" macbook pro battery was completely dead. I kind of needed my laptop to answer all emails so I hooked it on the power supply and started working, but the battery was not charging.

After a few hours of tumbling my thumbs hoping I could save the little battery his live, the battery started to charge again, I am saved ;-).

Be a good sysadmin, check your log messages...

2008-04-14T23:49:00.003+02:00

You might know the feeling of never be able to check your system/web/mail/ftp log messages, due the lack of time. I do have to guarantee it will cause problems, so better do it yourself or have someone do it for you ;-).

I do know this does not apply to you as you are always checking/analyzing your logs, running a fully tested and updated system and read every changelog/readme on any expected problem. But still as a piece of advice five reasons to do read your logs. Trust me if you have not been there, you might will be one day if your do not know the risks, I have visited all paths unfortunately (great learning experience how-ever ;-))

Your machine resources might run out unnoticed You will get called in the middle of night cause your
```
/var or /tmp
```
ran out of space, causing the machine to halt

Resources will not be sufficient anymore: Users tend to run as must software/services on the machine if possible draining your network, memory and cpu power and some day you are left with a ssh session will be a slow as your few baud terminal you used to have ages ago

>System might be abused Not checking the log messages most likely also means not checking whether every piece of software/script is up2date. You do want your forgotten outdated phpBB forum test instance to be abused by link/email spammers, do you?

Your fully automated scripts are missing some crucial bits and pieces: Written down in a debug log message, but never ever checked. Doing a backup one a night, but excluding a number of file, due some tag was set wrongly

Missing deprecated warnings of updated software and wonders why the software breaks down real bad after upgrading a few releases.

Inventation spam...

2008-04-09T17:25:00.003+02:00

I hereby introduce to you the latest type of spam "Inventation spam", using a ics file. And I thought I have had seen all ;-)

Identifying and fighting scammers...

2008-04-07T18:43:00.003+02:00

Scamming is one of the not so nice things of the internet. Scamming is said to be mistreating persons in order to get better. One of the worst things about it, is the fact that some people seems to be proud of doing this kind of internet fraud. Take a look at one of the popular WoW forums, they have dedicated separate sections to it over here (required login).

It's just like spam, there will also need to be some good guys to fight them. Which comes with counter examples to keep the spammers thinking ;-). This simple steps guide will give you a start, but be-are it is not perfect and the scammers are reading as well ;-).

Step 1 - Recognize: We need to make sure to detect them, which could be rather trivial cause they tend to have the same tricks. Fast responding AIM chats (fully focused on the victim), bidding (way) higher then all others and tend to raise there offer really soon (they not gonna pay any way), not responding your questions or being vague with personal details (do not want to get caught), using anonymous channels like AIM (MSN, Skype, GoogleTalk, IRC), phone and others (again, better save then sorry). Flashy natural names and easy adoption of your language style and many others thing (gain your trust).
If you spot this kind of behaviour be warned!

Step 2 - Identify: Get to know your scammer 'victim' and collect his private date, if his still (tries to) rip you off you have some data which you could send to your local
police station. In order to do so you will need to know the following details: email, real name, phone, bank details, ip and we need to verify them. Email, send an email to his box with a secret number, and have him to reply to it, make sure he is using an email account which could be tracked and not a disposable one, like Hotmail, gmail and all others. Send $1 like amount to his bank account, again with a secret number in the comment and have him report the number back to you. Send a SMS to his mobile phone with (how boring) again a secret number. Get a person living close by to (secretly) check his address. Match his IP address to his hometown using sites like ipaddresslocation.org. Get him on the webcam and make screen shots of the person. Setup and use remote services like logmein.com to watch them while doing the transactions and other stuff. Have him to write something (like his name and the date) down, scan, and send it to you (in front of the webcam).
And always keep a copy of all log messages, emails, photo's, screen captures and more.

Step 3 - Deal: Suggest using a middleman which talk it will be to transfer goods and money safely. Have him to sign/reply to a message (and if possible get a autograph) stating this is not a scam/rip off of any kind and notice the goods and amount of money in here. Print and scanned version should be fine as well.
Always remember that you could request a bank to cancel the transfer while ongoing, screen shots and web pages could be crafted or altered, email,postal could be faked, electronic money transfer screens hot be faked. Packages could contain other stuff (like bricks) then requested (open them on delivery).

Step 4 - Scammed :-(: Hopefully you will never reach this step, but if so make sure to file your attempt at your local police station. It might seems stupid of you, but do remember they are they ones makes the faults. A little bit of good faith make this world livable. With all the evidence you collected you will make a good change of catching this scammer.
When the scammer contacts you (or gets back to your), try to be nice and friendly and just act as of the deal went just fine (trust me, it will work the best). Just give him a few compliments and gracefully start asking more personal questions. Like forums he is visiting, favorite music and such, just keep him connected. Meanwhile start monitoring and validating what he is telling and ask him to visit a few websites or post a comment/review somewhere. Get as much data out him as possible.

When done, post your story -slightly less obfuscated of course, so no revealing of any personal data of both sides as it might be a fake identity and you are blaming the innocent wrong person- on a few forums and blogs to make sure your story is read/heard) and people will learn from your mistakes, turning the bad move into something useful. Do NOT visit a house by your own, always bring police protection or something else, as it might cause dangerous situations.

As a last note just check out what popular sites has to say about save trading like paypal.com , ebay.com and for all the dutch readers marktplaats.nl and 2dehands.nl

Fighting spam...

2008-04-01T09:48:00.006+02:00

I have to reveal something I love spam, the more the better ;-) Spammers feel free to email at rick@wzoeterwoude.net instead annoying others.

5 reasons I like spam:

I am a active user of Spamassassin and always like to improve the service

It it is quite a technical 'fun' game of the spammers against the spam fighters

Spam is a great way of stress testing my email servers and email software

Spam allows me to maintain and build large email clusters, to be able to fight the spam

I have to admit, some spam messages are actually really funny written :-)

Wireless Leiden chatting...

2008-03-04T09:54:00.007+01:00

Having problems with Wireless Leiden? Do you need support, do you want to share some great ideas? Come on and join in. At the Wireless Leiden public skype chat!

Will talk to you soon!

UPDATE: As the links are not working (see forum bug post) please use this direct one

Join Joost experimental live testing @ Wednesday 27th of Feb 2008

2008-02-26T13:05:00.004+01:00

Wanna win a voucher for amazon.com or bol.com? Help Joost to do Experimental Live testing!
Go and head to the announcement for any more details!

Fosdem 2008...

2008-02-23T14:45:00.002+01:00

As from yesterday Brussel, Belgium is the place to be. Brussel is hosting Fosdem one of the biggest open source events around.

Speak for yourself, come by and have a look. Or look at the pictures

The crazy guys around me -the so-called nerds- are Eddie, Gerard and Marten.

My first Nokia (N95)...

2008-02-04T20:03:00.000+01:00

Having a company phone is nice, but having a working phone is even better. In order to provide some decent remote connectivity our team has received some Nokia N95 to do the job using hsdpa.

Apart from missing a decent qwerty keyboard the phone was fully featured, with cool stuff like a 5.0M camera, a decent music player, bluetooth, wifi, GPS and such. The battery how-ever is a bit disappointing and the 2 two sliding mechanisms also feels a bit to cheap.

But anyway now comes the fun part (according to the hackers standard of life) of getting the device to work properly with Mac OS X 10.4. Before even starting please download the latest compatible drivers at http://europe.nokia.com/mac/isync/

When done installing pair your device using bluetooth, I will not help you over here, using the power of the net ;-)

For the next step I assumed your phone already has a working a 3.5g hsdpa or 3g umts connection if not ask you provider how to configure it. In order to get your macbook pro to use your N95 data connection you first need to download and install some non official connection script -but perfectly workable!- at http://www.taniwha.org.uk/.


# Ones installed you will need to unhide your phones' serial dialup connections. 
* Open Bluetooth Preferences
* Devices, and select your phone device
* Click Edit serial ports
* Make sure to select the Dial-Up Networking ([phone]-dia) one and 
  check 'Show in Network Preferences'
* Apply

#Enable your newly network interface
* Now go to Network in the Preferences Plane (warning about a new port should popup)
* Click on the dropdown list of Show 'Network Port Configurations'
* Check your network port on and click Apply Now

#Configure your new network interface
* Select your newly network interface in the Show drop downlist
* Select the tab Modem and make sure to select the Modem: Nokia HSDPA CID1, 
  if you cannot find it on the list please make sure to properly install 
  the modem scripts from the sites I mentioned earlier.
* Now go to the PPP tab
# if you do not know the details, please check http://www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html
# I have used the settings of Telfort, note that a blank username/password also did work
* Service Provide: [name of your provider]
* Account Name: [telfort.nl]
* Password: [password] <-- no hidden tricks just the word password
* Telephone Number: [internet] <-- also known as access point of abn
* Apply

Testing!
Al should working now, just press Dial now and Connect, if you get any errors, please make sure to check your Bluetooth settings, the error log /var/log/ppp.log, the hints page http://www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html, the README provided with Nokia scripts package of http://www.taniwha.org.uk with regards of disabling Compression and PPP echo reply and if all fails feel free to comment of course :-)

Google maps, instead of nokia maps this is free of charge and GPS works really cool (please do mind it takes about a few minutes to get an initial fix, waiting for the firmware upgrade ;-)

Social networking...

2008-01-22T18:35:00.000+01:00

Sorry long time no see, I had to learn for my exams, which all went pretty well (thanks!). But lets stick the the subject.

What will be the use of the massive amount of social networking sites all over the place? Instead of making one big community I see little communities all over the web, but none of them is actually trying to communicate with all of them.

I can see it might be handy to be the one and only social networking site all around the globe. But lets face it, this will never gonna work cause we all need to make money right ;-), so what about collaboration and open standards then? All the little ones needs to come together and start using each others data.

You will see this integration all over the web, but nothing is not yet 'perfect', the different social networking sites should work more with each other instead of stealing users from one and the other. It will make the internet just again way more better :-)

FYI: Happy 2008...

2007-12-31T18:59:00.000+01:00

As a little gift to all of you for this lovely new year. I would like to point to you to ack. This little nifty piece of Perl code, will make your development searching way more easy then using crippled grep for the same purpose.

Just give it a try and you feel so much better :-)

Getting FreeBSD libaries in one line

2007-12-27T20:49:00.000+01:00

Libraries are common practice these days, but maintaining them is sometimes a bit problematic. FreeBSD has some beautiful tools to fix this. One of them is portupgrade.

So let's review it:


[rick@traffie] /lib $ sudo portsclean -LL
** You have multiple versions of libgpg-error but 1 of them are not from packages:
        gpg-error.3 (/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.3)  <- ?
        gpg-error.0 (/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.0)  <- libgpg-error-1.5
and the symlink (/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so) points to:
        gpg-error.0 (/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.0)  <- libgpg-error-1.5
 --> Skipping gpg-error.3 because it is newer than what the packages provide

Ok we have a problem, let's see who did install the files in the first place


[rick@traffie] /lib $ sudo pkg_info -W /usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.0
/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.0 was installed by package libgpg-error-1.5
[rick@traffie] /lib $ sudo pkg_info -W /usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.3

Thats odd one of the files was linked by any package anymore, as we are all humans there might be a bugs somewhere.
Lets check wether the files really differ:


[rick@traffie] /lib $ md5 /usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.{0,3}
MD5 (/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.0) = 3fecd10d408cacc034d767d19465784b
MD5 (/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.3) = 8259f0206df08b699bae266a12b99d20

They are, might be a forgotten removed file then?


[rick@traffie] ~ $ find  /usr/ports/ -name pkg-plist -exec grep -Hn libgpg-error.so {} \+
/usr/ports/security/libgpg-error/pkg-plist:7:lib/libgpg-error.so
/usr/ports/security/libgpg-error/pkg-plist:8:lib/libgpg-error.so.0

Nah, no luck only the installed package libgpg-error. So the final but dangerous -meaning not, no really not! to be tried on a mission critical system- let's remove/rename it :-)

sudo mv  /usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.so.3 /root/

Watch your logs for over a week to spot any weird errors.

If you have many multiple dependencies problems and one of then which references to /usr/X11R6 and you 'recently' updated Xorg please alter /etc/rc.conf and include


ldconfig_paths="/usr/lib/compat /usr/local/lib \
                /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg"
ldconfig_paths_aout="/usr/lib/compat/aout /usr/local/lib/aout"

and rerun /etc/rc.d/ldconfig and /etc/rc.d/ldconfig_compat

imagemagick postscript file generation...

2007-12-23T12:23:00.000+01:00

When doing batch processing/manipulation of images imagemagick is one of the most powerful tools around. And the best of it, it open source -GNU to be exactly, so I will not call it free ;-)-

But as with most powerful tools you will need to understand the manual to start working with it properly and hereby comes the problem; I was looking for a way to convert scanned images from a book back together to a postscript document. Running

convert -page letter p*.jpg   hp-437-439.ps

did result into a ps document with a lot of very small pictures. Fixing it was not very easy, cause I had to find one implicit fact; Postscript files by default have a DPI of 72, imagemagick convert every picture which needs to be included to 72 DPI and thereby scales the picture down to a smaller format.

To avoid this make sure to explicitly 'downgrade' your picture using the density setting.

convert -page letter -density 72 p*.jpg  hp-437-439.ps

Winter is coming to town...

2007-12-20T10:55:00.000+01:00

This is just beautiful , is it? To be a good IT-Dutchy you need to love to things; The beautiful winters where ice skating is possible and having one of the best broadband penetrations in the world of course ;-).

I made my first steps on the frozen ditch today -it have been freezing cold for over a week now- and I just cannot wait to go ice skating, except for the fact that I have to do a exam Concept of Programming languages today :-(

Just which me luck, although I hope I do not need it ;-)

Bloody linux...

2007-12-10T19:05:00.001+01:00

As some of you now I run an Ubunu box which I try to keep up2date. apicron reports me the problems/updates on a nearly daily basis, which kind of surprises me. Most of the times I have to update libaries due some security flaws or something else?

It just does not seems logical to me as running the same set of software on a FreeBSD machine will not report not that many problems at all. Which OS to trust?

Openoffice.org Mac OS X version

2007-12-06T19:37:00.000+01:00

Openoffice.org started porting it's beautiful product to Mac OS X. Some of you might wonder and start pointing to NeoOffice which is doing this job for quite a few years and pretty well. But I just like to check out OOo their latest alfa/beta and it is actually preforming pretty well.

But there are some fundamental differences between the versions, which explained at openoffice.org wiki. One of the main is licensing, as NeoOffice is licensed GPL which does not allow this code to be imported the main OOo project which is licensed as LGPL.

The small conclusion; Having NeoOffice has been a great big advantage, cause OOo under X11 was so damm slow that it was not workable. But the new development OOo native is starting to get way more attractive in terms of speeds and usability. It will properly take a few years before NeoOffice is gone, but it will for sure not last forever.

PS: I do would like to do a big thanks the NeoOffice guys -core development is done by 2 persons only!-, cause you are saving my ass for a few years now. Your product did really help me survive in the bloody 'Word/Excel/Pointerpoint World'

pushing a new 'standard'...

2007-12-04T20:00:00.000+01:00

Which the new version of Microsoft Office 2007 they also pushed the default fileformat to be their bright and shiny docx files, which kind of surprises me. The new version has no big pro's against the old version doc and if you compare it to the open document standard odp it does not seems to have any advantage.

Their attempt to make their fileformat an open standard in order to make sure that their products could be used in organizations which require such standards -like governments- is a pretty smart move if you look at it in an business prospective. If you are looking for open communication and collaboration it is not a very smart move. Just implement the open document standard and the whole world will be better.

It is quite odd that Microsoft is trying to keep itself on the market by making people depending on them and make it pretty expensive to migrate away from the products, which again sounds logical business wise but will on the long run most do a lot of harm, cause Google, Novell, Apple and others are looking for their part of the pie.

Just think to yourself and the way you are sucked in using Microsoft Office products and thinking the Microsoft way. It is just a vicious cycle, you grow up using Microsoft Products, Office/Windows are the default installations at school -they received their system with a huge scholar discount-. At home your PC is shipped with Microsoft Vista/Windows by default. Hardware manufacturers only build their software for Microsoft Operating systems.

Due the fact you are working with Microsoft products so long, you preform best at work using Microsoft products as well, which gives the company no choice then to move to a Microsoft based environment.

I just wonder, when, who and how will this cycle be broken?

Typing skills...

2007-12-02T13:51:00.000+01:00

Self learned typing ain't that good as you think it is. I tried the very cool -and free of course- flash based typing course made possible by Thinkquest. The UI is dutch, but is very intuitive.

I discovered I was only using a few fingers instead of all -which I thought I did-, the course showed me how to type way more effectively.

Go check it out and when do play the game and try to beat the best -not me ;-)-

NOTE: It is something a bit low on loading, just be patient.

psyko pictures...

2007-11-29T23:58:00.000+01:00

Movement faked only by the brain, Akiyoshi Kitaoka is really super good in playing tricks with your mind. Go, go check it out. View his website or enlarge the sample by clicking on it. Can you see it happen?

Davilex upgrades gives me a quick vista review for free...

2007-11-28T23:47:00.000+01:00

I got a request from my aunt to have Davilex Club installed on her new laptop which had vista installed. She was still using a Windows 98 SE with Davilex software based from 2000. Lets rant about the installation and configuration of Davilex.

Their main shipped released versions: Davilex 8 (DaviClub 2000) -> Davilex Business 9.0 (2003) -> Davilex Business 9.2.0 (2007), which is nowhere to be found

The switched from informing by paper to e-mail based communication, but forgot to check whether an account had an email address at all, meaning no communication was received in ages

When making a support call they do not even check whether some details exists, but just bluntly assume the email is configured

Version 9.0 had a migration wizzard to import version 8, they removed this in 9.2.0 ,meaning in order to update you have to do at least tho steps

Their support portal is buggy -under IE7-, crashing and making exceptions all over the place

If you do not have an active account you are unable to view the basic FAQ questions, which for example gave me a big frustration of finding out that 9.0 was not working under vista, but does install :-(. Not support component was an old version of SQL Server namely 2003

After all this shit I finally managed to install and get it configured. Having to work for 2 days with Vista was actually big fun to me and I learned a lot about this new and shiny OS. I am not a great fan of the interface however, the graphics are not that clear to me and the nagging about whether something is allowed or what will be solution is somehow a bit irritating, the '+' in front of the folder has been made a bit smaller to be used efficiently, so you are now stuck in moving you move all over the screen to navigate to an folder. The graphical style by default is also disturbing, cause blur-ing what its on the background of sizes of an active window is just one of those examples which distracts you.

When going a bit deeper into the configuration I see they have not changed much about it -like the System Manager window-, which kinds of surprises me. But I guess the took the approach newer change a winning horse ;-). Seeing all this graphical power I am a bit worried about power consumption while working on full power.

The overall conclusion will be a bit pessimistic, but thats mainly cause my style of work is more unix related and I feel much better in using VIM/latex to write my minutes/reports to have all the bloat of Office -both Microsoft and OpenOffice- to 'help' me write it. I did not see much new stuff either which is really handy, but I guess I have to dig a bit deeper. Meanwhile I will pretty happy with my good old MacBook Pro ;-)

A traceroute problem...

2007-11-26T19:00:00.000+01:00

As part of my hobby Wireless Leiden I am developing Node factory, which is basicly a bunch of shell script files bundled together to provide a stripped down version of FreeBSD. This could be used as wireless router or proxy machine. But when working I tend be a bit to enthusiastic in stripped files which result in pretty weird error messages,like

root@CNodeZwet:~# traceroute zwet
traceroute: unknown protocol (null)

The solution however is very simple, take a look at the lines

traceroute.c
505: cp = "icmp";
506: pe = getprotobyname(cp);

getprotobyname call requires /etc/protocols to be present which I forgot ;-)

To like it or not...

2007-11-23T22:27:00.000+01:00

A ITer judging on fashion, that is not a very usual combination, but what the heck, we live in a free country ;-) With the ultra low hip jeans and cycling in Holland are both very popular we all see underwear showing up. This behavior in general looks pretty good in combination with a thong ;-) but with the Bjorn Born type underwear...

Girls please if you do want to show your underwear please make sure it looks pretty ;-)

bloody wireless (after mac os x upgrade to 10.4.11)...

2007-11-22T09:29:00.000+01:00

Just upgraded my macbook pro to 10.4.11 and it just keeps disconnecting from the wireless access points at home. I know both of the access points has got Senao prism 11b cards -cause they are part of our city homebrew network Wireless Leiden-, but I really do not have a clue on the cause yet.

Lets see whether we have some time later this week it fix this nasty problem

UPDATE: Give the machine a reboot -cause if froze again, I would prefer a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) instead of just not doing anything anymore- and it seems to work perfect again.

Mister Apple, I know you want to have Microsoft Windows XP/Vista users switched over, but implemented the bad behavior is not gonna work I guess ;-)

Bicycle + failing hardware = auch!...

2007-11-21T22:17:00.000+01:00

Cycling home after a long day of hard work -with a speed of 25km/h- and suddenly. Bang! The saddle pin bolt broke off and a hit the ground pretty hard :-(

Unlucky this is not the first time this week I got contract with the earth pretty rough. Slippery leafs and a broken pedal where the other problems.

Who did call cycling harmless and healthy?

FreeBSD ports update hidden gem

2007-11-21T21:08:00.000+01:00

Ones a while you gets really fed up of something and you struggle trough the source to get some fix, well this is just one of them. Update all packages mark critical by portaudit without getting those blue config screens in which you choose the default options anyway, cause the port maintainer knows his job well!


#fetch latest portsversion
$sudo portsnap fetch
$sudo portsnap update
#update portaudit
$sudo portaudit -F
#update the critical ones :-)
$sudo portupgrade -mBATCH=yes `portaudit -aq`

Subversion as backup system...

2007-11-20T00:37:00.001+01:00

I just started playing with svnsync and it really works pretty well and I am thinking on replacing some of my backups currently done with rsync by using subversion. A few big pro's

Always have every status of your data back
Efficient algorithm in transferring data, read this on the NetBSD list
Very easy to create multiple backups and now the exact status of each of them

Got meta data on actions, so might able to analyze trends and problems

Planet blog, but what about backups...

2007-11-19T22:44:00.000+01:00

Blogging is hip, blogging makes your live cool, and Planet blog software makes grouping of blogging a fun job :-). There is only slight little problem, what if Mr/Ms Google decided to suddenly deletes my blog due some reason?

For this cause I wrote a few lines of shell code to auto import new blog entries, fetched by Planet into subversion. I live living on the save side of the planet :-)

Google is your friend?...

2007-11-18T23:36:00.001+01:00

I just caught myself in thinking the Google way, which is something like this: I want to report a bug to my provider, lets use my gmail account instead of my providers ones, cause it always works. How many people hits my blog or website? Ah I will embed analytics instead of awstats cause it is done in a sec. Lets use Google calendar to share my appointments with my wife. Nah no need to setup WordPress I will use blogger.

Google is no longer a search engine anymore, but also a very effective in basically every type of web based application. Take for example this blog ;-)

And yes I have to admit Googles' web-based applications are very superior in just all ways, people which do use analytics, gmail or something else, knows where I am talking about. The UI is great, features needed are present and able to extend anything is possible using the API's.

Googles presence in the open source world in the terms of code-sharing supporting -using Summer Of Code- or collaboration -Firefox,StarOffice- is pretty high.

Having this 2 facts makes criticism against Google very low, which kind of worries me. Cause a company which that many power should be used with care. Just take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google and judge for yourself

Ubuntu distribution upgrade...

2007-11-18T21:57:00.002+01:00

UPDATE: For some reason Google finds this 3 years old post still useful, but the way Ubuntu does distrubution updates changed the last years a bit (as rightfully mentioned in the comments). Please follow this instead:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade

I promised you all, we gonna do some Ubuntu distribution upgrades (using the terminal) -Edgy Edge (6.10) -> Feisty Fawn (7.04) -> gutsy gibbon (7.10)-. For all dutch speaking lads, this forum post by anika did help me a lot to keep on going...

This actions could potentially kill your system or worse, so be careful. It is your system and you cannot blame me if something goes very wrong

The rules of the game:

Make a backup of all your data and config files, it will save your ass in case of problems :-)

If I tell you

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

, please run the command again if you no not see the message

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Try to answer yes to all questions about replacing maintainers specific config files, if you did modify them, you most likely did not choose the right location
Do move forward one distribution of the time
When working from a remote computer, make sure the connection is stable and the computer cannot run out of power. Best way hack around both problems is to use the handy program screen.

Actual upgrade

A up2date system will be a first pre-requisition, so lets do it :-)

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

if you did upgrade some dist stuff after your last reboot, please reboot -sudo reboot-

Ones you are back in we gonna prepare your

/etc/apt/sources.list

to fetch the new packages. As we only can do one major distro jump at the time, edgy to feisty will be the first one. Replace all references ``edgy'' to ``feisty'' using your favorite editor or shell skills ;-)

Lets do the update, fetch the new index files and start updating. Follow the steps pointed out above for guidelines in the upgrade process. Just try to keep your system as close to the original distro as possible and edit configuration files on the places you will asked to edit them.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

as you did upgrade dist stuff, please reboot -sudo reboot-

Ones the system is back up it is running feisty instead of edgy, check whether all services are still running as expected and you are done or continue to upgrade to gutsy.

Next upgrades

You can follow just same steps as the upgrade from edgy to feisty to replace feisty with gutsy. Just make sure to use the different name in the

/etc/apt/sources.list

Problems...

Unable to fetch file, server said 'Failed to open file.  '
Failed to fetch ftp://ftp.rz.tu-bs.de/pub/mirror/ubuntu-packages/pool/restricted/l/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.22/linux-restricted-modules-common_2.6.22.4-14.10_all.deb  Unable to fetch file, server said 'Failed to open file.  '
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

Ehm, dead mirror try to find a new one at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors or wait a few hours and try again

Package Configuration (blue screen)

Just follow the directions provided, most of the time, just press OK

Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Review packages you would like to install and confirm

Configuration file `/etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf'
==> File on system created by you or by a script.
==> File also in package provided by package maintainer.
What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
D     : show the differences between the versions
Z     : background this process to examine the situation
The default action is to keep your current version.
*** apache.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

Make sure to installed the package maintainer's version (Y) after reviewing (D)

Ubuntu release cylces...

2007-11-17T11:45:00.000+01:00

My external server runs at Hetzner but the have made the 'bad' choice to ship their root servers with Ubuntu 6.06 by default, instead of a decent operating system like FreeBSD ;-)

But anyway we cannot have it all -actually I can run BSD on the machine, but this either cost me some money to have them do it for me, or I will need to follow this hack- and it would not be bad to get some some inside details how you Linux guys made to keep a server running.

There is at least one thing that annoyance me a bit, cause running the 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) packages seems to be 'frozen'. Take for example subversion 1.3.2 which now lives at 1.4.5. I know all of this is done to ensure stability and such, but running 'outdated' software is in most of the times not very workable if you are running in a cross-system environment with both FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X system.

So get ready for my next post, we gonna do some dist upgrades :-)

Mr symantec, it just looks like spam to me...

2007-11-15T11:00:00.000+01:00

How cryptic could unsubscribing be, check this one from symantec


To unsubscribe from this broadcast email, please scroll to the bottom of the page.
To view this email as a web page, click here.

No details at the bottom of the page only a link to privacy stuff and finally I ended up at this page https://www-secure.symantec.com/custserv/cgi-bin/cs_privacy_dyn.cgi

Filled the form -just put on every field not required, else it will not process your form-


Privacy Options
Your privacy information will be processed.

The majority of preferences are processed within a few days. However, please allow up to 8-12 weeks to ensure all updates are complete.

We apologize we are unable to stop any mail already in the delivery process. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter.

Thank you for using online Customer Service.

8-12 weeks(!) and all the mess, that's way above the 'standards', but where to report to? I do not know...

Time to write a nice complain email :-)

building a static subversion...

2007-11-13T13:17:00.001+01:00

Installing a latest version of subversion can be a real pain in the ass is you are not allowed the alter the base system (read: no root access) and the system administrator rather drinks coffee than keeping his/her system up2date.

Luckily most of the times the compiler is installed and so are the header files, so no worry I will provide you a way to get the bleeding edge to work :-)

First some boring, but handy background. Subversion uses several libraries and programs to extend it functionality, which all good programs should do ;-). Some of them are not optional and needs to be compiled first, these are apr, zlib and neon. 'Luckily' all external needed program sources are pre selected and put into the subversion-deps archive :-)

In order to avoid the library mess, I will try to use as many static libraries as possible. This might make your program feel to load a bit slower, but you do know for sure you are using the right libraries.

FYI: The --without-gssapi disables advanced authentication (kerberos and such) and the --without-swig disables the python bindings, cause python was not installed on the machine :-(


$ curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.5.tar.gz
$ curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.5.tar.gz 
$ tar -xvzf subversion-1.4.5.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf subversion-deps-1.4.5.tar.gz
$ cd subversion-1.4.5
$ ./configure --with-ssl --without-gssapi --without-swig --enable-all-static
$ make

Working :-)


[hvdzwet@silver 0:23 /scratch/hvdzwet/subversion-1.4.5] > ldd ./subversion/svn/svn
        not a dynamic executable
[hvdzwet@silver 0:23 /scratch/hvdzwet/subversion-1.4.5] > ./subversion/svn/svn --version
svn, version 1.4.5 (r25188)
   compiled Nov 14 2007, 00:06:52
# Big beast :-)
[hvdzwet@silver 0:30 /scratch/hvdzwet/subversion-1.4.5] > ls -lh ./subversion/svn/svn
-rwx------ 1 hvdzwet student 5.8M Nov 14 00:11 ./subversion/svn/svn

It is proven, she is smart...

2007-11-13T12:47:00.000+01:00

Whowho, partytime! My girlfriend just heard from the Erasmus University that her final paper has been approved. From 13 December on I will need to call her 'Master of Science of Economics and Business I.N. Hiemstra' and I am proud of it!

iPod ears broken...

2007-11-12T21:45:00.000+01:00

My iPod ears broke down after 1 years of 'moderate' usage ;-). Thinking that I was able to repair them myself, I discovered those damm Apple gods put a build in protection into the ears. Ones you opened them there is no way to get them to work again, sigh :-(

Steve, I am not gonna make you happy, I bought Creative ones ;-)

Dead switch...

2007-11-12T19:17:00.000+01:00

Huh, 90% packetloss on a wired link? Turns out you could fry a chicken on my main switch :-). Took my multimeter and checked the actual output of the adapter. 12,5V(!) instead of 7.5V.
On advise of Ed I shorted the adapter using a big resistor, cause adapters could have a big voltage drop when they get some load.

Still 9.75V, so this adapter is marked dead ;-)

WM6 password bug on home cooked images...

2007-11-12T00:39:00.000+01:00

Oops my QTEK 9090 did it again -or actually I did cause I let it run out of battery- it locked my device completely not allowing me to enter it anymore. Which is a known bug at my favorite mobile device hacking forum http://xda-developers.com. But I got the system running in 10 minutes again:

Hard-reset: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=1164331

Re-install of GPRS connection

Re-install of custom root certificate

Setup active sync to sync with the Zimbra service

Minor tweaks in notifications

DONE

I disabled the password protection for the time being and started searching for a more decent phone or at least a better operating system ;-)

optic hacking...

2007-11-11T15:00:00.000+01:00

We (meaning the Wifisoft people) are hacking with optic links from Ronja, just check our project page

Bye, bye my dear shell server

2007-11-08T14:07:00.000+01:00


Welcome to the LIACS shell server.
Please do not put a heavy load on this machine.


After many years of service, this shell-server is going to
be retired. It has been running for over 6 years.
For an old PII, this has been a good investment.

Next vriday (nov 9) it will be switched off permanently.

Please use ssh.liacs.nl to connect to our new
shell-server.

Why replacing it always worked :-) I better of recompiling all my personal binaries again :-(

Directory hopping in the terminal...

2007-11-07T23:22:00.000+01:00

Tried of hopping a around in your favorite bash/sh shell and typing the full directory every time? At least I did ;-) Put the code attached below in your $HOME/.profile and start using quick jumps :-)

Make a mark of a current directory using `mark `. And go back by it using `back `. As the directory mapping is shared throughout all your open terminal hopping around will never be the same again!

Happy hopping!


markBackCommon()
{
    MARKFILE="$HOME/.mark"
    DIR=`pwd -P`
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        MARK=B
    else
        MARK=$1
    fi
}

mark()
{
    markBackCommon $1
    grep -v -e '^$MARK#' -e '^B#' $MARKFILE > $MARKFILE.tmp
    (cat $MARKFILE.tmp; echo "$MARK#$DIR"; echo "B#$DIR") | sort -u > $MARKFILE
}

back()
{
    markBackCommon $1
    TARGET=`awk -F# "/^$MARK#/ {print \\$2}" $MARKFILE`
    
    if [ -n "$TARGET" ]; then
        cd $TARGET
    fi
}

listmark()
{
    markBackCommon 0
    cat $MARKFILE
}

alias m=mark
alias b=back
alias lm=listmark

Exchange 2007 (and less)...

2007-11-02T14:55:00.000+01:00

Ever wanted to use entourage 2003 with exchange 2007, I strongly suggest you wait till office 2007 for the mac comes out begin 2008, cause you are most likely to get into a lot of weird issues.

Some background, Exchange 2007 is equipped with 'legacy' 2003 support, and most important with a so-called DAVEx.dll which handles the virtual /exchange calls.

Entourage 2003 uses the 'legacy' /exchange calls to connect to the exchange system and some other settings:
* URL: https://<exchange>/exchange/<username>/
* Domain:
* LDAP: FooBar (not secured so please do not use)

All of the sudden you might get errors like temporary unable to connect or complete request which cryptic error messages codes like 501, when you for example rebooted your exchange server. You better of trying to login using the administrative account and then the error seems to be gone again.

Still do not know what is going on over here, but someday I will post a few extra notes how to start debugging this issues. In the meantime just remember this keywords as a first start:

* Client Logfiles
* event manager
* IIS Logfiles
* Exchange Logfiles

Enjoy debugging exchange problems :-)

Reset admin password a 3com superstack 3 switch...

2007-11-02T14:35:00.000+01:00

I got a switch 3CR17500-91, but no password :-(. Luckily the knowledge base of 3com was able to help me (3KB10785)

* Login at CLI -default serial 18600, 8N1- using username/password recover/recover
* Hard reset -eg poweroff-poweron-
* Wait till you see

Enter the new password for the Administrator:

and enter your new password
* Now able to login username ``admin'' and your newly typed password :-)
* You are back in business!

Sound at a equal level...

2007-10-23T19:39:00.000+02:00

Imagine; listening to your iPod and having to adjust the stupid volume time by time, cause the songs are not equally leveled or call it normalized.

As iPod or iTunes does not give you the right tools to do it at ones, let me help you a bit -with a big thanks to the makers and maintainers of MacMP3Gain-

First of all install the lovely piece of Software MacMP3Gain, you properly know the drill, download, load, drag and drop to the Applications Folder.

Next normalize all your iTunes songs:
WARNING: Please make a backup of your iTunes directory before continue, cause this will ruin your iTunes collection if things goes wrong and as always, I am NOT responsible.

As I do not like the GUI and just want to normalize all my songs the command I use will be:

$find $HOME/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music -type f -exec \
/Applications/MacMP3Gain.app/Contents/Resources/aacgain  -c -r -m 0 {} \;
# -c = ignore clip
# -r = radio style, level number to specific value
# -m 0 = use the default level of db 89

Now you will see all your files processed, it might take a (long) while, making your machine slow and less responsive, but it will do the job :-)

When you import a new album or song, just run the command again. It will skip songs already processed.

Damm apple keys...

2007-10-18T14:47:00.001+02:00

Ever wanted to use a key shortcut discribed in symbols, but does not know where to find the key on the keyboard. I did :-(

Luckaly I was able to find the symbol -> key mapping over here:

http://blog.nominet.org.uk/tech/2006/10/30/apple-keyboard-symbols/

And forward Delete works like pressing Fn + Delete, as told by Apple:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75459

Cryptic OpenSSL...

2007-10-17T19:57:00.001+02:00

$ openssl pkcs12 -in rick.p12 -info  -nodes
Enter Import Password:
Can't read Password

Can't read Password, brrr something naghty, bug found?

No the reason is pretty simple, the max length of the password cannot be more then 50 characters as you can see in the source


   char pass[50], macpass[50];

source: pkcs12.c

Ultimate trust of FreeBSD port system...

2007-10-17T09:50:00.000+02:00

Do you trust your system configuration and the port system, then give the following commands a try. I have to warn you, I am not responsible for any problems caused and a proper sysadmin first tries this at a sandbox (or at home ;-) )


#install latest ports
$sudo portsnap fetch
#spot out of date ports
$sudo pkg_version -vIL=
#check whether install all ports goes fine
$sudo portupgrade -na
#stop all relevant ports, apache in my case
$sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache22 stop
#install them all
$sudo portupgrade -a
#restart any service updated, in my case apache (mind the out of date list)
$sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache22 start

When talking about FreeBSD ports you might also want to checkout the handbook about portsnap to install a small cron line to report outdated ports everyday

While installing port monitoring tools you also need portaudit to have critical port vulnerabilities reported to you

CGI whitespace...

2007-10-12T14:40:00.000+02:00

I Just could not get rid of the stupid newlines and whitespace in front and at the back of my entry :-( Someone pointed me on a forgotten newline character, so this will do it :-)


#! /usr/bin/env python

import cgi
import cgitb; cgitb.enable()
from common import *


def process():
fields = cgi.FieldStorage()
print htmlHead()
if fields.has_key('testbox'):
   print "XXX<pre>%s</pre>XXX" % fields['testbox'].value.strip('\r\n ')

else:
   print """
<form action="test.py" method="get">
<textarea name="testbox"></textarea>
<input type="submit">

"""
print htmlFooter()
if __name__ == '__main__':
process()
</form>

Note: the htmlHead() and htmlFooter() functions are just the value of the html head and footer code, which live in my own library common

Libraries and Mac OS X...

2007-10-09T21:12:00.000+02:00

Ever wanted to build a shared library and hit a mac os x like machine, than the regular commandos:

$ gcc -c -fPIC calc_mean.c -o calc_mean.o
$ gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libmean.so.1 -o libmean.so.1.0.1  calc_mean.o

will give you the error:

gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libmean.so.1 -o libmean.so.1.0.1  calc_mean.o
i686-apple-darwin8-gcc-4.0.1: unrecognized option '-shared'
/usr/bin/ld: unknown flag: -soname
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

You know why? Could those lovely things are called dynamic libraries in macworld and need the corresponding syntax ;-)


$ gcc -c -fPIC calc_mean.c -o calc_mean.o
$ gcc -dynamiclib -install_name libmean.dylib -o libmean.dylib  calc_mean.o

Thanks to the example of René Nyffenegger about shared libraries in C

iPhoto & Kruitvat (Gunpowder barrel ;-) ) photo software is not a very good combination...

2007-09-25T13:45:00.000+02:00

Oops, installed Kruitvat photo software; Popups up a small warning like iPhoto v4.0 is not compatible and whooes their goes my whole iPhoto Library.

Yes I know I am still be able to find my photos at

~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals

, but having them to reindex all over again and make new slideshows is quite a bit bummer :-(

So glad I made it...

2007-09-20T10:44:00.001+02:00

I so glad to have you share this memorable fact . I graduated for my Propedeuse, meaning I am officially capable to continue my study Computer Science :-)

Damm cab files and windows mobile...

2007-09-17T22:22:00.001+02:00

When you want to download a cab file to your windows mobile device 5/6 from an apache webserver, which you are able to control (legally ;-) make sure to set the mime-type correct or else your device will just love to show you the binary junk on his screen :-(

Set application/x-cab-compressed to the cab files, when you are using ubuntu (cause your hosting provider to to lazy to install a proper BSD OS by default) use

$echo 'application/x-cab-compressed cab' | sudo tee -a /etc/mime.types
$sudo killall -HUP apache2

Now check whether it worked fine

$curl -I URL

Kudo to 6brand for the hint

Big guy came home...

2007-09-16T23:21:00.001+02:00

After a little bit of a bumpy flight, we finally came back home. Thanks to my lovely girlfriend, which offered to drive us home.

I desided to get on the balance, cause my belt was not needed anymore. 90kg(!), made my BMI 30. the critical mass has been reached :-( Time for a public statement: "I will loose 10kg"

So guys when you see me around, offer me a beer, but do not invite me for dinner ;-)

Target

The day after...

2007-09-16T10:18:00.001+02:00

Ssssssst please keep quiet, hackers with hangovers are working over here.

It is quite pointless to say that we drunk o lot of beer yesterday, it was even a part of the program (like all good things are). But we had still had to checkout at 9 o'clock :-(

So with a table filled with orange juice and water the most creative inventions (discussed yesterday) are be implemented or proven to be totally wrong.

I cannot wait to go to Strassbourg (EuroBSDCon2008)!!!

My first blog ever...

2007-09-15T22:58:00.001+02:00

It might be funny for a digikid like me, but I tend to keep far away from blogging. But I finally got the call...

Hacking a whole week long at EuroBSDCon 2007 finally reveals the need of this digital portal. I just CANNOT keep all this exciting new development -zfs/refuse/puffs/carp- away from you all...

Just check http://rickvanderzwet.nl/eurobsd and read the whole story

PS Did I mention the new development of the USB stack of FreeBSD made by Hans?