| Breaking the Law (of Hostname Canonicalization) |
[Jun. 9th, 2006|06:40 pm] |
Mailman is a great little program written in Python that lets you manage mailing lists. I was tasked with installing it on a new machine last week, and I got to learn about canonicalization the hard way. All of the emails sent by our server out to the mailing lists were using the host name instead of the DNS A record for the Mailman VirtualHost. I tried for days to fix this and eventually got the feeling that it was DNS related. However, I still couldn't see why Sendmail would force the To-header back to the canonical name when Mailman was setting it correctly.
Eventually, I happened across this email on Mailman's dev list that solved the problem by removing one of sendmail.cf's canonicalization rules. I'm sure this violates some RFC. Although, the hack does indeed solve the problem. The actual wizardry was to comment out the following line in sendmail.cf.
# pass to name server to make hostname canonical
# R$* $| $* < @ $* > $* $: $2 < @ $[ $3 $] > $4
It's absolutely wrong to do this because if you edit sendmail.mc, and restart sendmail, the cf file gets regenerated automatically which obliterates the change. Is there a better way to fix this without violating RFCs and changing sendmail rulesets? Note: I don't have access to the DNS server. |
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| Hexeditting a Drum Track! |
[Apr. 6th, 2006|02:06 am] |
 | I finally did it! I can now record my drums as a midi track and map each individual pad (and rim) to any wave file that I want to, after I play it! It's absolutely the most awesome thing I've ever seen. The picture here is actual midi data from a real song that we're trying to record. This probably sounds like a lot of babble, but essentially what I'm doing is hooking VDrums into my computer via a MIDI cable, recording that data, and then replaying it with arbitrary wav files representing each note within the file. I knew it was possible, but it's cool to actually see it work in real life. Big thanks to mitya000 for hacking the infinite VST settings to allow this to go... |
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| Problems with the Windows XP Flickr Uploader |
[Feb. 22nd, 2006|04:30 pm] |
Hmmm, the Flickr XP Uploader it appears to work somewhat, but there are some problems. First off, the tags that I add don't seem to ever be applied. Also, if I add the pictures to a new album, that doesn't seemto work either e.g. a new album doesn't get created from the uploader. To top it all off, I tried uploading 109 pictures last night, and it stopped no less than twice which forced me to restart upload from where it left off. Am I the only having this problem? |
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| Today Shall Live in Infamy |
[Feb. 13th, 2006|01:16 am] |
I paid 25 dollars in actual cheddar for the NetNewsWire RSS aggregator on my Powerbook. It's pretty much the most Appleriffic feed aggregator on the planet. My one month trial was up yesterday, and I was really jonesing to see what was going on in the world of Intraweb irrelevance, but I couldn't. So, I ponied up the 25 clams over to RancheroSoft. This is the second piece of software that I've purchased for the Mac. The first was the venerable Textmate. I'm just speculating here, but the third and fourth pieces of software that Imma buy is iLife and iWork '06 when I get around to it. |
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| Sourcecasting |
[Jan. 16th, 2006|01:34 am] |
I just had an idea tonight for a way to automatically download and build a source release tar ball from an open source project. I call it Sourcecasting. I'm sure this idea can't be novel because it merely extends the ideas of podcasting and photocasting, but I was thinking that it might be convenient for project, distro and rpm maintainers particularly if open source projects had a unified way of releasing their latest versions. So, why not create an RSS feed with links to the last 10 or so source tar ball releases e.g. a FOSS project Sourcecast so to speak.
Most FOSS projects have an ftp site and some methodical way of naming files, and this has been working pretty well since the grand experiment had begun. There are some problems with this because it does require quite a bit of infoware (custom perl/python, etc) to handle these in any kind automated way. A Sourcecast would really be a convenient method for everyone compiling or releasing source code tar balls in whatever capacity.
There are several advantages to Sourcecasting over just putting a download link to Sourceforge and using a weblog to promote your project. First, this method would systematically let everyone know where the last 10 or so release can be downloaded. Next, a Sourcecast RSS feed could even be used to load balance or to perform a phased release using GeoIPFree (e.g. incrementally roll out your release on a per country basis). You could even go in finer granularity if you had state and ZIP Code IP address databases (which cost $$$$). Another interesting spin on load balancing this way is that you could even write some javascript to (initially, not for every load) calculate the fastest download link for your site, and then send the latencies back to the server via SOAP or XMLHTTPRequest, the server could then create a custom RSS feed specifically for your location. This could then be updated on an as needed basis. The other large advantage to this system would be that all open source projects now have a machine parsable release strategy, and this would be a real boon to distro and package maintainers (Red Hat are you listening?). Not only that, but it'd be neat to add Sourcecasts to an RSS Reader just to see when your favorite project has released new code.
I know it's kind of silly to expect everyone to start doing this, but there are some backdoors. Probably the easiest way to do this is for free would be for the Apache Foundataion add an automatic RSS feed to mod_autoindex. This way, Sourcecasting is essentially painless and would come for free if you ran Apache's httpd. I think this could really be a huge boon to productivity for FOSS, if implemented correctly. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some projects are already doing this in one form or another, but I haven't seen any mention of it on Google. So, at the risk of sounding like a sanctimonius dolt, I present this idea as my own. |
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| Bloxor Hacks |
[Dec. 16th, 2005|09:24 pm] |
 | I've been recently hacking my local installation of bloxor to shreds. I made drag and drop work, and hacked the icon scheme. I'm still working on it, but I did manage to take this screen shot earlier which shows it in action. |
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| Bitbee 1.0, Fedora Core 5 T1 Screenshot, Irssi for FC5T1, Other Changes |
[Dec. 5th, 2005|02:23 am] |
 | Well, first off, I installed FC5T1 test under VMWare, and compiled the necessities. I got bitlbee 1.0 to compile under FC5, and built an RPM for it (also under FC4, Redhat 9, and RHEL4 as well). I wanted to test it, and ended up building an irssi RPM as well. The Bitlbee RPMs are located here. In the process of building, I took a screen shot and uploaded it to the screen gallery here. Also, I've been seriously hacking my httpd.conf file, and it has grown to around 1760 lines long. I'm redirecting a lot of old content, and I've migrated everything that used to be uberh4x0r to hudge, and a lot of cached links from the old server are now redirected properly on hudge. |
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| TotalUniques.rb |
[Nov. 20th, 2005|10:55 pm] |
 | I modified my Browsershare ruby code to produce a chart showing Unique IP Visitors for as long as I've been keeping track of involution.com traffic. You can view the script here |
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| Gruff Problem on OS X |
[Nov. 20th, 2005|03:01 pm] |
I just added another page to my Ruby On Rails Wiki about some problems I'd been having with Gruff on OS X. You can view it here. Essentially, I keep getting this error on OS X Tiger 10.4.3:
/lib/gruff/area.rb:8: uninitialized constant Gruff (NameError)
...
Gruff seems to be working fine RHEL4, but I really want to use my Powerbook as a staging server for my work.
Solved!!! Apparently, I needed to build ImageMagick from source with these ninja configure options:
CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include " CFLAGS=$CPPFLAGS \
LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib" ./configure --prefix=/opt/local \
--disable-static --with-modules --without-perl \
--without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 \
--with-gs-font-dir=/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts |
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| Browsershare.rb |
[Nov. 19th, 2005|05:54 pm] |
 | I just wrote browsershare.rb to convert my massive AWStats cache store into a perty Browser Share graph. I wrote this entirely in Ruby using the infinitely awesome Gruff gem from Geoffrey Grosenbach. I think the biggest trouble I had with using Ruby was all the explicit to_s and to_i casts. It's strange when print doesn't show an integer if you concatenate it with a string, but maybe I'm such a b4k4 ruby n00b that I don't get it. |
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| Mac Office / Visual Age xlC and xlf |
[Nov. 18th, 2005|08:02 pm] |
 | I just talked to a fellow Mac head here at IBM, and, apparently, the Visual Age xlC and xlf compiler are available for free to IBM Employees. In addition, Microsoft Office 2004 for OS X is also available at no charge via the internal network. Can you guess what I'm downloading now? All of the above, baby! Wheeeeeeeeh |
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| This volume does not support symlinks |
[Nov. 18th, 2005|07:42 pm] |
Hmmm, suudsu was raising quite a ruckus about "This volume does not support symlinks" when I tried to install Fink today. Then, I wasn't able to find much on teh google about this one. So, I broke out some mad OS X command-line foo to solve this problem.
sudo Installer -pkg \
/Users/jperrie/Desktop/Fink\ 0.8.0\ Installer.pkg -target /
Now, I'm just assuming Fink software should go into /sw... |
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| Synergy |
[Nov. 14th, 2005|04:15 pm] |
Several of the peeps have told me about the joys of using Synergy. I didn't really understand the point of it until the VNC project forked in twenty directions and I managed to connect a forth operating system up into my working environment today (Windows XP, Linux, AIX, OS X Tiger). I ran a Synergy server on my Linux workstation, and connected clients to the left and right of the monitors that it was driving. I actually hooked the Powerbook into Monitor 1's secondary input so it drives the majority of my workspace. What I'm really wanting is a 30-inch cinema display and a way to get past our internal firewall on OS X, and I'd likely dump my Gnome and XP desktops altogether. |
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| Reddit |
[Nov. 8th, 2005|03:30 pm] |
I'm really liking this reddit site. I yelled at them one time to fix their RSS feed, and, *GASP*, they listened! Usually, when I go off on one of my tirades people just laugh at me. |
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| Ruby on Rails |
[Nov. 8th, 2005|11:32 am] |
 |
I've been spending a lot of time recently learning the newest, shiny, whizbang/neato intraweb framework around, Ruby on Rails. Now, mind you, my entire site is running on PHP, and I've been programming in it since 1999, however, there's some big problems with using it. It is possible to use it correctly, however, the path-of-least-resistance is to use it incorrectly. The big thing that didn't even realize was a drawback is that all of the SQL is buried in the PHP code itself. The Ruby on Rails MVC model makes it easy to separate the SQL from the Ruby. So, development is very agile and adaptable. This allows you to make changing the database by adding tables or fields to an existing table very quick and painless. I'm currently using Wordpress and Gallery, however, there's all kinds of naughty braindead code that I hate in these CMS systems. I really want to roll my own system because I'm stubborn and idiotic like that. Add to the fact that I'm severely unimpressed with Gallery2. Google freaking released an RSS plugin in their summer of code jamboree, and the gallery folks haven't put it in the release yet. I looked at adding it myself, but the Gallery2 tables don't have a "LastUpdated" field in the album title, and guess what it's coded in? You got it, PHP. So, good luck finding every freaking query that refers to an album in all the core Gallery2 PHP and all of the plugins.
The other thing that I'm really digging is the script.aculo.us stuff and the Prototype Javascript library. It makes it ridiculously easy to make it look like you know what your doing with Javascript. I have a test page up and running now using some of this stuff, however, it's mostly useless, but keep your eyes peeled as I'll probably be making Involution.com 7.0 completely run on Rails in the near future. |
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| Gallery2 |
[Nov. 4th, 2005|02:48 pm] |
Gallery 1.51 ended up making me so mad that I installed Gallery2 today. It's new and shiny and uses MySQL. I changed the link on the left panel to point to the gallery2 site, however, I think I need to leave my old gallery running at the original URL due to the fact that I have hardcoded links on involution.com and livejournal pointint to it... |
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| Rsync |
[Oct. 27th, 2005|03:23 pm] |
Rsync is a great tool that allows you to trade network bandwidth for CPU bandwidth. It's great for keeping a mirrored directory current on a remote system. I'm currently using it to mirror involution.com two different machines in two different states to minimize the chances that I lose any of my hard work.
This is the command that I use for the backup:
rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite1:www/
rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite2:www/
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