rullzer

I’m pretty sure you all know what I’m talking about. When you are at some site and you fill in a form. Doesn’t matter what is is for. And you submit (everything you entered is OK) and a warning box pops up telling me that everything is send.

First of all why is this a Warning? I mean I know I pressed Send. And besides that if it is a waring they should provide me with contact information on how to get my submission removed.

Now apart from the warning box it could be a message telling me everything is inserted into the database. Let say they have some java script in the background that does that and once everything is inserted it gives the warning (still a warning is wrong but OK). However I checked the source of the site and guess what? All the button does is generate the pop-up after which the stuff is submitted.

Now I’m wondering why people do this? It does not look good, since it is a wrong pop-up box. It does not speed up the process. It is wasting my time. Which in general I do not like.

I really like bash.org. However there is no RSS feed available for the latest quotes. This makes me sad. However after a 15 minute php session (which was more than enough php for me) it is working.

Checkout my bash.org rss feed. It updates every 15 minutes. Enjoy

First of all Happy Hollidays. Christmas is almost over and I hope you all had a good time. However on this second Christmasday I found myself at my girlfriends parents waiting for the other guests to arrive. Since it would take roughly 3 hours before they would come I figured I’d better do something. So after reading up on some blogs and articles I found wondering what to do next.

They their projector popped into my head. It has an USB-port. My laptop has an USB port. It did not take me to long to find out that I could do some nice things whit that. Acer has some software under windows. I was hoping they would have just posted the protocol online. But no. Ofcourse not. After browsing the Acer website and google. I could not find anything usefull about what command to send to the Projector (it does not help that Acer also creates a whole lot hardware).

So It was time to hookup my Laptop to the proejctor. Everything still works. And I was monitory /dev for any changes. The first thing to catch my eye was a bunch of new stuf in /dev/input. A mouse was automatically recognised. And it even worked. Moving some sort of analog stick around made my mouse move! Isn’t that magical!

However it is nice and all that I can use it as a mouse but who really cares? Now also tty12 was created. Which seems a lot more interesting. However I had ofcourse no idea what to send to the Projetor in order to get response. Now maybe I’ll hijack a Windows Laptop tomorrow and sniff some of the command send trough the USB port.

Ah well a nice project to work on during this vacation.

When I’m in Amsterdam I’m hooked up to the internet trough Surfnet. A network that connects all the universities but also takes care of students. However the network is owned by surfnet they do not maintain it here. That is done by some oter company. So now you know a little bit how it is organized around here.

So 2 days ago something was wrong with the network. Don’t ask me what but it just was. All of the sudden no 10 mbit line. No it seemed like I was back at my old 56k6 modem. Damn. Pages not loading instantly. Man that is a pain in the ass. I had totally forgotten what it is like. That grabbing the source code for a random package can actually take more tan 1 minute or so :S

Well it is fixed now and I hope it won’t happen again.

So this weekend I had some spare time. So I decided to reconfigure the samba domain so that when we get a new pc for my sister (wich will run gentoo… No paying for a windows licence) everyone can login everywhere etc. In order to do that I had to move some files around. But it works.

Now I wanted to share some extra stuf on the server. For example the music, some files, photo’s etc. In windows they are all mounted. So I wanted to do the same on my linux boxes. Should be a piece of cake since a have a share dir on the server that holds all the stuff to be shared.

So I shared that dir via NFS. Mounting went easy. However. all the dirs were empty… Now why is that? Could it be some kind of dark magic? No it is just that NSF (for security probably) can only acces 1 partition per share. So now I have them all shared seperatly. Not a big deal ofcourse. BUt always good to know.

So the laptop is on its way to me. Which is both good and bad… It is of course good because I want to play with my new Laptop. Get gentoo on it. Ah well you all know what I mean right? But the bad thing is that I have some homework to do this weekend.. In other words it now all is a matter of planning.

Now something else. The laptop is send with TNT, the post service in Holland. Now they have a nice track and trace system which allows me to enter the barcode and the postal code and well I know “where” the package is. However for some reason they do not have an rss feed on that. That would be something which it is perfect for. Ah well… I’m not sending packages that often… but still

So I was at work 2 hour ago and me and a friend needed to print sometime. So we press the nice icon and expect the printer to do his thing. Normally it does so why not today. But it turns out that it is a special day today. The paper was jammed. But not 1 piece of paper. O no. like 5 pieces of paper. Janking it didn’t do the trick. I torn the paper apart but that didn’t fix the jam. After looking at the printer for like 3 minutes we came to the conclusion that the only way to get the paper out was to open the printer.

But as it isn’t supposed to get jammed we had to get the screwdriver out. So after taking almost every screw out of the printer we finally got the part where the paper was jammed. A lot of poking and torning later all the paper was gone and we could put the printer back together. Now the whole point of this story is…

A printer always finds a way to get the paper jammed.

So today I had my first matlab experience. The exercise was not complete so it was a blast… I can’t say I like it much so far. I mean matrix computation are easier than I have ever seen. But common. If I have 1 space to after a ; it all goes wrong. Ah well I’m currently compiling octave and koctave so I can work also on it at home. But all of a sudden I had to recompile GCC… with fortran support. The first time I’ll ever use that… Ah well. Lets hope after this no more suprises in relation to matlab.

So today it was time for the big Apache update at my home server.
Of course PHP had to be recompiled but other than that Apache started like a brand new car. Or so it seemed.

I tried visiting one of the sites hosted on the server but I got denied. I tried an other site but again denied. After going trough the logs and the (main) config file I only discovered that the permission was denied by Apache. Now it comes. The Apache config file has been split. So I had to check /etc/apache/modules.d as well. It would have been nice to have that in big blinking text after the emerge… But it turns out that the default settings were that Apache denied everyone…. now what is that about…. A webserver which default setup is to deny everyone….

But with that it wasn’t done.
A new issue with the new Apache is that not all the env vars are set correctly. The user you run under is Apache which it should be but the ~ is set to /root. So the svn viewer a friend of mine made wasn’t working anymore. Now that was fixed in the end by a simple adjustment in the calling of the code. But never the less it is an annoying thing that it isn’t set correctly. But I’m probably not the only one with the problem so maybe a new revision is already on its way.

Apache 2.2 is running sweet now. So take your time for it if you are doing the upgrade. But upgrading in general is not a bad idea of course.

A while ago I wrote a little story about fail2ban. Back then I was using an unstable version (turned out later). And it did not work that well at the time.

However today I was updating the router and I checked all open connections (It can keep track of that) and I noticed some connections going to my server that I could not find out. Some people use my server for svn etc. But I recognize those IP’s most of the time. So anyway. I opened auth.log on the server (again) and I noticed a lot of login failures like: NTadmin, admin etc. So I figured I was in somebodies scanning range again and I decided that I would give fail2ban another try.

Currently version 0.8.0 is the latest and the even releases are stable. So that should be save. However they switched the entire configuration. Not a problem but you need to know it So after some easy configuring I started fail2ban. Worked like a charm. 5 minutes later all the unknown connections dropped (got killed) so another fine program to use.