Planet Grep

Mark Van den Borre: "La cité du mâle" and self censhorship

2010-09-02T20:43:00+00:00

La cité du mâle (EN) is a documentary on the position of women in those "hot" quarters of major French cities mostly inhabited by people of North African descent. It was coproduced by Arte, a French-German TV channel with a reputation to uphold. Think NPR, not Fox.

Arte has scrapped "La cité du mâle" from its broadcast schedule for now, "to protect participants who feel threatened".

Sébastien Wains: Setting up Synergy between Mac OS and Linux

2010-09-02T20:38:53+00:00

This post should be OK for any kind of client/server combination. That’s just that I only had a MacBook and a Linux netbook under my hands at the moment of writing this.

Quoting their homepage : “Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, without special hardware. All you need is a LAN connection. It’s intended for users with multiple computers, where each system uses its own display.”

They forget to mention clipboard along with mouse and keyboard sharing. But it’s not completely working for some reason. See below.

For the setup, either see here : http://synergy-foss.org/pm/projects/synergy/wiki/Setup

Or for the quick way :

On the Mac (Synergy server, right screen) :

Edit synergy.conf somewhere on the filesystem :

section: screens
   mac.intranet.example.com:
   linux.intranet.example.com:
end
section: links
   mac.intranet.example.com:
       left = linux.intranet.example.com
   linux.intranet.example.com:
       right = mac.intranet.example.com
end

Start the server :
synergys -f --config synergy.conf

Under Linux (Synergy client, left screen) :

synergyc -f mac.intranet.example.com

Done !

By the way, I was able to capture the clipboard from Linux to Mac but the contrary didn’t work for some reason.

Don’t forget : if you want to get rid of any keyboard or mouse on the client computer, make sure synergy starts at boot

Frank Goossens: Lui klust met hout

2010-09-02T19:41:32+00:00

Indien ik Kabouter zou zijn, dan was ik niet Klus, maar Lui. Ik ben immers echt niet handig en van hard werken word ik zo moe. Mijn Kwebbel zou dat zeker bevestigen, maar ik hoop dat ze er wel aan zou toevoegen dat als ik eenmaal hamer en zaag vastheb, ik niet meer te stoppen ben.

Maar soit, te stoppen of niet, ik heb hoedanook twee linkerhanden. Toen ik een jaar of 14 was, droeg m’n vader me op om tijdens de grote vakantie een vogelkastje te timmeren. Ik kreeg wat hout, het gereedschap en een week de tijd om pakweg een koolmees een dak boven kop en kroost te klussen. Maar dat liep, ondanks de hulp van buurtvriend Patrick, al van bij het begin verkeerd; ik had de 6 plankjes schots en scheef gezaagd. Vooral de zijkanten, die bovenaan een hoek van pakweg 35 graden moesten hebben, waren een ramp. Bij elke poging om linker- en rechterkant enigszins gelijk te zagen, werd het vogelkastje weer een stukje kleiner. Ik denk dat we, op aangeven van m’n wanhopige vader, de zijkanten uiteindelijk samen in de Black&Decker Workmate hebben geklemd en met een grove houtvijl, rasp of schaaf de boel enigszins gelijk hebben gedwongen. Toen het kastje min of meer in elkaar zat, hebben we de resterende gaten en kieren met Gupa dichtgestopt. Ik was misschien onhandig, maar ook een beetje trots, want we hebben dat vogelkastje aan het huis opgehangen en gedurende pakweg 15 jaar hebben zich daar elk jaar kool- en andere meesjes in genesteld.

We zijn nu 27 jaar verder maar er is op dat vlak weinig veranderd. Ik voel me opnieuw onhandig maar trots; ik heb met wat overbleef van het houtschuurtje van de vorige bewoners, eigenhandig een nieuw afdak voor brandhout in elkaar gezaagd en getimmerd! Het is niet volgens de regels van de doe-het-zelf kunst, het staat allemaal niet waterpas, maar het is wel stevig (het dak droeg een kortstondige belasting van 85kg) en m’n hout zal de komende 15 jaar min of meer droog liggen. Ik denk dat deze Lui nu echt wel een frisse pint uit de Melkherberg verdiend heeft, toch?

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

Wouter Verhelst: Frans Pop

2010-09-02T11:30:54+00:00

I'm shocked to learn that Frans has died.

Even more shocked to learn that, due to me sitting with my head in the sand, I almost missed it.

You'll be missed, Frans. I didn't always agree with you or your methods, but I deeply respected you for who you were, what you did, and what you were willing to do.

May you rest in peace.

Kris Buytaert: Pidgin and OAUth

2010-09-01T18:53:42+00:00

So earlier today the nice folks over at twitter figured it was a good time to change all the authentication to oauth ... they might have announced it all over the place .. but it never catched my attention

The onlything that did catch my attention was that after not having ued pidgin for about 2 weeks I didn't have access to twitter anymore.

I`m using the purple-microblog plugin and the default version of that plugin in Fedora 12 wasn't really up2date. The plugin supports OAuth as of 3.0 which was released ages ago.

The version in fedora-updates-testing however was already recent enough ..

So enabling that repo and running
yum update purple-microblog
quickly solved my proble .. till I disabled twitter in my pidgin again as there was way to much talk about some weird fruit ...

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Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/1016

Tom Baeyens: What Do BPM Industry Experts Say About Activiti?

2010-09-01T08:31:02+00:00

James Tayler had a first look at Activiti. It's a very accurate and well written overview of Alfresco's motivations and the direction of the Activiti project. He concludes:I liked the potential of the collaboration environment to bridge the gaps when rules and process are both being used in a solution and I also liked the potential of applying content management to business rules. Interesting ideas both of them and I look forward to learning more.

This confirms what the BPM Analysts have said about us at the launch. Joram created a nice overview of the reactions:

Sandy Kemsley, renowned BPM analyst, wrotea an objective analysis of the Activiti platform. She is eager to see how Activiti will evolve. And we won’t dissapoint her.

BPM expert Scott Francis of BP3 wrote a very motivating blogpost. He actually downloaded the distribution and played with it. Let me quote him a few times here

“Did I mention that the whole stack ran just fine, natively, on my Mac as well as a Windows VM?”
“The documentation is already pretty comprehensive, and gets down to no-nonsense details (not true for many commercial products).”
“I think the market is ripe for an open source BPM platform that leverages standard underlying technologies and is built from the beginning to allow for cloud-based deployment”
“We may end up investing some time in the project ourselves.”

The 451 Group posted a spot-on business analysis of the announcement, and let me quote them:

Activiti is likely to shake-up the BPM market with a ubiquitous project that supports the BPMN 2.0 standard from the Object Management Group.

Peter Hilton from Lunatech Research, hits the nail on the head:

business processes and work-flow are aspects of most business software and integratingembeddable BPM will be a key element in reducing the cost of business software development.

Theo Priestly asks the question everybody wanted to ask: “has the fight for open-source dominance begun?”

It's great fun to shake the BPM market ;-)

Tom Baeyens: Activiti 5.0.beta1 Rocks

2010-09-01T08:31:02+00:00

This release

Adds a first preview of Activiti Cycle, contributed by Camunda. Bernd explains Activiti Cycle.
Adds documentation about the Spring integrations
We extracted the Process Virtual Machine as a separate module

Enjoy!

and let us know what you think.

Machtelt Garrels: Wired Treefrog

2010-09-01T07:44:38+00:00

A couple of hours of crocheting and soldering resulted in the first prize of the Froscon Creative Contest:

The pattern for the frog is an adaptation of this one. I crocheted the head and body in one part and also the feet and the suckers are one part.

You will need 6 LEDs that fit in the holes of the suckers. The wiring follows this scheme:

A 3V coin-cell battery attached in a holder under the belly of the frog provides the power to this circuit.

Sébastien Wains: Force SSH password authentication

2010-08-31T20:25:43+00:00

If for some reason you want to disable public key authentication temporarily when SSH’ing into a machine, type :

ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no user@machine

You should get the prompt for the password.

This goes without saying, but ChallengeResponseAuthentication (at least on Debian) must be set to yes on the server side for this to work.

Thanks to Philip for proof-reading this post

Chitlesh GOORAH: FEL: Bugfix release of Perl-Verilog 3.302

2010-08-30T21:17:25+00:00

Verilog::Language 3.302 was released shortly after 3.300 to fix a few bugs, namely Increase define recursions before error. [Paul Liu] Fix documentation on verilog_text and link, bug278. [Mike Z] Use Digest::SHA instead of SHA1, bug189. [Ahmed El-Mahmoudy] Fix false test failure if Math::BigInt not installed. It will soon be among your updates. Special credits go [...]

Patrick Debois: Virtualbox Savestate Restore Network Problems

2010-08-30T19:04:27+00:00

Virtualbox Savestate and restore does not restore the network

I make extensive use of Virtualbox to test my installations. When I automate the installation , I use the savestate and restore to rollback changes I do to the virtual machine. Recently the network of the virtual machine would not be accessible anymore after the restore. A network ping from both inside or outside the virtualmachine fails. Several tickets have been created for it, and the bug seems to pop up every new update or so Fixed in 25205 , re-introduced in Ticket 5666, Ticket 5654 .

The first work-around I found was:

On a linux machine restart the network stack with a /etc/init.d/network restart . But that is not very portable, and it's hard to automate because the network is gone.

A more generic work-around is to temporary disable the network link:

$ VBoxManage controlvm <yourvmname> setlinkstate1 off
$ VBoxManage controlvm <yourvmname> setlinkstate1 on
$ sleep 2

NAT: re-establish port-forwarding after savestate / restore state

Another quite annoying bug is that virtualbox sometimes looses it's NAT mappings Ticket 25402 There is no other way then re-executing the NAT mapping.

Patrick Debois: Capturing the Screen or Video of Your Virtual Machines Using X, Vnc, Rdp or Native ways

2010-08-30T13:30:09+00:00

With this blogpost we continue the previous investigation to interact with a virtual machine using X, VNC , RDP or native ways with a virtual machine. This time instead of sending keystrokes we are looking for capture screenshots or even capture the complete session as a video.

Interacting with X-Windows

Capturing a screenshot:

Grabbing a screen of an X-Windows session is easy: in order to grab the screen on an X-session on :1 issue the following command:

$ import -window root -display :1 screenshot.png

Recording a video:

I got the idea of using the ffmpeg command for capturing the X-session from

http://gasubasu.com/2009/05/06/flash2video/

So I installed ffmpeg using macports

$ sudo port install ffmpeg

When I executed it, it complained about Unknown input format: 'x11grab'

$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -vc x264 -s vga -r 30 -b 2000k -g 300 -i :1.0 session-recording.avi
FFmpeg version 0.6, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Aug 29 2010 16:56:51 with gcc 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)
  configuration: --prefix=/opt/local --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libdirac --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --enable-libvpx --enable-libspeex --enable-nonfree --mandir=/opt/local/share/man --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --disable-indevs --cc=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 --arch=x86_64
  libavutil     50.15. 1 / 50.15. 1
  libavcodec    52.72. 2 / 52.72. 2
  libavformat   52.64. 2 / 52.64. 2
  libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
  libavfilter    1.19. 0 /  1.19. 0
  libswscale     1.11. 0 /  1.11. 0
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
Unknown input format: 'x11grab'

There was no variant or option for macports to have ffmpeg take this flag for compiling. So I downloaded the sourcecode from the ffmpeg repository:

$ wget http://www.ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-0.6.tar.gz
$ cd ffmpeg-0.6
$  ./configure --enable-x11grab --enable-gpl

Although I had specified the --enable-x11grab option, ffmpeg still complained about the Unknown input format.

I got some clues here and here. And after a look at the the configure file, I found that in order to work, it required the Xfixes and Xext libraries:

enabled x11grab                         &&
check_header X11/Xlib.h                 &&
check_header X11/extensions/XShm.h      &&
check_header X11/extensions/Xfixes.h    &&
check_func XOpenDisplay -lX11           &&
check_func XShmCreateImage -lX11 -lXext &&
check_func XFixesGetCursorImage -lX11 -lXext -lXfixes

So after installing those libraries:

$ sudo port install xorg-libXext
$ sudo port install xorg-libXfixes
$  ./configure --enable-x11grab --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --extra-cflags="-I/opt/local/include -I/opt/local/include/X11"  --extra-ldflags=-L/opt/local/lib

....
Enabled indevs:
x11_grab_device
...

Now with the input x11_grab_device available, I was all set to record a running session.

$ ./ffmpeg -f x11grab -vc x264  -s xga -r 30 -b 2000k -g 300 -i :1.0 session-recording.avi
FFmpeg version 0.6, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Aug 30 2010 09:11:02 with gcc 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)
  configuration: --enable-x11grab --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --extra-cflags='-I/opt/local/include -I/opt/local/include/X11' --extra-ldflags=-L/opt/local/lib --disable-shared
  libavutil     50.15. 1 / 50.15. 1
  libavcodec    52.72. 2 / 52.72. 2
  libavformat   52.64. 2 / 52.64. 2
  libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
  libswscale     0.11. 0 /  0.11. 0
[x11grab @ 0x10100b000]device: :1.0 -> display: :1.0 x: 0 y: 0 width: 1024 height: 768
[x11grab @ 0x10100b000]shared memory extension  found
[x11grab @ 0x10100b000]Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
Input #0, x11grab, from ':1.0':
  Duration: N/A, start: 1283153847.281641, bitrate: 754974 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: rawvideo, bgra, 1024x768, 754974 kb/s, 30 tbr, 1000k tbn, 30 tbc
File 'session-recording.avi' already exists. Overwrite ? [y/N] y
Output #0, avi, to 'session-recording.avi':
  Metadata:
    ISFT            : Lavf52.64.2
    Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 1024x768, q=2-31, 2000 kb/s, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame=  310 fps= 30 q=2.0 Lsize=    2810kB time=11.83 bitrate=1945.1kbits/s dup=0 drop=21    
video:2796kB audio:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.502798%

This worked fine! But the recording only captured 1024x768 (flag = xga), when I tried to have ffmpeg capture a larger screen 1600x1024 (flag wsxga), it told me an error about Can't get shared memory . No clue why. For now, the xga option is enough for me.

./ffmpeg -f x11grab -vc x264  -s wsxga -r 30 -b 2000k -g 300 -i :1.0 session-recording.avi
FFmpeg version 0.6, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Aug 30 2010 09:11:02 with gcc 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)
  configuration: --enable-x11grab --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --extra-cflags='-I/opt/local/include -I/opt/local/include/X11' --extra-ldflags=-L/opt/local/lib --disable-shared
  libavutil     50.15. 1 / 50.15. 1
  libavcodec    52.72. 2 / 52.72. 2
  libavformat   52.64. 2 / 52.64. 2
  libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
  libswscale     0.11. 0 /  0.11. 0
[x11grab @ 0x10100b000]device: :1.0 -> display: :1.0 x: 0 y: 0 width: 1600 height: 1024
[x11grab @ 0x10100b000]shared memory extension  found
[x11grab @ 0x10100b000]Fatal: Can't get shared memory!

Interacting with VNC

Capturing a screenshot:

I found two projects that touted the ability to capture the screen of a VNC session:

VncSnapshot (C)- http://vncsnapshot.sourceforge.net/
VncCapture (Perl) - http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Net-VNC-0.36/bin/vnccapture

None of them really worked for me. So I resorted back to using Xvfb as an intermediate:

$ vncpasswd mypasswordfile
$ Xvfb  :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -fbdir /var/tmp/
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (dlopen(/usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so, 5): image not found)
(EE) GLX: could not load software renderer
(EE) XKB: Couldn't open rules file /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb/rules/base
(EE) XKB: No components provided for device Virtual core keyboard
$ DISPLAY=:1 rdesktop -u username -p password -d domain remotehost
$ import -window root -display :1 screenshot-rdp.png

Recording a video:

To record an vnc session to flash I found the following pointers:

I went for the C version of vnc2swf :

$ wget http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/vnc2swf-0.5.0.tar.gz
$ cd vnc2swf-0.5.0
$  LDFLAGS=-L/usr/X11R6/lib  ./configure 
$  LDFLAGS=-L/usr/X11R6/lib  make
$ ./vnc2swf
usage: ./vnc2swf [<options>] <out.swf> <host>:<display#>
       ./vnc2swf [<options>] <out.swf> -listen [<display#>]

<options> are standard Xt options, or:
              -shared
              -viewonly
              -fullscreen
              -passwd <passwd-file>
              -noauto
              -encodings <encoding-list> (e.g. "raw copyrect")
              -geometry <geometry>
              -bgr233
              -owncmap
              -truecolour
              -depth <depth>
              -framerate <frames-per-sec>
              -startrecording
              -nowindow
              -nostatus
              -clippinggeometry <geometry>

Àn alternative is to ffmpeg as explained in the X-session, with vncviewer displayed in Xvfb session

Interacting with RDP

Capturing a screenshot:

I found 0 tools to capture a screenshot directly from an RDP (at least a tool on Linux or MacosX). While poking around I found a reference to VNC inside the code of Rdesktop: there was mention of rdp2vnc

$ ./configure --help |grep vnc
  --with-libvncserver-config=CMD  use CMD as libvncserver-config
  --with-libvncserver     make rdp2vnc

I almost got it to work by checking out the latest svn

$ svn co https://rdesktop.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rdesktop rdesktop
$ cd rdesktop

It required the installation of LibVNCServer library - http://libvncserver.sourceforge.net/

./configure --prefix /opt
make
make install

$ cd rdesktop
$ ./configure  --with-libvncserver  --x-includes=/opt/local/include/ --x-libraries=/opt/local/lib --with-libvncserver-config

But in the end - nothing and I was facing a Compile problem

So of to the X-session fallback using rdesktop and xvfb:

$ Xvfb  :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -fbdir /var/tmp/
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (dlopen(/usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so, 5): image not found)
(EE) GLX: could not load software renderer
(EE) XKB: Couldn't open rules file /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb/rules/base
(EE) XKB: No components provided for device Virtual core keyboard
$ DISPLAY=:1 vncviewer -FullColor --Passwordfile mypasswordfile localhost
$ import -window root -display :1 screenshot-vnc.png

Recording a video:

The only way (I found) is to capture the RDP session as a video is to use ffmpeg as explained in the X-session, with rdesktop displayed in Xvfb session.

Virtual Server helpers:

Capturing screenshots with Vmware Esx

The Vsphere API allows the creation of a task by using CreateScreenshot_Task() command. I used the VMware VI (vSphere) Java API - http://vijava.sourceforge.net/ and coded an example to create the screenshot. The file itself is saved by vmware in the datastore root, so you need something like scp to grab it from there.

import java.net.URL;
import com.vmware.vim25.*;
import com.vmware.vim25.mo.*;

public class takescreenshot 
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        String url="https://localhost/sdk"; 
        String username="root"; 
        String password="thepassword"
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        ServiceInstance si = new ServiceInstance(new URL(url), username, password, true);
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.out.println("time taken:" + (end-start));
        Folder rootFolder = si.getRootFolder();
        String name = rootFolder.getName();
        System.out.println("root:" + name);
        ManagedEntity[] mes = new InventoryNavigator(rootFolder).searchManagedEntities("VirtualMachine");
        if(mes==null || mes.length ==0)
        {
            return;
        }
        
        VirtualMachine vm = (VirtualMachine) mes[0]; 
        Task screentask=vm.CreateScreenshot_Task();
        si.getServerConnection().logout();
    }
}

For an example using the perl API have a look at the script at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10497

Screencapture and recording a video in Virtualbox

I found that virtualbox itself has a way to capture the screen (--capture) and to record the session to file. Internally it uses ffmpeg. I wasn't able to run it on my mac, as it is not supported on that platform, but it might work for you.

$ VBoxVRDP --help
Oracle VM VirtualBox Headless Interface 3.2.8
(C) 2008-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

Usage:
   -s, -startvm, --startvm <name|uuid>   Start given VM (required argument)
   -v, -vrdp, --vrdp on|off|config       Enable (default) or disable the VRDP
                                         server or don't change the setting
   -p, -vrdpport, --vrdpport <ports>     Comma-separated list of ports the VRDP
                                         server can bind to. Use a dash between
                                         two port numbers to specify a range
   -a, -vrdpaddress, --vrdpaddress <ip>  Interface IP the VRDP will bind to 
   -c, -capture, --capture               Record the VM screen output to a file
   -w, --width                           Frame width when recording
   -h, --height                          Frame height when recording
   -r, --bitrate                         Recording bit rate when recording
   -f, --filename                        File name when recording.  The codec
                                         used will be chosen based on the
                                         file extension

Frank Goossens: The state of WP YouTube Lyte (now with fresh Pomplamoose)

2010-08-30T06:02:53+00:00

Although it has been a few months since I last wrote about my baby WordPress plugin, time did not stand still between version 0.3.0 and 0.5.2; the player size can now be changed in the options-screen, I’ve replaced my newTube html5-hack with Google’s official (yet experimental) new html5-compatible embed code and I started migrating the CSS from the mess that had become the JavaScript-file. And I almost forgot what may be the most important change; I started searching for blogs that use WP-YouTube-Lyte to see how it behaves in the wild. Some of the bugs I discovered that way;

WordPress has a lousy “the_excerpt”-function which removes script-tags but not the script itself, which caused my JavaScript to be displayed as normal text in excerpts (typically in category-pages). Fixed with some unpleasant CDATA-tinkering.
Some blogs allow crawlers to see the contents of a directory if no index.* is in place, so e.g. options.php gets indexed with an ugly (but logical) error-message. Fixed with an index.html.
There’s a lot of themes and some of those have CSS that impacts the way WP YouTube Lyte is displayed. Most issues should be fixed by better CSS for my plugin, but do let me know if you encounter more weird display-problems (especially the controls that are incorrectly positioned).

But with all those changes you might start to wonder if WP-YouTube-Lyte still reduces download size & rendering time substantially, no? So I ran a couple of new tests for this page on my blog (it has 3 embedded YouTube’s) on webpagetest.org (settings: 5 runs on IE7 via Amsterdam, excluding requests to stats.wordpress.com). The difference is … well, judge for yourself (or see below the tables for the summary)

With normal Flash-based embeds (full results here):

				Document Complete			Fully Loaded
	Load Time	First Byte	Start Render	Time	Requests	Bytes In	Time	Requests	Bytes In
First View	1.850s	0.634s	1.330s	1.850s	15	343 KB	5.350s	22	524 KB
Repeat View	1.142s	0.346s	0.497s	1.142s	5	17 KB	2.455s	5	17 KB

And with WP YouTube Lyte (full results here):

				Document Complete			Fully Loaded
	Load Time	First Byte	Start Render	Time	Requests	Bytes In	Time	Requests	Bytes In
First View	1.201s	0.355s	0.974s	1.201s	10	55 KB	2.065s	20	103 KB
Repeat View	0.605s	0.352s	0.473s	0.605s	2	12 KB	1.447s	5	14 KB

Did you see that? Less requests, less data and faster rendering for first and repeat views. Hurray for WP-YouTube-Lyte! But enough with that ego-tripping already, I’ve got an Opera-bug to look into! Or wait, I’ll watch this great new Pomplamoose+Ben Folds+Nick Hornby videosong first:

Elise Huard: Land Rat

2010-08-29T16:18:16+00:00

Yesterday was my second time sailing. A friendly coworker is the proud owner of a cruiser-racer hybrid sailboat, which can take a crew of 6. He’s often looking for crew, and as the end of summer is nearing, I thought I’d give it another shot.

First time was a mixed experience. The weather was good, and I enjoyed most of it, but ended the trip thoroughly cold and a little seasick. The sea wind is very efficient at sucking every heat out of you, and I was glad when the day was over.

So this time I came prepared for the cold, I had 3 layers of fleece over normal clothing, a windbreaker, and windbreaker pants. But, foolishly, I didn’t come prepared for seasickness.

The trip started out fine – the weather forecast was not promising, but we actually had a clear sky. The wind was whipping up large waves, and as soon as we left port, the boat started dancing on tall waves – impressive but fun.

The idea was to run a race. Races in that kind of boat means going through a virtual starting line as soon as the starting shot is fired, and doing a few loops around a couple of buoys. The buoys are dynamic so that you need to sail at least one of the legs upwind.

This being a race, the more experienced sailors got to steer and adjust the sails, and I was left playing intelligent counterweight. I listened to anything that sounded like ‘changing tack’ or ‘ready to gipe ?’ and scrambled over to the other side of the boat. Not that simple when you climb over a near featureless expanse of white plastic, and the boat is changing inclination dramatically, and you need to avoid a sail swiping past over your head.

As it was, it was fortunate that I didn’t get to do anything more complex than hanging over the correct side of the boat. About 45 minutes in, my stomach started playing up, and the fun part was over. I learned that seasickness comes in waves, like the sea: you feel steadily worse, until you start retching up (whatever’s left) a few times, and then you get a reprieve for about 10 minutes, until the buildup starts again.

During reprieves, I tried to understand what was going on. Sailing vocabulary takes some translation (starting with bloody ‘left’ and ‘right’, for god’s sake), especially when you have to parse it in two languages (dutch and english). There are many rules, and numbers in knots and degrees. We were at times surrounded by other boats, not that surprising, in a race, and priority was to be observed. Keeping two sails taut and functioning at all times in changing and violent winds also takes a lot of ongoing monitoring and action. A sailboat, like good open source projects, is no democracy, and you quickly understand why that’s necessary.

There’s no graceful way to be seasick. I puked a few times on myself before finding the right way to get everything to go down the side. The upside was that I was showered with brine on a regular basis, so the worst got washed off. Also I hadn’t eaten anything since 6o’clock in the morning, so I was spared anything solid.

I had a major case of cognitive dissonance. I love the idea of sailing, and have wanted to do it for ages. The waves glinting in the sun, the graceful shapes of other sailboats, would normally have me sighing with contentment. As it was, I was feeling way too bad to enjoy it, which felt like a shame, even through the nausea.

As I was hanging there, my feet soaked with seawater, painting Peter’s boat with the contents of my stomach, I reflected on how I could be sitting in my living room reading a good book, with no more movement than the slow, slow sliding of tectonic plates a few miles below. Not having eaten since six, being wet and violently sick left me a shivering wreck, just waiting for it to be over.

There was another unhappy sailor on board, so I was spared being the only one. The skipper ended up taking pity on us and cut the race short. He explained to me that at that point, there weren’t many points to lose anyway. As soon as we hit port and quieter waters, I felt better. I took a shower, changed clothes, and forced down some sandwiches, feeling almost human again. Then I scrubbed whatever traces of sick that were left on the boat.

If I’m allowed back, I’ll give it another try. This time I’ll take the pills, and I’ll wear the many layers, and plastic boots, and I’ll hope the experience will be somewhat more like what I keep imagining it should be. Arrrr.

Patrick Debois: Sending Keystrokes to Your (Virtual) Machines using X, Vnc , Rdp or Native ways

2010-08-29T14:35:42+00:00

Options overview

The most common way to interact with a virtual machine is by remote login via ssh. This blogpost is about a different way of interaction: it will show you how to send keystrokes (or mouse) directly to the remote screen of the machine. This can be used for instance for kickstarting a machine before the network is up (typing linux), or automating things that require screen interaction.

In general three types of remote screen sessions exist:

VNC: is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses the RFB protocol
RDP: A proprietary developed by Microsoft
X-session: based on the X Window System (commonly X or X11)

Most virtualization solutions allow you to activate one of these remote session options:

Keycodes versus keys

Before we start of with the different solutions, I would like to point out that sending keystrokes to these remote sessions is not the same as printing a character to the screen.

Keyboards and for that matter virtual keyboards interact with scancodes : every key on the keyboard is assigned a scancode. This has a few consequences:

An uppercase letter is a combination of a scancode for Shift and a scancode for the letter
The same scancode on a different keyboard layout can cause a different letter to be send: f.i. scancode 10 (hex) generate a 'Q' on a Qwerty keyboard but 'A' on an Azerty keyboard

Most of the tools assume the use of a US Layout keyboard. A good overview of the different scancodes can be found at http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/scancodes-1.html

Interacting with X-Windows

Before VNC and RDP existed , people already had the option of using an X-client to an X-server.

P.S. I know you are probably looking for RDP or VNC interaction, but this description will come in handy as we will use this through Xvfb.

I found two tools that help sending keystrokes:

xte : http://hoopajoo.net/projects/xautomation.html
xdotool : http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/
C++ example code : http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/x11-fake-keypress-event.html

I couldn't get xte to compile on my mac but xdotool is conveniently available in macports.

What is xdotool? This tool lets you simulate keyboard input and mouse activity, move and resize windows, etc. It does this using X11's XTEST extension and other Xlib functions. Additionally, you can search for windows and move, resize, hide, and modify window properties like the title. If your window manager supports it, you can use xdotool to switch desktops, move windows between desktops, and change the number of desktops.

$ sudo port install xdotool
--->  Computing dependencies for xdotool
--->  Fetching xdotool
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for xdotool
--->  Extracting xdotool
--->  Applying patches to xdotool
--->  Configuring xdotool
--->  Building xdotool
--->  Staging xdotool into destroot
--->  Installing xdotool @2.20100818.3004_0
--->  Activating xdotool @2.20100818.3004_0

To use xdotool (and avoid the error message "Error: XTEST extension unavailable
on '(null)'") you need to enable the XTEST extension. If you're using Apple's
X11.app, the command to do so is: 

defaults write org.x.X11 enable_test_extensions -boolean true 

If you're using the MacPorts X11.app, use: 

defaults write org.macports.X11 enable_test_extensions -boolean true 

This only needs to be done once.
--->  Cleaning xdotool

Sending the key 'a' to your X-sessions

$ xdotool key 'a'

The tool has a lot of ways of interacting with the windows, and for our purposes it has a option to send a key and even mouse .

$ xdotool
Usage: xdotool <cmd> <args>
Available commands:
  getactivewindow
  getwindowfocus
  getwindowname
  getwindowpid
  search
  selectwindow
  help
  version
  click
  getmouselocation
  key
  keydown
  keyup
  mousedown
  mousemove
  mousemove_relative
  mouseup
  type
  windowactivate
  windowfocus
  windowmap
  windowmove
  windowraise
  windowsize
  windowunmap
  windowreparent
  windowkill
  set_window
  behave
  set_num_desktops
  get_num_desktops
  set_desktop
  get_desktop
  set_desktop_for_window
  get_desktop_for_window
  get_desktop_viewport
  set_desktop_viewport

Interacting with VNC

Using Ruby-vnc

The easiest way I found to interact with a VNC session is by using the excellent ruby-vnc library http://code.google.com/p/ruby-vnc/

The example on the website gives you a good idea on how it works:

# launch xclock on localhost. note that there is an xterm in the top-left
Net::VNC.open 'localhost:0', :shared => true, :password => 'mypass' do |vnc|
  vnc.pointer_move 10, 10
  vnc.type 'xclock'
  vnc.key_press :return
end

Using vncviewer and xvfb

If you are not that confident with ruby, there is another option. Xvfb allows you to create a virtual screen on which you can interact. Together with the vncviewer (X-client) we can use it with xdotool to interact with a vnc session.

The first step is to create a vnc password file, as with vncviewer the password can not be supplied on the commandline.

Create password file name 'mypasswordfile'

$ vncpasswd mypasswordfile
Password:
Verify:

Start Xfvb screen (:1 means another display and 24 is the colordepth)

$ Xvfb  :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -fbdir /var/tmp/
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (dlopen(/usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so, 5): image not found)
(EE) GLX: could not load software renderer
(EE) XKB: Couldn't open rules file /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb/rules/base
(EE) XKB: No components provided for device Virtual core keyboard

Now we can start vncviewer (that logs in automatically) within the Virtual Frame buffer

$ DISPLAY=:1 vncviewer -FullColor --Passwordfile mypasswordfile localhost

Now we are back to using xdotool to interact with the session.

Interacting with RDP

Using properjavardp

Properjava rdp - http://properjavardp.sourceforge.net/ is a full implementation of the RDP protocol in Java. It doesn't seem to be maintained and several 'forks' are available.

I used the original source to get it running:

Import the src directory in a java project
Add the src files like RdpPacket_Localised for the src-1.4 directory
Add the jar files to the project (log4j.jar, ..)

The following code will give you an idea on how you can use it

package net.propero.rdp;

import java.net.InetAddress;
import net.propero.rdp.rdp5.Rdp5;
import net.propero.rdp.rdp5.VChannels;

public class SendKeysRdp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int logonflags = Rdp.RDP_LOGON_NORMAL;
        Rdp5 RdpLayer = null;
    
        VChannels channels = new VChannels();
        RdpLayer = new Rdp5(channels);
        Common.rdp = RdpLayer;      
        try {
/*
 *                  RdpLayer.connect(Options.username, InetAddress
                            .getByName(server), logonflags, Options.domain,
                            Options.password, Options.command,
                            Options.directory);         
 */
            RdpLayer.connect("Username", InetAddress.getByName("192.168.2.30") , logonflags, "Domain","Command", "","Directory");
            RdpLayer.sendInput(Input.getTime(), Input.RDP_INPUT_SCANCODE, Input.RDP_KEYPRESS, 0x1f, 0);

        } catch(Exception e){
            System.out.println(e.toString());
        }
    }
}

Using rdesktop and Xvfb

$ sudo port install rdesktop
$ Xvfb  :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -fbdir /var/tmp/
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (dlopen(/usr/X11/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so, 5): image not found)
(EE) GLX: could not load software renderer
(EE) XKB: Couldn't open rules file /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb/rules/base
(EE) XKB: No components provided for device Virtual core keyboard

$ DISPLAY=:1 rdesktop -u <username> -p <password> -d <domain> remotehost

Directly from C code re-using code from rdesktop

I found a link to an xrdp overflow tool that seems to use the rdp_send_scancode function to send the keystroke.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GIucABEgkT8J:packetstormsecurity.org/0904-exploits/xrdp-overflow.txt+rdp_send_scancode&cd=7&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be&client=firefox-a

Another cool trick I picked up, was the way to launch commands using rdesktop :

http://www.singularity.be/2008/03/using-rdesktop-to-script-windows.html

Virtualbox option

Virtualbox provides a way to send keyboard scancodes directly using it's excellent API. The option keyboardputscancode allows to specify the hex code of the scancode. You can also send multiple keycodes after each other. In my experience this doesn't work well for a long sequence. It seems the buffer it limited and your best option is to send the different keycodes in multiple calls to the command line.

VBoxManage controlvm        <uuid>|<name>
                            pause|resume|reset|poweroff|savestate|
                            acpipowerbutton|acpisleepbutton|
                            keyboardputscancode <hex> [<hex> ...]|

Using a non-headless solution

In order to automate visual tasks, there exist a lot of macro/recording tools, the downside of them is that they need an actual display to run. When scripting you are mostly looking for headless solutions though. The disadvantage of headless solutions is that they are cumbersome to create as you have to move the pointer and the keys at the exact spot.

Sikuli

When you are interacting with a session you as a person do a lot more then just typing things. You yourself also locate which window to focus, what button to click.

Sikuli is a great tool that tries to help you in those tasks. It uses image recognition tools to find the correct place on the screen. Think of it a visual scripting language for screen interaction. An example script looks like this:

It allows you use these commands within java and it seems that someone is working on replacing the java.awt.robot to a vnc version

More background can be found at:

The function type() simulates keyboard typing just as a user types text in a application. However, type() doesn't work for different keyboard layouts other than QWERTY, such as DVORAK. We provide a workaround paste() since 0.9.7 (20100127). The function paste() transfers text through system's clipboard, which is fully independent of keyboard layouts. A sample usage that paste "network" into a search box is shown as follows.

Other options

For completeness I provide different options I found useful

pywinauto : http://pywinauto.openqa.org/
autoit : http://www.autoitscript.com/
Using applescript: http://jehiah.cz/projects/ARD-SendUnixCommands.php

$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "LOGIN_NAME"'; \
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke tab'; \
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to delay 0.5'; \
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "PASSWORDHERE"'; \
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to delay 0.5'; \
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke return'

Replace LOGIN_NAME and PASSWORD with the proper values
Run as "root" user

Jo De Baer: Adelaide Australia - Beach Run and Wine Tasting

2010-08-29T11:24:07+00:00

Good time today: ran 13k in just over an hour, 12.9kph on average. A large part was on the beach. Bit better than my Provo run to the Salt Lake (average was 12.09kph), but then again that was at a much higher altitude. Today’s run brought my week’s total to 46k, which is more than my 42k goal. Was not easy, considering two time zone shifts of at least 8 hours each, and having a 6 day week (lost the 27th somewhere in the Pacific). I ran the whole week with my new set of shoes, Adistar Salvation 2. First impression is very good.

In the afternoon the people from our local Novell partner took us on a trip to the Fleurieu wine area. We visited D’Arenberg and Woodstock. I’m not a big wine drinker, but we had a glass of the 2004 Woodstock Cabernet Sauvignon during lunch, and I must say - “yum”.

Amedee Van Gasse: Visual Editor 1.4 voor Eclipse 3.6 (Helios)

2010-08-28T21:11:24+00:00

Een van de plugins die ik gebruik in Eclipse is Visual Editor. De installatie instructies zeggen dat je http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ve/updates/1.4/ moet invullen in de Install Manager.

En toen dook er een vies bugje op. Blijkbaar is Visual Editor nog niet voorzien op Eclipse 3.6. De bug staat in detail beschreven op de Eclipse Community Forums. Kort samengevat verwacht VE één heel specifieke versie van com.ibm.icu, in plaats van te kijken naar een minimum versie.

Gelukkig is er een vriendelijke Japanse medemens die al de manifest files van VE aangepast heeft zodat er niet meer gekeken wordt naar één bepaalde versie. Het resultaat daarvan is te vinden op http://sourceforge.jp/projects/tmdmaker/wiki/VisualEditor1.4.0ForHelios. Uitpakken, in de dropins folder zetten, GEF SDK en EMF SDK installeren, Eclipse herstarten, klaar.

Sharing is caring, dus bij deze. En ook nog: arigato, nakaG.

Amedee Van Gasse: Mijn plugins voor Java development in Eclipse

2010-08-28T21:10:57+00:00

Ik heb me ingeschreven voor een cursus Java in avondschool. Om er direct al goed in te vliegen, installeer ik nu al Eclipse, nog voor de eerste les. En ja, ik weet 100% zeker dat Eclipse gaat gebruikt worden.

Vorig jaar heb ik wel eens EasyEclipse gebruikt, maar ik ga het nu houden bij een "standaard" Eclipse waarin ik alleen die plugins installeer die ik echt ga gebruiken. Voorlopig zijn dat de volgende:

Visual Editor
Er is wel een probleem mee, maar een vriendelijke Japanse medemens heeft dat kunnen oplossen.
AnyEdit
EGit

Welke Eclipse plugins raden jullie mij nog aan? De comments staan open.

Patrick Debois: ssh tricks - the usual and beyond

2010-08-27T13:16:34+00:00

SSH is an amazing beast. I nearly use it everyday and I'm amazed every time I learn something new. The following is a list of my tricks in the bag. It starts with the usual tricks that you find all over the place, but I hope there will be some new tricks for you too.

What's your best trick? Share it in the comments with the world. Nobody can know enough of ssh!

The basics:

Password-less login:

This is usually the first thing start doing when want automation with ssh

#Create a new keypair
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/patrick/.ssh/id_dsa): 
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in /Users/patrick/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /Users/patrick/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
87:66:b7:a0:f6:0e:6a:71:2c:5d:ee:5f:17:2a:b7:2f patrick@localhost
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ DSA 1024]----+
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
|        ..       |
|     o oS o   .  |
|    o ++.+ . . . |
|     ++.  o + .  |
|    .o o.  +Eo   |
|   ..  .o.. .o.  |
+-----------------+
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh user@remotehost "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
$ ssh user@remotehost

Install your keys on a remote server:

$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@remotehost
#Alternative 
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh user@remotehost "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Passphrase automation:

If you have protected your keys with a passphrase (which you should), then it is annoying to re-enter that all the time. You can avoid that by running your environment inside an ssh-agent and using ssh-add to enter the passphrase once.

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_dsa
Need passphrase for /home/mah/.ssh/id_dsa (you@example.com).
Enter passphrase:
$

Pseudo Terminal :

some commands like sudo require a pseudo terminal to be activated

$ ssh -t patrick@remotehost sudo cat /etc/passwd

Avoid lastlog:

$ ssh -T user@hostname.com

Piping

Example of using piping to backup over the network

$ ufsdump 0uf - /dev/md/rdsk/d33 | ssh r280n "dd obs=32k ibs=32k of=/dev/rmt/0n"

Rsync over ssh

$ rsync -avz -e "ssh -i /home/thisuser/cron/thishost-rsync-key" remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/dir /this/dir/

Tunnels and firewall-piercings:

X-forwarding:

$ ssh -X patrick@remotehost
Warning: untrusted X11 forwarding setup failed: xauth key data not generated
Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
Last login: Fri Aug 27 20:27:40 2010

Port forwarding:

Set up a localforward from the remote machine port 25 to a local port 9025

$ ssh -L 9025:localhost:25 patrick@remotehost

No command:

Sometimes you just want to setup a forward with having a shell

$ ssh -N -L 9025:localhost:25 patrick@remotehost

KeepAlive:

Getting tired of those timeouts by the firewall? Have ssh send a keepalive/

Put the following options in your $HOME/.ssh/ssh_config

    KeepAlive yes
    ServerAliveInterval 60

Socks Daemon for proxying: (-D)

Sometimes it's interesting to start a socks daemon. You can configure this in your browser to surf as it seems to come from the remote machine.

$ ssh -D 9999 patrick@remotehost

Tunneling over an http proxy:

Corporate firewalls often only allow http to go outside. See corkscrew

ProxyCommand /usr/bin/corkscrew proxy-ip 8080 %h %p ~/.ssh/myauth

Chaining ssh hopping:

Host pc1.example.org pc2.example.org
ForwardAgent yes
ProxyCommand ssh -qax bastion.example.org /usr/bin/nc -w 120 %h %p

Netcat mode:

Starting from openssh 5.4: we can have ssh act as netcat. (-W) This connects stdio on the client to a single port forward on the server. This allows, for example, using ssh as a ProxyCommand to route connections via intermediate servers.”

$ ssh -p 443 -W remotehost2:23 patrick@remotehost
Trying remotehost2...
Connected to remotehost2.
Escape character is '^]'.

User Name : ^]
telnet> close
$

Mounting over ssh:

Sometimes it's nice to mount a remote directory over ssh. Fuse and sshfs are your friend

$ sshfs remote-user@remote.server:/remote/directory /mnt/remote-fs/

http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

VPN Tunneling:

Did you know that ssh can do layer 2 and 3 VPN tunneling?

Check out ssh -w. Example from manpage:

$ ssh -f -w 0:1 192.168.1.15 true
$ ifconfig tun0 10.0.50.1 10.0.99.1 netmask 255.255.255.252

SSH http multiplexer:

sslh lets one accept both HTTPS and SSH connections on the same port. It makes it possible to connect to an SSH server on port 443 (e.g. from inside a corporate firewall) while still serving HTTPS on that port. http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh.shtml

Speed

Compression

If you are working on a slow link, compression (-C) and using a simple cipher (-c blowfish) saves you speed

$ ssh -C -c blowfish patrick@remotehost

Multiplexing - ControlMaster:

Another great way to speed up ssh is to re-use the same connection when you connect multiple times to the same host

$ mkdir –p ~/.ssh/connections
$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh/connections

Add this to your ~/.ssh/config file:
Host *
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/connections/%r_%h_%p

Managing keys

Ignore Hostkeys:

When you're re-installing a machine over and over again, you often want to get rid of the hostfile key verification. This is what you need:

$ ssh user@host -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null

Check if hostkey exists:

k$ ssh-keygen -F 192.168.2.152
# Host 192.168.2.152 found: line 31 type RSA
192.168.2.152 ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAwHH15HpeJo21wyqpe2iFM8/0CtoYnE9DDXfCewws7iMhM+vgp7pjnaC83IgAt7G/x/VDHcbnyuI4odrGSEAE5wm7LNuT6uSfQMbXCayE+uoOIrAVhf41ZnAFQrs/+Mutk5LFEjPPNhuriq5ltBT4UwMlYQMa5z/SzmxV0ZAGXks5GMDz0o89yUwRarRfsGudASEtzUxgnxnOo5STBMZOdQ0GNEVdfJDgfJDAOi34T1FidpCqAtm8akYuB+Qsj3/hDQmIT+GsKYaGNZvz8ZNnPBAc9kWlS6VqXXNreyEeu7AmHDWXjMP3NW1tsibmZ8zeOSZdmEVEiuaYCIvERDq3MQ==

Remove a hostkey:

$ ssh-keygen -R 192.168.2.152
/Users/patrick/.ssh/known_hosts updated.
Original contents retained as /Users/patrick/.ssh/known_hosts.old

Get hostkey of remote server:

$ ssh-keyscan remotehost
# remotehost SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.2
remotehost ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAyREFGMBB6Qi1uoEYIk4GlqLXdS26moAxmV69UX0icQjp0Rw53xZ/2L0ZQwhsUiFV1vq4QfZNeUO142IzBgSspgsJZ7wJq213tsE7WIJGIBqvWnhU3vJuL9wgYT8f6BAvLoEfapFhLy24TDmn2DXldJAYgo8MnUbRrJlvnhQZPpd5cDWCXkzPGQE8r7REZsAWbWNlVOFRvZioPoGCGYMtsDWSBelBISGkedoNpTSpRkMmBAnsHBfvIzDPoTDYL4PZR0jJ8MaJrDhRtD4caRw4HVyhzSa3/FCpcm09PyBRabH/CyxNSOZjLc2+N9Ph9AKeTNgvmxP70wx668XaGYwCrQ==

SSH DNS Keys

Instead of using your local hostfile, you can store your keys in DNS. Have a look at sshfp to do the job. Then you can specify that ssh needs to

$ ssh localhost -o "VerifyHostKeyDNS=yes"
yes authenticity of host 'localhost (127.0.0.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 2d:d3:29:bd:4d:e2:7d:a3:b0:15:96:26:d4:60:13:34.
Matching host key fingerprint found in DNS.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

SSH Escape Sequences:

It often happens to me that I'm working into an ssh shell that used forwarding. I always thought there was no way to change the forwarding rules and that I had to logout. It seems not! SSh has an internal shell activated by a tilde. Seeing is believing!

Escape sequences are only recognized after a newline and are initiated with a tilde (~) unless you modify it with the -e flag.

Hit ENTER ~? on a running ssh session to see a list of escapes:

Supported escape sequences:

~. – terminate connection
~B – send a BREAK to the remote system
~C – open a command line
~R – Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
~^Z – suspend ssh
~# – list forwarded connections
~& – background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? – this message
~~ – send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)
~. and ~# are particularly useful.

Visualize hostkeys:

Every host key has it's own visual fingerprint

$ ssh -o VisualHostKey=yes patrick@localhost
Host key fingerprint is 9f:a0:03:c1:63:8b:b8:c6:d6:83:cb:22:33:cb:83:cc
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|                 |
|   .             |
|    =            |
| . o +           |
|. . o   S        |
|..o  . . o .     |
|== o  o   o      |
|@E. .  .         |
|+B.              |
+-----------------+

Security hacks

Local Password sniffing:

If you have process that connects to your ssh and you want to see the password it's using, then strace is your friend.

$ ps axuww | egrep 'PID|ssh'
#Now become root and attach to the running daemon with strace, changing the PID as appropriate:

$ sudo strace -f -e 'read,write' -p12345

Remote Password sniffing:

A more passive way of listening into ssh sessions (v1) is using dsniff - Dsniff

Fingerprint fuzzing:

This one is to lure a lazy administrator into accepting your certificate. It generates keys with an almost similar fingerprint. http://freeworld.thc.org/papers/ffp.html

SSH Honeypot:

And to go totally security. Launch your own ssh honeypot and capture all the remote commands (and typos) with Kippo

Need more?

Top 50 SSH Helper tools - OMG!

Share yours! I'm definitely interested

Geert Vanderkelen: Find out if every element of a list is part of another, with Python

2010-08-27T08:57:02+00:00

Update 2010-08-27: Comments indicated that what I did here is not the best solution. Like noted in my original post, a set would be better in this case. I eventually used set(r).issubset(set(l)). Marius also pointed out to set(r) = set(l), but I like the issubset one more.

I wanted to check if every element of one list or tuple is part of another one using Python. A set has the issubset()-method, but I couldn't find anything build-in for a tuple. It was, however, rather quickly done:

>>> r = (1,2)
>>> l = (3,4,1,5,2)
>>> False not in [ e in l for e in r ]
True
>>> r = (1,9)
>>> False not in [ e in l for e in r ]
False

Why I'm posting this? I just found it cute code, somehow.

Geert Vanderkelen: Using Globals in Pylons.. everywhere

2010-08-26T19:06:15+00:00

In Pylons v1.0 you can define global variables by adding them to the Globals-class. If you want a variable called spam and you want it to be globally available, your lib.app_globals.Globals-class would look like this:

class Globals(object):
  def __init__(self, config):
    self.cache = CacheManager(**parse_cache_config_options(config))
    self.spam = False

To use it in a model-module for example, you have to import app_globals from the pylons module, like this:

from pylons import app_globals as g

print g.spam

It took me a while to figure this out.. And I'm starting to like Pylons somehow.

Geert Vanderkelen: AppleScript exporting photos from Aperture

2010-08-26T18:48:17+00:00

The following AppleScript will:

Prompt for a destination folder
Ask for an album name, which will be a folder in destination folder
Get currently selected photo(s) from Aperture
Store the image files using the Image ID of Aperture
Store some META information in a text file, with similar name as image file

The export format is PNG 1024x1024. I needed only that, so I hardcoded it.

Note dependencies: You need the renameFile, joinList and splitString functions found in earlier blog entries.

property defExportSetting : "PNG - Fit within 1024 x 1024"

on apertureExport(fldAlbum)
 tell application "Aperture"
  set imageSel to (get selection)
 end tell
 
 set out to {}
 repeat with img in imageSel
  tell application "Aperture"
   set kwList to (get id of every keyword of img)
   set imgDate to value of EXIF tag "ImageDate" of img
  end tell
  set imgId to id of img
  
  set imgName to name of img
  set imgTags to my joinList(kwList, ",")
  
  copy "Name: " & imgName to end of out
  copy "Tags: " & imgTags to end of out
  copy "ApertureId: " & imgId to end of out
  
  set dstFileMeta to (fldAlbum & imgId & ".meta") as string
 end repeat
 
 tell application "Aperture"
  set dstFile to (export imageSel using export setting defExportSetting to fldAlbum)
 end tell
 set dstFile to my renameFile(dstFile, imgId)
 copy "File: " & (POSIX path of dstFile) to end of out
 tell application "Finder"
 end tell
 
 set fp to open for access file dstFileMeta with write permission
 write (joinList of out given delimiter:return) to fp
 close access fp
 
end apertureExport

on run
 set dstFolder to (choose folder with prompt "Choose an destination") as text
 set dlgAlbum to display dialog "Album name" buttons {"OK", "Cancel"} default answer "Picture pool"
 
 set dstAlbum to (text returned of dlgAlbum) as text
 
 tell application "Finder"
  if not (exists alias (dstFolder & dstAlbum)) then
   make new folder at alias (dstFolder) with properties {name:dstAlbum}
  end if
 end tell
 set fldAlbum to (dstFolder & dstAlbum) as alias
 
 apertureExport(fldAlbum)
end run

This script is safe, but I don't take any responsibility when it screws up you Aperture library. It shouldn't really, I coded it on my main library: hardcore!

Geert Vanderkelen: Renaming a file using AppleScript

2010-08-26T18:36:42+00:00

The following AppleScript function renames a file. If you thought this to be a simple thing, try to write it without looking here below. I spend a lot time on this, I might not even use it, but here it is for other mortals wishing to lose weight exercising AppleScript:

to renameFile(oldAlias, newFileName)
 tell application "Finder"
  set f to item (oldAlias as text)
  tell f
   set ext to its name extension
   set nFn to (newFileName & "." & ext)
   set its name to nFn
  end tell
 end tell
 set tmp to my splitString(oldAlias as text, ":")
 set the last item of tmp to nFn
 return my joinList(tmp, ":")
end renameFile

No comments in code, I do not want to spoil your fun!

I needed while writing an export script for Aperture. Here is how I used it after a photo was exported from Aperture:

tell application "Aperture"
 set dstFile to (export imageSel using export setting defExportSetting to fldAlbum)
end tell
set dstFile to my renameFile(dstFile, imgId)

Geert Vanderkelen: Splitting as string and joining a list using AppleScript

2010-08-26T18:36:19+00:00

Two small helper AppleScript functions for joining a list and splitting a string given delimiter. Sure, quite an easy task, but it involves setting a global delimiter. Bit like FS in shell. I hope this helps a few folks out there starting out with AppleScript.

to joinList(aList, delimiter)
 set retVal to ""
 set prevDelimiter to AppleScript's text item delimiters
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to delimiter
 set retVal to aList as string
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevDelimiter
 return retVal
end joinList

to splitString(aString, delimiter)
 set retVal to {}
 set prevDelimiter to AppleScript's text item delimiters
 log delimiter
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {delimiter}
 set retVal to every text item of aString
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevDelimiter
 return retVal
end splitString

Here a few lines showing how to use them:

set tmp to my splitString(oldAlias as text, ":")
set imgTags to my joinList(kwList, ",")

Again, no comments! Enjoy!

Thomas Vander Stichele: long life external batteries for laptops ?

2010-08-26T18:19:27+00:00

I’m probably going to be doing some long flights pretty soon and I’d like to maximize my laptop time hacking on the plane.

Who of you have experience with big external batteries, what’s a good one to get, how long can I expect them to last and how long do they take to charge ?

Sébastien Wains: Red Hat Cluster Suite monitoring with SNMP

2010-08-26T18:04:43+00:00

I’ll consider your cluster is already up and running.

Install cluster-snmp (available in Red Hat Cluster repository) :

yum install cluster-snmp

Let’s see what we have in there :

# rpm -ql cluster-snmp /usr/lib/cluster-snmp /usr/lib/cluster-snmp/libClusterMonitorSnmp.so /usr/share/doc/cluster-snmp-0.12.1 /usr/share/doc/cluster-snmp-0.12.1/COPYING /usr/share/doc/cluster-snmp-0.12.1/README /usr/share/doc/cluster-snmp-0.12.1/README.snmpd /usr/share/doc/cluster-snmp-0.12.1/REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB /usr/share/doc/cluster-snmp-0.12.1/REDHAT-MIB /usr/share/snmp/mibs/REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB /usr/share/snmp/mibs/REDHAT-MIB

Now on every node of the cluster, edit /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and add this :

At the very beginning of the file :
dlmod RedHatCluster /usr/lib/cluster-snmp/libClusterMonitorSnmp.so

If you run a 64 bits node :
dlmod RedHatCluster /usr/lib64/cluster-snmp/libClusterMonitorSnmp.so

After other view items :
view systemview included REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB:RedHatCluster

Now reload SNMP and restart modclusterd :
service snmpd reload service modclusterd restart

You should now be able to query your nodes with any LDAP client.

On a Linux client, copy the MIB’s from the RPM under ~/.snmp/mibs and then run :

$ snmpwalk -v 2c -c public node1.example.com REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::RedHatCluster REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcMIBVersion.0 = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterName.0 = STRING: "MailServerExample" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterStatusCode.0 = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterStatusDesc.0 = STRING: "All services and nodes functional" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterVotesNeededForQuorum.0 = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterVotes.0 = INTEGER: 2 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterQuorate.0 = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterNodesNum.0 = INTEGER: 2 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterNodesNames.0 = STRING: "node1.example.com, node2.example.com" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterAvailNodesNum.0 = INTEGER: 2 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterAvailNodesNames.0 = STRING: "node1.example.com, node2.example.com" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterUnavailNodesNum.0 = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterUnavailNodesNames.0 = "" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterServicesNum.0 = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterServicesNames.0 = STRING: "MailServer" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterRunningServicesNum.0 = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterRunningServicesNames.0 = STRING: "MailServer" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterStoppedServicesNum.0 = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterStoppedServicesNames.0 = "" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterFailedServicesNum.0 = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterFailedServicesNames.0 = "" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeName."node1.example.com" = STRING: "node1.example.com" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeName."node2.example.com" = STRING: "node2.example.com" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeStatusCode."node1.example.com" = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeStatusCode."node2.example.com" = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeStatusDesc."node1.example.com" = STRING: "Participating in cluster" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeStatusDesc."node2.example.com" = STRING: "Participating in cluster" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeRunningServicesNum."node1.example.com" = INTEGER: 1 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeRunningServicesNum."node2.example.com" = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeRunningServicesNames."node1.example.com" = STRING: "MailServer" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcNodeRunningServicesNames."node2.example.com" = "" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcServiceName."MailServer" = STRING: "MailServer" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcServiceStatusCode."MailServer" = INTEGER: 0 REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcServiceStatusDesc."MailServer" = STRING: "running" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcServiceStartMode."MailServer" = STRING: "automatic" REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcServiceRunningOnNode."MailServer" = STRING: "node1.example.com"

You are now provided with very interesting information, like :
REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcClusterStatusDesc REDHAT-CLUSTER-MIB::rhcServiceRunningOnNode

Tom Baeyens: Alfresco Developer Conferences In Paris And New York

2010-08-26T16:02:56+00:00

The timing of the Alfresco Developer Conferences couldn't be better for Activiti. The one in Paris is October 20-21 and the one in New York is 3-4 November: Exactly around the time that Activiti 5.0 GA will be released.

I'll be speaking together with Joram about it and also Erik Winlof who started the Activiti Explorer and Activiti Probe web UI's is present so you can expect some nice demos and concrete insights.

Hope to see you there!

Fabian Arrotin: FrOSCon 2010 is over .. waiting now for 2011 :-)

2010-08-26T14:40:10+00:00

It was the first time that I was at FrOSCon and I admit I enjoyed it. Not only because I can always see in real life some other CentOS contributors (thanks again Andreas, Sarah, Didi and Christoph), but also because I can see some other people really happy with CentOS. Last year (even if i was not there), CentOS was used to ‘power’ some TFT screens at the entrance. So we did the same this year and just because Dag asked it, we took a picture this year too

Patrick Debois: Webby Rss feed and Syntax Highlighting

2010-08-26T14:37:23+00:00

When I first started blogging I used Wordpress, while it was nice at that time, it felt rather cumbersome to use for posting technical stuff like code samples. Also having everything in the database make it difficult to use my favorite text editor to manage my content. So I decided to move to Webby : it allows you to use the power of ruby erb inside you html pages without the overkill of running a rails Another advantage is that it creates static html so it's both fast and secure.

I've been running it now for more then a year and have been happy ever since. This blogpost shares some of my scripts/enhancements I've used:

Wordpress exporter to Webby : this was my first challenge, how do I get everything from my wordpress out of that database. I wrote a little script that reads from the RSS feed of the wordpress and export everything into webby structure . It's not the most robust script (it was early stages ruby for me at that time), but you'll get the idea.
RSS feed in Webby: I didn't find any good rss feed code, most of it didn't pass the rss validation. So here you can find my take on it. As a bonus the script tries to make your images absolute, which is important for having your images displayed in some rss feedreaders.
Absoultify helper: It takes a string of an filename and prepends the correctpath before it to make it an absolute URL
Highlighting with Coderay : webby includes a way to highlight parts of the code. This works very well, but I found myself missing a way to include a file instead of pasting the code directly into the blogpost. This has many advantages: I can edit the file separate and the correct syntax highlighting in my favorite text editor still works. And the escaping works better for ruby code as there can not be a problem with escaping special characters.

This is all for now.

Codify helper: put inside your webby-root/lib

if try_require 'coderay'
require 'enumerator'

Loquacious.configuration_for(:webby) {
  desc <<-__
    Options for CodeRay syntax highlighting. See the CodeRay home page
    (http://coderay.rubychan.de/) for more information about the available
    options.
  __
  codify {
    desc 'The language being highlighted (given as a symbol).'
    lang :ruby

    desc 'The file you want to read instead of a string'
    lang :file

    desc 'Include line numbers in :table, :inline, :list or nil (no line numbers).'
    line_numbers nil

    desc 'Where to start line number counting.'
    line_number_start 1

    desc 'Make every N-th number appear bold.'
    bold_every 10

    desc 'Tabs will be converted into this number of space characters.'
    tab_width 8
  }
}

module Webby::Helpers
module CodifyHelper

  # The +codify+ method applies syntax highlighting to source code embedded
  # in a webpage. The CodeRay highlighting engine is used for the HTML
  # markup of the source code. The page sections to be highlighted are given
  # as blocks of text to the +coderay+ method.
  #
  # Options can be passed to the CodeRay engine via attributes in the
  # +codify+ method.
  #
  #    <% codify( :lang => "ruby", :line_numbers => "inline" ) do -%>
  #    # Initializer for the class.
  #    def initialize( string )
  #      @str = stirng
  #    end
  #    <% end -%>
  #    
  # The supported Codify options are the following:
  #
  #    :lang               : the language to highlight (ruby, c, html, ...)
  #    :file               : the file to highlight
  #    :line_numbers       : include line numbers in 'table', 'inline',
  #                          or 'list'
  #    :line_number_start  : where to start with line number counting
  #    :bold_every         : make every n-th number appear bold
  #    :tab_width          : convert tab characters to n spaces
  #
  
  def codify( *args, &block )
    opts = args.last.instance_of?(Hash) ? args.pop : {}

    parent=File.dirname(@page.path)
     file=opts[:file]
    text=""
    if (!file.nil?) 
      begin
        filename=parent+File::SEPARATOR+file
        file=File.open(filename,"rb")
        text=file.read
        syntax=guess_syntax(filename)
        if !syntax.nil? && opts[:lang].nil? then
          opts[:lang]=syntax
       end
      rescue
        puts "Error reading code file"+filename
      end
    else
      text = capture_erb(&block)
    end
    
    return if text.empty?

    defaults = ::Webby.site.coderay
    lang = opts.getopt(:lang, defaults.lang).to_sym

    cr_opts = {}
    %w(line_numbers       to_sym
       line_number_start  to_i
       bold_every         to_i
       tab_width          to_i).each_slice(2) do |key,convert|
      key = key.to_sym
      val = opts.getopt(key, defaults[key])
      next if val.nil?
      cr_opts[key] = val.send(convert)
    end

    #cr.swap(CodeRay.scan(text, lang).html(opts).div)
    out = %Q{<div class="CodeRay">\n<pre>}
    out << ::CodeRay.scan(text, lang).html(cr_opts)
    out << %Q{</pre>\n</div>}

    # put some guards around the output (specifically for textile)
    out = _guard(out)

    concat_erb(out, block.binding)
    return
  end

  def guess_syntax(filename)
    extension=case File.extname(filename).downcase
      when ".rb" then :ruby
      when ".html",".html" then :html
      when ".sh" then :sh
      when ".css" then :css
      when ".js" then :java_script
      when ".diff" then :diff
      when ".yaml" then :yaml
      when ".json" then :json
      when ".java" then :java
      when ".xml" then :xml
      when ".txt" then :plaintext
      when ".py" then :python
      when ".xml" then :xml
      when ".c" then :c
      when ".sql" then :sql
      else nil
    end
    return extension

  end

end  # module CodefyHelper

register(CodifyHelper)

end  # module Webby::Helpers
end  # try_require

# EOF

Rss feed file

---
title:     JEDI - Just Enough Developed Infrastructure
subtitle:  www.jedi.be
description: development, infrastructure and other stuff
site:      www.jedi.be
author:    Patrick Debois
email:     Patrick.Debois@jedi.be
extension: xml
layout:    nil
dirty:     true
filter:    
- erb
# <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://www.jedi.be/css/blueprint/screen.css"?>
---
<%- require 'rexml/document' -%>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
        <channel>
                <atom:link href="http://www.jedi.be/blog/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
                <title><%= h(@page.title) %></title>
                <description><%= h(@page.description) %> </description>
                <link>http://<%= @page.site %>/blog</link>
                <pubDate><%= Time.now.gmtime.rfc822 %></pubDate>
                <generator>webby rss script</generator>
                <lastBuildDate><%= Time.now.gmtime.rfc822 %></lastBuildDate>
                <managingEditor><%= @page.email %> (<%= @page.author %>)</managingEditor>
                <webMaster><%= @page.email %> (<%= @page.author %>)</webMaster>
                <language>en</language>
         <%- @pages.find( :limit => 10,
                 :in_directory => 'blog',
                 :recursive => true,
                 :sort_by => 'created_at',
                 :reverse => true).each do |article|

             next if article.blog_post.nil?
         -%>
                <item>
                        <title><%= h(article.title) %></title>
                        <link>http://<%= @page.site %><%= article.url %></link>
                        <% if article.guid.nil? %>
                        <guid isPermaLink="false">http://<%= @page.site %><%= article.url%></guid>
                        <% else %>
                        <guid isPermaLink="false"><%= article.guid %></guid>
                        <% end %>
                        <pubDate><%= article.created_at.gmtime.rfc822 %></pubDate>
                        <comments>http://<%= @page.site %><%= article.url %>#comments</comments>
                        <description><%= normaltext=render(article); 
                        normaltext.gsub!('<img src="/', '<img src="http://'+@page.site+'/')
                        normaltext.gsub!("<img src='/", "<img src='http://"+@page.site+'/')

                         h(normaltext) %></description>
                
                        <%- if !article.keywords.nil? %>
                                <%- article.keywords.each do |keyword| %>
                                           <category><![CDATA[<%= keyword %>]]></category>
                                <%- end %>
                   <% else %>
                           <% if !article.tags.nil? %>
                                        <%- article.tags.each do |tag| %>
                                                   <category><![CDATA[<%= tag %>]]></category>
                                        <% end %>
                        <% end %>
                   <% end %>
                        <content:encoded><![CDATA[<%= REXML::CData.new(render(article)) %>]]></content:encoded>
                </item>
        <% end %>
        </channel>
</rss>

Wordpress to webby conversion script

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'rfeedparser'
require 'pp'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

def write_feed(feed)
  pp feed.title
  pp feed.subtitle
  pp feed.links[0].href

  @site_url=feed.wp_base_blog_url
  #feed.wp_base_site_url
  #feed.updated
  #feed.generator
  #feed.updated_time
  #feed.updated_parsed
  #feed.wp_tag_name
  #feed.wp_tag_slug
  #feed.wp_cat_name
  #feed.wp_category_parent
  #feed.wp_category
  #feed.wp_wxr_version
end

def write_entry(e)
  #File.open(local_filename, 'w') {|f| f.write(doc) }
  
  base=e.link.gsub(@site_url+'/','').gsub(e.wp_post_name+'/', '')
  path=@webby_dir+"/"+base+'/'+e.wp_post_name
  FileUtils.mkdir_p path
  filename="index.html"
  @counter=@counter+1
  
  #write entries
  puts "[#{@counter}]creating "+path+"/"+filename
  File.open(path+"/"+filename, 'w') { |f| 
    f.write("---\n") 
    f.write("title: "+"\""+e.title+"\""+"\n")
    f.write("author: "+e.author+"\n")
    f.write("guid: "+e.guid+"\n")
    format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.0 +00:00"
    #created_at: 2009-09-10 22:16:41.382708 +02:00
    f.write("created_at: "+ Time.parse(e.wp_post_date).strftime(format)+"\n")
    f.write("blog_post: "+ "true\n")
    f.write("filter:\n")
    f.write("  - erb\n")
    f.write("  - basepath\n")
#    f.write("  - tidy\n")

    tags=Hash.new
    categories=Hash.new
    rssterms=e.tags
    rssterms.each { |t|
      scheme=t['scheme']
      term=t['term']
      if scheme=='tag'
        tags[term]=''   
      end
      if scheme=='category'
        categories[term]=''   
      end
    }
    f.write("categories:\n")
    categories.keys.each { |c| 
      f.write("   - #{c}\n")
    }
    f.write("tags:\n")
    tags.keys.each { |c| 
      f.write("   - #{c}\n")
    }

    #f.write("  - maruku\n")
    f.write("---\n")
    #fixing empty lines to be a hard break
    f.write(e.content[0].value.gsub(/\n\n/,"\n<br>\n")) 
    
    #fixing URL's for the images and relative paths
  }
  #fixing directory urls
  
  #browsing subdirectories index.html?


  puts "---------------------------"
  
  
  return
  
  puts e.link

  puts counter.to_s+":"
  #e.wp_post_date
  pp e.wp_post_type
  pp e.title
  #e.summary_detail[0]
  #e.post_meta
  #e.wp_meta_key
  pp e.wp_post_name
  #e.wp_post_date_gmt
  pp e.author
  pp e.wp_post_id
  pp e.wp_status
  #e.wp_comment_status
  #e.summary
  #e.guidislink
  #e.title_detail[0]
  #e.wp_meta_value
  pp e.wp_post_parent
  #e.wp_ping_status
  #pp e.content[0].value
  pp e.content[0].type
  pp e.content[0].language
  pp e.links[0].href
  #e.links[0].rel
  #e.links[0].type
  pp e.link
  #e.wp_post_password
  #e.wp_menu_order
  #e.wp_post_id
  #e.excerpt_encoded
  pp e.updated
  #e.updated_time
  e.updated_parsed
  
end

def download_attachment(e)
  url=e.wp_attachment_url
  puts url
  base=@webby_dir+"/"+url.gsub(@site_url+'/','').gsub(e.wp_post_name+'/', '')
  directory=File.dirname(base)
  filename=File.basename(base)
  puts directory
  puts filename
  FileUtils.mkdir_p directory
  
  myURI = URI.parse(url)
  pp myURI
  Net::HTTP.start(myURI.host) { |http|
    resp = http.get(myURI.path)
    open(directory+'/'+filename, "wb") { |file|
      file.write(resp.body)
     }
  }
end

def write_entries(entries)
  @counter=0
  entries.each { |e|
    
    if e.wp_post_type == 'post' && e.wp_status == 'publish'

      write_entry(e)
  end

    if e.wp_post_type == 'attachment'
      #we should download it      
      download_attachment(e)
  end

  }
end

if ARGV.length < 2
  puts "Usage: wp2ruby <feed_url> <webby_dir>"
  exit
end

@feed_url=ARGV[0]
@webby_dir=ARGV[1]
@site_url=""

wpr=""
begin
  wpr=FeedParser.parse(@feed_url)
rescue
  puts "Error parsing feed"+$!
  exit
end

write_feed(wpr.feed)
write_entries(wpr.entries)

Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Connector/Python and database pooling

2010-08-26T11:12:55+00:00

MySQL Connector/Python is (or should be) compliant with the Python DB-API 2.0 specification. This means that you can use DBUtils' PooledDB module to implement database connection pooling.

Here below you'll find an example which will output the connection ID of each connection requested through the pooling mechanism.

from DBUtils.PooledDB import PooledDB
import mysql.connector

def main():
    pool_size = 3
    pool = PooledDB(mysql.connector, pool_size,
        database='test', user='root', host='127.0.0.1')
    
    cnx = [None,] * pool_size
    for i in xrange(0,pool_size):
        cnx[i] = pool.connection()
        cur = cnx[i].cursor()
        cur.execute("SELECT CONNECTION_ID()")
        print "Cnx %d has ID %d" % (i+1,cur.fetchone()[0])
        cur.close()
    
    for c in cnx:
        c.close()

The output will be something like this:

Cnx 1 has ID 42
Cnx 2 has ID 41
Cnx 3 has ID 40

Wouter Verhelst: include povanim.mk

2010-08-26T01:58:00+00:00

I was finding myself to be running the same povray command lines over and over again. And then ffmpeg2theora. And occasionally forget to update one or two .png files in the mean time, because I was trying and trying and trying some stuff all the time, and forgot that one frame in the final render. That's silly; that's why we have make.

So I wrote me a makefile.

START := $(shell grep 'Initial_Frame' $(INIFILE) | cut -d'=' -f 2)
STOP := $(shell grep 'Final_Frame' $(INIFILE) | cut -d'=' -f 2)
NUMBERS := $(shell seq -w $(START) $(STOP) )
POVFILE := $(shell grep 'Input_File_Name' $(INIFILE) | cut -d'"' -f 2)
ifeq ($(OUTPUT),)
OUTPUT := $(basename $(shell grep 'Output_File_Name' $(INIFILE) | cut -d'"' -f 2))
endif
ifeq ($(OUTPUT),)
OUTPUT := $(basename $(INIFILE))_$(basename $(POVFILE))
endif
PNGFILES := $(foreach nr, $(NUMBERS), $(OUTPUT)$(nr).png)
LEN := $(shell echo "$(STOP)" | wc -m)

$(OUTPUT).ogv : PATTERN := $(OUTPUT)%$(LEN)d
$(OUTPUT).ogv : $(PNGFILES)
	ffmpeg2theora -f image2 -i '$(PATTERN)'.png -o $@

$(OUTPUT)%.png : ONAME := $(OUTPUT)
$(OUTPUT)%.png : INAME := $(INIFILE)
$(OUTPUT)%.png: $(POVFILE) $(INIFILE)
	povray $(INAME) -D +SF'$*' +EF'$*' +O$(ONAME)

ifeq ($(CLEANFILES),)
clean:
	$(RM) $(CLEANFILES)
endif

CLEANFILES := $(CLEANFILES) $(PNGFILES)

The first part, to just write the makefile so that it would work, was easy. The second bit, write it so that you can include it in the same Makefile several times and have it generate patterns for the files you need, without having them conflict with eachother, was... slightly harder. But not impossible, apparently, with GNU make.

Use like this:

INIFILE=foo.ini
include povanim.mk
INIFILE=bar.ini
OUTPUT=bar
include povanim.mk

with povanim.mk containing the above Makefile

Now just run 'make' or 'make bar.ogv', wait for the rendering and encoding to complete, and you have an animation film. You can even use make's '-j' option to speed up processing by using multiple processors. Which will no longer be useful when povray 3.7 comes out (since that uses multithreading to use all cores with a single povray instance, anyway), but it is for now.

Paul Cobbaut: simple zfs snapshot demo

2010-08-25T22:47:06+00:00

create a zfs file system on four disks

root@sol10u8 /# zpool create zzz c2t0d0 c2t1d0 c3t0d0 c3t1d0
root@sol10u8 /# zfs create zzz/data42

populate it with 2MB of data

root@sol10u8 /# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/zzz/data42/file2MB count=2048 bs=1024
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out

verify the used disk space is 2MB

root@sol10u8 /# zfs list -o space
NAME        AVAIL   USED  USEDSNAP  USEDDS  USEDREFRESERV  USEDCHILD
zzz         7.81G  2.11M         0     23K              0      2.09M
zzz/data42  7.81G  2.02M         0   2.02M              0          0

add 3MB

root@sol10u8 /# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/zzz/data42/file3MB count=3072 bs=1024
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out

wait a couple of seconds, then verify usage of diskspace
2MB + 3MB = 5MB

root@sol10u8 /# zfs list -o space
NAME        AVAIL   USED  USEDSNAP  USEDDS  USEDREFRESERV  USEDCHILD
zzz         7.81G  5.12M         0     23K              0      5.10M
zzz/data42  7.81G  5.03M         0   5.03M              0          0

create a snapshot to preserve this 5MB forever

root@sol10u8 /# zfs snapshot zzz/data42@Wednesday

snapshot = read only copy
snapshot = takes almost zero diskspace when created
snapshot = consumes diskspace as data changes
snapshot = because it keeps the original data

verify diskspace used by snapshot

root@sol10u8 /# zfs list -o space
NAME                  AVAIL   USED  USEDSNAP  USEDDS  USEDREFRESERV  USEDCHILD
zzz                   7.81G  5.12M         0     23K              0      5.10M
zzz/data42            7.81G  5.03M         0   5.03M              0          0
zzz/data42@Wednesday      -      0         -       -              -          -

force 3MB of data changes on the original file system

root@sol10u8 /# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/zzz/data42/file3MB count=3072 bs=1024
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out

this new 3MB of data was written over 3MB of existing data

wait a couple of seconds!!
then verify disk usage of file system and snapshot

root@sol10u8 /# zfs list -o space
NAME                  AVAIL   USED  USEDSNAP  USEDDS  USEDREFRESERV  USEDCHILD
zzz                   7.81G  8.15M         0     23K              0      8.13M
zzz/data42            7.81G  8.05M     3.02M   5.03M              0          0
zzz/data42@Wednesday      -  3.02M         -       -              -          -

notice that the snapshot uses 3MB --> it's keeping the original 3MB forever!
notice that the zpool consumes 8MB : 5MB of current data + 3MB snapshot data

copying the snapshot to another file system would total to 5MB
the same 5MB that existed at the time we took the snapshot
3MB inside the snapshot + 2MB of original data still on zzz/data42

add another 4MB of data to the file system

root@sol10u8 /# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/zzz/data42/file4MB count=4096 bs=1024
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out

wait a couple of seconds
verify that data42 now consumes 9MB
snapshot stays at 3MB
total for the pool is now 12 MB
12MB = 3MB snapshot + 2MB original data + 3MB new data + 4MB new data

root@sol10u8 /# zfs list -o space
NAME                  AVAIL   USED  USEDSNAP  USEDDS  USEDREFRESERV  USEDCHILD
zzz                   7.80G  12.2M         0     23K              0      12.1M
zzz/data42            7.80G  12.1M     3.02M   9.03M              0          0
zzz/data42@Wednesday      -  3.02M         -       -              -          -

this new 4MB data is in a new file, so it does not influence the snapshot

take a look at the file system

root@sol10u8 /# ls -l /zzz/data42/
total 18457
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     2097152 Aug 25 21:45 file2MB
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     3145728 Aug 25 21:49 file3MB
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     4194304 Aug 25 21:51 file4MB

take a look at the snapshot

root@sol10u8 /# ls -l /zzz/data42/.zfs/snapshot/Wednesday/
total 10256
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     2097152 Aug 25 21:45 file2MB
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     3145728 Aug 25 21:46 file3MB

notice the difference in the time stamp on the 3MB file!!

use zfs send/receive to copy the snapshot

zfs send zzz/data42@Wednesday | ssh server "zfs receive yyy/data42"

or use cp, tar, cpio, rsync... to backup a snapshot
www.linux-training.be explains these commands

destroy the snapshot

zfs destroy zzz/data42@Wednesday

FOSDEM organizers: Call for Main Speakers and Devrooms

2010-08-25T20:46:16+00:00

FOSDEM, the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the open source community, is taking place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 February 2011. Apart from having many invited speakers, the conference offers developer rooms, stands and lightning talks to projects from the Free and Open source community. This results in a staggering number of 250+ lectures!

We hereby invite ideas and proposals for main speakers, and proposals for developer rooms. The call for stands and lightning talks will be done after announcing the accepted devrooms.

Details and dates below.

FOSDEM organizers: Distribution Miniconf

2010-08-25T20:44:07+00:00

Last year we organized a Distribution Miniconf for the first time, and we are eager to do it again this year and improve the concept.

Subscribe to the mailinglist to join the discussion.

At FOSDEM we care strongly about open source projects small and large. FOSDEM was created as a meeting place where developers from different projects and with different backgrounds can come together and share ideas, discuss, etc.
The devrooms have always been premier place for this. However, in recent years we have reached the limit of our capacity, with more than double proposals over rooms available. Distributions have always had a strong presence at FOSDEM, however, we were faced with having to choose some distributions over others.

Holding the distro miniconf provides a way to better achieve our goals in two ways:
- by organizing a mini conference where all distributions can participate in, we foster collaboration and cross pollination,
- additionally, some rooms become available for use by other projects, thereby diversifying the audience and topics at FOSDEM.

Dieter Plaetinck: the "Community Contributions" section on the Arch Linux forums is a goldmine

2010-08-25T20:11:58+00:00

The Community contributions subforum of the Arch Linux forums is awesome.
It is the birthplace of many applications, most of them not Arch Linux specific.
File managers, media players, browsers, window managers, text editors, todo managers, and so on. Many shell scripts, urxvt extensions and dwm patches aswell.
Most of the apps are designed after suckless/KISS principles, but there are also some GUI programs.

If you like to discover new apps and tools, check it out.

Bert de Bruijn: Comparing bluetooth carkits

2010-08-25T20:07:51+00:00

Bluetooth carkits come in three main categories: those with bluetooth HSP, those with bluetooth HFP, and ones that do bluetooth SAP. Some implement multiple of these profiles and allow you to choose.

HSP (head set profile) is the simplest profile: your carkit is basically a speaker-microphone combo, and will play the received audio and send your voice to the telephone. The telephone connects to the cellular network and handles the call. HSP is commonly used in bluetooth earpieces.
HFP (hands free profile) is the most common protocol in carkits with a display: your phone still handles the call, and the carkit provides the two-way audio function just like HSP. But the carkit also has basic control over the phone: it can access the received/dialled/missed call lists. It can also instruct the phone to dial a number, to accept or to reject an incoming call. Most carkits also access the phonebook.
SAP (SIM access profile, also known as rSAP or SIM) is the most complex of the three: this carkit contains a cell phone ! The mobile phone will disconnect from the network, and lend its SIM card to the carkit phone. Calling is now done by the carkit phone. The carkit will typically also sync the phonebook of the phone via another bluetooth profile.

this is my list of pros and cons for all:

HSP pro: your phone can do everything it wants, and you speak to the carkit the way you'd speak into your phone. You still have 3G, and if your phone does smart tricks like voice commands, that probably still works over the carkit. You can seamlessly disconnect the bluetooth kit during a call and continue the call on your phone.
HSP con: your phone is the only place to control calls, see caller ID, etc. Also, your phone emits radiation inside your car.

HFP pro: you can still use your phone to control calls, but also the carkit display and buttons. On your phone, you'll still have 3G. In my experience, things like voice commands for your phone won't work anymore, but maybe your carkit has similar functionality. As with HSP, you can seamlessly disconnect/connect the carkit during a call.
HFP con: your phone emits radiation inside your car, although with a suitable cradle, your mobile phone may benefit from an external antenna. Depending on phone and carkit, you may not hear your personal ringtone anymore.

SAP pro: no more phone radiation inside your car! The carkit has an external antenna, which means better reception. Battery usage on your mobile phone is minimal.
SAP con: you can't seamlessly switch from carkit to mobile phone. Getting in your car during a call means ending the call and redialing from your carkit phone. Your phone can't do 3G anymore while connected to the carkit. Not all phones support this profile (most notably the iPhone doesn't). You don't hear your fancy personal ringtone anymore, because it's now you carkit phone that's ringing.

Litrik De Roy: Dynamic working sets

2010-08-25T10:28:41+00:00

If you have a lot of projects in your Eclipse workspace you should check out the Dynamic Working Sets plug-in.

It allows you to define working sets based on a regular expression. If a project name matches the regex it will be included in the working set.

It sure beats adding new projects to existing working sets all the time. Really handy to keep your workspace organized.

Philip Van Hoof: Tracker’s new class signal system being developed

2010-08-24T22:49:53+00:00

Tracker 0.8’s situation

In Tracker 0.8 we have a signal system that causes quite a bit of overhead. The overhead comes from:

Having to store the URIs of the resources involved in a changeset in tracker-store’s memory;
Having to store the predicates involved in a changeset in tracker-store’s memory (less severe than A because we can store a pointer to an instance instead of a string);
Having to UTF-8 validate the strings when we emit them over D-Bus (D-Bus does this implicitly);
DBus’s own copying and handling of string data;
Heavy traffic on D-Bus;
Context switching between tracker-store and dbus-daemon;
We have to wait with turning on the D-Bus objects until after we have the latest ontology. So after journal replay. And we need to reset the situation after a backup restore. Complex!

Not all aggregators show this list as A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Sorry for that. I’ll nevertheless refer to the items as such later in this article.

Consumer’s problems with Tracker 0.8’s signal

Aforementioned overhead: consumes a lot of D-Bus traffic. This is caused by sending over URLs for the subjects and the predicates;
Doesn’t make it possible, in case of a delete of <a>, to know <b> in <a> nfo:isLogicalPartOf <b>, as <a> is removed at the point of signal emission;
Round trips to know the literals create more D-Bus traffic;
Transactional changes can’t be reliably identified with SubjectsAdded, SubjectsChanged and SubjectsRemoved being separate signals;
A lot of D-Bus objects, instead of letting clients use D-Bus’s filtering system.

The solution that we’re developing for Tracker 0.9

Direct access

With direct-access we remove most of the round-trip cost of a query coming from a consumer that wants a literal object involved in a changeset: by utilizing the TrackerSparqlCursor API with direct-access enabled, you end up doing sqlite3_step() in your own process, directly on meta.db.

For the consumers of the signal, this removes 3.

Sending integer IDs instead of string URIs

A while ago we introduced the SPARQL function tracker:id(resource uri). The tracker:id(resource uri) function gives you a unique number that Tracker’s RDF store uses internally.

Each resource, each class and each predicate (latter are resources like any other) have such an unique internal ID.

Given that Tracker’s class signal system is specific anyway, we decided not to give you subject URL strings. Instead, we’ll give you the integer IDs.

The Writeback signal also got changed to do this, for the same reasons. But this API is entirely internal and shouldn’t be used outside of the project.

This for us removes A, B, C, D and E. For the consumers of the signal, this removes 1.

Merge added, changed and removed into the one signal

We give you two arrays in one signal: inserts and deletes.

For consumers of the signal, this removes 4.

Add the class name to the signal

This allows you to use a string filter on your signal subscription in D-Bus.

For us this removes G. For consumers of the signal, this removes 5.

Pass the object-id for resource objects

You’ll get a third number in the inserts and deletes arrays: object-id. We don’t send object literals, although for integral objects we’re still discussing this. But for resource objects we give without much extra cost the object-id.

For consumers of the signal, this removes 2.

SPARQL IN, tracker:id(resource uri) and tracker:uri(int id)

We recently added support for SPARQL IN, we already had tracker:id(resource uri) and I implemented tracker:uri(int id).

This makes things like this possible:

SELECT ?t { ?r nie:title ?t .
            FILTER (tracker:id(?r) IN (800, 801, 802, 807)) }

Where 800, 801, 802 and 807 will be the IDs that you receive in the class signal. And with tracker:uri(int id) it goes like:

SELECT tracker:uri (800) tracker:uri (801)
       tracker:uri (802) tracker:uri (807) { }

For consumers this removes most of the burden introduced by the IDs.

Context switching of processes

What is left is context switching between tracker-store and dbus-daemon, F. Mostly important for mobile targets (ARM hardware). We reduce them by grouping transactions together and then bursting larger sets. It’s both timeout and data-size based (after either a certain amount of time, or a certain memory limit, we emit). We’re still testing what the most ideal timeouts and sizes are on target hardware.

Where is the stuff?

The work isn’t yet reviewed nor thoroughly tested. This will happen next few days and weeks.

Anyway, here’s the branch, documentation, example in Plain C, example in Vala

Bert Desmet: iRail hackathon

2010-08-24T21:00:09+00:00

Hi all!

A friend of me, Pieter Colpaert, is one of the core developers on iRail. I don’t know if you all followed the buzz around iRail, but iRail is more alive than ever!

And because they want to get that extra push, they are organizing a hackathon at Whitespace on Friday 17 September from 18h. I won’t be able to make it because of Fudcon, but I want to give them my full support!

More information is available on the Whitespace wiki

Tom De Vylder: Fixing strange device names using Ubuntu templates on VMware ESX or vSphere

2010-08-23T18:12:55+00:00

If you regularly deploy Ubuntu VM templates on your VMware ESX(i) or VMware vSphere boxes you will probably run into strange network device numbers. This is caused by a udev rule. This problem has been confirmed to exist in Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10 and 10.04. I haven’t had the time to check out other versions. As [...]

Dieter Plaetinck: Review of "Python 3 Object Oriented Programming"

2010-08-23T17:01:09+00:00

Dusty Phillips, Arch Linux shwag guy, Archcon co-organizer, (python) consultant and since recently buddy of mine wrote his first book: Python 3 Object Oriented Programming.

I got the opportunity to get a free pdf copy in exchange for a review on my blog, so here we go.
Mind you, my Python knowledge is very limited. I have done some python programming, and I once read (most of) Dive into python, but over the years that experience has vanished from my memory. Dusty's book has had many proofreads/reviews by python-aficionado's, now it gets a fresh perspective from an amateur, and for me this was a good opportunity to work on my python skills.

To paraphrase the "who this book is for" paragraph, which is in the beginning of the book and in online advertisements for the book:

people new to OO programming and people with basic python skills who want to improve their python OO.
OO programmers experienced in other languages who want to get into python.
python 2 programmers interested in learning python 3, although this is not the target audience.

Good, that includes me (category 2)

Pro's:

seems very accurate
OO focused. But not in a college/university-ish way. Real experience, nuanced, real examples and exercises. Tells you when *not* to use OO. Teaches you the difference between object orientation, OO programming and OO design, and makes you understand that in the end everything are just means to end, and thanks to the versatility of Python, teaches you various tricks to implement certain designs in less then obvious ways.
Chapters about design patterns (there sure are many of them), testing, libraries, and some other topics not directly related to OO.

Con's:

Not an introduction to Python. Assumes some basic knowledge about Python. (like data structures and loops). There is a chapter about (some of the) datatypes later on in the book but it focuses more on their OO nature, and to get to know the basics, you're referred to the official python tutorial.
Does not cover *everything*.

I should clarify my last point. Here and there I found some information to be lacking. Especially static class methods (they are only mentioned very briefly in a case study somewhere) and static properties/variables.
Other then that, sometimes an example or explanation was not entirely clear to me. This didn't happen often, but there were moments where I thought 95% of what you need to know is explained, but the other 5% you have to google up yourself.
It is quite convenient however, to have the author of a book available in your jabber client.
So FWIW here are the things I asked him about and which responses I got, with some comments added by me afterwards.

<Dieterbe> hmm you mention that methods *need* a self param, but why is this?
           can't python automatically make a variable self available in the scope of the function, when calling it?
<Dusty>    no, they are always explicit
<Dieterbe> but why?
<Dusty>    it's part of the python philosophy, I guess. "explicit is better than implicit" is in the zen of python poem.
           Basically, if you are accessing a variable in any namespace, that variable has to be have been made explicitly available in that 
           namespace. The one exception is the from X import * syntax, which 98% of python programmers avoid exactly because of the namespace issues.
<Dieterbe> right
 
# good to know.  Too bad this isn't really mentioned anywhere.
 
 
<Dieterbe> i don't quite get why - in your notebook example of chap 2 - you iterate over the list to find the correct note based on its id.
           can't you just get the element based on it's index in the list? (ie keep the node id in sync with the index in the list)
<Dusty>    I don't have the code in front of me, but I suspect that it's because if a note is deleted, that id should not be recycled and applied to another note.
<Dieterbe> but still, since you keep the last used id, and keep increasing it, you won't recycle id's.
<Dusty>    yeah, but the index in the list will change
<Dusty>    when you delete #4
<Dieterbe> oh
<Dusty>    the object with ID 5 becomes the object at #4
<Dieterbe> thanks buddy
<Dusty>    no problem. :)
 
# again, makes perfect sense.  But if you don't know the ins and outs of the datatypes, you're on your own.
 
<Dieterbe> i had a question about your example for the decorator pattern.
           you use a socket and then you have 2 decorators that implement a send function which do some stuff (logging and what not)
           but also the actual sending on the socket
<Dieterbe> and you mention you can have multiple decorators on the same object.  but since each decorator also does the sending on the socket,
           doesn't that mean the sending happens multiple times?
<Dusty>    no, because the first decorator is decorating the second decorator
<Dusty>    which is decorating the socket
<Dieterbe> ah yes you're right. and although you did not specify it like this in the explanation text, it should be clear from the code.
 
# If I would have looked better at the code I would have figured it out.
# I just assumed something had to be wrong, I'm too used to the way 'behaviors' are implemented in CakePHP.
 
<Dieterbe> one last remark i have about the book: i couldn't find an explanation of static variables/properties.
           i did see a very short mention of static methods in the case study at the end of chap 3, i would have expected to have that info a bit more 
           prominent, in it's own subsection or something
<Dieterbe> especially because you use static class methods a few times throughout the book
<Dusty>    I had a long section on them and ended up removing it because the chapter was too long and one of my reviewers suggested that they aren't very good form in Python.
<Dieterbe> hmm. i see

The writing is pretty informal, and here and there you'll find a subtle reference or joke. But of course that's not what you buy this book for.

Conclusion

I would say the "who this book is for" part is a bit too optimistic. You won't learn Python (3) from scratch by only using this book. It's not a book restricted to mere OO subjects (in python), but neither does it cover all basics of the Python language.

So if you are a python newbie, I would probably recommend you 'Dive into python'. It's free, covers the basics, but doesn't contain so many real life examples.

If you want to know more about OO in python, design patterns, some real life examples and techniques, or advice from a pro, then I definitely recommend this book.

Free chapter: Chapter No. 7 – Python Object-oriented Shortcuts

Frank Goossens: Protecting wp-contact-form from spam

2010-08-23T15:25:33+00:00

Ever since I installed WordPress on my (virtual) server, I’ve been using the WP Contact Form plugin to provide me with simple contact form. The plugin isn’t exactly under active development (Last Updated: 2009-8-28), but it got the job done and I was quite happy with it. Until spammers found the page and started abusing it, that is. There’s a bunch of other Contactform-plugins in the wordpress.org plugins repository, but most of them were either too feature-packed or development for them seemed to have stopped.

I considered adding ReCaptcha at first, but why would I want to put my visitors through such an ordeal; the captcha’s seem to have gotten very difficult to decipher. Next possibility; implement Akismet (Mollom would have been a great choice as well)? There’s a great Akismet PHP5-class, you just provide your API-key and off you go. But it seemed kind of inefficient to have to do all that with the official Akismet-plugin already in place?

But wait a minute, why not just piggyback on the Akismet-plugin, as the Clean-contact plugin and wp-contactform-akismet did? Keep it simple stupid and so I just copy/pasted the clean_contact_akismet-function from Clean Contact’s code into my wp-content/plugins/wp-contact-form/wp-contactform.php and on line 142 I changed:

mail($recipient, $subject, $fullmsg, $headers);
$results = '<div style="font-weight: bold;">' . $success_msg . '</div>';
echo $results;

into:

$akismet=clean_contact_akismet($msg,$subject,$email,$name);
if (!$akismet) {
mail($recipient, $subject, $fullmsg, $headers);
$results = $success_msg;
} else {
$results = 'If it looks like spam and smells like spam, it must be spam. Leave (or rephrase)!';
}
echo '<div style="font-weight: bold;">'.$results.'</div>';

That was all it took to add Akismet spam-filtering to that KISS-y wp-contact-form plugin. I wonder why this isn’t in the plugin already?

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

Paul Cobbaut: Impressions on Oracle

2010-08-22T21:33:13+00:00

There are enough blogposts mourning OpenSolaris (or hoping for Illumos). What follows are some real world experiences in dealing with Oracle since it took over the Sun Solaris trainings in Belgium.

1. Remote labs are free!
Solaris teachers and students can now connect to remote labs with nice hardware for free. This is a great addition to the simple Intel machines in the classroom.

2. Support is excellent!
In the weeks prior to the first Oracle Solaris training several people from Oracle called and/or emailed me to make sure everything was okay. These are real people that don't mind sharing their real email address and their real phone number. Cool! And they were very friendly and helpful!

3. Support is excellent!
When sending an email on Sunday to report a problem, there is an almost immediate response from one of these real people. On a Sunday?! Super cool!

FOSDEM organizers: FOSDEM 2011: 5+6 February 2011

2010-08-22T19:40:53+00:00

The date for the coming FOSDEM edition is set, mark it in your agenda:

5 and 6 February 2011

Preparations are starting and a call for devrooms and speaker suggestions will be sent out soon.
Check this website or subscribe to the RSS feed to stay informed !

The FOSDEM staff

Joost Damad: digicorder and recording subsequent programs

2010-08-22T06:19:46+00:00

Digital television is getting the norm in Belgium, and typically people rent a “digicorder” from the TV provider. This allows you to watch television and also record programs for later consumption.

In practice my family only records a few programs and watch them later. It’s very convenient not to be bound to a specific schedule. (On the other hand it would probably be cheaper to just buy the DVD boxes of the series we like instead of having television at all, but that is another discussion ).

In general, the digicorder works fine, I have one big gripe with it though: recording of subsequent programs.

Lets say we’re recording subsequent programs A and B from channel 0. Let’s assume there is some advertisement in between programs. This gives as timescale something like this:

Now, there are three ways the digicorder can record the program, not counting the completely faulty ways when timing goes all wrong.

Both programs want to record a time-slice before and after their program, but this goes wrong in the middle, and only one recording ends up with the middle part.

correct

The correct recording is with the break point in the middle like this:

I presume there are not some kind of markers in between the broad-casted programs on commercial television because it makes their advertisement store even worse.

Therefor, in practice you typically end up with one if these two:

B in recording 1

This is problematic because if you don’t remember not to erase recording 1 after watching program A, the start of program 2 will be lost.

A in recording 2

This is even worse. Lets say you want to watch program B first.

You first have to open recording 1, fast forward all the way to the start of program B, start watching and after a few minutes switch to recording 2. This will also leave recording 1 marked as “watched” even though you didn’t watch program A yet. More confusion!

A simple solution

In the end this is a simple technical problem with an even simpler solution: record the overlap in a separate file and make it part of both recordings. Visual:

If you watch recording 1, you get recording 1 + X. If you watch recording 2, you get X + recording 2.

If you erase recording 1, X stays. Only if both recording 1 and recording 2 are erased, X gets deleted.

More in general there will be X areas both in front and at the end, etc…

Would be nice if the biggest TV provider of Belgium could implement this. If the digicorder was open source I would’ve done this already months ago…
I guess I’ll have to look into some kind of MythTV like setup one day.

Kristof Willen: Running the native Nvidia drivers

2010-08-21T07:27:03+00:00

Since the upgrade to Karmic on my desktop, graphic performance has gone down considerably. I solved this in the past by downgrading Nvidia, but since Lucid, this has become impossible. It's not that I cannot live without the desktop bling, but suspend-resume is impossible without running the Nvidia drivers. The problem manifest itself by very high CPU bursts by kernel processes (kondemand, ksoftirqd), which makes the desktop unworkably slow.

I tried everything, from disabling PAT, KMS modesetting, switching framebuffers, all without success. I even tried to enable Lenny's Nvidia drivers, but that pulled in a 2.6.26 kernel, which I cannot use, because my filesystems are ext4.

I eventually turned in despair to the Nvidia website, looking for older drivers. The 173 release was still available in the archive download section, which came as a ncurses-based installer. These Nvidia based drivers are famous for messing up a Linux system, so I was rather reluctant to use those. I still decided to give them a go, which rather went surprisingly really well.

Finally a performant system again !

Gert Schepens: Creating Dutch dictionary for android

2010-08-20T19:52:24+00:00

As a follow up to yesterdays post, a howto for creating the LatinIME dictionary (in this case raw-nl/main.dict) files!

All info necessary to do so is readily available on http://code.google.com/p/softkeyboard/wiki/BinaryDictionaries

As a base, you need a wad of decent text, the more the better! The quality of the dictionary will improve as more data is fed into the file. The example on SoftKeyboard uses the Wikipedia for bulk text!

The dutch dump is available on http://download.wikimedia.org/nlwiki/20100813/ Considering the different dumps, I chose the one containing the Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages, but not the revision or user data..

2010-08-13 16:17:13 done Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages.
2010-08-13 16:17:13: nlwiki 1003105 pages (382.643/sec), 1003105 revs (382.643/sec), 92.5% prefetched, ETA 2010-08-13 16:59:24 [max 1971556]
This contains current versions of article content, and is the archive most mirror sites will probably want.
pages-articles.xml.bz2 549.0 MB

The SoftPedia explenation offers the following bash script to analyse the wad of text into a weighed word list.

My blog screws up code, check gertschepens.be or the original page for the commands
Code from Softkeyboard, contributed by Jacob Nordfalk

This creates a weighed and sorted list of the words in the file. The more data, the more reliable this set will be. (The database dump of a dutch forum would be a nice addition to get more of the common language in there, as a counterweight to the dictionary wording.)
The weighed values are between 194 and 8671269 (this is the # of times a word is found in the text) in case of this specific export. The sample.xml however speaks of a frequency value from 0 to 255.

So I created a perl script to fix the numbering; the script needs a sorted list, frequent words first, infrequent ones later. It cycles trough and replaces the initial numbering (in the correctly formatted xml) by the weighed alternative.

The source is not available here for formatting reasons; click the Perl script link!

Once we have a decent .xml, all we need to do is convert it to the necessary .dict format, which is described in the Softpedia text; and the necessary software is in their repositories.

After this, we have a valid main.dict file, ready to be compiled into a LatinIME pack. Compiling all languages into the pack will not be possible due to very limited space on the system partition (My magic has about 1 MB free space on its /system partition), so a solution will have to be found to store the dictionary files out of the LatinIME keyboard apk. (which is preferable at any rate!) My dutch dictionary was submitted to CM but will probably not make it in until the external/internal dictionary problem is solved! (in the mean while, Im using a home-rolled version! The default CM keyboard with added raw-nl, currently available here)

Frederic Descamps: Windows 7 and Samba

2010-08-20T19:39:32+00:00

Today I tried to put in production an update of Samba 3 (3.5.4) to allow Windope 7 clients to join the domain.

After having performed what's on the samba wiki page about this topic [here], I could join the machine to the domain but I was not able to login !? :(

In the log :

[2010/08/20 16:55:20.682477,  0] rpc_server/srv_netlog_nt.c:714(_netr_ServerAuthenticate3)
  _netr_ServerAuthenticate3: netlogon_creds_server_check failed. Rejecting auth request from client RO-BACKUP machine account RO-BACKUP$
[2010/08/20 16:55:30.993850,  0] lib/util_sock.c:474(read_fd_with_timeout)
[2010/08/20 16:55:30.993958,  0] lib/util_sock.c:1432(get_peer_addr_internal)
  getpeername failed. Error was Transport endpoint is not connected
  read_fd_with_timeout: client 0.0.0.0 read error = Connection reset by peer.

The problem was easy to solve but not easy to find : the two machines had not the same time (30 secs delay !)

Fixing the time sync fixed the problem (and I'm not using kerberos and AD)

Dag Wieers: Is 10 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?

2010-08-20T07:31:17+00:00

Almost exactly a year ago, I posted a blog article titled Is 7 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?. In that article I make the case that with RHEL major releases moving from 1.5 years to 3 years and virtualization reducing the importance of hardware life cycles, RHEL support should be extended beyond 7 years.

Yesterday Red Hat announced that it did just that. From today Red Hat offers RHEL Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) on top of normal subscriptions for specific versions and variants. Meaning that for RHEL3 only i686 AS/ES and for RHEL4 i686 and x86_64 AS/ES and ia64 AS are taken into consideration and are thus more expensive than regular support. No pricing information is available yet.

As a result of this the timeline of RHEL releases looks like this:

Click the picture to see it in all its glory

Honestly, the announcement comes too late for a lot of companies that already have planned and executed (sometimes painful) RHEL3 migrations. Extended support could in some of these cases be a more cost-effective solution. On the other hand, with this late announcement Red Hat might have anticipated lowering the number of applicants at the start of the offering. And a sufficient high price tag will influence decision makers even more...

An offering like this also risks that application vendors might hold on to (too) old RHEL releases rather than spending time testing and fixing their software (often agents) on the latest RHEL release. Which is one of the most important reasons why companies delay implementing newer RHEL releases today. Which makes Open Source alternatives more attractive (as they do not suffer from that). Companies that suffer from this delayed availability of proprietary software should complain loudly to vendors and threaten to move (or simply move) to alternatives.

All in all, this new support option clearly strengthens Red Hat's position in the wider Enterprise OS market and makes their virtualization product (RHEV) offering even more attractive compared to the competition.

And to answer the question, yes, 10 years of support should suffice for some time ;-)

Frank Goossens: Switching back from Froyo to HTC’s Eclair

2010-08-20T06:08:22+00:00

Although I was quite pleased with my Hero after installing HTC’s version of Android 2.1 (in the guise of VillainRom 12), I couldn’t refrain myself from wanting to install Froyo, the latest and greatest version of Android. The guys over at VillainRom provided a great Froyo rom (Froydvillain 1.2) based on the official Android sources and the work of the CyanogenMod team with CM6 and added LauncherPro, a beautiful alternative to HTC’s Sense, to the mix:

Gert Schepens: Where are the Keyboard Dictionaries in #Android?

2010-08-19T19:02:35+00:00

I love the Froyo multiple languages keyboard feature! Its AWESOME, sliding a finger over the keyboard to change language .. Awesome!
If your specific dictionary is in there. Which it probably isnt, since there are only 6 dictionaries in the default keyboard. And Dutch isnt in there. Dutch is in several other keyboards, like the HTC one, but sadly there is no shared space where these dictionaries live, in the contrary, they all reside in the .apk that contains the keyboard.

By opening /system/app/LatinIME.apk (as found in CyanogenMod), we find out that the dictionaries are in the .apk under the res directory. While we’re there, someone mentioned the availability of more dicts might be a size issue, but I dont think so since they’re all quite moderate in size:

raw-de: 739K
raw-en: 822K
raw-es: 768K
raw-fr: 775K
raw-it: 688K
raw-sv: 911K

Also, the custom words are saved in a database at /data/data/com.android.inputmethod.latin/databases/auto_dict.db

Now, looking to add a dutch dictionary, I went looking in the AOSP. The LatinIME source is in ./packages/inputmethods/LatinIME and contains a ./packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/dictionaries directory. I expected to find the dictionary files there, but it only contains a sample.xml file. So no .xml dictionaries. The aforementioned res directory is at ./packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/ but contains none of the raw-lang directories.
The dictionaries do not appear to be part of the AOSP. I guess Google is not able to open source these?

While searching (the interwebs and IRC) I also discovered that a lot of other people (Issue 1827: add dictionaries for other locales (or make it easier for users to do so) – Im d.gen… in that thread) were looking to add their language to the code tree and that some people had solved the problem by just rolling a custom LatinIME (Softkeyboard). I dont like that option, however since I’d rather strengthen the default tree instead of splitting from it and updating the code after each AOSP update.

CyanogenMod however does have the dictionaries and so I checked out the CyanogenMod tree. it took me a while to find out where they were as I was expecting them to be in the paths I mentioned before, but no such luck. Apparently (and this makes sense,) the CM specific files are in the ./vendor/cyanogen directory, the binary dictionaries in

./vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/raw-sv/main.dict
./vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/raw-de/main.dict
./vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/raw-fr/main.dict
./vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/raw-en/main.dict
./vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/raw-it/main.dict
./vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/raw-es/main.dict

So. How to add new dictionaries to Android?

Either in AOSP under packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/dictionaries/ as .xml files (preferable),
under packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/java/res/ as binary files
or if that turns out to be impossible for some reason, adding them to CM in the respective vendor/cyanogen/overlay/common/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME/ directories (so that at least CM has the extended languages).

The ideal situation however would be to split the dictionaries from the keyboards and put them somewhere where any application might use them; making it possible to install new dictionary packs (eg DutchDictionary.apk) from the market, thus solving the whole dictionary problem. Maybe by adding them in /data/data/com.android.inputmethod.latin/databases/ although there is probably a performance reason for them not being there in the first place?
Anyhow, in the mean while, we do need the dictionaries! So lets not wait for this and add the data to AOSP now

Im wondering though why the Softkeyboard people dont add their dictionaries to AOSP.. I do see the benefit of keeping it available in the market as a separate app, ie making it available to every android user instead of those “few” tinkerers running the latest AOSP (or mods based on it.)

Fabian Arrotin: Automatic network switcher on Nokia E71

2010-08-19T11:54:09+00:00

I’ve always loved Nokia products and always have been satisfied by my last two E-series (E51 and E71). But there are those little things that can bring you a better life when using it. For example, you can decide which data access point (Wireless or 3G) you want to use when launching an application. That’s fine and of course I prefer using my WLAN at home than the 3G connection. But what if you schedule something to happen automagically on your phone, like calendar and contacts sync (I sync those with the integrated Mail for Exchange application, even if, obviously, i don’t have an Exchange server, but rather a Zarafa OpenSource server with z-push installed). You have to define a ’sync plan’ and choose which connection it will use in the background. Wait, I’d like it to select my Wireless AP when at home (or with some pre-defined wlans from friends, etc ..) if available and then switch to 3G if no wlans available. That’s where SmartConnect helps you a lot : you can define a ‘fake’ access point which is in fact a group that contains your connections (wlans/3G) with priorities and it will use the first available one. Use that ‘fake’ access point on your mobile, whatever the application (even tested with Putty for Symbian). Great and useful.

You can download it from the official website, or directly install it from your mobile through the OVI app installer.

Tom Baeyens: Activiti And The BPM Market In A Nutshell

2010-08-19T10:14:40+00:00

Too much happened to fit into 140 char twitter message so I decided to write the summary here, but first this side note: Elke delivered Joram 2.0 early (probably it will not be often, but hey...) He's called Lars. Congrats to the whole family!

Last release of August 1st already includes a decent coverage of BPMN activity types. Summer time is a great time to get some coding done. Last couple of weeks were really hard core coding with fine tuning of the core engine. We extracted the Process Virtual Machine as a separate module, added a super efficient event mechanism and optimized the DB persistence to the max. First of all, the runtime data is kept to a minimal, with minimal updates during process execution. On top of that, if a parallel gateway forks again, the joined executions are now actually recycled. It's good for performance and the environment! It's amazing that I still find significant optimizations after I've been coding core BPM engines since 2003.

Tijs Rademakers (from Open Source ESB's in Action) got started on a book called BPMN 2.0 with Activiti in Action. I already look forward to reading it.

Josh Long created an Activiti integration with Spring Integration. He's going to show it at JavaZone. Don't miss it.

Furthermore there is an Activiti BPMN 2.0 eclipse designer and an iPhone app in the pipeline. Really cool stuff. More about that later.

But what does that mean for the BPM market in general? Wel... this morning I was cycling to the office and I actually came across the perfect boat metaphors to illustrate what's happening in the BPM market. First I saw this:

That is a really good metaphore for the typical traditional BPM player: Inert, not in the shape that it once was but it's floating.

Then I passed along this one:

That's Activiti: New, fast, agile and fun to work with!

And then I saw what's going to happen with the traditional BPM players after Activiti the GA release in November:

Oh no!

;-)

Steven Wittens: Customer Support - A Three Act Story

2010-08-19T06:57:48+00:00

I recently switched cell phone providers.

dt { text-align: right; float: left; display: inline; margin-left: -60px; width: 60px; }dl{padding-left: 60px; margin-bottom: 4em;}

Me: "Hi, I'd like to know when you're launching in Vancouver?"
Them: Silence.
8 days pass.
Them: "Thanks for the email it is greatly appreciated. We can't say when. Keep refreshing our site!"
Me: ... "You and your pre-customer care suck."

Me: "Hi, my SIM card still has my temporary number. How do I fix this?"
Them: "We don't know. I attempted to browse the internet for an answer but was unable to find one."
Me: ... *googles* ... "Please do one of these things: ..."
Them: "Thanks for contacting us, it’s appreciated. Try resetting your phone."
Me: "It's not the phone. I already tried that. Just tell me X."
Them: "Ok."

Me: "Hi. I can't listen to internet radio or use IRC because you block all non-trivial ports. Look at this netstat report. I want real internet, how do I get it?"
Them: "Thanks for your email to WIND - the power of conversation! Please tell me your phone make and model and which applications you are having problems with. Don't hesitate to join us for a conversation over instant messaging at WIND!"
Me: *facepalm*

I'm usually a pretty calm person, but customer support just drives me up the walls. Why do we let these big corporations talk to us in these utterly bizarre newspeak voices in the name of Customer Service? I'd much rather deal with a computer... then at least I know it can't help being dumb. :/

Litrik De Roy: Getting Unix time (epoch) in an Ant build file

2010-08-18T14:34:34+00:00

Ant includes a Tstamp task that allows a property to be set to the current date and time in a given format. Unfortunately there is no way to get that value as a Unix time (epoch).

Here's how you can do this with the help of some Javascript:

<target name="print-epoch">
  <script language="javascript">
  <![CDATA[
    property = project.setProperty("now",Math.floor((new Date()).getTime()/1000));
  ]]>
  </script>
  <echo message="${now}" />
</target>

Check the documentation of the script task for more information about scripts and their dependencies in Ant.

Toshaan Bharvani: Oracle retires OpenSolaris

2010-08-17T22:35:14+00:00

Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, a while ago, both US and EU regulator approved this deal. Oracle was quick to change all logo’s on websites and programs, however their real strategy isn’t being implemented that quickly. The MySQL community was in doubt about the future of the DBMS.
The Solaris community was quite certain it would be killed an so it has, on 15th August 2010 a memo was leaked that stated the end of OpenSolaris.
We can presume that OpenSolaris is being dropped in favor of Oracle Enterprise Linux aka Oracle Unbreakable Linux, which is an Oracle rebuild of RHEL. My interest in OpenSolaris was to test the ZFS filesystem, but as Oracle will relocate the OpenSolaris people, I suspect that ZFS has also died, then again we have BTRFS in Linux to look out to. There is an effort from former Sun employees to keep Solaris alive, called the Illumos project, we will see how this works out to be. By the way Oracle already killed the Sun build farm for PostgreSQL, the open source database comparable to OracleDB. Now we just need to see if MySQL will follow the same faith. Again, there is an alternative MariaDB, a drop in replacement of MySQL. Some open source projects have already been looking at MariaDB as an extra database to support, none use it as the default, also no major distribution is including MariaDB in it’s repositories, as far as I currently know. Then again as PostgreSQL is adding more clustering and replication features, it might be good to look at PosgreSQL. For now my projects include both MySQL and PostgreSQL, depending on the requirements and the platform being used.

Gert Schepens: The Wonderful Telenet detailed usage view.

2010-08-17T21:15:53+00:00

I dont get it. Telenet has this Wonderful detail view. Im not on the unlimited plan and I can see my downloading habits in this great graph, How much (yeah, thats 83G this month), what type of volume, .. Its all there.

Then Why the Fuck do I have friends, paying more than I do, NOT getting that info?

The answer seems very simple.. because they dont want us to know exactly what the “Fair Use” numbers are. Keeping a foot in the door to stop anyone under the flag of data usage reasons (Your arrow points red, You only get 10Gb for the rest of the month,) whenever they like. Or can anyone point me to an official reason?

And oh yeah, you re paying more to have them treat you like that.

Gert Schepens: The internet is a creative and often cruel place!

2010-08-17T19:27:37+00:00

And documenting the most popular and often most cruel pieces of creativity is http://knowyourmeme.com/

And there are some AMAZING things on here. Do read the dedicated pages however, the base video might be worth watching, but the epic part is what happens with it afterwards. Peoples reactions, follow up videos, remixes or parody..

From the very funny

Lying Down Game is a mass-participatory meme that involves having one’s photograph taken whilst lying rigidly face down in public space and then sharing the image via internet. Since becoming popular through Facebook around June 2009, the viral game has spawned thousands of photos of people lying flat in public landscapes across the world. The official Facebook Group hosts over 19,000 pictures.

to the Extremely Cruel (but, forgive me, also very funny)

Jessi “POP A GLOCK AND MAKE A BRAIN SLUSHY” Slaughter

What happened next?
Check knowyourmeme.com: Jessi Slaughter

Its brutal. Its what happens when a 11yo goes wild and unsupervised on YouTube. You done goofed!

and

Antoine Dodson

What happened next?
Check knowyourmeme.com: Antoine Dodson

All n all the guy is some sort of a hero. He saved his sister and Im very glad he s taking the whole thing very well. Also the rap Rules Kudos to Kidstatic and the Gregory Brothers! Hide ya kids, hide ya wife and hide ya husband too! Hillarious!!!

And our own Kimberley Vlaeminck is on there too!

Gotta love Youtube. Gotta love 4chan

In the end, “know your meme” is a cautionary tale to people around the world. And I guess, an extra reminder to parents too.. Watch the fuck out with the internets, coz once its on there, its on there! And if its a big cockup; EVERYONE ll know about it, everyone will have an opinion about it. And you can be sure there ll be some crazy ass derivative stuffs made on top of it!

Its great to see the worlds population create with whatever mad technologies are thrown out there! Its like a million monkeys with a typewriter and one of them accidentally writing Shakespeare. But with the internet bringing it to our homes and the rest of the monkeys flocking towards the awesome, weeding out the crap!

FOSDEM organizers: Archives

2010-08-17T11:23:27+00:00

We just archived the FOSDEM 2010 edition website. If you still need to find the pages from previous editions check out our archive site: http://archive.fosdem.org

Dries Buytaert: McDonald's using Drupal

2010-08-16T20:50:40+00:00

The website of McDonald's Australia is using Drupal. I'm lovin' it!