Redirecting Fun with Lightty

Published on April 23, 2008 under Tech Blog

Two of my colleagues were having just a little bit too much fun with my blog, so I decided to have some fun back. Over a period of 10 minutes, they managed to leave 10+ comments. Luckily I have full control over my server, and was able to quickly ... Read more.

ethX Issues with Xen and Ubuntu

Published on April 20, 2008 under Tech Blog

My new guest VMs under Xen seem to be having issues where upon each reboot, the network interface gets incremented by 1. For instance, it starts at eth0, then goes to eth1, then eth2, and eventually ethX. There are two issues to fix: 1) get the count back to 0, ... Read more.

Using Distcc

Published on Jan. 1, 2008 under Tech Blog

I'm in the process of working on one of my projects, and the requirement came up to download a fairly large file (4GB). Since I only receive ~20GB/month at my house, I decided to just use my server in the U.S. The next requirement came about needing to compile Mapnik, ... Read more.

Zenity GUI to a Shell Script

Published on Oct. 21, 2007 under Tech Blog

I have to admit, I'm pretty lazy. I don't (ironically) like to type, and I really don't like typing the same command over and over. I found myself switching between my external monitor and laptop quite frequently, and decided to somewhat automate the task. Although I know there are other ... Read more.

Mass Spam Delete Django

Published on Oct. 2, 2007 under Tech Blog

As you can read, I've been traveling around quite a bit lately. This means I haven't been checking the comments on my blog, which means quite a bit of spam has been entered. I am blocking the spam via akismet, however, it is still recorded in the database. Being somebody ... Read more.

My Portable Travel Stick

Published on June 29, 2007 under Tech Blog

This will be my last post from Taiwan, and I'm placing it in my tech section. Shortly I will be flying to Hong Kong, and then traveling into China. I'm not bringing my laptop with me. I'm always a little wary of using public computers, especially in many of the ... Read more.

Turn Off Google Suggest in Firefox

Published on June 7, 2007 under Tech Blog

I generally like Firefox, and generally like Google. But having Google suggest enabled when I search for things is annoying, at least on my rather small laptop screen. Mostly it is because my internet right now is pretty crap, so I try to cut down on any extra traffic. Anyhow, ... Read more.

Colddirt Information

Published on May 29, 2007 under Tech Blog

I wrote up the majority of this on a Friday night, so cut me a tad bit of slack:) Feel free to take a glance at the entire source. NoteColddirt's source code is run from Django SVN, check out on May 10th-ish. If you are using a newer branch, ... Read more.

Django SVN Update Goes Splat

Published on May 9, 2007 under Tech Blog

I'm writing this just in case somebody runs into this same issue. I'm about to go live with a website and figured it would be best to have the latest SVN snapshot checked out from Django. I updated, and noticed that my voting module didn't quite work as expected. I ... Read more.

AWS in Python (REST)

Published on March 3, 2007 under Tech Blog

As some of you may know, I have some projects cooked up. I don't expect to make a million bucks (wish me luck!), but a few extra bills in the pocket wouldn't hurt. Plus, I'm highly considering further education, which will set me back a few-thirty grand. That said, one ... Read more.

Darn You HiNet

Published on Jan. 24, 2007 under Tech Blog

As you may know by now, I'm in Taiwan.  Live is pretty good here, especially the internet -- I'm sitting on a pretty decent 12M/1M connection.  But the company I have my internet through seems pretty laid back about network usage -- which for me isn't good.  Their ... Read more.

MySQL Compat

Published on Nov. 15, 2006 under Tech Blog

I've run into this error quite a few times, might as well toss blog entry about it: ERROR 1064 at line 17: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1' at line 7 One likely reason this comes about is because the data being ... Read more.

Three Little Commands and a Pen-Test

Published on Oct. 15, 2006 under Tech Blog

Yea, you read that right. Three commands and you can run a pen-test on your website/webserver. So, how? kelvin@home:~$ sudo apt-get install nikto kelvin@home:~$ sudo nikto -update kelvin@home:~$ nikto -h www.thoughtdeposit.net As you can see, Nikto is a web server scanner, apparently for over 3200 dangerous ... Read more.

Hunt the Anomaly

Published on Sept. 1, 2006 under Tech Blog

Information is power, or so many of us think. As an I.T. administrator, no matter what the level, it is of my opinion that knowing what your network is doing is important. This includes regular operation, what it could do in the event of a disaster, or when it is ... Read more.

Setting up a Mapnik Server on Ubuntu

Published on April 27, 2008 under Notes and Tutorials

First, we go ahead and install the needed packages. I've tried to include "my" list of packages that were needed to get a vanilla 7.10 image up to steam. apt-get install build-essential libltdl3-dev autoconf libtool automake \ postgresql postgresql-8.2-postgis postgresql-server-dev-8.2 \ wget subversion libboost-python1.34.1 libboost-thread-dev \ libboost-program-options-dev libboost-regex-dev \ ... Read more.

Tunneling over SSH

Published on June 7, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

As a rule, whenever I'm online I'm logged into my server back in the States. I'm also usually wireless, which we all know is beyond insecure -- I've found it especially useful to tunnel firefox over SSH. I try my best to tunnel stuff over SSH back, and if you ... Read more.

Solved: NO PUBKEY

Published on May 25, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

I've received this error more than once, so I'm finally writing my notes how I solve it. Error message: W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org stable/updates Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A70DAF536070D3A1 This really is just your standard don't-have-the-gpg-keys error. So, get'em ... Read more.

Postfix/Dovecot + MySQL

Published on May 24, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

As you can see by another post, I decided to reinstall the server. This isn't really a problem, I have pretty good backups. I've installed apache and friends a bagillion times. However, Postfix(chroot)+Dovecot authenticating from MySQl, that doesn't install quite so smoothly. Just for my future reference, and maybe ... Read more.

Generating a Self-Signed SSL Cert

Published on May 11, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

I have the need to generate an SSL cert (Apache2) about once every 3 months. And since I'm cheap, I don't ever actually *buy* one, I just self-sign it. And every time I forget the commands needed. So, here they are, for my reference only. 1) Generate Private Key ... Read more.

PNG Transparency and IE

Published on May 7, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

I've vowed to not use transparent PNGs until almost everybody has switched to IE7, where they are actually supported (despite being supported by every other major browser). I've done the hacks, and have had good results. I like using PNGs, I'll admit it. ... Read more.

Simple Chrooted SSH

Published on March 29, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

You might be asking: why would you want to chroot ssh? Why use ssh anyways? Here are the quick answers: FTP usually sucks. Unless sent over SSL, all information is sent cleartext. SSH usually rules. SSH sends all data over an encrypted channel -- the main drawback is: you ... Read more.

Layer Images Using ImageMagick

Published on March 22, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

For one of my webapp projects I'm needing to layer two images. This isn't a problem on my laptop -- I just fire up GIMP, do some copy 'n pasting, and I'm done. However, since everything needs to be automated (scripted), and on a server -- well, you get ... Read more.

Make Dynamic Crap Static

Published on Dec. 7, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

Let's say one page on your site is getting hit hard. And I mean, it was digg'd or something. If the page resides on some CMS or blog, and each request is being processed by PHP and resulting in requests to your database, crap is gonna hit the fan. Well, ... Read more.

Resize a Xen Image

Published on Nov. 8, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

So, you've got a few Xen images around, and they are starting to fill up. How do you add a few more gigs to 'em? root@tpe:/# xm shutdown vm01 root@tpe:/# cd /xenimages root@tpe:/xenimages# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000 >> vm01.img root@tpe:/path/to/images# resize2fs -f vm01.img ... Read more.

Convert VMWare Movie to FLV

Published on Sept. 30, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

This little process, a total of two lines, took way to long to figure out. First, we convert the VMware avi (VMnc format) to the Microsoft avi format. mencoder -of avi -ovc lavc movie.avi -o movie2.avi Next, we convert the Microsoft avi format to FLV format. <pre ... Read more.

Linux as a TFTP Server

Published on Jan. 16, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

So, you need a TFTP server for something? Cool, you must be doing something fun. I need a TFTP server to copy Cisco IOS images onto the routers; hopefully you are doing something cooler. 1) Enable TFTP in inetd.conf Open up /etc/inetd.conf and look for the following line: ... Read more.