You know you are too nerd like when your conversations are like this. Preface: I posted some packages I needed to upgrade into a Skype window (much better than a clipboard)….

[11:56:03] Kelvin Nicholson: sorry, needed to post that somewhere

[11:56:04] Ian FItzpatrick: i am not apt!

[11:56:15] … you can’t pass packages to me ;)

[11:56:34] Kelvin Nicholson: blah blah blah

[11:56:43] … apt-get upgrade ian

[11:57:02] Ian FItzpatrick: apt-get error: unmet dependency, “beer 1.0-4 not found”

[11:57:14] Kelvin Nicholson: yea, that got a good laugh

Well, I’m basically all done upgrading to Version 3.0, I deserve a cake or something. Here’s the 411:

For the past few years I have been using Mambo, then Joomla, to manage the content on my site. It worked quite well, and was in PHP, so I could add or remove any code. Indeed, I’ve written a decent amount of PHP apps. In early 2004 I wrote a PHP platform to track adventures people had gone on, and networked people seeking to go on adventures with each other. I never marketed it, and mainly created it to learn PHP, but it was a CMS (Content Management System), and a little more. Late in 2004 I wrote another blog-esque platform for my second trip to Europe. It was pretty cool, I’ll admit: Casey and I each had a blog, and people could leave us “dares” and/or messages – and we could easily update our status. Overall, it worked great. You can also see the projects section of my site for some of the other things I’ve done in PHP.

Fast forward a few years, and here it is in early 2007. I’ve never really liked PHP all that much, but I couldn’t put my thumb on it. Deciding to switch to something else, I picked up and read the book, Beginning Python, from Novice to Professional. If anybody is looking for a well written book, I would highly recommend this one. Anyways, with my goal to drop PHP in mind, I held the debate of Django and TurboGears. I went through the demos for each, and felt like I really played around with them. Ultimately it came down to 1) Django has obvious crazy cool caching, 2) Django has pretty darn good documentation, and a freaking online book, and 3) the “powered by” sites are quite impressive – both the length of the list and the large amount of traffic some of these sites entertain.

So I went with Django. My friend in New Zealand, Ben Ford, has been ragging me for two months to get my ass in gear and learn it, saying I would love it. And he is right, the framework is simply beautiful. For the last week I’ve been reading through the documentation, going through the online book (both are incomplete, in my opinion, but compliment each other nicely). I think it is important to write your own code instead of just repeating examples, so my goal: transform my blog/site by using just Django.

So, while some of the kinks still need to be worked out, everything is no transfered over. I’ll mention my experiences shortly, but overall: I’m very impressed.

To all my loyal (but most likely few, and mainly with the same last name as me):

I think I’m going to redo the structure of my site, yes, it is about time.  I’ve been using a CMS (Content Management System) to categorize everything, but it is time to ditch that and write something.  Time to stop being lazy.  Time to stop procrastinating.  Time to learn something new.

Let me make this clear: version 3.0 surely won’t be based off PHP.

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 entire IP subnet appears banned from IRC, which means I have to be a little sneaky when I want to talk to my I.T. friends in New Zealand.  Worse, some websites even banned the entire subnet:

Your access to this site has been denied because of the large amount of abuse produced by the users from your country. The access will be enabled once we perform the investigation of the abuse issues. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Luckily, Tor+Privoxy+FoxyProxy provides a quick way around any blocks that might be setup.  So, to the developers of these solutions, my kindest thanks.

I love my Snort, I really do.  But sometimes, I just don’t need all the extra overhead – sometimes the resources on a server are somewhat, limited.  Looking for a solution I stumbled upon PSAD , a way to detect port scans.  Since port scans are often one of the first tactics used to find vulnerabilities on a server, it is a pretty good idea to detect them.   Depending on the attack, I receive a nice little email telling me what is going on.  To test it out I first fired up nmap, and received a few emails.  Next I fired up nessus with updated plugins – you can be the judge.  I now have 50 emails from myself telling me somebody is doing something naughty:

\=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Tue Jan 23 10:30:04 2007 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


         Danger level: [5] (out of 5) Multi-Protocol

    Scanned tcp ports: [11-41111: 337 packets]
            tcp flags: [SYN: 337 packets, Nmap: -sT or -sS]
       iptables chain: INPUT, 337 packets

               Source: 218.167.75.27
                  DNS: 218-167-75-27.dynamic.hinet.net

          Destination: 64.79.194.165
                  DNS: kelvinism.com

      Syslog hostname: kelvinism

     Current interval: Tue Jan 23 10:29:54 2007 (start)
                       Tue Jan 23 10:30:04 2007 (end)

Historically I’ve used the ever-so-popular AutoMySQLBackup script.  While it seems to work just fine, I’ve decided to give another solution a whirl.  This solution, provided through Zmanda, seems to be less hackery and more enterprise.  The instructions are very clear, and the backup test went as planned.  Looks  like this is another gem for the toolchest.

My buddy Ian  mentioned Amazon’s S3 service, and the potential for using it for fun webapps.  While utilizing it for webapps will have to wait a few months, I was able to use it as a cheap backup for my home server (pictures, documents, etc,.) – and my server that houses my email and websites.  The setup is pretty quick, and most of it can be detailed here.  The ruby package is here   I’ll toss in my recommendation to use the jets3t Cockpit application for viewing the buckets, especially considering the Firefox extension didn’t work as advertised.  My only two comments will be this:

1. Making sure SSL is working.  The site mentioned above just has you hunt down some random bash file, that isn’t even hosted anymore.  On my Debian system I simply added this to my upload.sh:

export SSL_CERT_DIR=/etc/ssl/certs/

2. The second suggestion is another example of the s2sync layout.  Let’s say you created the bucket “kelvinism” – the following would move the documents inside a test folder from /home/kelvin named test to a folder named test in the kelvinism bucket.  Sweet.

 s3sync.rb -r --ssl --delete /home/kelvin/test kelvinism:/test  

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 imported/exported is not compatible with the database version. For instance, at home you export the information from a mysql5 database. Then you try to import it on a mysql3.23 database somewhere else – and it fails on you. Bummer.
The solution is quite simple:

 mysqldump --compatible=mysql323 -u root -p database > exportName.sql

Ian keeps bugging me at how great Quicksilver is. Knowning that there must be an alternative built for linux, I accidently stumbled across Katapult.

While it still has a little room to grow, Katapult makes a great tool in any KDE toolchest. Press ALT+SPACE, and your widget fires up, ready to take your orders. Since words don’t really do this justice, I created a screencast.

Katapult Screencast from Kelvin Nicholson on Vimeo.

In the next year I plan to make a little video, nothing fancy likely, but something that will require an editor. However, I don’t own a mac (which rules our Final Cut Pro + After Effect and iMovie, which Ian and I both have had too much fun with. Inside joke.) I’m also a die-hard Linux fan, trying to hold out buying a mac for as long as possible.

SF to the rescure. There are four editors listed, and in the next year I’ll try them all. Overalll, they look quite promising.

Jahshaka – Beta. Good reviews from what I’ve seen.
Kdenlive – Alpha/Beta. Looks a lot less mature than Jahshaka, especially since I’m going to have to check it out via svn. But, the screenshots look quite impressive.
LiVES – Beta.