Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/12/dumbest-update-ever/
Dumbest Update Ever, brought to you by Microsoft.
Apparently, NT will have trouble if it is installed on a disk that is too large, or, it’ll just completely lose its nut at a date in the future, when a Microsoft update will destroy the ability of the system to function, without wiping and reinstalling it. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/09/20/windows-startup-registry/
Run regedit and review http://www.absolutestartup.com/help/Winstart.htm.
God I hate Windows.
And, for the record, Trend Micro PC-cillin sucks in many layers. I’m not going to elaborate.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/09/14/make-realplayer-suck-less/
Q: RealOne Player is evil and it sucks ass. I hate it. Is there anything else that can play RealAudio while sucking less?
A: Download Real Player 8 from http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html. This is a pretty decent version of the software that was written before they starting loading it full of spyware that auto-reinstalls itself. Be careful — it’ll occasionally offer to upgrade itself. Just hit cancel when it does.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/09/14/howto-create-tar-archive-from-manifest/
I had a list of files that someone requested. I wanted to put them in a tar archive, but the tar on the box doesn’t have an option to add a list of files. Huh. Well, this is quick and dirty, and will choke if you have any space in the filenames, but it met my purposes: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/24/whatever/
So, lnk.to is situated in its new home. It is something of a shadow of its former glory, but things have been busy. I’ll be flying to California this weekend for a wedding.
People miss the “top” and “recent” listings, so I hacked up a quick top page as an exercise in making SSI XBithack <––#include virtual ––> work. But I’m mainly thinking this leads to a new Lnkto::Chain class that can return a list of Lnkto::Lnk objects. But I’m too distracted to do that right just now.
I attended a seminar on customer service today as well. It was somewhat beneficial. I am moving our “run book” / “employee guide” to yet another architecture. (MediaWiki versus POD versus WordPress.) This seminar has given me material I should include on stress management, and how to do a phone call well, and left me with ideas as to how to improve call-management procedures, with an eye toward metrics. I would feel bad about “re-implementing” my documentation a few times over, but this is my first time through something like this, and I allow myself room for experimentation. Ultimately, I suspect that the happiest medium will be some combination of Wiki and Blog software. But that’s an entirely new subject …
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/19/lnkto-preview/
Please visit http://p0.lnk.to/ and test it out.
The database will be wiped out and loaded with current http://lnk.to/ pretty damned soon.
But if you find a bug before then, I would be happy to hear about it.
Thanks,
-danny
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/18/look/
You may already know about /usr/dict/words, /usr/local/share/dict/words, /usr/share/dict/words or wherever it is on your local system that the list of English-language words is installed. I don’t know how many times I have egrepped this file to check my spelling.
Apparently though, there’s been a handy command available since Version 7 AT&T UNIX. It is called “look” and it is handy for looking up words. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/16/hoohah/
The other tech support guy is out this week, so its all me, all day.
And of course, because its Monday, we have to be slammed by dumb people. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/12/lnkto-progress/
I keep messing with how the database table should work, and I had a hard time figuring out how to create a new key within a class referring to an object that I am hash-tieing to the lnkto table with Tie::DBI, but the good news is, that I’ve actually gotten started. It is a little frustrating at the moment, but the knowledge that I am building a class that will make writing the actual web site so much easier is good for morale. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/10/quick-linux-peeve/
You know what’s lame? I frequently log in to Linux boxen and try to invoke “vim” only to get “command not found.” Now, this would be reasonable on Solaris or BSD, where they maintain their own version of vi, but in Linux, vi is vim, only it is vi, and not vim. Why? … It seems so pretentious. “Vim? You mean ‘vee eye?’ I got one of them, sure, although it is just vim … but you’ll have to type vi. You know, that’s how it is done on Unix systems.”
Or is there some GNU vi that is going around?
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/27/lnkto-brainstorming/
lnk.to has to relocate, like, this week.
What is lnk.to, you might ask? Well, lnk.to will take a long link, and make a very short link to it. If you have to give someone a URL, it is handier to give them a shorter URL. Have you ever tried to send someone a link to Yahoo Maps? Then, you know what I mean.
Phase 0: Classic lnk.to
So, my think is to re-implement lnk.to, and duplicate the current functionality — you can add a link, see the recent links, see, perhaps, the most popular links, which are all just porn anyway … but this time there’s an option for “private” link.
It’ll be re-written in this format, from scratch, with a proper, clean Perl Object back-end to a MySQL database.
Phase 1: my.lnk.to
Next, we’ll use mod_rewrite to get even a bit more cleverer. If you go, say, to dman.lnk.to, you’ll go to dman‘s lnk.to. This will be a chain of like 25 links maintained by the user dman. dman will have his own RSS export and other neat things that could facilitate export to people’s blogrolls. dman can share his account with friends, if he likes, basically sharing links around.
Phase 2: my.lnk.to/friends
The user model will be extended to allow users to add RSS feeds from which to populate links. “Virtual” RSS-only users will be creatable, and users will be allowed to list out who their friends are. Using that “friends” interface, a handy aggregator can be fashioned.
Behind the scenes, we see code extension — I write a “link chain” interface for Phase 0. Phase 1 requires a “user interface” and management extensions to the “link chain” interface. Phase 2 then sees extensions to the “user interface” …
I have a few other cute ideas to toss in there, which might crank up the fun a bit … dang this day job! Dang this lack of infinitely-flexible server resources! Ah, well, it forces me to think a great deal, measure several times, and make, I hope, one awesome cut!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/23/damn-phishers/
I spent way too much time trying to track down this eBay phisher. Instead of exploiting someone’s Formmail.pl they apparently purchased a fraudulent account, and uploaded a PHP script that pulls a bunch of addresses from a databases and spams them all. So, qmail logs the messages as coming from Apache, whereas Formmail.pl would have been wrapped through suexec. And since one invocation can send thousands of messages, there’s no suspicious log activitity.
Fortunately, the contents of the spam message were stored in the PHP script. I finally ran a find-pipe-grep on our vhosts directory for ‘ebay.com’ and shut the slimey bastard sonuvabitch down. The HTTP requests to trigger the script came from Egypt at like 4AM local time.
Grr! Let’s waste my morning on nonsense.
Then we got another spam complaint for another shared hosting server, but after some basic checking, I wrote them back indicating that the header was forged, and they wanted to instead contact a cable company in Japan.
Time to take a walk, unwind, get some real work done, perhaps.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/22/my-first-wordpress-hack/
As posted to WordPress Hacks:
Hey. I wanted to be able to see posts that had been “recently modified” as opposed to the date posted. This way I can add entries out-of-order, but still advertise them on my sidebar.
I hacked the
get_archives()function to add a recentlymod option. You can see the following function call in use under “Recent Posts.”
get_archives('recentlymod', 7);The hack is available at http://dannyman.toldme.com/scratch/wp-template-functions-general.diff.
Personally, I would like WP to have an admin feature to distinguish between
post_dateandpost_modified… a toggle I could set somewhere to ensure that my RSS feed was behaving as “Recent Posts” does.
Now I can post stories from my World Tour (still not finished yet!?) and my readers will have a clue that new material has appeared.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/07/wordpress-first-impressions/
I recently installed WordPress, mostly out of curiosity. My web site has evolved over many years from static files, to using stylesheets, and some lightly-templated formatting to facilitate the creation of an RSS feed. While I have maintained a “log” for a few years now, I’ve always been wary of the whole self-important, vapid, “blogging” stuff.
Well, I saw Keith Garner using it, and I liked the idea that it was a rewrite of some previous software, and had a plug-in architecture, so I thought I would try it out. The install was easy enough, and then I got hooked in to the possibility of importing my data from into via an RSS file. There was some wrestling involved to hack the migration script to eat my raw HTML, and a bit more to get my scraping script adapted to output the appropriate HTML via RSS, but lo and behold, everything made it in.
And I got to tweak the look and feel a great deal with the stylesheet, and by editing the index.php directly. It has all the bells and whistles. Like, comments, which I’ve never had before, but a few people have asked for. And then all this gay backtrack stuff and pingback and backflip and blogflop and whatever. Okay, it promised to be easy to install and support all the silly jargon that I don’t care about, personally. Yay.
And for the most part, it has been comfortable. I get to put things in categories. The categories can be organized hierarchically, but any given item can have more than one category. I can maintain a list of links that can be displayed in the side menu bar. No really serious god-awful, show-stopping bugs …
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/07/wired-news-building-a-better-mozilla/
I really really enjoy using Firefox as a web browser. It is a stripped-down, development version of Mozilla, which is what Netscape became. Among the best features of this web browser are tabbed browsing, where you can keep several navigation panes in one window, and click among them by selecting them via tabs at the top of the window. The browser also tends to do a better job at standards compliance than MSIE.
Firefox also has a plug-ins architecture so programmers can add features to the basic web browser, and share them with users who might enjoy those features. I just reviewed an article from Wired News that talks about some of the more popular plug-ins. From reading this article, I have now got BugMeNot and Dictionary Search installed here at work.
Other plug-ins which I use and love:
I think I should also give a shout out to Moji, which will someday help me learn Japanese. With the click of a button, you can get a web page set up so that you can hover over words and get their English or Japanese translation. Yayoi was impressed when I showed her.
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