Brian's Blog

I've been up to a bunch-o-stuff recently and thought I'd mention them quick.

First off, I've finally installed Skype only about 3 months after everyone I know has stopped raving about it. I haven't really had time or the opportunity to check out how it works but I've been told it's about the best that there is. You can even sign up for SkypeOut which let's you call to regular phones. I didn't do a comparison but other say the cost of SkypeOut is cheaper than normal long distance. BTW, I thought I was in for a long night getting sound recording to work in Linux but was pleasantly surprised. It sort of just worked after I turned up the proper things in the mixer.

Something else I've tried out much after everyone else has signed up is Bloglines. Previously I had been using Snownews as my RSS aggregater but Bloglines is way to nice. Don't get me wrong, I still like Snownews, but what really sold me on Bloglines was the ability to use the Blogroll Wizard to add my list of feeds as a Blogroll here. Now when I add or remove a feed to or from Bloglines my Blogroll updates itself. Good stuff.

Something else that I just did last night was to setup my own search for the site. Some how I don't think this is going to be popular enough to warrant a search engine but I did it for the experience. I replaced the Google search that comes with Nanoblogger with a cgi script called Perlfect Search . It was pretty easy to setup following the instructions on their site and seems pretty darn configurable. The only thing that isn't mentioned how to get the indexer to update the index every now and then. I just setup a cron job to do the job. If not, I'd have to run the indexer manually and that's a pain.

Another script I've been playing with is Reblogger for allowing comments. You can either sign up for the service on Reblogger's site or download it and run it on your local server. I was considering using Haloscan but found references on their forums of comments being lost. You can pay to upgrade your account to one where that won't happen but why pay when you can run it yourself and have full control? I've been using Haloscan for the trackback feature only just because I think it's a nice thing and I haven't been able to find something that I could run locally that would do the same thing.

On a side note, the City of Bethlehem finally took the mountain of leaves that have been piled up in front of my house. I'd like to say it took them long enough but honestly this is probably the only disposal thing the City does right. Garbage removal should be just as simple as sticking what you want on the curb at night and it just "goes away" the next morning. I miss living in Whitehall where that used to happen and still does.

On the agenda for tonight if I have time is trying to get Webdav working so I can start using Sunbird to access a central calendar. Wish me luck.

While poking about on Bloglines I came across this story in which the student choir who sang in Another Brick in the Wall are suing Pink Floyd for royalties some 25 years after the fact. Now, while I'm all for preventing the exploitation of children I'd give those royalties, my right arm, and my left testicle to have had the chance to be involved in such away with Pink Floyd. They are, in my opinion, the best band ever.

I guess to some people being involved in the making of history isn't enough.

I saw the reference to this article on bOing bOing.

For no really good reason other than to see if I could I added a "Now Listening To" section off to the right. The idea was that I wanted something relatively real time that showed just the title of the song I was playing in xmms at any given moment and to show Nothing when I wasn't. Anyway, I searched high and low for some simple pre-made code or service that would do it and ran up dry. So, I decided to do it myself with my limited knowledge of Linux and bash.

During my adventures I found a general plugin for xmms called xmms-infopipe. The sole purpose of this plugin is to output some stats about the song that is played at the moment into a file with the idea that you can process it in some way. It created a file in /tmp that contains something like this:

MMS protocol version: 2467
InfoPipe Plugin version: 1.3
Status: Playing
Tunes in playlist: 409
Currently playing: 397
uSecPosition: 50606
Position: 0:50
uSecTime: 208692
Time: 3:28
Current bitrate: 192000
Samping Frequency: 44100
Channels: 2
Title: John Williams - 09. Dobby The House Elf
File:
/mnt/music/Music/mp3/complete_cds/Soundtrack/ \
harry_potter_and_the_chamber_of_secrets/ \
harry_potter_and_the_chamber_of_secrets-john_williams/ \
09-dobby_the_house_elf.mp3

There's tons of stuff there but I only wanted the title, so I wrote a single one line script for bash that would get just the title and stick it into a file on my web server. Just put echo $(grep Title /tmp/xmms-info | cut -d: -f2) > /mnt/www/nowplaying.txt into a file called currentsong.sh and chmod u+x it. Then modify as needed.

After that I used the general plugin called Song Change that comes with xmms and set it to run my currentsong.sh at every track change. Now, what this did was created a nowplaying.txt file in my web server that contains just the title of the song based on the ID tags in the MP3 or ogg I'm playing at the moment.

So, then in my blog template I did a server side include like so where I wanted the info to appear.

<!--#include file="nowplaying.txt"-->

The one thing that I noticed was that, if I close xmms it just keeps the song that it was last playing in the nowplaying.txt file. Since I'm nearly 100% of the time playing music on my system when I use it I just decided to have bash put the word "Nothing" into the nowplaying.txt file on logout creating a file called .bash_logout in my home and placed echo "Nothing" > /mnt/www/nowplaying.txt. Now, when I log out my site says nothing is playing, which is true.

I know, it's kind of a hack and I'm sure there are many many different ways to do this that are much better. But for my skill level this is good enough and it gets the job done.

I'm not sure how you'd get that file sent up to an ftp server but I'm sure you could put a line after the echo to automate an ftp upload if your site is hosted by someone other than you.

Yesterday we went over to my wife's Aunt and Uncle's for more of a Thanksgiving lunch. Dinner was at noon since they were traveling later to distant relatives. We all stuffed ourselves silly and my wife even made her famous (at least among the family) chocolate chip cookies.

I was hoping to have more pictures of the holiday but for some reason there were next to no photo-ops. Usually I like to get a picture of the impressive spread of food but it never happened. But, I did manage to get a pic of the cookies just before I stole a few.

We even got to see my grandmother, the one we nearly never see. I made sure to get a picture of her with Angie and Ellie. I don't remember much of my Great Grandparents except for what I'm shown in old pictures. At the very least my children will know what their's looked like. The few pics I have of the holiday are in the Photo gallery.

Today my wife has the kids off at the grandparents where they are all working on setting up the trains for Christmas giving me a quiet day at home. Grand-dad is into model trains in a major way and always has an impressive setup each year. After Christmas I'll have pics of his work in the gallery.

I hope everyone had an excellent holiday.

Today I found a couple articles that made me think a little. Here they are and what I thought.

The SOX Act

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Basically, this Act is to prevent the corporate people from getting away with the kinds of things they have in the past. Think Enron and Worldcom. Anyway, while reading this my brain was saying to me, Why do we really need this? Do the leaders in major companies have any integrity? Have they every had any integrity? I mean, this stuff just seemed to never happen 20+ years go, then again, I didn't pay attention to these things that long ago.

All in all, it seems to be a good thing but if the scandals of the recent past didn't happen this Act probably wouldn't have either. And it looks like it will be yet another burden on corporations.

But really, why do we need this? Corporate leaders should feel some responsibility to something other than to their own personal coffers. And I'm sure there are plenty that are actual leaders. But I guess there are enough bad eggs to warrant a specific law to combat this kind of fraud. Oh, and it's not just the big companies. My former employer had a fair amount of creative accounting going on and they were small.

Big Brother Alert!

Gunshot Detection Technology

This technology looks interesting, gunshot detection. One of the other articles I ready (sorry, can't find the link) mentioned that it can call the police and triangulate to within about 25ft the location of the gunshot. There was even mention of a remote camera that can me pointed in the direction of the gunshot for monitoring purposes until the police arrive. Don't get me wrong, quick detection of gunshots is a good thing, especially if it saves lives. But this quote from the article linked above disturbed me a little.

Proxity said the technology could also be used to monitor movements and sounds around railways, ports and national borders, "since every sound, including walking, movement through water or vibrations on the ground, could be programmed into the GDS detection system."

So, they can use it for good stuff. Great! But can we trust them to not use it in bad ways? What else can they program these things to do? Maybe pick up the spoken word since that is just sound too?

On a Lighter Note

Use an NSLU2 as an iTunes Server

This looks like an interesting hack from hackaday.com. Well, if you like iTunes it's interesting.

I've only been using Linux as my main OS for about a year or so. When I made the change from Windows one of my requirements was to have spam filtering that was at least as good as what I had working under Windows. When I started looking into meeting this goal I found there wasn't one all encompassing source to get what I wanted done so I spent many hours Googleing about the Net and asking questions on mailing lists. Doing this was kind of an annoyance and, if I wasn't such a stubborn guy and stuck it out, I may have never switched to Linux at all.

The purpose of this entry is two-fold, one is to consolidate all this info into one place in case I need to look it up in the future. The other is maybe someone who is new to this will stumble on my page and be saved a bunch of time and effort.

I'm not going to write anything new or profound here. No sense re-inventing the wheel since the other sites I'll reference are better written than I think I could do.

Here are the tools I use for spam control:

• Mutt - An E-mail client.
• Procmail - A rules based mail processor that sorts inbound mails into mailboxes.
• SpamAssassin - A score based spam detection program.
• Vipul's Razor - A collaborative database of spam, used by SpamAssassin to better detect spam.

Filtering spam

First, before I could even think about killing spam I had to get my E-mail working with mutt. One thing that screwed me up for a while was trying to send mail from mutt until I was told that, unlike Outlook, mutt didn't have it's own built in SMTP server. Most Linux distributions come with the sendmail MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) and I think it will "just work" but I chose to install qmail as my MTA. If you want to go to that extent you can use Life With qmail to get it all setup.

OK, once the MTA is working all you need to do is configure mutt to work. That sounds simple enough when you read it but it was actually the hardest part for me. To get E-mail flowing takes multiple programs, and it can get very confusing. The sources I used for getting mutt to work are here and here. The second reference there is just a list of someone's working config files which doesn't sound like much but I found it useful to see what working settings looked like. And don't forget mutt's site for FAQ's and links to other documentation. There's plenty there.

In a nutshell, without making this longer than it needs to be, I use fetchmail to actually get the mail, which passes it to procmail, which sorts it into mailboxes, then mutt views it. Spammassassin gets called from procmail.

As far as procmail goes, I fully admit I don't know enough to say much about it, so I used The Procmail Quick Start to get me going. This is not a short read by far, but it's well written and has a section geared specifically toward using Procmail with SpamAssassin. It'll tell you just what to do with great explanations and examples. First I'd just read the quick start to learn about procmail, then go into setting up SpamAssassin.

Once you are familiar with procmail read the Top-Level Install File at www.spamassassin.org. The easiest is to install using the CPAN instructions at the top. It's pretty detailed, but once I got it installed, I pretty much just followed The Procmail Quick Start to get me going. In a nutshell, what happens is procmail passes the message to SpamAssassin which analyzes it and adds some new header info such as the number of hits (hits are the number of "spammy" things it find) and whether it considers it spam or not. You use these new headers in your procmail recipes to filter out your spam.

Once procmail and SpamAssassin are happy, that is tested and working, it's time to install Vipul's Razor. To quote their site:

Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content. User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures.

The Razor simply adds more tests and increases the accuracy of your spam detection. There's no need to modify any procmail rules. SpamAssassin should use Razor automatically. If it doesn't you may need to recompile it. The instructions are very clear and nice. Follow them exactly and it will work fine.

As a side note, you may want to look into using clamassassin along with clamav to sort out any viruses you may get. Even though 99.999% of them will not work on any *nix system I think it's just a good idea to be able to tell someone you know they have a virus. Think of it as being a good netizen.

Also, if you are forced to use Windows thus ruling out any of the stuff I've been talking about you can look into Cloudmark which is essentially SpamAssassin+Razor for Windows. The only down side is Cloudmark requires a subscription. If you don't want to pay an annual subscription then you may want to check out Mailwasher. Mailwasher is rules based, meaning it only knows what you tell it so it's not as effective as SpamAssassin+procmail but once you get it trained it's pretty good. Before I switched to Linux Mailwasher was my spam control of choice.

Well, that's it. All of the info I've gathered and personally used to get this stuff going having no experience with any of it before starting. I can say that well over 90% of the spams I get are filtered into my spam directory with precious few false positives. This entire process was a lot of work for me to figure out, especially being totally green. But, now that it's all done, I can't see doing it any other way.

I've tried to be as accurate as I can. If you find anything wrong please let me know.

Today my friend Bob pointed out a new comic book movie that has me pretty excited. Yes, it looks like The Fantastic Four is coming out sometime in 2005. Anyway, here is a link to some info at movies.com where they have pictures of the characters and an interview.

The shots of The Thing look sweet (see also: awesome, magnificent, drool worthy). Dr. Doom looks well done also.

This evening at my friend Chris's house I took the opportunity to show off the pictures in my photo gallery of my children. In this there were a couple of pictures where my oldest daughter had a loose shirt on that fell off her shoulder showing part of her chest. When they saw this they told me they had similar pictures on their own site and were told by their provider to remove them because they were considered child pornography.

It's a sad world in which we have to be afraid to show innocent pictures of our children. Apparently, it's become illegal to be a proud parent. Or at least you must be proud with caution. Therefore, I have scoured the "filth" from my gallery. Both to protect myself from being falsely labeled and to protect my daughter from any psychos using these innocent images inappropriately.

Wait, there's still a picture exposing her left elbow. I better remove that one too.

I just took my daughter, Elaina to see the Sponge Bob movie. It was, uh, unique to say the least.

Before the movie there was a preview of the Fat Albert movie coming out around Christmas time. It looks like it has potential to be funny as hell. Bill Cosby is even in the movie which seems fitting.

Oh, I also saw a sign about a movie called Elektra which is an offshoot of Daredevil. Daredevil was OK, maybe this will be better.

I just learned about these things tonight. Everyone else on the planet probably knows, but hey, I do kind of live in a bubble.

Edited for clarity 11/29/04.

While exploring Nanoblogger I came across a cool plugin that lets you include a picture in your entries. It's a recent release and the author hasn't written much documentation yet, so I thought I'd put here how I got it working here. It's not hard at all.

First, I downloaded the plugin and copied it to where I have Nanoblogger installed. Then I untared it which should put everything where it needs to be in the plugins directory. After that I edited the picture.sh that was put into plugins/entry, searched for http and changed the URLs I found to point to my blog. I only changed up to the occurrence of /$ARCHIVES and left everything else alone. After that I changed to my images directory and did a mkdir small. Finally, I edited entry.htm and permalink_entry.html in my templates directory and added $NB_Picture just above the line containing $NB_EntryBody.

Now, at this point I just copied the picture of my choice to my blog_dir and added an entry. In this case a picture of my wife and youngest daughter. The picture needs to be either a png or jpg and be called current.jpg or current.png. I noticed it uses imagemagick to convert pictures so if you get an error like I did then check that you have imagemagick installed and working. I run Slackware so it was just a matter of downloading the slackpack and installing it.

Also you will have to replace all occurences of "http://cgi.ethz.ch/~scdaniel/weblog/" in plugins/entry/picture.sh with "http://your.blog.url" before it will work.

I'm not the author so I don't know specifically what the plugin does but I did observe that it takes the current.{jpg,png} and renames it to the same format as your articles permalink. In the case of this entry the image was renamed from current.jpg to 2004-11-20T11_13_11.jpg and moved to [blog_dir]/images while a thumbnail by the same name was created in [blog_dir]/images/small. The original current.{jpg,png} file is then not in your blog_dir anymore. If you want to link to the image in your blog manually you'll have to reference it in [blog_dir]/images. ie <img src="[blog_dir]/images/2004-11-20T11_13_11.jpg">

I hope I have this accurate. If there is anything wrong shoot me an E-mail and I'll fix it. The plugin can be found at sourceforge.net

Warning, short consumer rant below.

Most everyone has heard of Lands' End clothing and about how high quality they are. My wife loves there products and really the do sell some nice looking stuff. The problem is, when washed according to the care label the tend to shrink. At least that's what has happened to me twice now. I bought over $100 of shirts on one occasion and all of them shrank to a noticeable degree. The arms of one shrank by about 4 inches. Recently, I spent $80 two pair of pants, one of them is fine, but the other has shrank to the point of being high waters.

My point is, for the price they sell these things for why do they shrink when washed and dried according to label? I've owned many Docker clothes and have had no problems.

I think the reason my wife has no troubles with Lands' End is she insists on hang drying all her nice clothes. And, if the label said so, then I'd hang them and be happy. As I see it, Lands' End is overpriced for what you get and the fact that the care instructions are inaccurate makes it even worse.

I'm taking a trip back to Sears tomorrow to get my $80 back and then going to put that money into some Dockers.

End rant.

I've finally managed to get cgicomment to work with Nanoblogger. I knew it was possible since I saw other blogs using it. However, the Nanoblogger docs assume you are putting your blog in a directory below your servers root. As in, it assumes you want to put your blog in http://rignesnet.tzo.com/[blog_dir] instead of right in http://rignesnet.tzo.com/.

The docs show to add two lines like:

BASE_DIR=../cgicomment/
ARTICLEDIR=../[blog_dir]

My first inclination was to set ARTICLEDIR=../ thinking it would find the root of my site. But all it did was complain about not being able to find the article, even though the URL's were all correct. Eventually it dawned on me to set ARTICLEDIR=../htdocs/ and comments worked perfectly.

So far Nanoblogger is very nice and super simple to use. Somehow though I think running a blog will get easier once I learn some actual HTML other than what I can remember from my old Descent site. I'd like to customize the Nanoblogger templates some when I get the time and the know how though the default layout is nice enough. At least I managed to get the smiley faces working. It's not totally obvious in the docs but you must set MOODS_URL in your blog.conf file to point to where you have the moods directory.

The next thing to try out will be setting up comments support.

Finally, after ages of resisting, I've decided to actually play around with starting a blog. I don't have much to say at the moment so I'll go back to figuring out how this blogging software works. Wish me luck.

The basic syntax is: nb [-b blog_dir] [options]

How to ...

• create a new weblog (directory) = nb -b [blog_dir] -a
• create a new entry = nb -a
• create a new category = nb -c new -a
• create a new entry for a category = nb -c [cat_id] -a
• list current entries = nb -l [current|all]
• list categories = nb -l cat
• list entries by category = nb -c [cat_id] -l [current|all]
• edit an entry = nb -e [entry_id]
• move an entry to a category = nb -c [cat_id] -m [entry_id]
• delete an entry = nb -d [entry_id]
• delete a category = nb -c [cat_id] -d cat
• delete an entry from a category = nb -c [cat_id] -d [entry_id]
• force update of weblog = nb -u [current|all|main]

Thank you for trying NanoBlogger. Please direct comments and suggestions to the mailing list or submit a bug report to the project page on sourceforge.net.