Wed, 16 Aug 2006
Show Disk Usage in Windows - and a little hack
One of my favourite Windows applications is WinDirStat, a great little
utility that breaks down disk usage by file and folder and shows it using a
treemap. The tree map is possibly the best way of displaying this kind of
information, in addition to the obvious "block size is relative to the file
size" you also get colour coded file types (you soon learn to spot clusters
of mp3s...) and easy right click access to most of the functionality you'll
want to use while investigating disk hogs.
And now the little hack. The Show Usage registry file adds a "Show Usage..." right click option to all folders, if you invoke it then WinDirStat will start running from that point, saving you from opening the application, navigating to your current place in explorer and then running it.
Notes: If you've installed WinDirStat somewhere other than the default you'll need to amend this file manually and set the path to the executable. Be warned. This is a registry file. Running it may eat your machine. If so I don't want to know. It worked for me on a Windows 2003 eval install (don't ask).
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Posted: 2006/08/16 22:11 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Local Mail Box Nagios Check
One of the annoyances of my (working) life is the build up of
mail in obscurely named mailboxes on different machines. While the
typical aim is to have all hosts sending their local mail to a central
point (for mass filtering and deleting^Wlogging) you - firstly - have to
actually implement this change (normally on machines with lots of
different mailservers - yum!) and then add a check to ensure that it
never gets broken in the future.
I wrote a script that helps with both of these tasks, the Check Local Mail Nagios Script; which does what the name suggests. Once deployed and running with nagios it flags any mailboxes with contents and can both help pinpoint the noisiest machines and serve as a longer term configuration check, if you get the mail working and it gets broken in the future then the check'll flag it up again and you can just follow the red spots in nagios. It's not a complete solution (you also want to check where the machine thinks it's mailing to remotely and that mail actually arrives) but it's a simple first step.
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Posted: 2006/08/16 21:11 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Alien vs. Predator - Short Review
What can I say, one of the most intriguing ideas for a 'vs' film. Two of
the best alien menaces from the 80s. A big budget. A cast of complete
unknowns. A really shite film.
While the film needed a human element to get the audience involved the director took it too far and ended up with a human / Predator buddy cop feel by the end of the film. The action scenes were dull, no where near the standard of Aliens and mainstream nature of the two namesakes means a lot of the shock and surprise was lost even before this heavy handed attempt to scare the audience.
I was hoping for a couple of decent special effects, a small Predator platoon fighting an encroaching horde of Aliens for example. Instead we get the Iraq Reserve Militia of the Predators homeworld fighting some Aliens that consider the Winona Ryder days of Alien Resurrection to be a career high. The scariest thing about it? They've commissioned a sequel. 3/10.
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Posted: 2006/08/16 21:10 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
2 Misses and One Hit
The hit: I recently got sent away to the 2006 Exim Course in
Cambridge. The main presenter, Dr Philip Hazel, who's also the author of
Exim, was a good presenter. The material seemed well rehearsed, nicely paced
and covered a fair amount of ground over the three days - he also knows
pretty much everything about Exim so the audience questions were always
quickly answered. There were also two guest speakers, who had an hour
each. I was a lot less impressed by those sessions. I didn't really pick
anything useful up from them. If you want to learn Exim I can recommend the
course - although it might be better if they cut down the number of breaks
and made it a two day course instead.
And now the misses. I was damn ill while on the Exim course (and it seemed to take a handful of the other attendees out over the week as well) and I got back the day before the second LUG Radio Live event. Which I then ended up missing by being stuck in bed for another couple of days. And I lost my room deposit. From everything I've heard Jono and the others did another amazing job. Due to my being off-line for most of the week I also missed the announcement of the d.Construct tickets so I won't be getting to that either. Grrr.
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Posted: 2006/08/16 21:10 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
CPAN META.yml to DOAP Converter - Can't Be Bothered
Last year I was quite interested in the Description of a Project (DOAP)
project. I added DOAP files to all my Sourceforge projects, wrote some
little util scripts, contributed DOAP files to a couple of the Free
software projects I use that had asked for them... and then promptly
forgot all about it.
A couple of recent posts about the Python Package index and DOAP interested me enough to dig out one of my half-finished scripts, it's the (very messy) first pass of a CPAN META.yml to DOAP converter for the automatic creation of DOAP files for perl modules. And after a little play I'm giving up. The sheer number of META.yml files that are badly formed, missing certain fields, based on previous versions of the file contents or even just empty files has surprised even the cynic in me. If I was bothered enough to have another go I'd seriously think about a two pass attempt, first the META.yml and then just mine the POD for the missing data. And hope they don't disagree.
The point of this post? CPAN is THE perl killer app but it has so much cruft it's scary. And to remind me to work on things I can actually survive...
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Posted: 2006/08/16 20:33 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Incompetents, Security and Hellish Policies
"You do not secure the liberty of our country and value of our
democracy by undermining them. That's the road to hell.
-- Lord Phillips of Sudbury (source: BBC News - "Police
decryption powers 'flawed'"
I don't normally post on politics or law because I'm not an expert and, to be honest (judging by my apache logs), they're only interesting to a small fraction of the people that stop by here. However, two of the security related news stories I've seen today need to be pointed out, first of all we have proof of the old saying, "if they want you bad enough they'll get you".
Only in this case "they" turned out to be a 12 year old child (and no, I don't read the Express - it's the only instance of the story I could find to link to) who'd run away from a care home in Merseyside. And made it on to a jet during "one of the tightest lock-downs in airport history". He only managed to sneak through passport control. And police. And security. And a metal detector and pad down. And the ground control checks. And through the departure checks.
Who ever said "The guards are most diligent after the break in" has obviously never met any of the massively skilled people at Heathrow. I liked "we're launching an investigation", I don't want an investigation, I want a full witch hunt; with bloodhounds. Followed by lots of high level sackings and possible prosecutions. Airports are a vital part of our infrastructure, something like this must be as near to criminal negligence as you can get without seeing a nice cell and that guy called "Bruiser" with the pretty tattoos on his knuckles...
Now I've released my bile let's get to the other story, well, another link. Some peers have claimed the Police decryption powers are 'flawed' and risk being abused.. No shit.
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Posted: 2006/08/16 20:32 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
London Ruby User Group - Presentation Archive
Although I've been remarkably slack and only managed to make it to a
couple of the meetings, the London Ruby User
Group Presentation Archive allows me (and you...) to have a peek at
what's been presented.
The highlight of the current talks, in my opinion, is "Ruby on Rails from the other side of the tracks" by Tom Armitage - if you do any kind of website work it's worth a couple of minutes of your time. If the quality of the slides is any indication the talk must have been incredible.
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Posted: 2006/08/16 20:32 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
