Wed, 23 Aug 2006
Is Perl Installed? Don't use this script to check!
Over at use.perl.org Ovid recently posted
How to tell if Perl is installed on your computer
, an entry that points to a shell script that must die.
Go and read the script in the post, I'll wait.
Note: this isn't his code and he's blame free, he just found it and started waving it like a red flag so the anal shell scripters among us have something to moan about :)
Firstly why use ksh? The script doesn't do anything neat so just use sh,
which exists on almost all Unix machines in some form (even if it's bash
in a dress playing pretend). Secondly, why do a which perl
and then COMPLETELY IGNORE the results? You might as well just run
perl -V on the command line as you're using
$PATH anyway. GAH!
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Posted: 2006/08/23 01:39 | /justdont | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Eric Cartman^WRaymond Strikes Again
The Register is one of the sites covering ESRs
Linux / iPod-compatibility rant and he's managed to confuse himself,
other people and the issues. Once again.
Firstly we have this request that the "community", most of whom cringe when he starts talking, start compromising on closed source platforms and formats. Apparently the OpenSource movement hasn't given up enough rights yet and he'd like us to back down and hand over a couple more.
He then tangents off about 64bit architectures and the desktop... Which is an odd mix to start with, all the early 64bit action will happen in the datacentre and the server room. But anyway, Linux has had better AMD64 support than Windows for years now. SuSE led the crowd (Bo Thorsen gave a couple of great 64 bit porting talks at GLLUG years ago) and his "the end of the transition to 64-bit computing by the close of 2008." is insane. The sheer number of people still running Windows 95 is a testament to how slow the conversion process happens.
As for binary kernel drivers being a necessary compromise what can I say, I'll side with people like Theo De Raat and RMS any day. They've done the legwork, written the code and actually stick to their principles. Unlike the guy who's now most famous for a kernel build system that the kernel builders wouldn't touch and altering the Hackers Dictionary to suit his own ego.
Bonus link: The Everybody loves Eric Raymond Cartoon.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 01:22 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Scientific American and Developer.com Printer Friendly Greasemonkey Redirects
The overly long title has most of the details. I've created a print
friendly redirect Greasemonkey script for both Developer.com and Scientific American.com.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:58 | /tools/online/greasemonkey | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
I'm going to YAPC::Europe 2006
And you should be too!
YAPC::Europe 2006 is my first YAPC since 2001; when I stopped working as a Perl developer I started spending my cash and holiday time on more relevant conferences. Now I'm working in a heavily perl shop they've been gracious enough to pay for my attendance in Birmingham. Where they have curry. Lots of curry. And a Perl conference, but I should get my priorities right ;)
There are a number of great talks in the schedule but I'm especially looking forward to Marty Pauley and Karen Pauley, who have a couple of talks each and are both excellent speakers - Marty is one of the most animate, likable speakers I've ever seen and Karen has a perspective on the IT industry that's *always* worth listening to, Tim Bunce on DBI (THE horses mouth when it comes to DBI), Dave Cross talking about actual databases (you know, the ones with views, stored procedures and real replication) and a couple of SNMP talks which'll be useful for work.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:36 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Enable ICMP Internally - Or I'll Find You...
When designing internal firewalls and filtering policies *PLEASE* stop
and think about ICMP Echo Request and ICMP Echo Reply (the ICMP types
used by ping). If you turn these off you're not really
gaining any real security (especially on your internal network, and to
be honest you want to think long and hard about what turning it off on
the external facing machines gets you) and you're making life much
harder than it needs to be in the long run.
Network diagnostics and host discovery are two simple, and quite common, tasks that become a hell of a lot harder to do, and consume more time and resources, if you turn ICMP off. And it annoys the hell out of new staff as they try and learn about your networks, it also irks people you ask to do you a "quick favour".
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:34 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
FireFox Extension - Disable / Remove Weirdness
I use a LOT of FireFox extensions and in an attempt to slim my install
down I disabled the less used ones so I could remove them in a week or
so if I hadn't needed them. The first stage was easy, right click the
extensions in the Extensions menu and choose "disable". I then
carried on using FireFox as normal. I didn't need the extensions removed
immediately so I didn't restart it.
A couple of days went past, the browser had been restarted a few times and I wasn't missing any of the functionality. So I removed the extensions thinking all was well. Very foolish of me.
I first started to notice my tabs were acting a little different a couple of days later; after I'd removed the (previously disabled) extensions and restarted the browser. External applications were opening a new tab each time rather than replacing the right most one and other little bits like that. But this only started after the remove, not the disable - which is wrong.
I don't know why, I'm assuming that something doesn't understand "disable" and left the extensions running even though the GUI displayed them as greyed out. And then when I removed them it actually actioned the change. I've not (yet) been able to reproduce it and it's bugged the heck out of me for almost ten whole minutes. I'm mentioning this in the hope that someone else has seen the same thing but actually managed to reproduce it or work out what's wrong.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:34 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Basic Accessibility Analyzer IE Plugin
I'm happy to announce the first release of the Basic
Accessibility Analyzer IE Plugin. This IE plugin wraps the service
provided by Peter
Krantz and has already found some quirks in my own site.
The full list of what it checks can be found here.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:34 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
An Evening with Kevin Smith - Short Review
I've been watching my way through Kevin Smiths back catalogue of work
recently and one of the forgotten highlights of my DVD collection is
An Evening with Kevin
Smith. Although the format's pretty simple, Kevin Smith engaging the
audience in Q&A sessions in a number of American colleges, the material
is polished, the delivery near perfect and the speaker charismatic.
Over three hours of footage he fields questions on pretty much everything, his films, loves and life. All tied together with a number of entertaining stories and anecdotes. If you like Kevin Smith films and his style of dialogue then buy this now. 9/10.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:34 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Snakes on a Plane - Short Review
How could I resist a film called Snakes on a Plane, featuring
one of the masters of over acting, Samuel L. Jackson, that had some of
its scenes re-shot to be funnier, yes, funnier, based on anonymous
internet posts on movie forums? Well, obviously I couldn't.
I'm honestly not sure why I bothered. I like good films, I also like REALLY bad films, I have a soft-spot for the old Godzilla movies for instance, but this film wasn't good and it wasn't that bad. The over acting wasn't as extreme as I thought it would be, the pacing was OK and none of the actors either redeemed or destroyed their careers with their performances. The film was pretty much middle of the road. Rent it on DVD if you're really bored. 3/10.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 00:34 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 17 Aug 2006
Azumi 2 - Death or Love Short Review
Azumi 2: Death or
Love is a pretty standard Japanese sword fighting film with
impressive wirework, well choreographed action scenes, very little plot
and a pretty lead, in this case Aya Ueto.
It follows on directly from the first film, between the continuation of the plot, a number of the same characters and, aside from a few small flashbacks, it makes no attempt to welcome new viewers. Although as a sequel why should it? While it ticks all the same feature boxes as the first film this one seemed to have more (at least more noticeable) bluescreen backgrounds and the pacing didn't seem as well thought out as the first film.
It's watchable and has a couple of great katana fights but it's not as good as its own prequel. 6/10.
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Posted: 2006/08/17 00:30 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
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
