This seems obvious but it’s really handy to have my website setup with DAV access to the backend for administration purposes. I’ve recently setup on of my sites this way and it works out quite nicely.
Split horizon, Bind, and reloading zones
I always have to look this up. To reload a zone on bind 9 where the server is running split horizon you need: rndc reload
bogofilter and the corrupt wordlist.db
Looks like something burped on my mailserver and my bogofilter wordlist got too big. Probably something to do with limits anyhow. In any case I was looking for a way to recover from the issue and came across this pearl in the Bogofilter FAQ. Well, the advice is incomplete. If you really hose up the database then bogoutil -d will stop printing entries before the end of the database. The next recovery step is to use the db utilities: db_dump and db_load to fix the database. db_dump -r (on FreeBSD db_dump-<version>) dumps the database into a text file and db_load creates a text file from a word list. The problem is that the advice in the bogofilter faq is out of date. It looks like there are some parameters that have to be specified. My solution: use db_dump without the -r that creates a broken database with a default header. Copy the header into the new text file and then append the output of db_dump -r to that. Et voila!
Mother of all MiFi wishlist
My Mother of all MiFi wishlist:
- Runs for 4 ~ 5 hours on rechargable batteries. Preferably 4xAA NiMh cells which I have in abundance.
- WPA encryption if possible otherwise pre-auth by mac address or live auth via authpf.
- Automatically connects to my lan using certificate based IPSec.
- Provides DNS locally.
- Gui configuration but can be a python TkInter of X11 Gui.
- 802.11b/g although given my experience last week 802.11n over 5GHz would be nice.
- SNMP configuration? That’s why I got an enterprise number from IETF.
To Do:
- Put the Soekris Net4511 on my Kill-a-watt meter to see how much juice it really needs (and how efficient the power supply is.)
- Figure out how to get USB into the thing. The outside internet will be a Verizon or Sprint network dongle.
- Get a case and power supply for the 4511
- Will OpenBSD provide WPA2 authentication?
- How hard is it going to be to get a USB jack into a 4511 case? (Bill Johnson?)
- How many people can I connect to it before it’s overloaded?
- 4521 Case? Automatically has room for batteries.
Alright, it’s no longer 1998!
One thing that really ticks me off the web designer conversation where your web design guy insists on designing to an 800×600 screen resolution to ensure that your pages will be accessible by everyone on the web. Today I ran across this nugget (opens in a new window). I’ve always said that this is so 1998 yet I’ve had this conversation as recently as 2007. Well, if you dissect the table you come up with this:
| Width | |
| 1920×1200 | 2.27% |
| 1680×1050 | 8.72% |
| 1440×900 | 18.37% |
| 1366×768 | 20.76% |
| 1280×1024 | —- |
| 1280×800 | —- |
| 1280×768 | 58.09% |
| 1152×864 | 61.04% |
| 1024×768 | 94.94% |
| 800×600 | 100.00% |
| Height | |
| 1920×1200 | 2.27% |
| 1680×1050 | 8.72% |
| 1280×1024 | 21.97% |
| 1440×900 | 31.62% |
| 1152×864 | 34.57% |
| 1280×800 | 56.92% |
| 1366×768 | —- |
| 1280×768 | —- |
| 1024×768 | 94.94% |
| 800×600 | 100.00% |
That’s right. If you design for 1024×768 you reaching nearly 95% of all the web browsers that participated in this survey. Now web designers can partly like it’s 2004!
More on deception in the marketplace
Interesting piece in the New York Times.
Deceptionocracy
If you’re expecting something about the latest Transformer movie, I’m sorry to disappoint. This venting of my spleen concerns or societies move towards a deception-ocracy. I’m coining a new word o describe a system where the market protects those producers who do the best job of deceiving their customers. The credit card companies have been doing this ever since they discovered that they make more money from customers who cannot pay of their bills. There entire business model now is to deceive people into getting in so deep that they can’t pay off their balances. They live fat and happy on the finance charges. It used to be that credit card companies were happy to make money from yearly fees they charged consumers and the convenience fee that they charged merchants. But that changed when they started offering consumers cards with no annual fee as a means of boostin customer retention. It wasn’t long before Jack Welch famously called the people who paid off their GE platinum cards in full each month “Dead Beats” because they didn’t make any money for the GE. The financial analysis is spot on but I can’t help but think that Jack’s got something wrong there.
I’m currently dealing with a PC from eMachines. If you know me you know that as far as windows recovery goes I’m with Ripley, Hudson, and Cpl Hicks on the recovery of Windows machines that have been hit with viruses: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” In a normal world when you spend $400.00 on a PC the manufacturer includes recovery media at a cost to him of about $2.00. Apparently, eMachines is so starved for cash that the extra $2.00 is the difference between staying in business and not. It’s too bad considering that the overwhelming majority of Windows boxes would benefit from a periodic re-install even if there were no viruses. And that re-install process changes the recovery media from a luxury item into a must have. Or, perhaps Acer/eMachines has found a way to turn the $2.00 recovery media into a profit center generating $18.00 in “handling fees”.
How to torpedo your own open source project.
My friend Leanne has a wisdom that I am only beginning to understand. A couple of weeks ago we were having pints of beer at an old college hangout and topic of conversation got onto computers. At this point a mutual friend interjected:
“But the Macintosh is the best computer platform available. How can you not think it will take over the entire PC marketplace?”
— DW
Now, if someone accuses me of being a Mac fanboi I’ll demure so I agree with his statement about the best platform. But I’m more than willing to argue over his question. As I learned long ago from Leanne:
 “Being the best product in the market place does not guarantee that you will win in your market.”
–LF
 As denizens of open source this is an axiom that we would do well to understand. Most time when I meet Linux fanbois, especially in businesses outside of the computer industry I both admire and am appalled by some of the things that they want to do. I wish they would ask themselves the question:
 If Microsoft is not the best product in it’s marketplace why does it have the best marketshare?Â
In operating systems Microsoft is certainly not the best product in the marketplace. It has the most users because of a combination of things. Not to be minimized in that list of attributes is the support that Microsoft gives to it’s customers. (In fact support is probably the main reason why Mac OS X is the best product in the OS market).
 For denizens of Open Source the support line is critical. As this economy rolls onward more and more of us will be getting the opportunity to build cool business projects on Open Source. When we do this we must understand that being the best tool in the market place isn’t enough. So when you are making the decision between say FreeBSD, CentOS, and Red Hat Linux: Unless you know that you or someone a lot like you will be supporting the project until you are 90 years old and buried. You’d better choose Red Hat or have a damned good reason for choosing something else. As a consultant I’m getting used to seeing and hearing IT managers freak out when they find out that some mission critical app is running on an operating system that they haven’t heard of. Trust me, you are very lucky if your Manager is even aware of CentOS.
 If you must choose an open source application for your project it’s very important that the application has developed to the point of having both a stable and a development branch. Because no matter how sexy the development branch is, if you want to see the project end up with a reasonable life span then you’d better choose the stable one.
 These are two of the things that your Director of Open Source Development and CIO want to see. They want to see it for a lot of reasons:
 Imagine, a mission critical app is intermittently up and down because of a bug in the operating system. Two managers, one’s on the phone to Red Hat in North Carolina and the other is grovelling through Google looking for a source code kernel patch for FreeBSD. Which one gets to keep his job after the problem is fixed?
 Imagine, your intranet project that needs just a couple of tweaks to authenticate against Active Directory so it can go corporate. The expertise to do so doesn’t exist in house because you left for that cherry job at Google. What does your manager say when he finds out from his consultant that you need another 20 man hours to pull the project onto a stable release the wiki software that you chose for the foundation?
 Peace
A tribute to Rita Mae Brown
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
— Rita Mae Brown
Windows… Ugh
My hat’s off today to the guy who packaged Windows Patch KB951847. An update to the .net Framework. There’s three hours of my life that I won’t get back. Just as a general rule I want to know how to turn Windows Update off completely. The Mac OS X’s update is smart. It pops up sometime during the day and says that there are updates. Then it give me the option of downloading them. It lives under the Apple Menu so it’s always easy to find. About 90% of the time I say not right now and then do the update manually within a day or two. On the other hand: windows update complains loudly if I try to make it emulate the same behaviour. It’s constantly putting up a little red shield in the system tray and then putting up a balloon to say “You turned me off, what are you crazy”. It seems reasonably obvious that Windows does not know it’s place in my computing world and more so, doesn’t understand why it got put there in the first place. On my Machine Windows is a VM under Parallels. I’ll start it once every six months or so when openning a Word doc or excel spreadsheet and I’m trying to work around a bug in OpenOffice.org or I just don’t feel like using iWork. That’s pretty much him. I’ll run Windows Update when something breaks but since Windows is a distance also-ran on my computer that won’t be frequent. As to why it got there.Window’s behaviour in the first place is the issue. Insistant system tray applications constantly stealing my screen real estate. Update that were written by crettins who thought to try and save me time by not sending a complete package and an attitude towards system failures that would have stranded Jim Lovell on the Dark Side of the Moon are pretty much all it took to convince me to buy a Mac.