Category Archives: Geek

All things geek

Geek

Greylisting

1 Comment

Recently, I was asked to write an article on greylisting for a slightly non-technical audience. Through the editing process it became a much smaller article and had its focus slightly changed. I still like my original version and got permission to post it here. Actually, I hate the second paragraph, but I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to fix it.

Comments, corrections, etc, welcome.

———————————————

Greylisting: another tool in the war on spam

As anyone who uses e-mail knows, getting spam is a constant problem. In the spam arms race new technology is being created all the time. One of the newest technologies on the side of e-mail receivers is greylisting.
Continue reading Greylisting →

Geek, ____ of the day/week

Scrapbook

Leave a comment

My firefox extention of the week is Scrapbook. It allows you to make local copies of web pages, sections of web pages, and keep them locally. This is nice for fast access when you aren’t online. The other neat feature is you can annotate those local copies with notes to yourself. It has a few other features, but those are the two I’ve used the most.

James Coates wrote about Scrapbook in his column last weekend. Its the only useful bit of information I’ve ever gotten from the column. As my friend said when I brought this up to him, “Coates’ column is like a car wreck, you can’t help but stare at it even though you don’t really want to.”

Geek, Linux

Open the iPod bay doors, HAL

1 Comment

As I’ve written about before I’ve written a .fdi file for my iPod for using with hald on FC3. My .fdi file fixes a few things that hald does by default. To find out more, just read that post!

Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note that I figured out last night how to specify any arbitrary mount option. I suppose it was possible all along, but last time I went down this trail, my brain was getting fried and thought only the mount options I saw in examples were possible. It turns out you can do any mount option as long as you specifiy it as a bool and set it true or false. You can also turn off default ones.

For some reason, for vfat filesystems, hald‘s default .fdis are set up to mount fat as UTF-8 by using the mount option of iocharset=utf8. This was causing some problems with gtkpod, so I wanted to remove that. Looking at some examples, I deceided to finally try specifing this in my iPod.fdi:

<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.iocharset=utf8" type="bool">false</merge>

This worked, so I thought I’d try some other mount options I would have liked, but couldn’t figure out how to get going my last go around with the iPod.

<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.shortname=win95" type="bool">true</merge>
<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.noatime" type="bool">true</merge>

Those also worked. It looks like you can put anything after volume.policy.mount_option. as long as you specify the full option and set it to true.

If you want to recreate what I’ve done, take my .fdi from the previous post add the above lines to it for the second parition on the iPod and you two can get fstab-sync to create an fstab entry that looks like this:

/dev/sda2 /media/iPod vfat pamconsole,exec,noauto,noatime,shortname=win95,sync,managed 0 0
Entertainment, Geek

WWCSI

2 Comments

As Wil Wheaton reminded us yesterday via his blog, tonight is the airing of the Wil Wheaton enhanced episode of CSI. I find I’m having a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup moment where someone’s put one of my favorite blogs into one of my favorite tv shows, or one of my favorite tv shows into one of my favorite blogs.

I’ve been following Wil’s blog for quite awhile now and as cliche as this sounds, he comes across as a truly nice guy and a fellow geek that I could have some really good conversations with over Guinness with. While I’d be watching CSI anyway, I feel like a lame teenage girl due to my excitement that Wil will be on. Of course, this is all due to getting to know him via his internet ramblings. Without him sharing himself on the net, he’d be just another actor that I think I recognize as a guest on the show.

If nothing else, I hope this helps relauch Wil into a regular series of some sort. If only so he can be reinvited to either World Poker Tour’s Hollywood Home Game or Celebrity Poker Showdown to redeem himself after his recent WTPHHG appearence. Just kidding, mostly. Really, it’d just be great for a nice guy, who’s great with his family, to get something good now that he’s figured out who he is and what’s important to him.

Coding, Geek, Windows, ____ of the day/week

Today’s computer hatred brought to you by INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR

4 Comments

Generally, I really love working with computers. I can’t imagine what else I’d do as a profession if I wasn’t doing what I do. However, there are some bugs on some days that just piss me off so much I need a place to vent. Good thing I have a blog.

Anyway, it looks like if you’re trying to compile things on Windows XP SP2 using Visual C++ with pre-compiled headers turned on and your code is hosted on a network drive hosted by samba, you’ll cause:

fatal error C1001: INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR
(compiler file ‘f:\vs70builds\3077\vc\Compiler\Utc\src\P2\p2symtab.c’, line 1609)

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2005-January/099421.html

This is probably one of those bugs that is half samba’s fault and half VC++’s fault. That being said, I also found a report that looked similar, but with win2k and offline files.

Geek

Upgraded WordPress…

3 Comments

As you can maybe tell by the new look, I’ve upgraded WordPress to 1.5. I’ve been very happy with the update for a few reasons:

The biggest win has been the new template system. I can create my look and feel and when wordpress updates, I won’t have to lose what I’ve done. In previous versions of wordpress I was having to update index.php every release, which caused me to not upgrade, even in the case of security fixes.

The downside is that I haven’t yet found a good anti-spam solution. By default, WordPress is pretty good about putting stuff that it thinks is spam into the moderation queue. However, on spam heavy days, I can see myself flushing out 100s of bad messages.

The other problem is that comment spammers have moved on to trackback spamming. Everyone with a WordPress blog (and many with Movable Type) were hammered this weekend with trackback spam. In 1.2.x and 1.5, trackbacks do not go through a moderation step by default, they end up right on the page. From reading other blogs that cover this, it seems to all come from one asshole and counter measures are being worked on. *sigh*

One really cool thing I found while editing has been the Plugin Manager. Its a great tool for plugins it knows about. It lets you know if they are up to date, and if you configure things properly, you can even do one-click installs of a lot of plugins.

The plugin manager led me to the MyNetflix plugin by Jimmy Oliver, which was written for pre-1.5. Since WP 1.5 comes with all the RSS functions, MyNetflix has some namespace collisions due to its included RSS library. The plugin also just dumped the whole queue, which really clogged up the sidebar as I have 124 DVDs in my queue, I would have liked to limit that. You also had to hard code the URL in the php source file, which was silly. It meant you could only ever follow one queue. So, based on Jimmy’s work I created KTGNetflix that fixes these few things. KTGNetflix requires wordpress 1.5. You can call it like ktgnetflix("your rss url") and it’ll show you the top 20 items in your queue or you can specify the limit by passing an integer argument like ktgnetflix("your rss url", 12) . KTGNetflix is now powering the netflix queue you see on the sidebar.

Entertainment, Geek

PS2: Now with hard driving goodness

Leave a comment

A few years ago Sony released a Linux for Playstation2 kit. The kit included a Redhat install tailed for the PS2, USB keyboard and mouse, ethernet adaptor, VGA adaptor, and 40GB hard drive. This was at least a year before the hard drive came with Final Fantasy XI.

I played with Linux on it for a bit, but I didn’t have the time to do any really good programming projects with it. Also, I never ran an ethernet cable near the TV that has the playstation hooked up to it, so it never became the “basement theater term.” Sony pretty much let it die, so the software is so out of date as to be almost painful to use. So, for the most part, I’ve had a hard drive sitting idle in the PS2.

Anyway, a few months ago I stumbled across HDLoader, a tool to load PS2 games onto the hard drive so they load faster. Not a new idea, as the X-Box has been able to do this, but it was nice to see available on the PS2. At the time, I wasn’t playing many games, for some reason. Anyway, its stayed in the back of mind for a long time, especially since that hard drive was seemlingly going to waste.

For Christmas I got The Bard’s Tale from Sarah. I dived right into the game since I enjoyed the original Bard’s Tale games so much on the Commodore 64. I’m really enjoying the game, especially its sense of humor. You also can’t go wrong with Cary Elwes, aka The Dread Pirate Roberts, as the voice of The Bard. The only downside to the game was load time. When exploring villages you go in and out of huts and each entrace and exit causes a load of either the hut map or the village map.

So I looked again at HDLoader. Since it was only $30, I figured I’d give it a try. It is the best $30 I’ve spent on gaming in a long time. Looking at the lists of games that HDLoader works with showed me that most of the games I have with annoying loadtimes work perfectly. Traveling around villages in the Bard’s Tale is now painless. There’s still a load, but nothing like it was. Also, games like Sarah’s Mortal Kombat: Deception, which has a lengthy load before each fight have all but been eleminated. Its like a whole new game console.

With the 40GB hard drive, I’ve been able to fit about 10 games on. I’ve only had 2 games I wanted to put on, that are incompatible with HDLoader. Those two games are from smaller publishing places, which I imagine could be doing less “standard” stuff. However, I’m not sure that’s the connection.

Currently on the hard drive I have:

  • Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu
  • Buffy: Chaos Bleeds
  • Crash Nitro Kart
  • Final Fantasy X
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
  • Mortal Kombat: Deception
  • Spider-man
  • SSX Tricky
  • Summer Heat Beach Volleyball
  • The Bard’s Tale