Cat, glorious cats!
Remember how I said “if you are lucky there will be cat related things”? Guess what? It’s your lucky day!
There are several things I love about this video besides the fact that the cat is meerkating for over 30 seconds!
1. Grand theft auto poster!
2. The music, it cracks me up!
Enjoy!
Popularity: 11% [?]
Rails Woes. Back to my love: php and mysql.
I tried. I tried real hard to get that site working on rails! I just couldn’t do it. I found several security flaws (hello allowing scripts and hijacking overlays to run in input boxes?) and it was an administration/modification nightmare for me. Passenger also crashed apache probably every 30 minutes. I tried installing Ruby Enterprise but I couldn’t get that right. I am much more comfortable with php and mysql. I can understand how that works and I enjoy it. So much so if I ever have time I may look into learning more than what I know – which is a just a handful.
I got a classified script to run SecondList and it’s fantastic! The site is just starting however I am going to start a marketing blitz in a couple days to increase traffic to it.
Marketing in an online community is a very strange thing. People are so trained to forget about things after 10 seconds. It’s almost disheartening! If you don’t grab loyal customers/users within the first minute of your launch (speaking figurately) you pretty much lose out. Actually marketing now, in particular with TV advertising, has to resort to tricks thanks to DVRs and the ability to queue time and skip commercials. The crazier the commercial is the more likely someone is going to catch a glimpse during the ‘30 second skip’ and end up watching the commercial. My husband and I do it all the time. I always wonder what goes on in the marketing meetings where they brainstorm for commercials like the Old Spice ‘man on a horse’ commercial.
I have hired a lovely person to help think of marketing ideas. She’s though of some interactive marketing for SecondList. Interactive marketing works well in an online community because it engages the user. Although some interactive marketing plans like flickr contests and hunts seem to have been overplayed inworld. A ‘best of’ contest every week with prizes (monetary or otherwise) and an inworld Scavenger hunt! I am excited for her ideas and hope they produce. As for plain old advertising I have banner advertisements going up on 2 large resident run websites. The owners of these sites are supportive of other resident run websites but also they work hard to keep their site running and I want to support that.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Back to working out… at the YMCA
I am not a big fan of public exercising. It takes a lot of effort for me to get up and drive to the YMCA to get on the treadmill and do the weights. I went heavily before November when I got sick and then started back up just yesterday because I really need to finish this diet. I never finish anything, I should at least try this, right?
I want to write here a list of things people should NEVER do at the gym. I am serious. I can’t believe people do these things at all but it takes all kinds, I suppose.
1. Bring your children. What I mean is don’t bring your children into the weight room/treadmill area and leave them completely unsupervised. So much that the child is running across all the treadmills and demands you get off your treadmill so they could run across it. There is a reason the sign says “Children not allowed and teens allowed supervised only”. Last time I checked a 3 year old is not a teenager and you exercising on the bike watching the Olympics is not supervising your child, even if they are under age. People, it’s unsafe to leave a kid in the weight room! Hell, I hurt myself bad on the elliptical once and I am 33 years of age! (I can’t believe I admitted this.)
2. Wipe the equipment down after you use it. Look the Y isn’t a rich place but they have bottles of sanitizing solution and rags that you can use to wipe down the treadmill and weight machines. USE THEM. It’s nasty when you don’t. I also remember who you are and I will never use a machine after you. If you think you don’t sweat on the machine you are crazy. You do. It’s double nasty when you cough on your hand and then hold the machine. While we are on this topic there’s a nice hand sanitizer dispenser near the door. Use that too if you can, but that really isn’t as nasty as not wiping what you use down.
3. Talk on the cell phone. Emergencies I can understand but I saw someone today literally hold a 15 minute conversation on their cell phone while using the stair stepper. I give them props for using the stair stepper and talking but I really didn’t need to hear about your friend’s vaginal issues. Really. When I am 15 feet away from you. Because you are talking so loudly everyone can hear.
I am sure people have a long list of these but these are the 3 biggies I have experienced at my Y. If anyone reads this and wants to leave an experience feel free. I’d love to hear them!
Popularity: 9% [?]
I installed Ruby on Rails with Passenger and an app. I must be nuts.
I won’t even get into the whole day it took me to install Ruby, Rails, and Passenger but I installed this application that mimics Craigslist. Included with it is a plugin Simple Captcha to generate captcha for posts. I installed everything but my captcha image wouldn’t load.
I found a Ruby on Rails forum and asked what could be wrong (I was stumped) and the creator of the script answered it and I started troubleshooting with his information. As I googled and googled my nimble little fingers off I decided to look at another website using the same application and that’s when the pieces started to fall into place…
I noticed the font was appeared to be Arial (was it? not sure but my guess led me to the answer). I started looking into how to make sure Imagemagick/RMagick was installed correctly and one site suggested that I do this command:
convert label:abcdef test.gif
It popped out an error along the lines of “can’t find arial.ttf located in /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType” (I don’t remember the exact error but it was clear)
I recalled in some documentation regarding railslist that it used TrueType fonts for captcha. So I went here: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ and compiled them.
It stuck them in /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts
So I just copied the fonts inside that folder to /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType and ran the convert label command and I got a test.gif.
Reloaded my site and it was there.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Filtering MAC addresses in Windows 2003/2008 DHCP server
Something I had to look up recently was how to filter specific MAC address from receiving an IP from a Windows 2003 based DHCP server. Before I go into how I did that I want to point to a neat utility I found on the web for finding the vendor for any specific MAC address one has.
MAC_Find: locate vendor for Ethernet/Bluetooth
I knew in both consumer and business class routers you could allow/deny MAC addresses to obtain DHCP addresses but had never tried to do it when Windows was serving IP addresses. So off to Google I went. When searching I stumbled upon this page:
How to Filter MAC Address with Windows DHCP Callout Filter
The article is a good read and here’s basically the summary for the purpose of this blog:
Published a while ago by Raunak Pandya from the DHCP Server Team, a DLL that you can install on your Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 DHCP servers, and which helps administrators to filter out DHCP Requests to DHCP Server based on MAC Address. This DLL is called the “DHCP Server Callout DLL”.
The system I was working with was a Windows 2003 server so I installed the x86 (as it is 32 bit, not 64 bit). When you install it there’s an RTF document filled with all the good manual information. This is definately an RTFM moment as if you don’t do this right you could DENY all MAC addresses trying to get an IP address, rather than ALLOWing all except the specific one you wanted to filter. (Once again, my advice- RTFM)
Once you install the callout dll it will dump the files into your %systemroot%\System32 folder (please read the other site for 64bit). Then open up the SetupDHCPMacFilter.rtf. I noticed that you can modify the location of the logs and text file that handles allow/deny actions.
Since I wanted to DENY specific MAC addresses that I list I set up my file like this:
#MACList.txt
MAC_ACTION = {DENY}
#List of MAC Addresses:
000a0c0d1254 #notation about MAC address
000d0c4a6723 #notation about MAC address
If you wanted to ALLOW only the MACs listed in the text file you’d change MAC_ACTION = {ALLOW} and then list every MAC address you wanted the DHCP server to serve IP addresses to.
The error logs and text file required by the dll is located in %systemroot%\system32\dhcp and the dll is located in %systemroot%\system32. The text file allows comments (obviously) and MAC addresses cannot have anything in them (such as a : or – ). If you wanted to modify the location of the text file and logfiles you would need to modify the registry entries that the installation puts in the registry.
These are located here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\DHCPServer\Parameters
I left these alone but had to look at the registry keys in order to find the correct paths to the textfile and error logs as the documentation has different paths listed.
Once I made sure all that was settled I stopped and started the DHCP server and popped over to the Event Viewer to look for the 1033 event.
And here’s a screenshot of the magic event:
Popularity: 100% [?]
Why Yahoo Answers Sucks.
My husband and I joke around all the time about how Yahoo Answers sucks. It’s full of people who ask the dumbest questions and people who answer in the dumbest way. A lot of the times the ‘best’ answer is never chosen as the Best Answer. Most of the time your answers are “idk lol” or “why would you want to do that?” if you post a question asking which option is better A or B. I believe “Why would you want to do that” is an acceptable answer if it’s followed with “because <insert some real thought here>”.
Apparently I am not the only one who thinks Yahoo Answers is turning into a cesspool of the human race. Geekologie has a post on it with over 200 comments! There is also a blogspot blog here with some user submissioned bad questions from Y!A. This showcases some beautiful questions such as (and I’m giving the gist as I am not looking at the exact wording) “if I farted in a ziploc bag and mailed it across the country would the smell still be in it”. Well, now that I sit back and think about this question it does sound suspiciously like someone I know, DBB.
I started browsing around to find some samples but I realized that it is Christmas Eve and I am starting to get very depressed from reading the posts there. Humanity is seriously screwed if our future rests on the shoulders of some of the posters in ‘adolescence’ and in ‘parenting and pregnancy’.
For the record my Yahoo history is 28 questions answered, 3 are open, 12 are considered best answer.
For the record this post was prompted by a post over at Shopping Cart Disco describing how the Second Life(r) Resident Answers forum is turning into the cesspool that Yahoo Answers has become.
Happy Holidays!
Popularity: 44% [?]
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-20
- http://twitpic.com/tyhy7 – This is my wrapping paper. Don’t judge it is high quality paper. #
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Popularity: 7% [?]
Auditing Firefox’s history (for good or for evil)
It came across my plate to be able to export and view firefox’s browsing history and it took me a good 30 minutes of research on how to do it so I am placing it all here to save someone else some time.
Prior to firefox 3 history was stored in the profile folder under history.dat. That was apparently stored in some format called Mork. Apparently it was a real pain and poorly documented and just reading the “Criticism” section on the Wikipedia (and following the citation) I had lost hope of viewing the history.
Until I read that Firefox 3 uses a places.sqlite file (MozStorage) and I realized the version of Firefox I was using was 3.
You think the next step is me writing something to read this? I don’t write anything, except maybe this blog. I pay people or check to make sure the wheel was invented. Sorry to disappoint!
I found this piece of free software to view both history.dat and places.sqlite files and allow me to view Firefox history- even seeing how long a user was at a website! It exports into a human readable format, although the impact that someone spent 2 hours on eBay isn’t in the text file you export it still gives you an idea that they visited that site 35 times, which is significant enough.
Read the documentation carefully as it appears I was able to view Firefox 3 places.sqlite because I had Firefox 3 installed on my machine.
Before finding that I was led to here which had the Dork reader linked but I couldn’t use it. However the article and information was very helpful in my search so I am providing it here.
I found this link about Web Browser forensics (why does the IT person always have porn and pirated stuff?) while browsing that caught my interest – bookmarked for a later read.
Popularity: 32% [?]
Feedburner doesn’t update the feed from my Wordpress installation
***UPDATE***
Feedburner works on it’s own for the main blog feed but the category feeds refuse to update. I’ve given up on using Feedburner on those. I noticed that the documentation I had regarding the Feedburner ping service was old. I really wish that I didn’t have to browse the web searching for Feedburner help only to discover the correct ping service URL from someone beta-testing the ping service after Google bought Feedburner, but alas.
So here is the ping service URL. Works like a champ for the main feed. As for the category feeds, I stopped redirecting them to Feedburner and will just have to not get metrics on them.
http://ping.feedburner.google.com
***END UPDATE – COMMENCE OLD OUTDATED POST***
In an attempt to add Adsense advertising to my rss feed I decided the best and easiest approach would be to use feedburner. Feedburner provides RSS stats and email subscription digests so it seemed like a perfect marriage for me. My only problem was I noticed that when my Wordpress blog updated my Feedburner feed didn’t. I knew there had to be a way around it so I decided to add ‘http://ping.feedburner.com/’ to the list of update services on Wordpress’s Settings->Writing. I also turned on under Feedburner Publicize->Pingshot. I waited and nothing happened.
So I asked Google. My husband is forever making fun of me because I will sometimes type in actual questions under Google’s search. He says, “This isn’t the 1990’s, use keywords.” Instead I typed in something like “Feedburner not updating feed from Wordpress” and I found this. With that page I was able to update Feedburner but it wasn’t updating properly after a couple hours. I really can’t spend hours pinging Feedburner every 2 hours so that my subscribers can be updated so I thought there has to be an automated way to do this.
I use a cron job and curl to update my blog feed every 10 minutes to scrape for new posts that are marked to be scraped so I thought, “If I can use curl there, I can use curl here”, and I went from there.
/usr/bin/curl --silent http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain.tld%2Ffeed%2F
I have this run every hour and it does the trick. I have it go to www.feedburner.com not feedburner.google.com I am guessing because I have to be logged out. Let’s just say the cron output wouldn’t show a successful ping unless I had it go to feedburner.com.
Notes:
Replace domain.tld with your domain.
Popularity: 63% [?]
