Category Archives: minipost

Keys, identity, etc

Posted by on 2014/10/13 Comments Off

This post serves as a general notice of key update, as well as a short bit of history.

My new GPG key is a 4096 RSA. It’s available on the SKS keyservers already, and has the fingerprint 1A9260611F0D15319BE6465E474E16D0F70C7CC9. I have also updated my Keybase identity with this as appropriate, as well as updating my online pubkey store.

My old key was E5BB45ADAC20F87D8E5C2316D3C406A99ABE41AE, 1024 DSA. I’ll be pushing a revocation for this in about a week’s time.

The intention behind this is a general update, plus also just adding some clarity to my public key situation. I have some Older Keys which happened, in various states, from times when I had no clue to times where I had no ability to survive machine or disk failures. Aside from those conditions, I had another key which I also no longer wish to use (due to reasonable key size concerns etc).

Also, updates

Posted by on 2014/09/28 Comments Off 
mysql> delete from wp_comments where comment_approved=0;
 Query OK, 16330 rows affected, 40 warnings (0.59 sec)

*updates wordpress, disables comments, leaves Disqus to do the rest*

News and such

Posted by on 2014/09/28 No comments

Been a while. I wrote some small bad software. The cornercase for which I needed it was “mutually-viewed screen session running pushloop, which does puppet runs” for some work a colleague and I were doing. Post-receive config to echo to a file (from your DVCS of choice), done/done.

I’ll also be doing a talk on Logcabin at PyconZA this coming week (with opensourcing the module coming in the near future). It’s been fun doing things with that.

Outside of the tech space I guess I’m just waiting for things to tick up.

USB port orientation usability idea

Posted by on 2013/04/28 No comments

I’m not a designer by trade, so this is purely a quick image mockup. But imagine how much quantum turning could’ve been spared if this was in the standard from the getgo:

So what I’m thinking is that on the machine it could get indicated which side is which. And yeah, I finally got to post this thing, after meaning to do so (and continually forgetting) for a couple of months now.

Update: source for image original is Wikipedia

Something I really need to add to my system-prov script

Posted by on 2013/04/02 No comments

root@likho:~# echo “blacklist pcspkr” > /etc/modprobe.d/diaf.conf
root@likho:~#

“Quality of service”

Posted by on 2013/02/15 No comments

Alternative title: what happens when you buy things that are licensed/run per TCP connection it can maintain.

hageshii% date; elegua; date
Fri Feb 15 22:08:41 SAST 2013
Linux elegua 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:00:17 UTC 2012 x86_64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
No mail.
Last login: Fri Feb 15 20:44:49 2013 from 41.10.98.194
elegua% Write failed: Broken pipe
Shared connection to elegua.za.net closed.
Fri Feb 15 22:18:47 SAST 2013

10 minutes almost to the dot and my connection is forcefully severed, presumably for inactivity. I wonder how many inadvertent breakages this can cause. It’s certainly annoying. Thanks, Vodacom.

(Yes, I know I can VPN around this, or use mosh, or or or. Unfortunately none of those were quick to do because I hadn’t booted this box in quite a while, and Expensive-with-expiring-bytes-G connection is better used on other things than this)

And this is what the trace looks like:

 Host                                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 192.168.43.1                                      0.0%   131    1.5   9.4   1.1 211.2  27.6
 2. 10.17.7.11                                        0.0%   131   54.6 327.0  38.5 5456. 844.4
 3. 10.242.249.2                                      0.8%   131   47.9 314.3  42.1 5400. 823.9
 4. 10.113.228.1                                      5.4%   131   48.8 309.2  42.4 5346. 832.0
 5. 41.192.248.18                                    12.3%   131   55.7 247.6  39.4 5290. 790.0
 6. vc-196-207-44-134.3g.vodacom.co.za                7.7%   131   52.8 294.0  39.4 5234. 815.3
 7. 41.0.4.1                                         10.0%   131   49.7 249.9  36.6 5178. 764.8
 8. 10.118.46.10                                      7.8%   130  423.0 474.4 210.7 5155. 851.3
 9. te-9-2.car5.London1.Level3.net                   34.1%   130  483.0 461.4 204.0 4123. 762.5
10. ae-52-52.csw2.London1.Level3.net                 24.0%   130  239.5 502.6 216.1 5009. 882.5
11. ae-57-222.ebr2.London1.Level3.net                24.0%   130  231.0 409.9 216.0 4010. 614.4
12. ae-22-22.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net              22.5%   130  237.8 473.7 216.9 5906. 897.6
13. ae-72-72.csw2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net              22.5%   130  250.2 445.7 219.9 5851. 793.7
    ae-92-92.csw4.Frankfurt1.Level3.net
14. ???
15. 195.16.162.254                                   32.6%   130  247.4 406.6 223.9 4726. 723.5
16. hos-bb2.juniper1.rz1.hetzner.de                  74.4%   130  233.1 740.9 225.0 5682. 1218.
17. hos-tr2.ex3k9.rz1.hetzner.de                     18.6%   130  339.2 491.0 221.3 5626. 841.9
18. elegua.za.net                                     1.6%   130  343.7 508.1 226.2 5571. 829.2

Hi-kwality packets.

How MakingView works

Posted by on 2013/02/01 No comments

Found out about this (via a local news site) earlier, a product called MakingView. Their tagline:

Explore our unique and Award Winning 360° technologies, and the opportunities we offer in visual excellence.

Their pitch is that you can get the “real” experience. Pretty cool idea, so I thought I’d quickly take a look at how it works. First up, fire up a browser, grab the URLs.

Video: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/medium.f4v
Player: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/makingviewer.swf

Fire up VLC, and see the following (edit: apologies, it seems something somewhere is a bit screwed with the width of the content blocks, just open the pics in a new tab):

In the boat

In the boat

 

Boardwalk

Boardwalk

 

Next step: become disappointed that there isn’t really anything cool going on. Video is just a very long series of (admittedly probably well-tweaked) panoramic pictures, and the player maps that to a globe and points shows you wherever you’re watching. Sadpant.

Edit: to anyone wondering why I wrote this, I was really hoping there were some cool multi-stream video hax going on, but ended up not. And yup, first time I saw a thing like this.

ThoughtStreams

Posted by on 2013/01/29 No comments

In various ways, I’ll likely stop using the minipost tag/category, and rather feed all of that over here now: https://thoughtstreams.io/froztbyte

In general it seems like a platform better suited to that sort of thing. Time will tell.

Rage About Dinosaurs

Posted by on 2012/12/14 No comments

This text snippet from a colleague, although I’m fairly sure I’ll get my copy of the announcement soon as well:

“Up until now, Last.fm radio has been a subscription only feature in your country. However, unfortunately, from Tuesday 15 January 2013 we are no longer able to provide radio streaming to you due to licensing restrictions, and you will no longer be able to listen to Last.fm radio.”

I honestly wish all these dinosaur media companies and committees and agencies and whatever would just die already. Earlier today I was speaking to a friend of mine, one who also happens to be an artist. She’s currently raising money for her new album, and is just running it entirely by herself. Not that any of this is new to anyone sensible, of course. All of this licensing crap is just ridiculously frustrating, and at a guess I’m fairly sure it doesn’t actually end up helping all that many artists.

Ah well….hopefully time brings some useful change. At least the antiquated ITU seems to have been sent a decent message about how things should work.

Zenoss Device Listing

Posted by on 2012/10/16 No comments

Nice for if you need some form of automated report in zenoss, here’s a code snippet to print out a list of devices per class, formatted in markdown markup

typehash = {}
for d in dmd.Devices.getSubDevices():
    if typehash.has_key(d.getDeviceClassPath()) == False:
        typehash[d.getDeviceClassPath()] = []
    typehash[d.getDeviceClassPath()].append(d.viewName())

for key in typehash:
    print """### %s\n""" % (key)
    for item in typehash[key]:
        print "*   %s\n" % (item)
    print ""

Run it in the zenoss console, or anything with a dmd connection. Tested on 2.5.x, but should be trivial to port forward if it breaks.

(PS: I could probably fix up that last bit to do something with .iteritems() instead…)