Converting caffeine to code, shooting pics, and cruising the roads of life.

Archive for the ‘Tips and Tricks’ Category

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NetBSD 3.0 Release Now runs on the bebox

Monday, October 9th, 2006

As some of you know, and some of you don’t, last weekend was the 2nd NetBSD bugathon. Over 300 bugs have been reported as fixed and over 97 people joined the IRC channel to help out and talk about their ideas, I was one of them. I spent a lot of yesterday, in between homework assignments, chatting to a few of the developers about getting NetBSD/BeBox running again, and I succeeded.

Currently, the only thing you have to do to get NetBSD 3.0 Release to compile is edit the list file that has two entries for pte.h, one marking it obsolete and one marking it not. Remove the line marking it non-obsolete and compile as the handbook says with build.sh.

The good news to come from this is that one of the developers instructed to get the port updated was there. He doesn’t have a bebox, so he didn’t want to do it blindly. He asked me to assist him with getting it up-to-date. So not only was yesterday the first day that NetBSD 3.0 has run on the bebox, as far as I know, but it also marks my slow journey back into an open source project. (I’m not going to get near as involved this time.)

Here are some pics to drool over, click for larger versions:

NetBSD 3.0 on beboxNetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr
NetBSD 3.0 on beboxNetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr

Posted in C/C++, Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geekery, NetBSD, Operating System Development, Personal, Programming, Tips and Tricks | 5 Comments »

Myspace theming without the ads

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

Okay, I’m going to make it very clear before I even write the rest of this. I am not a fan of myspace.com. In fact, I think it is the sludgepit of the internet. So no that we’ve made that clear…

So we’ve all seen the disasters of pages created by millions of teenagers (like myself :/ ), that are impossible to read or even look at without giving yourself a seizure. To top all of that off, they have annoying flash ads that even talk without a mute button. So, today I set out to get rid of them and create my own, special, page.

First off, here is a screenshot for you to drool over:

moomoo Hosted on Zooomr

So to start, the first thing I did was see if I could escape the tables. Once I did this, I knew I could get rid of the ads and every other piece of junk I could. So in the About Me section, I had the following:

</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</table>

This allowed me to get out of the table-hell layout that is myspace.com, but I had to do one thing to make it not display the rest of the page. I had to reopen the tables. Code is below:

<table>
<tbody>
<tr><td>

Knowing this, I just added the CSS/HTML and images that can be found in the zip below to the About Me section.

Click here to download the zip file.
Click here to see the myspace live.

I hope that helps some of you.

NOTE: This *WILL* violate your agreement to the Myspace.com Terms of Service. Until they allow the iframe, we have no way to show their ads.

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, Geek Humor, Geekery, PHP, Personal, Programming, Site News, Tips and Tricks, Web 2.0, Web Development | 8 Comments »

Dealing with Domain Name Parkers

Friday, July 7th, 2006

Well I guess I’ll finally go ahead and make the annoucement of what my new “Web 2.0″ site was suppose to be called, Theed. Over the past few days, I have been trying my darnedest to work with the guy who has it parked. He’s trying to sell it as theED.com (the erectile disfunction for those not familiar with spam). This guy is on his fourth year of trying to sell it.

I emailed him and offered $50 for the one domain name, which he just renewed and pointed out that he would still be making a profit on it. ($8 * 4 = $32). He then comes back with a personal attack on my “IQ” level. I’ll let the following emails speak for themselves:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Are you interested in selling this domain name? I know it is going on it’s 4th
year for sale. What are you asking for it?

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HI CODY

I BUY AND SELL DOMAINS GLOBALLY…AND I HAVE MORE THAN 9200 DOMAINS..
MOST OF MY DOMAINS ARE ON AUTO RENEW.

I HAVE…THE FOLLOWING DOMAINS..

*THEERECTILEDYSFUNCTION.COM*
*THEED.COM*

I CAN MAKE A SACRIFICE IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT.

I SHALL SETTLE FOR *$900*

THANKS.

RAVI

THE*ED * ALSO CAN BE USED FOR EDUCATION.

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
I really only want theed.com, but I’m not paying $900 for it knowing what you just payed last week for it.
The most I would be willing to pay is $50. Would you be willing to sell it for that? It is still almost $30 profit.

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HOW MUCH DID U PAY FOR

CODYMAYS.NET

AND WHAT IS YOUR
ASKING PRICE

RAVI4321@AOL.COM

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
It is not for sale.
Do you or do you not agree to the price I offered in the last email?

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
WHILE
THEED.COM
IS NOT FOR SALE FOR $50…
WWW.CODYMAYS.COM
IS FOR SALE …

RAVI4321@AOL.COM

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Sir, I hate to break it to you, but it’s definitely not for sale. There is no way I am paying
$900 for one domain name that was purchased for about $8. Right now, you are the only
one at a loss here. I have nothing to lose, but you do because you have renewed the domain
for four years now.

If you accept the $50 payment for it, you will come out ahead, but if you don’t, you’ll stay in the
hole. No one else, obviously, wants this domain name because this is your 4th year of attempting
to sell it.

His response and the beginning personal attack. Notice the above email has no attack on him.

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HI

I BUY AND SELL DOMAINS GLOBALLY.
I DO NOT WANT TO WASTE MY TIME TRYING
TO GAUGE YOUR “IQ”. I LEAVE IT AT THAT.

RAVI

My final email before this post:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Okay, you’re going to gauge my IQ as lower than your own because I pointed out basic
business logic to you?

Well if we’re judging IQ here, you better get reading a grammar book, because you are
flunking English 101 right now. You see the key marked Caps Lock? Press it so the light
turns off. That will get you started. Hope you have fun in the coming days.

Now, I become another person to ask the international blogosphere for some help here. I know the blogosphere has been pretty powerful with Comcast and AOL over the past few weeks, so I figured I would try it as a last resort. As of right now, my partners and I are very set on this name and really want the domain. Is there anyway we could still go about getting it? Any help would be appreciated.

Note:
We do not want to harm Mr. Ravi. All email addresses provided here are for reference only. Do not attempt to spam him by email or phone number from a whois lookup of theed.com

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, Geekery, Personal, Programming, Site News, Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized, Web 2.0, Web Development | 15 Comments »

A guide to Linux’s kernel SysReq kernel interface

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

If you have ever suffered a kernel panic on a Linux system, only to reboot and find you need to fsck your harddrive, you will find these short cuts handy. I know I have needed something like this many times while messing around with Gentoo kernels and borked installs. If you have compiled your kernel with a yes to Magic SysRq key (CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ) in the kernel .config file, you will have the ability to use these shortcuts.

By pressing Alt + SysReq + any of the keys below, you can perform any of the functions listed:

  • r – Turns off keyboard raw mode and sets it to XLATE.cc
  • k – Secure Access Key (SAK) Kills all programs on the current virtual console
  • b – Will immediately reboot the system without syncing or unmounting your disks
  • c – Will perform a kexec reboot in order to take a crashdump.
  • o – Will shut your system off (if configured and supported)
  • s – Will attempt to sync all mounted filesystems
  • u – Will attempt to remount all mounted filesystems read-only
  • p – Will dump the current registers and flags to your console
  • t – Will dump a list of current tasks and their information to your console
  • m – Will dump current memory info to your console
  • v – Dumps Voyager SMP processor info to your console
  • 0-9 – Sets the console log level, controlling which kernel messages will be printed to your console. (’0′, for example would make it so that only emergency messages like PANICs or OOPSes would make it to your console.)
  • f – Will call oom_kill to kill a memory hog process
  • e – Send a SIGTERM to all processes, except for init
  • i – Send a SIGKILL to all processes, except for init
  • l – Send a SIGKILL to all processes, INCLUDING init (Your system will be non-functional after this.)
  • h – Will display help ( actually any other key than those listed above will display help. but ‘h’ is easy to remember :-)

There are more suggestions in the official Linux kernel Documentation directory (that’s where this came from). See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt for more information on this handy kernel feature.

Posted in Geekery, Linux, Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Managing the load

Sunday, May 21st, 2006

After yesterday’s little brainstorm about PHP memory caches and optimizations, you can guess what I did today. I had to drop memcached for now because I could not get it to compile at all. The config files for autogen had a bunch of binary crap in them so the resulting configure script would not run. That is not to say that good did not come from it though. I ended up downgrading to PHP5 and installing APC.

APC is very nice. The API is definitely the simplest out of all of the PHP memory caches I have looked at, but it lacks the ability to be distributed across different servers like memcached. I have run into some problems though. According to the documentation for APC, apc_load_constants() should return true on success and false on failure, but from everything I have tried tonight, that has not been the case. It has always been false, even when the constants loaded are working, which signifies to me that it actually worked.

I have also moved my new sites management system from Bugzilla to Basecamp. Basecamp is one of the many very idollized Web 2.0 sites from 37signals. The software is just amazing. The use of AJAX is very nice, it’s always were you want it and never where you don’t. Plus, the actual tools the software provides is great, even at the free level. You get very dynamic to-do lists, milestones (work kind of like deadlines), user management, asset stuff, and a whole slew of things I haven’t even played with yet.

My server rack page has also gotten some official recognition in my book. The man behind http://rack.modzone.dk found my project page today and linked to me from his site. Thanks, I really appreciate it!

If anyone has been wondering how to design a website efficiently, I would check out this article. That is pretty much the method I use, except I suck at coming up with such a pretty layout, but I’m definitely getting better with photoshop.

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, Geekery, Personal, Programming, Tips and Tricks, Web 2.0, Web Development | No Comments »

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