Owner: Patches and Hacks | Patchlog URL:http://patchlog.com Join Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 06:49:15 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: a blog about unix/linux, system administration, security, patches, servers and web development Site statistics:Click here
vim windows and tabs 2007-05-19 03:45:05 Tabs are great, I don’t know what I would do without tabs, they are everywhere, your browser has them, your editor has them, even your webmail has them ( see yahoo mail ). Well I just discovered vim has them too.
Before windows and tabs
I don’t know why I never thought of this before. I was always opening each file in it’s own vim session, but that’s hard to work with, you can’t copy/paste from one file to another using vim commands ( my, y`y, P ) , I used the mouse for that ( not the best choice ). And to switch from one session to another I had to always do CTRL-Z ( to put current session in background ) then fg x to put another session in foreground. That was until I discovered screen split.
Multiple windows
With vim you can split the screen vertically or horizontally and open a different, same or new file in each screen.
Pplit the screen horizontally - :sp filename or :new [filename]
Split the screen vertically - :vsp filename or :vne[w] [file
de-mono-ification 2007-05-18 12:43:18 Today I removed mono completely from my gentoo system. I’m not sure how it got there, but gnome seems to use it the ebuilds in gentoo seem to have it activated by default. Well I don’t need that, and it drew my attention on it when I did an update and it didn’t want to compile. Well I had a pretty good solution for that.
It’s sad that the gnome developers ( some of them working for novel ? ) chose mono for who knows what stuff they wanted to do. It’s hard for me to understand this. When you have so many free-not -microsoft-.net-clones out there and when you already have your project written in C+, why in the world start to write pieces of gnome in mono. Yeah so Microsoft claims Linux infringes it’s patents well let’s make them right , let’s clone their main programming language that they love so much. Oh wait we’re safe now that novel has made a deal with them.
The future is not so bright for gnome, I’m not sure I&rsqu
the ubuntu buzz 2007-05-18 12:27:50 there seems to be quite a buzz about ubuntu these days,. Digg and other similar sites are full of stories about “the perfect ubuntu setup”, “the perfect ubuntu server” and others like that.
Well maybe not today cause now we have bigger problems.
We’re shocked by engadget’s / apple , iphone delay anouncement , even though they also announced it was a mistake, basically fake news, apple fanboys seem to be still affected by it.
Another “big” problem seems to be with the Microsoft announcement that linux code infringes their patents ( come on … you want more then novel and dell ? is red-hat the last one ? ) I think they also tried this back 2004 but this time they specified the exact number that each subsystem infringes ( kernel, email , gui … ) so we’re back at the old “linux contains code patented by microsoft FUD” but after this we sould see some more ubuntu stories.
Oh yes ubuntu is so hot, espec
Stop playing with page titles 2007-05-15 15:05:59 This is more like a reminder to me then an advice for others to follow. It reminds me that I should stop playing with page titles and get them right from the beginning.
Wordpress default post titles
When I first started this blog using wordpress the default template had something like “Patchlog ›› Blog Archive ›› Post name” for the post titles.
That’s really not good for search engines. Having that “Patchlog ›› Blog Archive” in front of every post title is looking like all posts have the same title to a search engine because they only consider a small number of characters from the title when they index your pages, and because the part that makes them different is in the end it may not be considered or may not show up in results.
The first change and the imediat result
By the time I finally decided to change this, google had already indexed all my pages with the wrong titles. After I changed it google started to re-index everything because it t
Color Picker 2007-05-14 13:58:56 AdesClrPicker is an easy to use standalone program that let’s you designers out there easily get the code for colors anywhere on your desktop.
Of course it you’re using firefox there’s an extension out there that does the same thing but that will only let you pick colors from your browser and Ades Color
Picker has some useful extra features built in.
AdesClrPicker has a color library that let’s you manager the captured color codes, you can delete and edit colors ( set up the RGB values ), you can save the codes in a text file different formats ready to be used in HTML, Delphi, C++ and VB.
When started, this program goes to system tray and waits for activation.A right click on it’s icon in system tray will show a popup menu with several options (Activate, color Library, Settings, etc ) and a list or recently captured colors.
You can activate it from that menu or with a key combination that you can customize from settings.
When active the color picker wil
stop spam in phpbb with akismet 2007-05-14 03:25:55 Spam is a big problem these days. Spammers use advanced bots that can post thousand of spam messages on your forum, your blog, or any other type of site that allows the user to post messages or comments. The bots are becoming more and more advanced.
A few years ago it was easy to stop this type of spam using methods like CAPTCHA but now the bots have sophisticated ocr algorithms that can easily detect the obfuscated characters in an image so that’s not a protection anymore.
If you run a forum with phpbb you will have to install a few mods to protect it against spammers. If you don’t do anything you will get hundreds or thousands of spam messages a day, you’ll want to bang your head on to the wall trying to keep up and delete the messages and your forum users will most probably leave your forum before you’ll manage to get rid of all that spam.
There are a few mods on phpbb.com that you can find. Basically what they do is run some sot of filters on the message be
Full Feeds 2007-05-11 04:51:30 I just enabled full text feeds on this blog so now you can subscribe to my feeds and read full articles from the comfort of your feed reader .
I’m using the <!–more–> tag on some articles and because wordpress 2.1 also splits the feeds when it finds the more tag I had to install the Full Text Feeds plugin created by Ronald Heft.
There are some other methods to do this presented by Kevin Muldon on his How to use the more tag and display the full content in your RSS Feed post.
Free dual monitor video card 2007-05-09 12:33:40 John Chow if giving away an ATi Radeon-based X1550 graphics card.
This card has a dual DVI output so you can connect two LCD monitors to your computer, or two CRT monitors using a converter. The card has 512 DDR2 on board and it value is around $100.
To enter the contest just comment on his post Who Wants A Dual Monitor Video Card? . He will make a draw from all the commentators and on Friday someone will win this card and with an extra monitor will be able to work like John Chow
This is of course one of his genius techniques to attract more visitors to his site and get more feedback in the comments of his blog. Read more:video
Wordpress optimal title 2007-05-08 18:30:46 I’m using Aaron Schaefer’s Optimal title wordpress plugin to modify the way wordpress displays the title by default. This plugin provides a function similar to wp_title() but your title will not contain “blog archive” in front of your post’s title and this is good for seo.
You will have to modify your header template and replace the call to wp_title with a call to optimal
_header().
In a previous post I presented a plugin for integrating Jerome’s keywords plugin with google sitemaps, this post will show you how to integrate it with the optimal title plugin.
I had to modify a the optimal_header function a bit because I use Jeorme’s keywords plugin for tagging and I wanted the tag to be included in the title for better search engine indexing. I had to add the next piece of code right before the return from the optimal_title() function ( in optimal_title.php ) , actually before the line “// send out the generated optimal title accordingly&rdq Read more:Wordpress
Showing some link love 2007-05-08 16:41:53 As of today the links in the comments section do not have the nofollow attribute anymore. So those that will comment on any post will get a link back to their site and that will add to their page rank. I’m using Oliver Bockelmann’s Nofollow Case by Case plugin that will remove the rel=”external nofollow” attribute from links in comments. Thanks to Martin Reed of communityspark.com for his idea about making a blog link love compatible
The side bar also shows a top of those that commented the most with links to their sites ( also with no nofollow ) . I’m using the Show Top commentators plugin for this, thanks to John Chow for his ideas about how to increase blog comments
Some think that this will just increase spam ? what do you think ? do you show link love on your blog ?
Upload Mime types plugin for wordpress 2007-05-08 15:51:26 A few days ago I had to upload two diff files with the extension .patch on my previous post about qmail and dkim and wordpress asked me to try other extension because the file extension did not met it’s “security policy”. That was really annoying so I started to look through the code to “fix” this :).
Few minutes after, I find this function wp_check_filetype in wp-includes/functions.php. It seems this function is the one responsible for filtering unwanted extensions. The only problem with it is that the allowed extensions are hard coded in it. you can easily add your extension to it but then you’ll have to do that every time you upgrade wordpress.
Luckily wodpress has a hook named upload_mimes for this function so you can just write your plugin and add a filter for upload_mimes so each time the function wp_check_filetype is called your “filter” function will also be called and it can modify the contents of the $mimes array that holds Read more:types
, Upload
qmail and DKIM 2007-05-04 09:27:32 DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a method for validating the identity associated with a message using using public-key cryptography and key server technology. DKIM is an enhanced version of Yahoo’s Domain Keys and Cisco’s Identified Internet Mail methods. As of February 2007 an IETF draft was accepted as “Proposed standard”, it may take some more time till this will be a standard but the current version is stable ( according to dkim.org ).
Implementations of DKIM in email servers is not available as much as DomainKeys.
For qmail there is a patch that uses libdomainkeys to implement a replacement for qmail-queue that will verify and sign messages but this only works for DomainKeys not DKIM. I have developed a solution for qmail to be able to verify and sign messages with DKIM.
My solution was inspired by a post on the qmail list http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.qmail.general/52049 that used two shell scripts one as a qmail-queue wrapper for verifying the
reviewme paid reviews 2007-05-02 08:08:32 Today I received an email from reviewme (Aff) announcing me that my blog was accepted and they are ready to accept review orders, so I may write some paid reviews
if I find something interesting to review.
It seems they now have a marketplace where advertisers set up campaigns and publishers can accept those offers so you don’t have to wait for the advertiser to find your blog, you can find their offer and just accept it if they have such campaign. But it seems the prices for such campaigns are lower then what you would get if an advertiser would order a review.
Here is a link if you want to get Reviewed by this blog for $40 at ReviewMe!
The temple of sun 2007-06-02 09:26:41 Sun Microsystems created an online flash game for developers named “the temple of sun” as an attempt to get developers to try Sun studio 11.
The game is pretty much simplistic , you’re in a temple similar to those created by the maya civilization but this one was created by developers to protect Sun Studio 11, because the people or their time were just not ready for it. you have to avoid some obstacles, collect some gold and answer C++ questions, and at the final you have to answer a question that can only be answered if you download sun studio and compile some code on it.
Unforunately sun studio doesn’t install on my gentoo machine so there goes my chance to win up to $5000.
Linux apps anywhere 2007-06-01 08:47:04 LINA is a virtual machine that aims to run linux applications on any operating systems.
The concept is similar to the Java VM, write your application in C, C++ ( and other languages supported in the future ), compile it with LINA and it will run on Windows, Linux
, Mac OSX and maybe other OS. You will be able to run command line programs as well as gui applications that rely on GTK or QT and they will look native to the OS were you will run them.
Of course there is some overhead that will make your applications around 2x slower, but they say the performance will improve.
LINA VM and the tools that will be used to compile applications will be released using a dual license similar to MySQL’s licensing model: GPL for those that release their applications under GPL and commercial for those that want to release proprietary applications.
The developement seems to have started 4 years ago but nothing has been released yet. The plan is to release the virtual machine and compiler tools thi
Yet another perfect server 2007-06-01 07:42:07 A of howtos start like that “The perfect Server” or “The Perfect Descktop” or “The perfect Setup”. Howtoforge has lots of howtos like that. Their latest “the perfect server
” literally shows you, ( because the howto has more screenshots then words ) how to install Centos 4.5 and the servers that you need for hosting sites with mysql, php, email ftp and a control panel - ISPConfig.
A howto for each version
This is not their first “the perfect server for centos” howto, they had one for centos 4.4 and one for centos 5.0. Wonder how much different is Centos 4.4 from 4.5 and more exactly how much different if the howto for 4.4 from the one for 4.5? Well they replaced the version everywhere in the text and luckily the install gui was similar so they did not have to change the screenshots :). For 5.0 they did not have so much luck, they had to change the screenshots, and a add some more.
Made for Robots
What I don’t like about
Agloco viewbar available 2007-06-07 01:32:06 AGLOCO the company that pays you shares to browse the net, has finally released their view bar.
This is the tool bar you install in internet explorer or firefox that will display ads that are contextually targeted, then all you have to do is use your browser and navigate like you always do, but now you’re getting paid for it.
AGLOCO aims to be the company that is 100% owned by it’s members. The idea is that if you see ads you should be paid for it, after all, the ads are renting your screen’s real estate. the company is founded by the people that had a similar company in the past, All Advantage, but the new model is promising because they will not spend money directly, instead they will pay the members in shares, that members should be able to exchange at some rate in the future.
Get the viewbar, install it and start owning a piece of AGLOCO. Read more:available
css class names in IE 6 2007-06-11 13:54:47 I just realized today that IE 6 class
names must not start with something else other then [a-zA-Z]. So don’t you dare name your classes like _class1 cause it will not work in IE6.
It works well in Firefox 2.0, IE7, opera and safari and that will just make it harder when you’ll try to discover the problem.
I know this seems like a lame mistake and something any designer should know, but well I’m not really a designer and some things you never know unless they hit you.
Google set to kill link ads 2007-06-13 06:25:42 Google has a way of reporting paid links now. They say buying links is an attempt to game their pagerank algorithm and they want you to report sites that sell or buy paid links.
They agree links are a good way of advertising and are not against it, but they want those that display text link to put the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the links. Using the “nofollow” attribute will means that GoogleBot will not follow the link, thus will not use it when computing the page rank for the destination url.
I think the only reason you would want text links on a site is because of that, to get a higher page rank and relevance, so by requiring webmasters to use nofollow, they are just killing text link advertising networks like Text Link Ads that work especially because they sell link ads that are followed and transfer page rank.
Google says this violates their guidelines. How can you violate a guideline, you can violate a rule, but if it’s just a guideline that means yo Read more:Google
Comment relish optimization 2007-06-18 05:39:29 Comment Relish is a wordpress plugin that sends an email the first time someone comments on your blog. The plugin allows you to define the message in wp-admin and you can embed tags like author’s name, email, website and others in the message.
This can be used to send a welcome message to the first time commentators and maybe invite them to subscribe to your rss feed.
The Problem
John Chow, tried to use it on his blog but the plugin and his huge number of comments ( 43000 ? ) put the site down for about 2 hours. He said the plugin misbehaved and he would not recommend it if you have a lot of comments.
I did a little simulation on a wordpres blog with about 25000 comments and I can see how the plugin misbehaves :). It took more then tho minutes to select the email addresses that should be emailed before I decided to stop it, because that’s just unacceptable, but I think it would have taken a lot more.
I managed to optimize it easily by just modifying a field in the Read more:Comment
extracting fields in shell 2007-06-21 15:07:26 A lot of shell scripts require processing some kind of data structured in fields or columns separated by special characters ( space, coma, semi colon, etc… )
This is a short tutorial that shows you how you can extract the fields in a stream of data. There are several ways of doing this and each has it’s advantages of disadvantages.
Here is what I use:
Using cut
The ‘cut‘ program will allow you to extract the fields separated by one character. you can specify which field to extract, and what is the field separator.
Example: echo “a:b:c” | cut -f2 -d’:’ will output b
The cut program has the advantage that it is simple to use, almost ( all ) Unix flavors have it included in the base distribution and is relatively lightweight ( ~33Kb with no library dependency other then libc on my gentoo Linux )
The problem with cut is that the field separator can only be a single character.
Using awk
awk is a pattern scanning and processing langu
More optimization for comment relish plugin 2007-07-10 05:36:17 In my previous post about optimizing the comment relish plugin I managed to lower the load generated by the comment relish plugin on the database server by adding an index on a column in the cr_emailed table and by optimizing a query ( basically removing a “useless?” join ). This improved the load time a lot but some users still reported slow load times on blogs with a lot of comments.
Looking more over the source code I realized that the function that tried to find new commentators was executed on each page. This function was executing a mysql query that joined two tables wp_comments and wp_cr_emailed. I think you can imagine the result of this on blogs with a large number of comments.
The solution was to execute this function only when a new comment was posted. And this comes with two benefits:
because this is called only when a new comment is posted ( or approved ) the rest of the blog will remain as fast as before the plugin was installed.
because of the way we cal
How to write about Linux for Digg? 2007-07-20 13:15:58 I can’t say I really know the answer to this question as none of my articles reached the front page, and I don’t think they will ever be there mainly because digg audience doesn’t care much about the type of content I write, but check out this site www.venturecake.com.
The site has only 11 articles and 6 of them reached the front page on digg.com. Venturecake.com is a blog about technology, mainly open source, Linux
, Unix, Apple, and some others. The last post ( Who copied who? ) was published yesterday and it got over 600 diggs in one day.
The posts that made it to digg’s front page are about common buzz words like Apple, Web 2.0, ( Web 2.0 is built on Open Source ), Open Source ( yes this is still a buzz word ), Ubuntu and Virtualization ( 15 minutes to using your existing Windows install & apps in Ubuntu , 10 minutes to run every Windows app on your Ubuntu desktop ) but also some unique tips like
10 Linux shell tricks you don’t already know. Really, w Read more:Digg
Speedlinking Unix 20-07-2007 2007-07-20 02:40:30
Ivan Ivoras wrote an article that presents new features that will be included in FreeBSD 7. If you want to give it a try before it’s released you can download a snapshot cd image or you can try his FreeBSD 7 live CD snapshot
It seems like the next version of Mac OSX is going to get ZFS, well it shouldn’t be hard now that it was ported works on FreeBSD 7 snapshots and MacOSX has FreeBSD at it’s roots.
Leopard is also going to get Dtrace from Sun but they’ll call it Xray
Want to try OpenSolaris but you like Ubuntu too much? Get Nexenta, an operating system that uses OpenSolaris kernel and Debian/Ubuntu. It looks and feels just like Ubuntu, has more then 12000 packages in the APT repository and you can take advantage of some features that don’t exist in Linux ( yet ? ) like ZFS
It seems Solaris features (mostly ZFS ) make a lot of buzz these days. I wonder when ( if ever ) will Linux include ZFS in the kernel. I know there is a ZFS implementaion for L Read more:Speedlinking
No browser supporting socks5 authentication? 2007-08-11 05:36:28 If you’re trying to use a socks server with Internet Explorer , Firefox, Opera or Safari everything will work just fine, except for authentication.
From my point of view this is a big problem. Who in the world would leave such a proxy server unprotected? Yeah of course you can always limit access to a proxy server based on ip address, but in some cases ( see NAT ) this is just not going to work.
Internet explorer supports only the socks4 protocol which doesn’t even support full password authentication ( only username and it defaults to the current logged in username ) .
Firefox supports socks5 but no authentication mechanism so supporting socks5 is pretty much useless. I think I saw some ticket in bugzilla about this but no one managed to commit a fix yet.
Opera doesn’t even support socks protocol but I thought I should mention all major browser
s
Safari supports SOCKS5 and even allows you to set a username and password to access the SOCKS server but it does not us
Solaris in qemu 2007-08-10 05:38:00 For some time I wanted to try Solaris
mainly because all the buzz around it, going open source then with the buzz around ZFS, but I never got the chance to do it until today when I had to make a perl script work on solaris 9 ( this is a outdated but that’s what the client had installed ).
The perl script was using the Net-SSH-Perl module and the module had some requirements that had to be installed.
The problem is that the system where this script had to run had no C compiler so I had to install solaris9 in qemu, compile the requirements and send them all in one package.
Geting Solaris 9
So I went to solaris 9 download page and downloaded the DVD version ( split over 5 zip files suffixed with a-e ) , decompressed each file, then cat them all in one big file respecting the alphabetical order of the names and I got my big .iso file.
Qemu Scripts
When I use qemu ( and I use it a lot ) I have these 3-4 scripts that I use everywhere:
1 ) the start script : start.sh . I use this s
Repair a MySQL table 2007-08-09 05:11:23 I’m running mysql 5.0.23 on a FreeBSD server. I have several databases there and a few phpbb forums.
I noticed the tables used for searching the forums ( phpbb_search_wordlist and phpbb_search_wordmatch ) crash quite a lot lately from various reasons but mainly because of hardware problems ( like lack of power ). Nothing unusual here so far. When I notice this I go into mysql and do a repair like :
REPAIR TABLE phpbb_search_wordlist;
But this time I got this answer: ” Table is already up to date”. So MySQL
client tells me the table is fine but in phpbb when I try to search something I get this error message: “SQL Error : 145 Table ‘./simscripts_phpbb/phpbb_search_wordlist’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired”. I try to read the table from the mysql client and I get a similar message.
Going through the MySQL documentation I find some extra parameters i can pass to repair table. And use_frm seems to be the one that fixes the proble Read more:Repair
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