Joe Fleming dot net

I recently came across the band 3 on last.fm and absolutely love them. I managed to find all of their albums via torrents, but I thought I would actually buy their stuff since they aren’t on an RIAA label. Their website didn’t help at all and CDBaby didn’t have any of their stuff. I was about to give up when I thought I’d give Amazon a try. Turns out, it was a good idea; Amazon had all of their albums available for sale. But, that’s also where the problem came in.
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I’ve been considering picking up a new laptop for a while now. My old laptop, an ageing Dell Inspiron 8500, had treated me well for a few years, but I really wanted to change to a more portable machine. The Dell weighed in at around 8 lbs., had a battery that lasted about half an hour at its best and ran almost too hot to touch at times.

Ultimately, I just wanted a machine that was light, had a long-lasting battery and had a full-size keyboard. The 10-inch netbooks looked like a good buy, but it was difficult to find one that was worth buying. I had been considering the Lenovo S10, and came close to picking one up about a month ago when I found one for just under $300. What stopped me was reading about overheating problems with the machine. I’ve wanted the MSI Wind since it was announced, but it was always over the $400 mark, which I don’t think is a reasonable price for that class of machine. All of the other offerings were either overpriced, lacked some key features or had batteries that just weren’t going to cut it. In most cases, all of these were true.
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I just found out that comments have been broken on the site for a while. My bad! It’s fixed now…

Recently, my SATA controller on my RAID box failed, silently corrupting my entire array. Fun stuff, I assure you. Luckily, I had backed up the array about a month before the failure and was keeping a nightly rsync running. I had a few things that weren’t included in the rsync backup, but I didn’t really lose much data. So, again, backups saved my ass!

But, I’ve been aware for a while that regardless of how much I back up, I still have everything in one place. If there were a fire or a robbery, I’d be completely SOL. This fact has prompted me to look for some free or very low cost online file storage services. Most of the ones I found required you to run their software for them to work. This wasn’t very desirable for several reasons, the most important being that I run Linux and most of the services didn’t have a Linux client to use. But even more than that, I wanted to be the one in change of the backups, something that would allow me to just set up a cron job that would encrypt my data and ideally use rsync (via this script) to send that data. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found that, but I did find service that is both cheap and easy to use; Amazon’s Simple Storage Service!
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I recently started playing the game Fallout 3 a little more and I came across a terminal I could actually attempt to hack. After a few failed attempts at it, I thought I would poke around on the Internet and see if anyone had any guides for hacking the things. Instead, I found this online terminal hacker, among others (this was the best one though). I thought, “man, that’s pretty slick, but I wish I has something that I could run locally in the event my Internet was down.” I poked around online a little and found a bunch of people claiming to be prepping downloadable, standalone versions, but nobody had yet delivered. Then I thought, “I bet I could write me own,” and that’s exactly what I did.

The rules for hacking the terminals are:

• You get 4 tries, after which you can never try again
• If you exit before the 4 tries are up, your available tries reset to 4, but so does the puzzle
• For each word you pick, you will be told how many matching letters you got
• That count is how many matching letters there are in the SAME position of the correct word

Originally, I was going to write it in Python. That way I could potentially execute it from anywhere I could install the Python interpreter and it would give me a reason to dive in to Python. Then I decided I wanted it done quick, and in an even more portable way; as a raw HTML page. So, I decided to write my version in Javascript, and here it is!

I used the one over at mediumexposure.com as a benchmark and honed mine down a bit (I didn’t catch that last rule when I was playing the game, which is why I could never figure the puzzles out). I will admit, mine isn’t as smart as his since it doesn’t take past guesses and matches into account, only the most recent guess and the remaining list of possible words. So, there’s a chance mine won’t guess correctly in the 4 attempts, but in the handful of tests I ran, I always managed to get it.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. “Hey, this is just another online file, how is this portable? How can I run it from my machine?!” Simple, save the html file to your computer and open it locally. All of the magic happens in the Javascript code (which I commented so you can follow along), which will run from your machine without the need for any extrernal processing or server. Go ahead, give it a spin and be sure let me know what you think in the comments. It’s a work in progress, so when I make it smarter, I’ll update the file and post again. Enjoy!

I have a server set up with a RAID-5 array that I use to back up pretty much all of the data I have. Sure I have a bunch of things burned to DVD, but at only 4.3GB a pop, that can very quickly add up to a number of DVDs, and in fact already has. My server is actually an upgraded version of my old machine, running 4 500GB drives in a RAID-5 configuration. Since I’m cheap and don’t care all too much about performance, I use software RAID in Debian with mdadm running the show.

A short while ago, I had a drive that started clicking every time I would transfer large amounts of data to of from the box. Since all of the drives are mounted on the same bracket, it was nearly impossible to tell which drive was actually doing the clicking. I had a spare that I picked up a while back, so I figured I would wait for the drive to fail and then simply replace it. The problem was, when the drive finally did fail, another drive also failed with it, and if you know anything about RAID-5, you know it can only handle 1 drive failing at a time. Things were looking bad.
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CAPTCHAs can be good for stopping SPAM, but the last thing most of them are are usable. Don’t take my word for it, it’s a fact. One of the coolest ideas I ever saw was a HotOrNot mashup where you had to pick the three best looking ladies to prove you are a human. It was both usable and easy for a normal person, like my Grandparents, to use. That’s pretty unique and hard to come by, and that’s why I liked it.

One of the other easier CAPTCHAs I’ve used at work is a little dynamic images that asks you to do a little simple math. It’s an idea I saw on another site so I thought I would give it a try and it’s been extremely effective despite it’s ease of being broken. Surprisingly, it has completely stopped all SPAM coming through our contact form.

Another one I tried, much less effectively, is a colored word and a dropdown with a number of colors to choose from. It literally asks “What color is this text?” and offers a number of possibilities. This, however, was not effective for more than a week or so. The form still sees about one or two SPAM messages a day, which is especially strange because it’s a site that sees far less traffic. I think if I added more colors that weren’t even valid selections and changed the order it might be more effective, but I still need to find something better.

I’m thinking a system that would show three images and ask which one doesn’t belong could be usable, but it’s a little more difficult to implement; where do I get the images, how do I randomize the data, etc. I really like the HotOrNot CAPTCHA because the images always change and all of the images and data are crowdsourced, nothing for you to manage.

So, what can one do? Sadly, I don’t have an answer, but there is a lot of work being done on the topic. I think I need to just keep looking and mull this all over for a bit. We’ll see what I can find or come up with.

I know I said before that I would be replacing Wordpress with Drupal around here, and I did start working on that. However, the more I read about Drupal, the harder it seems to do custom things. Actually, it’s more a problem of poor documentation than it is a lack of flexibility. Still, if I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s hard to learn anything.

Granted, I could easily replace Wordpress for the sake of my blog here (and probably still will at some point), but that’s not why I was planning to learn it. I wanted something that would allow me to crank out new pages quickly without constantly restarting from scratch. I do have a very weak framework I’ve written to try to achieve this, but every time I start a new site, I feel compelled to re-do at least part of it, so in the end I don’t save any time. In fact, I lose time because I have to re-learn the changes I made for each site when I need to maintain them.
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So, I had some Real Media (rm) videos that I wanted to view in Linux. But, like so many other sane people out there, I didn’t want anything to do with the official Real Player for Linux. I’ve never been a fan of Real and I’ve always thought their software was a bloated mess. Plus, why install yet another media player when I know I can get the job done with the mighty Mplayer?!

A quick search on Ubuntu Forums yielded this post. Following the link posted, here’s how I got it working from the command line:

$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d medibuntu.list
$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs w32codecs

After that, the videos fired right up without a hitch. Brilliant! One thing to note: these codecs may be illegal in the US. I’ve read warning about them in the past anyway, though I didn’t happen to see any this time around. It’s kind of a legal gray area I guess, and while you’re not likely to get in trouble for using them, it’s something you should probably know. In any event, if you’re having problems playing videos in Linux (especially rm files), give this a shot.

In an effort to save time when I put together sites for people, I’ve been working on a universal engine I can use. It is modeled loosely off the MercuryBoard code and, for the most part, has served me pretty well. Recently, I’ve tried to revamp it with more object oriented code, integrating PEAR and a few other niceties. Still, the more and more I use it, the more I realize it saves me very little time. In fact, it actually costs me time when I have to go back and update the sites. It seems, sadly, the idea of a flexible CMS or framework is just too abstract for my skills.

I’ve spent some time reading about Symfony, which looks like an amazing project. I’m positive I can make it do anything I would need, but the learning curve is pretty steep and I’m worried that the time I’d take to learn it wouldn’t really pay off in the end. I like a lot of the concepts, but I’m just not completely sold on it.

So what does that have to do with Wordpress? Well, I’ve recently revisited a project that I spent some time with in the past but never really did much with. That project is Drupal.
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