October 2007
Monthly Archive
Google IMAP will be a Yahoo mail killer!
Posted by solipsistic on 24 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: mail
If you haven’t heard already, Google with be and is offering IMAP for their Gmail service! You might not have it available on your account immediately, but it should be within a few days or a week.
I’m one of the lucky ones that already has IMAP set up. I tried it out in Thunderbird and the setup was quite smooth. The only problem I ran into is that some of my old chats came up with a timestamp of 2:33am this morning. So, they were out of order and weird, but it wasn’t that big of an issue.
The real point I wanted to make in this post is that this will be a killer (imo) for Yahoo mail. Back in the day when I signed up for Yahoo mail, they were on the leading edge for features and interface. I remember when they moved to the interface they have which they now call their ‘classic’ interface, and I have saved HTML pages that show what their REAL classic interface looks like.
But until now I have not had a reason to move to Gmail. While I do have a Gmail account, I don’t use it as my primary account because there was no real advantage to switch to it. Some of the features might be nicer and sexier, but webmail is still webmail. Now that Gmail offers IMAP along with a host of other features that set it apart from other webmail clients, there is a huge reason to move to Gmail. For this reason, Yahoo will lose many ‘techie’ customers it hasn’t already lost unless it offers the same feature.
In case you’re curious, here are the settings:
Incoming: imap.gmail.com
Outgoing: smtp.gmail.com
Username: username@gmail.com
SSL: yes
Have fun!
LDS General Conference Podcast RSS feed
Posted by solipsistic on 20 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
LDS General Conference audio and video is available via podcast!
After watching conference the LDS General Conference at the beginning of October, I really wanted to download all the talks via an RSS feed. I didn’t see one available right away, so I considered making my own. Fortunately, I found that an official podcast does exist. Its just not publicized well by the Church.
MP3 audio: http://feeds.lds.org/ldsgccomplete_eng
Video: http://feeds.lds.org/ldsgccomplete_eng_mp4
This should get you the most recent General Conference. If you haven’t used RSS before, you just need to give either (or both) of the above feed URLs to a podcast downloader (such as iTunes). The downloader will download all the current talks, and theoretically, will download the new talks next conference.
As an unrelated side note, feeds.lds.org is actually hosted by feedburner. Thanks to ldswebguy for originally posting these podcast feeds.
Verizon FIOS and running a Linux operating system
Posted by solipsistic on 19 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: fios, linux, network
Despite the well known fact that Verizon Can’t Do Math, I have to say that I am surprised to find that their FIOS service is pretty good. I’ve had it for over a month, and haven’t noticed it go down or have any speed problems.
More interestingly, I’ve actually found that they are pretty Linux-friendly. Actually, Linux-friendly might be too strong – lets just say that they have not locked me into using Windows for their service. I did have to use activatemyfios.verizon.net, which has a Windows/OS X only Firefox extension. But other than that, I haven’t felt the vendor lock-in blues.
Here are some good points:
- As far as I can tell, Verizon only blocks port 80. I run both SSH and HTTPS from my home box.
- Once I spoofed the correct MAC address, I was able to use my own non-Verizon router
- There is no PPPoE authentication or the like
- My IP address has not changed since I started the service
- Latency is very low (about 12ms to Google)
- Service has not gone down
I don’t use their phone or TV services, so I can’t comment on those. My guess would be that services like Vonage or Skype would work pretty well on my FIOS connection.
Bad points:
- The backup battery is supposedly pretty weak. It only provides voice service during a power outage, not Internet. For that, you’d have to use a UPS. Fortunately, I haven’t had the power go out.
- It took forever to get the service installed. Even though the previous house owner already had FIOS installed, they couldn’t come out for 2.5 weeks.
Verizon does pretty well here. So if you’re thinking about switching – I would recommend it.
How to create a lookup table in Ruby on Rails
Posted by solipsistic on 18 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: rails, ruby
I’m a big fan of the Rails way, but sometimes the simple things get you. I like to set up “lookup tables” in Rails, ie. tables in the database that hold commonly used, (often) fixed values. For example, if I have a Car model, I might want to define a Car type model. This would have two purposes:
- Give me the ability to associate a type with the Car model (ie. Car.type => ’sport’)
- Pre-load common values into the database (ie. sport, coupe, sedan, etc)
New version of Rails available
Posted by solipsistic on 18 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: rails
If you didn’t know already, there is a new version of Rails out there.
And I’m not referring to the Rails 2.0 preview. This is Rails 1.2.5, which contains fixes for a JSON XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability. I’m not horribly familiar with the details, but the site does say that you don’t have to worry about it if you’re not using JSON. Probably a good idea to upgrade anyway.
Who the heck is 142.166.3.122 and 142.166.3.123 (radianrss-1.0)?
Posted by solipsistic on 15 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: linux, network, web
I’ve been perusing through my logs lately and found the user agent “radianrss-1.0″ numerous times. I’d never heard of this program (maybe an RSS reader?), so I did a google search. The only commentary I found was this post speculating that 142.166.3.123 was possibly involved in the compromise of katester.net.
Interestingly enough, the rest of the search results are the traffic statistics pages of various Wordpress blogs around the Internet. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer for what “radianrss” is, or why 142.166.3.122-123 is constantly indexing all of my blog posts.
If you’re not already, START USING DD-WRT!
Posted by solipsistic on 14 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: linux, wrt54g
==========================================================
____ ___ __ ______ _____ ____ _____
| _ \| _ \ \ \ / / _ \_ _| __ _|___ \|___ /
|| | || ||____\ \ /\ / /| |_) || | \ \ / / __) | |_ \
||_| ||_||_____\ V V / | _ < | | \ V / / __/ ___) |
|___/|___/ \_/\_/ |_| \_\|_| \_/ |_____|____/
DD-WRT v23 SP2
http://www.dd-wrt.com
==========================================================
I installed dd-wrt on my Linksys WRT54g because I was having problems with the Sveasoft Alchemy firmware. The wireless was dropping constantly, which can be real annoying when you’re trying to do a video call on Skype. My suspicion was that the firmware image was too large and too many services were trying to be run at once, and the unit was running out of memory.
Once long ago I had problems with the Alchemy firmware getting an IP address from my DSL connection. I managed to get syslog working (shouldn’t have been hard, but it didn’t work well with Alchemy) and the errors seemed to point to the fact that the unit was running out of memory. It would eventually work, it just took 20 minutes to get an IP address after it booted. Then it would stay up for months.
I guess I’ve just been out of the loop with regard to the newer firmwares. dd-wrt has much of the same basic functionality in their ‘mini’ version as the Sveasoft Alchemy fully featured version did. And to think that at point I paid for Alchemy because I wanted a more featureful, stable firmware 
The wireless issues have gone away, and the web interface has a much more polished feel to it. I like logging into the router just to look at the interface and see the random stats. It also gives you status on the signal strength of the wireless clients, which can be very useful!
The dd-wrt firmware is famous for being able to do client mode bridging, i.e. act as a transparent wired-to-wireless bridge. I’m looking forward to trying that out some day.
By the way, although my unit will broadcast at a power of 251mW, I read on the dd-wrt wiki that 84mW is ideal for most hardware in terms of getting the best signal-to-noise ratio. At 84mW, I get a SNR of somewhere between 30-40, so I feel like that is probably pretty accurate information, considering I probably only need a SNR of 10-15 to get a very good wireless signal.
Try out dd-wrt today!
Slow SSH logins in Ubuntu Feisty (7.04)
Posted by solipsistic on 14 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: linux, network
There are two major reasons (I know of) that can cause extremely slow SSH logins – anywhere in the range of 15-30 seconds. It doesn’t seem like a long time, but it takes forever to wait that out sitting at the terminal.
Say no to GSSAPIAuthentication
For some reason, GSSAPIAuthentication is turned on by default in Ubuntu Feisty (7.04). If you ssh -v somewhere.com, you’ll see this in the output:
... debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.3p2 Debian-8ubuntu1 debug1: An invalid name was supplied Cannot determine realm for numeric host address debug1: An invalid name was supplied A parameter was malformed Validation error debug1: An invalid name was supplied Cannot determine realm for numeric host address debug1: An invalid name was supplied A parameter was malformed Validation error debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent ...
There are two ways to fix it. You can edit either /etc/ssh/ssh_config to include
GSSAPIAuthentication no
Or, you can edit ~/.ssh/config and add the same line. The only difference is that /etc/ssh/ssh_config will affect all systems users – probably a good thing.
Slow/broken DNS lookups
Each time you log into an OpenSSH server, it will typically perform a reverse-lookup on your IP address and store it in wtmp (try running the command “last”). If that DNS lookup times out, you’ll be in for a big delay. Whats worse, OpenSSH has a habit of performing the lookup 3 or 4 times, further extending the delay to 30 seconds or more.
Its generally best to fix the source of the problem by fixing whatever problem exists in your DNS infrastructure. This could be as simple as pointing /etc/resolv.conf to the correct nameserver.
If you’re really in a bind, you can pass the -u0 flag to sshd. Unfortunately, the sshd man page does not reveal any config file options to accomplish the same thing. But, the -u0 flag will stop sshd from performing any lookups that are not absolutely necessary as part of the authentication mechanism.
Use ps2pdf to create PDFs from any Linux application
Posted by solipsistic on 13 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: linux
If you want to share a PDF of a web page or any other document with another person, PDF is usually the way to go. There are free PDF printers out there for Windows, but fortunately the necessary software is probably already installed on your Linux distribution. Just use ps2pdf.
First, print from your application (ie. Firefox) and make sure to check “Print to file”:
Press Print, save the file as filename.ps , and then run the following command:
$ ps2pdf filename.ps
The resulting file will be filename.pdf.
This is also a good way to convert old PS files (which can get pretty large) to the smaller PDF format. And, if for some reason you want to go the other direction, you can always use the pdf2ps utility.
Rails’ ruby script/console has tab completion!
Posted by solipsistic on 12 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: rails, ruby
While I recently found out about Ruby’s ‘methods’ method, I also found that Rails’ “ruby script/console” will do tab completion:
>> a = Array.new => [] >> a. Display all 157 possibilities? (y or n) a.fetch a.method a.slice a.__id__ a.fill a.methods a.slice! a.__send__ a.find a.min a.sort a.all? a.find_all a.nil? a.sort! a.any? a.first a.nitems a.sort_by a.assoc a.flatten a.object_id a.split a.at a.flatten! a.pack a.subclasses_of a.b64encode a.freeze a.partition a.sum a.blank? a.frozen? a.pop a.suppress a.class a.gem a.pretty_inspect a.taguri a.clear a.grep a.pretty_print a.taguri= a.clone a.group_by a.pretty_print_cycle a.taint a.collect a.hash a.pretty_print_inspect a.tainted? a.collect! a.id a.pretty_print_instance_variables a.to_a a.compact a.in_groups_of a.private_methods a.to_ary a.compact! a.include? a.protected_methods a.to_default_s a.concat a.index a.public_methods a.to_formatted_s a.copy_instance_variables_from a.index_by a.push a.to_json a.daemonize a.indexes a.rassoc a.to_param a.dclone a.indices a.reject a.to_s a.decode64 a.inject a.reject! a.to_sentence a.decode_b a.insert a.remove_subclasses_of a.to_set a.delete a.inspect a.replace a.to_xml a.delete_at a.instance_eval a.require a.to_yaml a.delete_if a.instance_exec a.require_gem a.to_yaml_properties a.detect a.instance_of? a.require_library_or_gem a.to_yaml_style a.display a.instance_values a.respond_to? a.transpose a.dup a.instance_variable_get a.returning a.type a.each a.instance_variable_set a.reverse a.uniq a.each_index a.instance_variables a.reverse! a.uniq! a.each_with_index a.is_a? a.reverse_each a.unloadable a.empty? a.join a.rindex a.unshift a.enable_warnings a.kind_of? a.select a.untaint a.encode64 a.last a.send a.values_at a.entries a.length a.shift a.with_options a.eql? a.load a.silence_stderr a.yaml_initialize a.equal? a.map a.silence_stream a.zip a.extend a.map! a.silence_warnings a.extend_with_included_modules_from a.max a.singleton_methods a.extended_by a.member? a.size
Unfortunately the same thing doesn’t work for the irb. Of course you can always
a.methods.sort
to see the same information.