Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
LibreOffice hot off the presses for Ubuntu and now in PPA!
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Software, Technology on March 1st, 2011
In case you haven’t heard, LibreOffice is available as a PPA. That means no more downloading individual .debs and auto updating! Found through OMG!Ubuntu here.
Let me introduce you to my little friends
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Software, Technology on December 22nd, 2010
I installed Linux on my workstation this week and I have been ‘rediscovering’ some useful apps.
First off, guake, yet another drop down terminal, but this one works surprisingly well. Its simple, but does just what it needs and nothing more. Apps like this are few an far between, since everyone tries to get their apps to rollover and fetch the newspaper too. Get this one if you use the terminal a lot.
Then there is Docky, I think I am just about the last person to have found this pretty and a useful system panel, a la OSX. Mac-ites should’t get all the cool apps.
And, why-oh-why does the default Ubuntu desktop come with Empathy rather than Pidgin for IM? I could go on about how incomplete and buggy Empathy is, but I think everyone already knows that…except for the Ubu-devs..
Maven, I think I know what this does..Its a..ahh, no, actually I am not even sure why I threw it in here. I have been it a lot lately and I am not sure if I am repulsed by it or intrigued..I have narrowed it down to either being the salvation of Java developers, or damnation wrapped in nicely formatted XML. I dunno, you decide..
Ok, so this list wasn’t nearly as long as I was thinking it was going to be..
Lighttpd can’t bind to port 80
If you are running Ubuntu 10.01 and you get the error message “can’t bind to port: :: 80 Address already in use” when you try to start up, check your config file and comment out the line that has ‘ include_shell “/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl” ‘
Just some advice from my wanderings.
Javascript is home
Posted by: jeffro in Geocaching, Software on March 9th, 2009
I was hacking together a widget for a friend last night and I was having a blast. I totally forgot how much fun I have coding Javascript. I am not sure if its because it was the language I learned programming on, or if its the syntax. Javascript can be so easy or so amazingly complex that it caters to a much larger crowd than the compiled languages. There are a few nuances that annoy me, but what language doesn’t have that? None I have ever encountered.
We went out to Ringing Rocks State Park yesterday and I decided to try and pick up some Geocaches while we were in the area. There were still a lot of leaves on the ground and it made find the caches pretty much impossible. So it was a total no-win in there. My kids still don’t believe that these things even exist as I have never found one when I had them with me. 
Goodbye SSL-Explorer, hello Adito
I have been wondering why 3sp hasn’t issued any updates for the community edition SSL-Explorer. I found out today it is because 3sp was bought by Barracuda Networks and the SSL-Explorer product has been discontinued. So for those of you that were lucky enough to get RC17 before they closed the doors, back it all up and put it somewhere safe.
On a related note, a community project named Adito is working off a fork of the SSL-Explorer RC17 code base. They are making extraordinary progress in getting Adito fully GPL, along with a plug-in database! So major congrats and thanks to everyone who got this running again. I am curious actually, as to how many former 3sp programmers are working on Adito?
For those that are in the dark, Adito/SSL-Explorer is an SSL VPN project that allow one to access resources inside a firewalled network over SSL. SSL runs on port 443 which is more commonly known as HTTPS, or secure browsing so it is rarely (read, never) blocked. So its a great way to cut down on the amount of holes you have to poke in your firewall while still allowing people access to the resources they need.
AutoMySQLbackup & Firefox3
Posted by: jeffro in Software, Technology, Web on March 24th, 2008
I needed an elegant way to backup all my MySQL databases and I didn’t want to have to make a bunch of little cron jobs to back up each individual DB. After a bit of searching I came across this little gem. AutoMySQLBackup. Its essentially just a wrapper around mysqldump, but it does alot more than that handy MySQL export function. It keeps daily, weekly, and monthly archives of your databases (it even creates the directories too, wow!) Its smart enough to backup every database it finds in an instance too, you only have to specify what databases to NOT backup. The user you assign in the script simply needs SELECT and TABLE LOCK privileges on the databases it will be backing up. Its nice and simply effective, thank you wipe_out for sharing this great script.
Oh, and one last thing, totally off the Database topic. If you haven’t tried beta Firefox 3 yet, go do it now, or if you just want to try it. Even in beta its more stable, and uses a fair bit less memory that its predecessor.
DenyHosts
Posted by: jeffro in Software, Technology on June 22nd, 2007
After enduing another set of SSH attacks on my poor little home server I decided I needed to do something about it. Check out DenyHosts, its a python script that blocks hosts that fail authentication multiple times, but foremost it synchronizes with a central DB of blocked hosts so you can blocks hosts that have been annoying other people too. All hosts can be removed via a aging system where the script keeps track of how long hosts have been blocked, this is necessary if you don’t want you hosts.deny to grow exponentially huge.
Currently have over 139000 blocked hosts in my hosts.deny. I age them out after 4 months of inactivity. This may sound like an inefficient way to keep out the, undesirables, but it beats having thousands of login attempts everyday. Few things please me more than getting my logwatch email and seeing
Refused incoming connections:
::ffff:211.169.219.81 (::ffff:211.169.219.81): 1 Time(s)
ethesys.csu.edu.tw (::ffff:140.127.131.8): 1 Time(s)
Eat that you zombies!!
JavaScript Techniques and Dustin Diaz
Dustin Diaz is one of my hero’s. I just got done reading one of his articles. He is the kind of developer I aspire to be. He is a bad-ass programmer that eats Javascript for breakfast, at Google of all places. Next to him I idolize Douglas Crockford, David Flanagan, and Brendan Eich. All Javascript demi-gods in their own right.
The thing that really sets Dustin apart in my mind is that he is that I can see the two sides of his brain at work when I read his articles. There is the technical part that gets a kick from programming, then there is the creative side that says “yes that works, but it isn’t sexy enough.”
So there, a little bit of idol worship, I am done now.
Fiesty Fawn
Posted by: jeffro in Software, Technology on April 19th, 2007
!ALERT! Ubuntu Feisty Fawn final has been released! Proceed to your nearest torrent tracker and initiate download and seeding. Or if your like me, ALL MY RAM ARE BELONG TO ME!
Oh, and Thunderbird 2.0 was released today too. But since everyone that would appreciate it already uses Gmail, it kinda got lost in the shuffle.
Slimserver
Posted by: jeffro in Software, Technology on March 2nd, 2007
I decided that I didn’t want all my music just sitting on my home machine, so I moved it all to my file server in the basement. The problem was that outside of mounting one of the samba shares, I couldn’t access my music anywhere but in the house. That solution worked for about a week, until I got curious to see how I could listen to my music anywhere. Well, by anywhere, I meant, anywhere there was an internet connection and a modern browser. 
I tried a couple of different products, but none really did what I wanted. Then a coworker told me about the software from Slimdevices that streams music to their hardware is open source and free for download. Never one to pass up a deal that included the word free (ye gods I am cheap, I admit it), I downloaded the source and eagerly tried to install it on my Ubuntu server. That lasted about as long as it took me to find that they have a package repository for debs. Just add the following to your sources.list:
deb http://debian.slimdevices.com testing main
then ‘apt-get update’ then ‘apt-get install slimserver’ and your running. I forgot to mention that you need perl installed on your machine too, but that usually comes standard anymore.
Oh, and I tried running APF last night for about 3 hours to no avail. At this point I am ready to give up, there HAS to be a better way to manage iptables than manually specifying everything.
