Technology

If you keep a blog, this is important (original). You should read it and take heed. If you use Typepad or LiveJournal, you’re covered (or will be soon). If you use Movable Type, see this post (original). If you use Blogger or Blogspot… um, I dunno, but since it’s a Google initiative and Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google, I imagine support will come pretty quickly. Now, this isn’t going to stop spammers from spitting out comments all over your blog. It will make them less likely to benefit from those comments. It would be nice to think that less benefit means less spam, but let’s be serious — the people selling the software that generates this spam aren’t going to tell their customers that it’s a worthless activity. Still, you’re cutting back on whatever money spammers are making, and that’s a good enough reason to do it in my book.

The hot rumor is that Six Apart is about to buy Live Journal. That strikes me as a fairly bad idea for a number of reasons, mostly technological — if you’re not going to get economies of scale from merging code bases, then you’re setting up Six Apart as a conglomerate, and frankly Six Apart just isn’t big enough to support two completely divergent code bases and/or development teams. But if you do intend to merge the code bases, wow, that’s a can of worms which (IMHO) would bring new feature development to a halt for six months to a year, minimum, on both sides of the fence. ...

“I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed. “I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.” ...

So I had to send my laptop into Apple for repairs a month or so ago. My own fault: I dropped it. The next time I used the DVD drive, I noticed it wasn’t working. OK; I called Apple up and said “Hey, this happened, I need to get it fixed.” I kind of expected that they’d charge me for it, since chances are it broke when I dropped the laptop. ...

cfengine is cool. I dug it. The tutorial was introductory and I was pretty sold on the concepts. If you already know about cfengine there is nothing useful for you in this post. Cheap summary: a host is classified into a number of groups. Lots of classifications are automatic; there’s a linux group (any machine running linux), there’s a 129_120_10 group (any host on the 129.120.10 subnet), there’s a Hr02 group (any host running cfengine between the hours of 2 AM and 3 AM), etc. Why would you want that last? Maybe you only want to do some checks during that hour. Yes, this is yet another way to schedule periodic jobs in a manner that future sysadmins will be unable to find… but I digress. ...

Our VoIP/Asterisk tutorial is going much more quickly than the presenter expected. This is not unusual for first-time presenters. Asterisk is pretty interesting, but shows signs of being an open source project. Hm — OK, some sample configuration file stuff: exten => s,73,Playback(thank-you-for-calling) exten => s,74,GotoIfTime(6:01-18:00|mon-sun|*|*?s,76) exten => s,75,Goto(s,78) exten => s,76,Playback(have-a-great-day-goodbye) In theory, the template is something like exten => ,,(), but it’s been brutally extended into something that looks alarmingly like BASIC. See the line numbers masquerading as priorities? It looks like it was originally just a simple method of specifying extensions, but grew like kudzu. Soon there’ll be m4 macros for building these scripts which masquerade as configuration files.

My Monday LISA tutorial was on system log aggregation, analysis, and statistics. mjr taught it, and he’s as good a public speaker as ever. Also the topic was pretty damned fascinating. I’ll be dumping a pile of links into del.icio.us sometime soonish now. Highlights, some of which are significant and some of which are just cool: You can set up an invisible loghost. What you do is you specify a non-existent host as the loghost on all your DMZ servers. You’re gonna need to manually stuff an entry into the arp table so that your DMZ servers will blithely send syslog packets off into thin air. Then you hook the real loghost up to the DMZ with no IP address in promiscuous mode. Run tcpdump on it to capture all the packets, and write some cheap perl to strip syslog payloads out of the captured packets. ...

There is some desire for a Jon Udell-esque library bookmarklet (original) for Harvard’s Hollis Catalog (original). A little bit of research, and there you go. It’s not perfect, since Hollis doesn’t seem to use ISBNs as the primary index, but the first book listed on the results page will be the book you’re looking for if it’s in the catalog.

Add San Francisco (original) to the universal wireless list, or at least to the “we’d like to have universal wireless someday” list.

Gmail tweaks, noted for my own reference — I haven’t tested these. POP3 Gmail access Import existing mail into GMail GMail alerts in your Windows taskbar GMail as your mailto: handler