2007 Aug 13, 3:35
|
|
I've been told that family members after reading my webpage which contains some technical related material would turn to my cousins webpage. So, in an effort to not drive away
readers I've...
|
Views: 328
3 ratings
|
|
Time: 00:08
|
More in Pets & Animals
|
video 2007 Aug 13, 2:05From : "Rarely do we think of mathematicians as glamorous. But during the 1980s, the rising importance of cryptography injected a certain amount of glitz into the discipline.
math article history cryptography 2007 Aug 9, 5:41To satisfy my hands which have already learned to type *nix commands I like to install
Win32 versions of common GNU utilities. Unfortunately, the
which command is a rather literal port and requires you to enter the entire name of the command for which you're looking. That is '
which which' won't find itself but
'
which which.exe' will. This makes this almost useless for me so I thought to write my own as a batch file. I had learned about a few goodies available in cmd.exe that I thought would
make this an easy task. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in ( `"echo %PATH:;=& echo %"` ) do (
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%b in ( `"echo %PATHEXT:;=& echo %"` ) do (
if exist "%%a"\%1%%b (
for %%c in ( "%%a"\%1%%b ) do (
echo %%~fc
)
)
)
)
The environment variables
PATH and
PATHEXT hold the list of paths to search through to find commands, and the extensions of files that should be run as
commands respectively. The '
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (...) do (...)' runs the '
do' portion with
%%a sequentially taking on the value of every line in
the '
in' portion. That's nice, but
PATH and
PATHEXT don't have their elements on different lines and I don't know of a way to escape a newline character to
appear in a batch file. In order to get the
PATH and
PATHEXT's elements onto different lines I used the
%ENV:a=b% syntax which replaces occurrences of a with b
in the value of ENV. I replaced the '
;' delimiter with the text '
& echo ' which means
%PATHEXT:;=& echo% evaluates to something like "
echo
.COM& echo .EXE& echo .BAT& ...". I have to put the whole expression in double quotes in order to escape the '&' for appearing in the batch file. The
usebackq and
the backwards quotes means that the backquoted string should be replaced with the output of the execution of its content. So in that fashion I'm able to get each element of the env. variable onto new
lines. The rest is pretty straight forward.
Also, it supports wildcards:
C:\Users\davris>which.cmd *hi*
C:\Windows\System32\GRAPHICS.COM
C:\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe
D:\bin\which.exe
D:\bin\which.cmd
which cmd technical batch for 2007 Jul 26, 12:12The folks at the Internet Archive have created a user modifiable Open Library that intends to catalog all books. As in all of them. Includes links to the books online (Internet Archive for ex.),
where to buy (Amazon for ex.), reviews, etc.
archive library opensource wiki research book books literature catalog reference 2007 Jul 23, 3:19List of sites to find public information on folks.
background search database birthday library identity privacy public phone lifehack 2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on
the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.
In Toronto we visited the
CN Tower, the
ROM, and the
Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse
like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the
Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal
monsters.
After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was
lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It
lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night
away until the wee hours.
In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the
Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists
right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the
Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are
given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors
with gigantic lights.
niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical 2007 Jul 13, 8:30I bought an external backup drive a few weekends ago. I've previously setup a
Subversion repository so I decided to move everything into the repository and
then back it up. So in went the contents of all of my %USERPROFILE% and ~ directories with a bit of sorting and pruning. Not too much though given its much easier to dump in everything and search for
what I want then to take the time to examine and grade each file. What follows are the notes I took while setting this up. It takes me a bit of time to look up the help on each command so I figure
I'll write it all down here for the benefit of myself and potentially others...
Setting Up the Backup Drive For Linux
I first changed the filesystem on the drive to ext3. I plugged it into my USB2.0 port and ran fdisk:
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Useful commands I used to do this follow mostly in order:
-
m
-
help
-
p
-
print current partitions
-
d
-
delete current partition
-
n
-
create new partition (I used the defaults)
-
w
-
write changes and exit
Then I formatted for ext3.
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
I made it easy to mount:
sudo vim /etc/fstab
# added line to end:
/dev/sda1 /media/backup ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0
I setup the directory structure on the disk
mount /media/backup
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users/dave
sudo chown dave:dave /media/backup/users/dave
After all that its easy to make a copy of the Subversion repository:
mount /media/backup
cp -Rv /home/dave/svn /media/backup/users/dave/
umount /media/backup
Next on the agenda is to add a cron job to do this regularly.
Subversion Command Reference
On a machine that has local access to the Subversion repository you can check out a specific subdirectory as follows using the file scheme:
svn co file:///home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html
Note also that although one of my directories is named 'dave@deletethis.net' Subversion requires the '@' to be percent-encoded.
Other useful subversion commands:
-
svn help
-
help
-
svn list file:///home/dave/svn/
-
list all files in root dir of svn depot
-
svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/
-
list all files in svn depot
-
svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/ | grep \/$
-
list all directories
-
svn status
-
List status of all files in the working copy directory as in - modified, not in repository, etc
-
svn update
-
Brings the working copy up to date wrt the repository
-
svn commit
-
Commit changes from the working copy to the repository
-
svn add / move / delete
-
Perform the specified action -- occurs immediately
Setting up Windows Client for Auto Auth into SVN
When using an SVN client on Windows via svn+ssh its useful to have the Windows automatically generate connections to the SVN server. I use
putty on my Windows machines so I read the directions on
using public keys with putty.
putty.exe dave@deletethis.net
cd .ssh
vim authorized_keys # leave the putty window open for now
puttygen.exe
Click the 'generate' button
Move the mouse around until finished
Copy text in 'Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file:' to putty window & save & close putty window
Enter Key passphrase & Comment in puttygen
Save the private key somewhere private
pageant.exe
'Add Key' the private key just saved.
Checking out using Tortoise SVN
On one of my Windows machines I've already installed Tortoise SVN. Checking out from my SVN repository was really easy. I just right clicked in Explorer in a directory and selected "SVN Checkout...".
Then in the following dialog I entered the svn URI:
svn+ssh://dave@deletethis.net/home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html/
Note again that the '@' that is part of the directory name is percent-encoded as '%40' while the '@' in the userinfo is not.
Windows Command Line Check Out
On my media center I didn't want to install Tortoise SVN so rather I used the
command line tool. I setup pageant like before the only
difficulty was getting the SVN command line tool to use putty. With the default configuration you can use the SVN_SSH environment variable to point at a compliant SSH command line tool. The trick is
that its interpreted as a backslash escaped string. So I set mine thusly:
set SVN_SSH=C:\\users\\dave\\bin\\putty\\plink.exe
The escaping solved the vague error I received about not being able to create the tunnel.
backup technical personal windows svn linux subversion 2007 Jul 12, 8:40ONN news story on the crash of the Internet. I blame that Mac the guy was using.
humor news onion video internet 2007 Jul 11, 9:54Stats on who uses social networks.
research reference statistics social web 2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog
hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his
Second
Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this
blog post I became aware of the
llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests.
I decided that I too could do something cool with this.
Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner
modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator
hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to
Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.
Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults
to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through
experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I
found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to
interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my
PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non
US-ASCII character input worked.
In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation.
Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.
personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest 2007 Jun 19, 9:25Unfortunate versions of popular pickup lines.
comic xkcd pickup-lines relationship humor 2007 May 24, 7:04Clip from Futurama featuring Morbo giving a knowledge smack down on windmills. That line makes me laugh everytime. (The funny is at the very end of the clip)
futurama video humor tv windmill morbo 2007 May 9, 4:15I read about
text/xml URI fragment resolution a few months ago. I was interested to find another kind of fragment reference other than the text/html URI
fragment but of course I didn't find an implementation in IE, Firefox, or Opera. I decided to see how much work would be required to implement this in IE.
In IE and Firefox when you open an XML file that doesn't have an XML stylesheet the XML source is rendered with syntax highlighting. In IE I also noticed that the gold bar appears when you open an
XML file off of your local machine. To me this suggested that the XML source was being rendered as HTML which I assumed was produced by running an XSLT on the source XML file. If so, I figured I
could modify the XSLT to implement text/xml URI fragments. I ran
FileMon to see if iexplore.exe loaded an
XSLT file when opening an XML file. Only the XML file and MSXML3.DLL were opened and no XSLTs were loaded as files. My next hope for modifying the XSLT was if it existed as a resource in MSXML3.DLL.
I did a findstr on the DLL for SCRIPT and found an XSLT so I decided to check for resources in MSXML3.DLL. Unfortunately my previous resource viewer didn't work correctly so I decided to write my
own.
I created
resource tools to view and modify resources in Windows modules. The viewer outputs HTML with links to the
individual resources of a module using the
res URI scheme that's built into IE. The modifier is a simple command line tool that
replaces or adds one resource at a time to a module.
Using these tools I found that the XSLT was stored as a resource in MSXML3.DLL. I'll talk more about the existing XSLT and the one I replaced it with next time.
resource technical xml msxml res xslt xsl 2007 Apr 18, 11:22For a trial period the BBC will open its archive online for free. Hopefully this is the start of a trend otherwise in the future the only freely available content will be reruns of Absolutely
Fabulous.
bbc television archive article ip 2007 Apr 17, 8:04A list of simple things you can do to make life easier.
advice howto tips 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack 2007 Mar 30, 3:26Information on reducing phone, email, and physical spam (junk mail & telemarketers). Also has lots of info on other privacy related matters. The sites ugly but I find its easy to navigate and
find the info I want.
privacy security tools junk mail spam 2007 Mar 19, 11:23This is a free online book on using Subversion the version control system.
reference book subversion svn tutorial documentation free download howto 2007 Mar 13, 1:29Google will help you out sharing scientific information by shipping harddrives with terabytes of your info to some destination. In return they get a copy of your data. Interesting to note it costs
less to ship harddrives then transfer the data over the
article p2p offline data transfer google
Some rights reserved