Toytoy Googie's Geeky blog

mysql revoke privileges

2012-01-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

Just to take this note that to revoke a privilege in MySQL, you need to execute the command below,

mysql> REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES, GRANT OPTION FROM 'dealme'@'192.168.1.1';

mysql> flush privileges;

and specifying the HOST/IP address would allow the user to be validated and verified by its IP allowing to connect into the host, i.e. remote logged in which can be done by the grant command below.

mysql> GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'dealme'@'192.168.1.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'dealmepassword'

and the command above will allow the user to connect to all database and with all privileges granted. This can be seen by querying into the database.

mysql> use mysql
mysql> select * from user where User='dealme' \G

\G would view the result vertically.

GraphViz error with SchemaSpy

2012-01-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

Just want to notify this myself, if encountering this problem [below],

Failed to query Graphviz version information
with: dot -V
java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "dot": error=2, No such file or directory

Just install Graphviz and this will gone.

tcpdump - just for my notes

2012-01-03T22:59:00.000-08:00

Well, I just want to put this to my blog for my own sake.

tcpdump -nq -s 0 -A -vvv -i eth0 port 80

Thanks to tcpdump.

Frequencey, Period, Amplitude and Wavelength

2011-11-19T19:19:00.000-08:00

Frequency is the number of waves per unit time.
Period is the reciprocal of that - the duration of a single wave.
Amplitude is the magnitude of the wave - how high it goes on the y axis.
Wavelength is basically the same thing as period - the length of a single wave on the x axis.

Dying Moslem see Jesus: Is Jesus the Son of God?

2011-10-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

Muslim sees Jesus in Toronto, Canada

by Geoff Waugh on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 6:34am

Nasir SiddikiLeft to Die

By age 34, Nasir Siddiki, a successful businessman, had made his first million, but money meant nothing to him on his deathbed. Diagnosed with the worst case of shingles ever admitted to Toronto General Hospital , his immune system shut down and doctors left him to die.

The next morning I woke in a sterile room on the eighth floor of the hospital, my skin burning as though someone had doused me in gasoline and lit a match. I felt on fire from the inside out.

My doctor arrived and looked at me in wonder. “The blisters are multiplying so fast I can literally watch them grow,” he said. ‘”Your body isn’t fighting back.”

The next morning, in addition to shingles, I had chicken pox from head to toe. I was put in strict isolation. That evening my temperature soared to 107.6 degrees — hot enough to leave my brain permanently scrambled.

For days I continued to deteriorate. My nerve endings became so inflamed that a hair drifting across my skin sent shock waves of fire rippling through my body. By week’s end, I was listed in critical condition.

My Last Hope

In life, I’d been bold, self confident, a risk taker. But facing death, I was terrified. I had no idea what might await me on the other side. I’d been raised as a Moslem in London , England , and I understood Allah was not a god who heals.

My only hope was in medicine.

I eventually slipped so close to death that the doctors didn’t know I could hear them when they examined me. “His immune system has simply shut down,” one of them said.

“He’s dying,” the other confirmed. “His immune system must be compromised by AIDS.”

I don’t have AIDS! I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t form the words. Then it hit me. He said I’m dying!

The doctors spoke quietly to my co-worker, Anita. “In a few hours he’ll be dead,” they said. “If by some miracle he lives, he’ll probably be blind in his right eye, deaf in his right ear, paralyzed on his right side and he may be severely brain damaged from the high fever.”

Then they left.

They left me here to die! I felt like a drowning man going down for the third time. Gathering my strength I whispered a prayer. “God, if you’re real, don’t let me die!”

In His Presence

During the darkest hour of the night, I woke and saw a man at the foot of my bed. Rays of light emanated from him, allowing me to see his outline. I couldn’t see his face, it was too bright. No one had to tell me, I knew it was Jesus.

The Koran mentions Jesus; Moslems believe He existed, not as the son of God, but as a good man and a prophet. I knew this wasn’t Mohammed. I knew it wasn’t Allah. Jesus was in my room. There was no fear, only peace.

“Why would You come to a Moslem when everyone else has left me to die?” I wondered.

Without words, he spoke to me. “I Am the God of the Christians. I Am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

That’s all He said. He didn’t mention my illness. He didn’t mention my impending death. As suddenly as He appeared, He was gone.

The next morning, the same two doctors arrived to examine me. “The blisters have stopped growing!”

“We don’t know what happened, but the shingles virus has gone into remission!”

The following day, still in pain and covered with blisters, I was discharged from the hospital with a suitcase full of drugs. “Don’t leave home,” the doctor cautioned. “It will be months before the blisters go away, and when they do you’ll be left with white patches of skin and scars. The pain could last for years.”

Stepping outside into the morning sun, I looked like a cross between a leper and the Elephant Man. When people saw me, they crossed to the other side of the street. However, my mind was not on my looks; my thoughts were on Jesus. There was no doubt in my mind that Jesus’ presence in my room had stopped the shingles virus. Whatever else Jesus may be, I realized that in His presence miracles happened.

That fact left me with one consuming question: Is Jesus the Son of God as the Christians claim, or is He just a prophet as I was taught?

At home that evening, in spite of the drugs, the pain and itching was so severe I almost had to tie my hands. Even so, I fell into a restless sleep wondering about Jesus.

Learning to Live

The next morning, I woke early and turned on the television. Flipping through the channels, I froze when I saw the following words across the screen: Is Jesus the Son of God?

I listened intently as two men spent the entire program discussing this topic — answering all of my questions. Before the show went off the air, one of the men led the television audience in a prayer. My body was aflame with pain but I knelt on my living room floor anyway. Tears streaming down my face, I repeated the prayer and invited Jesus into my heart.

Immediately a voracious spiritual hunger sprang up within me. I had to know more about Jesus. In spite of my doctor’s orders to stay inside, the next day I went out and bought a Bible. First I read the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Still ravenous, I started in Genesis and read through the Bible during my sleepless nights.

Meanwhile, Anita brought me books and teaching tapes explaining the Gospel. I devoured them while continuing to study the Word of God. As my understanding of faith began to grow, I dug out a picture of how I looked before shingles. I prayed and asked God to make me look that way again.

Nasir and Anita SiddikiJesus, My Healer

One week after my discharge from the hospital, I woke and found my pillow covered in blisters. I must have clawed them in my sleep, I thought. I crawled out of bed and stepped into the shower. What had started on my pillow was finished in the shower: Every blister fell off my body!

Instead of being covered with patches of white and scar tissue, my skin was simply red and raw. It slowly healed, returning to its pre-shingles condition. When it did, I not only looked human, I looked like I did before I got sick, except for the scars that I still carry on my chest.

None of the doctor’s dire predictions came true. My eyesight was 20/20. My hearing was normal. My speech was unimpaired. I suffered no brain damage.

My healing was miraculous, swift and complete. I never suffered from lingering pain or any other complication. Not only did I have the worst case of shingles ever admitted to Toronto General Hospital , I also had the most miraculous recovery.

Jesus, the God of the Christians, showed up in the hospital room of a dying Moslem and healed me. But that wasn’t the greatest miracle He performed. The transformation that occurred in my heart was even more dramatic than the one that occurred in my body.

An international teacher and evangelist, Dr. Nasir Siddiki is the founder of Wisdom Ministries (WisdomMinistries.org). He lives in Tulsa , OK with his wife Anita and their two sons.

Using Oracle 11g thru VirtualBox appliance in Mac OS X Lion

2011-10-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

I just found that its quite a lot of handy work to make Oracle work in Mac OS X Lion.

Currently, I have this quite cool machine with good memory anyway, so I decided to step the easy way, than the "too-much-time-to-work way".

So, I just decided to use VirtualBox with Oracle's pre-built virtual appliance with Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition.

To use this, I use the steps below.

1. Download VirtualBox at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/databaseappdev-vm-161299.html

2. Download the virtual appliances at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/databaseappdev-vm-161299.html then just follow the steps.

3. I added some specific ports, since I access it thru NAT so whenever I am, it's easier for me just to hook up my virtual appliance and turn it on.

So you can issue these command in your terminal,

$> VBoxManage modifyvm "OTN Developer Days" --natpf1 "ssh,tcp,,2222,,22"

$> VBoxManage modifyvm "OTN Developer Days" --natpf1 "oracle,tcp,,8282,,8282"

$> VBoxManage modifyvm "OTN Developer Days" --natpf1 "oracle 2,tcp,,1521,,1521"

$> VBoxManage modifyvm "OTN Developer Days" --natpf1 "oracle em,tcp,,1158,,1158"

FYI: I use VirtualBox 4.1.4

The result screenshot above are the ports I have forwarded from my Guest VM Appliacne to my Host machine.

Hope this helps.

Steve Jobs very promising and inspirational legacy he left for us!

2011-10-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

I just found this article posted by Horace Dediu

For my own reference, I copied it because this is truly inspirational that I can get back and read this how many times, still very inspiring.

Steve Jobs didn’t

Steve Jobs did not create products. He created an organization that predictably and reliably created emotionally resonant products.
Steve Jobs did not make movies. He made a company that predictably and reliably made blockbusters.
Steve Jobs did not wrest market share from competitors. He created new markets that attracted and sustained competitors.
Steve Jobs did not design anything. He gave others the freedom to think about what jobs products are hired to do.
Steve Jobs did not re-engineer processes. He brought engineering processes to works of creativity and the creative process to engineering.
Steve Jobs did not develop new management theories. He showed by example that innovation can be managed.
Steve Jobs was not a visionary. He put the dots together and saw where they led.
Steve Jobs was not a futurist. He just built the future one piece at a time.
Steve Jobs did not distort reality. He spoke what he believed would become reality at a time when those beliefs seemed far fetched.
Steve Jobs was not charismatic. He spoke from the heart compelling others to follow him.
Steve Jobs was not a gifted orator. He spoke plainly.
Steve Jobs was not a magician. He practiced, a lot.

He had taste.
He was curious.
He was patient.
He was foolish.
He was hungry.

These things many others can do. Maybe you can.

I would like to add on this article that, still, Steve Jobs is the same human as we are. Same as how we react, how we think, and how we process things, but with difference that he has the perfect package with great behavior, great thoughts, and great attitude leading him to very inspirational genius of all time that I have witnessed since my birth. I'm glad that I've heard him, even not met him in person, but at the least, witnessed his great achievements and inspire us on how we could make be the person we wanted to be, as how Steve Jobs did.

He's such truly inspirational, a genius, a gift for everyone in earth, made the technology in a different phase and experience in a very sophisticated user experience that we can ever think of, but him, Steve Jobs.

Even I haven't met him, he don't know me, and I don't do like appreciating and expressing my great thanks to someone that is not part of my family circle. But Steve Jobs, he gave me light, gave me passion, and great diversity to extend efforts in the area that I love and take those great inspiration thoughts that a person from technology, that I have witnessed in my generation.

Such a great happiness to me in a way that I was born, I knew someone, in the era I am zoetic and cognizant, a true Genius I witness and believe being alive whereas I wasn't born where Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and many great legendary geniuses we knew.

May you rest in peace, and I'm always be continuing to be inspired by your great wit and your help for us, specially in the area of technology leveraging our lives into a different pace of development and ideas for new generation. I love you Steve Jobs! Thank you so much!!! You are generally a person that anyone would like to miss as you are in the line of amongst legendary Genius that the Earth and Universe acclaimed.

Edited: I want to add more quotes from him as I love his inspirational quotes.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

objective-c: Do I have to release parameter objects or variable?

2011-09-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

I was confused on this until I just realized that if the case is,

-(NSString*)name:(NSString*) _name {
// I thought I need to do like [_name release];
return _name;
}

So instead, the _name paramater object anyway is being reference, so ideally, the releasing of the object from memory is outside, i.e. from the callers perspective.

Like,

NSString *stupid = @"Johnny Bravo";
[name setName:stupid];
[stupid release];

or I can do autorelease anyway.

This blog will be getting seriously and interesting on my following posts!!!

2011-08-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

I have just resigned from my previous work. The reason of my resignation is a decision that I am fully confident to pave my way into the real world of programming and technology.

I am now hailing this time to be getting serious and create technologies that I am interested into. I blogged this out so that I could not forget the day I promised to do hard work and always push myself to achieve my goal and make people happy with my work.

I hope I will be getting into my finish line, if God will provide, as I do trust him and I hope he'll always be with me and with my love ones. God bless us all!!!

Regards,
ToytoyGogie

LVM: How to remove a volume using pvremove

2011-07-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

First, I encountered this error "Can't pvremove physical volume "/dev/sdc1" of volume group "nova-volumes" without -ff" (I'm actually using OpenStack but it's another story).

So to remove this, do first,

~# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb1 VG nova-volumes lvm2 [1.82 TiB / 1.82 TiB free]
PV /dev/sda5 VG cloudmaster lvm2 [297.85 GiB / 12.00 MiB free]
PV /dev/sdc1 lvm2 [1.82 TiB]
Total: 3 [3.93 TiB] / in use: 2 [2.11 TiB] / in no VG: 1 [1.82 TiB]

Then, when I do,

~# pvremove /dev/sdc1
Can't pvremove physical volume "/dev/sdc1" of volume group "nova-volumes" without -ff

So I need to,

~# vgreduce nova-volumes /dev/sdc1
Removed "/dev/sdc1" from volume group "nova-volumes"

Then do `pvscan` again,

~# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb1 VG nova-volumes lvm2 [1.82 TiB / 1.82 TiB free]
PV /dev/sda5 VG cloudmaster lvm2 [297.85 GiB / 12.00 MiB free]
PV /dev/sdc1 lvm2 [1.82 TiB]
Total: 3 [3.93 TiB] / in use: 2 [2.11 TiB] / in no VG: 1 [1.82 TiB]

Then now, I can remove this by,

~# pvremove /dev/sdc1
Labels on physical volume "/dev/sdc1" successfully wiped

Then running `pvscan` again,

root@cloudmaster:~# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb1 VG nova-volumes lvm2 [1.82 TiB / 1.82 TiB free]
PV /dev/sda5 VG cloudmaster lvm2 [297.85 GiB / 12.00 MiB free]
Total: 2 [2.11 TiB] / in use: 2 [2.11 TiB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]

Shows that the /dev/sdc device is now removed. Hope this helps.

Resizing Disk Images in Linux

2011-06-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

To resize the disk image in Linux, do

# sudo fsck.ext4 -f DISK_IMAGE_FILE

# sudo resize2fs DISK_IMAGE_FILE

This is very helpful specially if you are having an instance in the cloud and wanted to resize an image.

Mounting an EBS in Eucalyptus

2011-06-21T05:11:00.000-07:00

First, do

# fdisk -l

to list the device available. You can identify what's the current device the Eucalyptus have avail for the current block storage given.

Now, to mount this, do

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda

where my current filing system is ext4 and the availed virtual device is /dev/sda. Then afterwards, you can do

# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda /path/to/mounted/directory

Hope this helps.

Eucalyptus - Save current Instance as backup with the power of "dd" command

2011-06-21T04:20:00.000-07:00

The current setup for this is that, I have this current instance in Eucalyptus and was already customized while its being in the cloud. This means like, installing packages and added extra configurations to some packages. While its time wasting if to go back and install those packages, doing a dd (disk dump) tool is very helpful.

Below is the command I issued,

#> dd if=/dev/vda1 of=jenkins.img conv=noerror,sync

I use the conv=noerror,sync which the sync to sync every input block and also its meta data. I've tried w/o that option and it didn't work.

After I run this into the cloud, I can ssh and I see the state before dd finished, it was there. It's really great!

Hope this helps!

Delete a file with a leading "dash" or (-) in Linux

2011-06-21T01:14:00.000-07:00

To delete a file with a leading dash, for example,

# ls -al

total 36195068

drwxr-xr-x 3 toor toor 4096 2011-06-15 16:46 .

drwxrwxrwx 12 toor toor 4096 2011-06-21 14:11 ..

-rw-r--r-- 1 toor toor 6887 2011-06-10 13:01 -C

# unlink -- -C

Hope this helps

Don't be a hypocrite! - One of my favorite gospel in the Holy Bible

2011-06-15T00:56:00.000-07:00

Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 6:1-6.16-18.

Jesus said to his disciples: «Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing,
so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face,
so that you may not appear to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.

Commentary of the day :

Saint Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo (North Africa) and Doctor of the Church
Sermon 150

Fasting, prayer, almsgiving

The Epicureans, who did not hope for any life beyond the grave and only knew the pleasures of the flesh, held to this expression: «Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die» (1Cor 15,32)... But Christians, for whom another and happier life is to begin after death, should keep well away of saying such things. In fact, bear in mind this truth: «Tomorrow we die», but continue: «Let us fast and pray for death may come tomorrow.»

However, I require yet something else, a third condition, and I don't want to pass over in silence what we should observe above everything else: let your fasting serve to satisfy the hunger of the poor. If you cannot fast then set yourself all the more to feeding the one whose satisfied hunger will win you pardon. So this is what Christians should be saying: «Let us fast and pray, let us give to the poor, for tomorrow we die.»

Eucalyptus - cannot find nodes

2011-06-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

Previously, we just have bought a cool machines supposedly to be setup as Node Controllers for our cloud master machine (running Walrus Controller, Cloud Controller, Storage Controller, and Cluster Controller).

The current setup we have is,

SERVER1 - Cloud master running i3 with 12GB of memory
SERVER2 and SERVER3 - running i7 3.0 with 16GB of memory

With our setup, our ideal result must have 62 available instances to be run inside the cloud, however, due to the inconsistency we found (check this http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusKnownBugs_v1.5.2) with the problem with cloud master against NC's, issuing the command

#> euca-describe-availability-zones verbose

AVAILABILITYZONE kinten-cloud 122.2.1.4
AVAILABILITYZONE |- vm types free / max cpu ram disk
AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.small 0031 / 0031 1 512 10
AVAILABILITYZONE |- c1.medium 0015 / 0015 1 1024 15
AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.large 0007 / 0007 2 2048 20
AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.xlarge 0003 / 0003 4 4096 30
AVAILABILITYZONE |- c1.xlarge 0001 / 0001 8 8192 40

which the result is not correct. It only able to see one NC (node controller). So fixing this, I tried to look on axis2c.log under /var/log/eucalyptus directory, and I see the errors below

[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] rampart_timestamp_token.c(179) [rampart]Timestamp not valid: Created time is not valid
[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] error.c(94) OXS ERROR [euca_axis.c:364 in verify_node] element failed , Validation failed for Timestamp with ID = #SigID-232793f0-9609-1e01-3638
[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] euca_axis.c(322) [rampart][eucalyptus-verify] "Failed to verify location of signed elements!"
[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] rampart_engine.c(159) [rampart][rampart_engine] Cannot get saved rampart_context
[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] rampart_out_handler.c(136) [rampart][rampart_out_handler] ramaprt_context creation failed.
[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] phase.c(233) Handler RampartOutHandler invoke failed within phase MessageOut
[Tue Jun 14 06:04:40 2011] [error] engine.c(696) Invoking phase MessageOut failed

This has to be the problem of ntp which the cloud master and the NC weren't sync at all. To fix this, I issued

#> ntpdate 192.168.1.1

where 192.168.1.1 is the IP of the cloud master inside the private network (server1, server2 and server3). IP 122.2.1.4 is within the LAN.

Before running ntpdate, make sure that your ntp daemon is not running, else you can do

#> /etc/init.d/ntp restart

be sure you have properly edited /etc/ntp.conf and have your server added there. Mine its

server 192.168.1.1

After all, I have working nodes found.

#> euca-describe-availability-zones verbose

AVAILABILITYZONE kinten-cloud 122.2.1.4

AVAILABILITYZONE |- vm types free / max cpu ram disk

AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.small 0062 / 0062 1 512 10

AVAILABILITYZONE |- c1.medium 0030 / 0030 1 1024 15

AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.large 0014 / 0014 2 2048 20

AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.xlarge 0006 / 0006 4 4096 30

AVAILABILITYZONE |- c1.xlarge 0002 / 0002 8 8192 40

Hope this will fix in your end.

Eucalyptus - authorizing a port

2011-06-14T22:47:00.001-07:00

To authorize a port in Eucalyptus from the running instance, issue this command

euca-authorize -P tcp -p 22 -s 0.0.0.0/0 default

IP Masquerading - To share internet connection within a private network

2011-06-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

So I have this setup,

SERVER1 - This connects to the LAN/Internet connection

SERVER2 and SERVER3 is connected to SERVER1, where SERVER1 is acting their gateway.

So SERVER1 is using CLASS A IP Address, using 10.0.2.45

while SERVER2 and SERVER3 is using CLASS C, having SERVER2 as 192.168.10.2 and SERVER3 as 192.168.10.3 and SERVER1 as their gateway using 192.168.10.1 IP.

Server3 has 2 interfaces, one connects to the LAN and one connects to the private network of SERVER2 and SERVER3.

So to achieve SERVER2 and SERVER3 must have internet connection,
first in SERVER1, login as root and then check if the ip forwarding is enabled by,

$> cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

if the result is 1, leave it behind, else,

$> echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

then, do

$> iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth2 -j MASQUERADE

I'm not going to explain fully what does the command do, you can check this by doing "man iptables".
So the "-o eth2", this is the interface that is dedicated to the LAN/internet connection. Since SERVER1 has two interfaces (namely eth0, and eth2), the eth0 is connected to SERVER2 and SERVER3 machines. So here, you should use the interface that has the internet connection to share.

Now in SERVER2 and SERVER3,
edit first /etc/resolv.conf and add the DNS that SERVER1 is using. Currently, I have SERVER1 dns to 10.0.2.1 so edit and add the line below,

nameserver 10.0.2.1

then save /etc/resolv.conf.

Now, ping google.com, hopefully this works in your end.

You can also add 8.8.8.8 which is a free DNS used by Google.

Hope this helps.

Singleton implementation in iOS on Objective-C

2011-04-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

Just read this very helpful article on implementing a singleton in iOS. Below is a simple snippet that is thread safe, and is indeed, faster than @synchorize when is executed.

+(MyClass *)singleton {
 static dispatch_once_t pred;
 static MyClass *shared = nil;
 
 dispatch_once(&pred, ^{
  shared = [[MyClass alloc] init];
 });
 return shared;
}

dispatch_once() function is indeed mentioned in Mac Developer Library that is useful in implementing singletons or global data.

Hope you found this helpful.

Reason why sizeof charstr adds another 1 byte in C Programming

2011-02-16T07:12:00.000-08:00

Returning back to C programming again, now I was stumbling why does
char o[] = "1"

and

sizeof o

returns 2, while
char o = '1';

returns 1. Or If I do
char o[] = "2345";

and

sizeof o

is 5. It seems that when char is an array/string, it adds 1.

Then I just found the answer that when it becomes a string, it includes the '\0' or null character or 0 byte mark which indicates the end of the string. Some call it as zero termination. So in the example, char o[] = "1", it goes like {'1', '\0'}.

CVS - How to check the newly modified files against the repository

2011-01-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

To check the modified files against the centralized repository, you can do

cvs -nq update

to specify the date, you can do

cvs -nq update -D "20110120 20:00"

The date format can be passed is "YYYYMMDD HH:MM"or by its relevant format of date.

Hope this helps.

CVS: View History via terminal or CLI

2011-01-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

I'm not really an expert with CVS, and unlike other VCS, running it's history would be easier, so I document this stuff which I'm forgetful when doing a history on CVS.

Issuing,

$> cvs history

and encountered the error below,

cvs history: Unknown method (`extssh') in CVSROOT.
cvs history: in directory .:
cvs history: ignoring CVS/Root because it does not contain a valid root.
cvs history: No CVSROOT specified! Please use the `-d' option
cvs [history aborted]: or set the CVSROOT environment variable.

So what I did, I use the -d option and achieve the below result,

cvs -d :ext:username@hostname:/path/cvs/project history -e

so the -e will do everything involve in its CVS history reports with all record types.

Hope this helps.

Oracle: OUTER JOIN operator

2010-12-16T16:33:00.000-08:00

Just to note that (+) means an OUTER JOIN.

Example :

select a2 from table_a,table_b where table_a.a1=table_b.b1 (+) and table_b.b1=999999

Mac OS X: how to list all open ports running in your machine

2010-10-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

In Mac OS X, I do use

netstat -a -p tcp

Though the ideal one to list all open ports in Mac OS X being opened is

lsof -i -P | grep -i "listen"

Simple command, but hope that helps.

Issue Single Command To Kill a Process In Linux/Unix system

2010-10-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

I am so tired of issuing back and forth this 'ps axu' command thing. I was debugging stuff in JBoss and I do always 'ps axu|grep jboss' then I took the process id and kill it by:

kill -9 processid

Then I just tried killing two process id at a time like for example:

kill -9 processid1 processid2

and that will actually kill two process id, however, that's still tedious but it does help in some way.

So I figure it out that I can use awk tool for this and get the column where the processid would be printed. So I found out a way with just one command to kill a process either in Linux/Unix system. I did this in my Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

kill -9 $(ps -e|grep jboss|awk '{ print $1 }') // works in Snow Leopard
or
kill -9 $(ps axu|grep jboss|awk '{ print $2 }') // Linux

the '$1' there is the index number where the process id is located. If you have some alias with your grep, don't forget to unalias it just to assure, because I do have a alias for my grep having -rn on it.

Hope this helps, with just one command, it would make your life easy. You can make this as an alias if you want also.

SVN: How-to view modified files being commited to central repository

2010-10-13T13:21:00.000-07:00

In order to view base on the revision number, just use the 'svnlook' tool to achieve this.

Say for example:
svnlook changed -r 23 /opt/repo

Where /opt/repo is the central repository. svnlook will look for the 'REPO_PATH/format' file, so just check if that file exist so that you can assure it that it is the right path for your repository.

Hope this helps.

Quickest way to create a table in Oracle

2010-10-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

I found this very easy and quick to create a table, though sort of copy a table to another table.

The syntax is:

create table table_to_create as select * from source_table where 1=0

Hope you find this a little bit of help.

Use Shell Editor for Eclipse for editing bash, ksh, csh in Unix/Linux system

2010-10-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

I found ShellEd when googling for any shell editor. It was trouble at first because there's no how-to that directs me, where I expect to have a direct link that I can copy-en-paste to my Eclipse for installation.

So what I did, I download ShellEd (as of this writing file version ShellEd-Update-2.0.0_M3.zip) from sourceforge.net and install, as required, the Linux Tools. After installing Linux Tools, I then locate thru archive the ShellEd zip file and install it successfully. It works good and I feel satisfied with this cool tool to be embedded in eclipse.

The sample attached shell script is from JBoss twiddle. It does supports syntax highlighting, intellisense which is cool. Hope this helps.

Discrimanator annotation in Hibernate

2010-10-13T07:00:00.001-07:00

Just a note I don't want to forget, @Discriminator annotation for Hibernate, is that, it's idea is base on the enum type in database or perhaps just a type discriminator for a record on how to identify it. It's powerful, and is a helpful feature of hibernate.

Test Web Services thru Telnet

2010-10-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

I use Mac OS X here, so other OS's might vary but I think in Linux, it is still ppp0 (but not sure with that) for VPN connection interface.

1. First, I use Wireshark in order to capture the packets.

2. Afterwards, I use the ppp0 interface (Mac OS X) then start

3. Now connect thru telnet by example:

telnet 192.168.10.51 8080

4. Then paste the example POST

POST /api/soap/v2/loyaltyaccount HTTP/1.0

Host: 192.168.10.232:8080

User-Agent: NuSOAP/0.7.3 (1.114)

Content-Type: text/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1

SOAPAction: ""

Content-Length: 1189

<s:Envelope xmlns:s='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'>

<s:Header>

<wsse:Security s:mustUnderstand='1' xmlns:wsse='http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd'>

<wsu:Timestamp xmlns:wsu='http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd'>

<wsu:Created>2010-10-04T17:24:48Z</wsu:Created>

<wsu:Expires>2010-10-04T17:25:48Z</wsu:Expires>

</wsu:Timestamp>

<wsse:UsernameToken>

<wsse:Username>testusername</wsse:Username>

<wsse:Password Type='http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText'>testpassword</wsse:Password>

</wsse:UsernameToken>

</wsse:Security>

</s:Header>

<s:Body xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' xmlns:xsd='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'>

</s:Envelope>

Server's response example:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1

X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1

Content-Type: text/xml;charset=ISO-8859-1

Content-Length: 7130

Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:02:53 GMT

Connection: close

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">

<soap:Body>

<GetTransactionsResponse

xmlns="http://testapi.com/api/v5/testservice" xmlns:ns2="http://testapi.com/api/v5/entity"

xmlns:ns3="http://testapi.com/api/v5/websitetest" xmlns:ns4="http://testapi.com/v5/faulthandler"

xmlns:ns5="http://testapi.com/v5/core" xmlns:ns6="http://testapi.com/api/v5/timestamphandler">

<ns2:id>2100334</ns2:id>

<ns2:createdAt>2010-09-18T22:55:51.458Z</ns2:createdAt>

<ns2:updatedAt xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<description xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<actionId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<rulename xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<auctionBidId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<productPurchaseId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<productname xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<adminUserId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

</loyaltyTransactions>

<ns2:id>2100434</ns2:id>

<ns2:createdAt>2010-09-22T18:18:18.831Z</ns2:createdAt>

<ns2:updatedAt xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<description>Balance Updated:another test on 2:19pm</description>

<pincodeId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<pincode xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<actionId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<rulename xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<auctionBidId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<productPurchaseId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<productname xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<adminUserId xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:nil="true" />

<optionalDetails>Balance Updated:another test on 2:19pm

</optionalDetails>

</loyaltyTransactions>

</GetTransactionsResponse>

</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

Afterwards, I do copy paste the stuff that I have and just edit it if you have another sub-URI for your service. I think it's faster this way, for development purposes only, but not ideally for QA. Still, scripts as client like Java, PHP, Python, Ruby is of course ideal since you need automation specially when you do continuous integration.

Hope this helps.

ORA-20000: ORU-10027: buffer overflow, limit of 2000 bytes

2010-09-28T17:23:00.000-07:00

The solutions for that error is to specify thru

DBMS_OUTPUT.ENABLE(10000).

Note that the default value is 2000 characters, and maximum is 1, 000, 000.

Oracle - Get the last inserted id how-to

2010-09-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Just simple, declare a variable with that type, mostly number, then use the 'returning' syntax for that.

set serveroutput on
declare
nr_id number;
begin
insert into employees( id, name, age )
values( seq_employees.NEXTVAL, 'Jones', 33 )
returning id into nr_id;
dbms_output.put_line( 'nr_id = ' || nr_id );
end;
/

Hope this helps.

- Toytoy Gogie

Oracle - Create auto-increment equivalent in MySQL

2010-09-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

So for example, I have my table below to create

CREATE TABLE "PC2"."TMP_PRODUCT"
(
  "ID" NUMBER(38,0) NOT NULL ENABLE,
  "ACCOUNTCODE" VARCHAR2(20 BYTE),
  "PRICESEGMENT" VARCHAR2(20 BYTE),
  "BRAND" VARCHAR2(20 BYTE),
  "PRODUCTLENGTH" NUMBER,
  "SALESID" NUMBER(38,0),
  CONSTRAINT "PK_TMP2_WPP_1009_ID" PRIMARY KEY ("ID") USING INDEX PCTFREE 10 INITRANS 2 MAXTRANS 255,
  CONSTRAINT "FK_TMP2_WPP_1009_SID" FOREIGN KEY ("SALESID") REFERENCES "PC2"."SALES" ("ID") DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED ENABLE
);

Then create a sequence which would manage the incremental part of the index key.

CREATE SEQUENCE SEQ_TMP_PRODUCT
  START WITH 1
INCREMENT BY 1;

Afterwards, create a trigger which what will do is to insert the incremented key of the table.

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER "TMP_PRODUCT_ID" BEFORE
  INSERT ON TMP_PRODUCT FOR EACH ROW WHEN (NEW.ID IS NULL) BEGIN
  SELECT SEQ_TMP_PRODUCT.NEXTVAL INTO :NEW.ID FROM DUAL;
END;

Just that simple. Just be sure with the table names, sequence names as you might confuse if you base on that sample I have.

Hope that helps.

Tunneling Oracle For Port 1521 From Other Server

2010-07-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

This set up is that, I cannot open the 1521 if I do directly from the outside host to my SQLDeveloper, so what I did, I tunnel to port 1521 by opening port 1525 to forward it to 1521 to that host I wanted to logged in. Basically, I can login to that system with my ssh account. So the command I did was:

ssh -L 1525:localhost:1521 username@your-host.com

Where 1525 is your local port to open and 1521 is the port you're going to tunnel, which is the default port for Oracle.

For some ways, you can also port forwarding like to port 80, port 110, or IRC ports like 6667-6669.

Hope this helps.

Oracle DB - Get the constraints information from a table

2010-07-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning now to use Oracle fro development, now expect that I'll be having more

SELECT table_name, column_name, CONSTRAINT_NAME
FROM all_cons_columns
WHERE owner='username_owner' AND
constraint_name='UK_CONSTRAINTNAME'
ORDER BY position;

where UK_CONSTRAINTNAME is a constraintname that you named like UK_USERSPROFILE or
UK_USERSPROFILE_FIRSTNAME.

Uncaught exception: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key window

2010-07-08T00:07:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of this error might be a helpful hint for anybody on iPhone dev. I was encountering this error stuff I have, which you can see on the image down below,

My fix for this was under my .xib file. I just open my .xib file and check that my app delegate object has the right class, right window property, and right view controller property. Take a look at below to see how it looks like,

Hope this helps.

Creating PVR file using texturetool for iPhone dev

2010-07-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

To create a 2 bits per pixel of PVR file as a mipmap, then issue this command

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/texturetool -e PVRTC --bits-per-pixel-2 -f PVR -o Brick_2.pvr test.png

To create a 4 bit, just use --bits-per-pixel-4 instead of --bits-per-pixel-2.

Brick_2.pvr is the output of the file, then test.png is your file that is height and width of your image file are equivalent in numbers of pixels.

If not a mipmap file, then just remove the -m like,

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/texturetool -e PVRTC --bits-per-pixel-2 -f PVR -o Brick_2.pvr test.png

Hope this helps.

Incompatibility of iconv for PHP 5.2.13 under Mac OS X

2010-06-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

I'm confused with this when I compiled 5.2.13 of PHP under Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I did update by downloading and compiling a new version of iconv at http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/ and compile it by running

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

When I compile PHP with the following "configure" params as

CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -bind_at_load" ./configure --prefix=/opt/local --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --with-config-file-path=/etc/ --enable-bcmath --enable-ctype --enable-dom --enable-fileinfo --enable-filter --enable-hash --enable-json --enable-libxml --enable-pdo --enable-phar --enable-session --enable-simplexml --enable-tokenizer --enable-xml --enable-xmlreader --enable-xmlwriter --with-bz2=/opt/local --with-mhash=/opt/local --with-pcre-regex=/opt/local --with-readline=/opt/local --with-libxml-dir=/opt/local --with-zlib=/opt/local --disable-cgi --with-ldap=/opt/local --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-mysqli=/opt/local/lib/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-openssl --with-mcrypt=/opt/local/ --with-mysql=/opt/local/lib/mysql/ --with-curl=/opt/local --enable-mbstring --with-gd --with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local --with-png-dir=/opt/local --with-freetype-dir=/opt/local --with-t1lib=/opt/local --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-ttf=/opt/local --with-pgsql=/usr/local/pgsql/ --with-iconv=/usr/local

And when I run "make" I do got these errors,

Undefined symbols:

"_libiconv_open", referenced from:

_do_convert in gdkanji.o

__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o

_php_iconv_string in iconv.o

__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o

_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o

__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o

_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o

_php_iconv_stream_filter_factory_create in iconv.o

"_libiconv", referenced from:

_do_convert in gdkanji.o

__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o

_php_iconv_string in iconv.o

__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o

__php_iconv_appendl in iconv.o

_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o

_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o

_php_iconv_stream_filter_append_bucket in iconv.o

(maybe you meant: __libiconv_version)

"_libiconv_close", referenced from:

_do_convert in gdkanji.o

__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o

_php_iconv_string in iconv.o

__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o

_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o

_php_iconv_stream_filter_dtor in iconv.o

__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o

_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o

ld: symbol(s) not found

collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

make: *** [libs/libphp5.bundle] Error 1

I guess this is a bug from PHP in which it only base for the libiconv library under /usr/lib directory, and my fix for this is by copying the libiconv I have recently compiled from /usr/local/lib/ with the current one, which is the /usr/lib/libiconv.* files.
So I did,

cd /usr/lib

mkdir iconv_backup

mv libiconv.* iconv_backup

cp -rf /usr/local/lib/libiconv.* .

cp -rf iconv_backup/* /usr/local/lib/

Now, running make compiles the source code of PHP successfully.

Caveat for this, my purpose of switching the libiconv files is because I have Adium and Adium isn't compliant with the libiconv in which I have recently compiled as x86_64 architecture or 64 bit, so having them under /usr/lib/iconv_backup, I run Adium thru terminal by /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/MacOS/Adium and it works good now.

Hope this helps!

pdftotext not found in CentOS

2010-05-11T00:19:00.000-07:00

pdftotext is a tool in Linux that would extract any text readable, which was formatted prior from PDF.

When you arrive on not able to find this helpful tools from Linux of your favorite distro, you can find it in the net for poppler utils which comprises the pdftotext binary file. It's codebase is base on XPdf 3.0.

For CentOS, do

yum install poppler*

which would install the developer package, poppler package, and the util package of poppler.

Hope this helps ;-).

Postfix + Cyrus IMAP Relay access denied (state 14)

2010-05-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

Solving this problem was freaking easy. I just did add the user, must have the proper domain name link to your IMAP, like us, I have toytoy.is-a-geek.org.

So what I did, I just add first the user's e-mail address like for example:

echo "mypassword" | /usr/sbin/saslpasswd2 -p -u toytoy.homeunix.org toytoy@toytoy.homeunix.org

Since I have the script to create an IMAP account for Cyrus, I just run

/path/to/imapcreate.pl -u cyrus -m "toytoy@toytoy.is-a-geek.org" -p cyruspassword -s localhost

then cd to the assigned virtual_alias file, if your postfix configuration doesn't modify or customized the default config, so execute (mostly /etc/postfix/virtual_alias)

cd /etc/postfix/virtual_alias
echo "toytoy@toytoy.is-a-geek.org toytoy@toytoy.is-a-geek.org" >> virtual_alias
which postmap virtual_alias

Then try sending e-mails, you can check the spool at

/var/spool/imap/domain/t/toytoy.is-a-geek.org/t/user/toytoy/2.

where "2." is the file.

Hope this helps!

My guide on how did I able to use autoconf

2010-04-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

In my experience, it seems that autoconf needs Makefile.am and configure.ac.

How did I do it, I run

autoreconf -i -v -f Makefile.am

then I did run

automake

to create Makefile.in then afterwards, I was able to run

./configure successfully.

Scons Add Prefix Before Install

2010-04-28T03:15:00.000-07:00

For my knowledge and guide,

sudo scons prefix=/home/hachico/local -j 4 sdl=1 install

then this will put the libraries, docs, and bin accordingly into that drectory.

Some CentOS/RHEL/Fedora rpm repositories for yum that would be helpful

2010-04-28T00:49:00.000-07:00

I got the repository from remi for my CentOS. By issuing the following commands:

su -
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-enterprise.repo

For webtatic,

rpm –import http://repo.webtatic.com/yum/RPM-GPG-KEY-webtatic-andy
wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d/ http://repo.webtatic.com/yum/webtatic.repo

where I got my latest versions of PHP.

For EPEL and remi,

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Some warned to discourage using the RPMForge because of some conflict with the repository under EPEL. EPEL is known for the repository project for Fedora.

For RPMForge,

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

This repos might help you fixing problems on looking for available repository packages.

This repositories are well applied for RHEL and CentOS as well as Fedora.

Links that might be useful also on configuring or getting this repositories are

http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/Config-en
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

tesseract compile with libtiff

2010-04-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled upon with this tesseract where I wasn't able to figure out what's the problem with libtiff since my libtiff, during configure, always says disabled, so I did able to fix it thru

./configure --prefix=/usr --with-libtiff=/usr/lib

I tried to let --with-libtiff only, not giving the specific path, but it fails. So specifying the right path, makes the problem fixed.

The current version of 2.04 of tesseract, is what I am compiling for this stuff. My libtiff is, indeed, updated using the current version from http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff.

Remember to have the required librarires installed, and these are

libpng-dev
libjpeg-dev
libtiff-dev
zlibg-dev
leptonica

which all of them are separate libraries that you need to install. Leptonica does image analysis and image processing, which is really cool. tesseract use this as it helps them to OCR images.

Hope this helps!

Awk and Bash: Print Linux/Unix User Accounts

2010-04-27T08:26:00.000-07:00

There are ways how to do this:

awk -F':' '{ print $1 "\t" $3 }' /etc/passwd

That would print the username and the UID. You can also add the sort command at the end like

awk -F':' '{ print $1 "\t" $3 }' /etc/passwd | sort

and this will sort alphabetically.

To add filter in the result, you can

awk -F':' '$1 == "hachiko" { print $1 "\t" $3 }' /etc/passwd | sort

where hachiko is a username you wanted to print with its UID.

Hope this helps!

MySQL: Create user and grant a user

2010-04-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

To create a user, do

create user 'myuser' identified by 'iampassword';

To grant a user, do

grant select, alter, alter routine, create, create routine, create temporary tables, create user, create view, delete, drop, execute, file, grant option, index, insert, lock tables, process, references, reload, replication client,replication slave, show databases, show view, update, usage on *.* TO 'ipyrusc'@'localhost';

The strings "select, lock, alter, alter routine, etc..." are privileges that you can select to what privilige you want the user created to have. Note that the 'myuser' is specified when granting the priviliges.

To assure this user exist, you can do query by

select user,host from mysql.user;

to show the users of MySQL.

To know more about this, check the page about granting and adding a user at MySQL website.

Just a Quick Guide For iptables

2010-04-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

For adding a chain entry:

    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 21 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 110 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 143 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 3000 -j ACCEPT
    iptables -A INPUT -j DROP
    iptables -I INPUT 8 -p tcp --dport 9999 -j ACCEPT

First entry, adds port 80 (http) to be accepted, port 443 (https), port 21 (ftp), port 22 (ssh,scp, sftp), port 110 (pop3), port 143 (imap), port 3000 (custom set port for thin server--a ruby web server).

Then,

iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

will drop everything that would connect to the server.

The last entry

iptables -I INPUT 8 -p tcp --dport 9999 -j ACCEPT

will insert into the list at the 8 row of the entry, this is useful when you will be setting a specific priority of filtering a port.

To delete an entry, you can do,

iptables -D INPUT 2

to delete the second row of the list, list can be viewed by issuing the command

iptables -L

To flush all the result, you can do

iptables -F

To add a chain that would only be specific to port intervals, let say, ban all the port that goes from port 20 - port 80, you can execute or add

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 20:80 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j REJECT

where --dport specifies the 20:80 (colon as the delimiter), and -m for extended match and may load extension (here the state), and --state for specifying the states (valid states are INVALID, NEW, ESTABLISHED), and -j to reject the attempt of opening a connection.

To save your rules, you can execute

iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

if your iptables config is in that directory path.

CentOS "apxs" command not found

2010-04-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

apxs is an Apachec extension tool.

I realize that this tool, is by default, not installed under CentOS (or perhaps even RedHat).
To fix this, just install it using yum by:

yum install httpd-devel.i386

where apxs is installed under "httpd-devel" package.

Hope this helps.

Understanding The "yum.conf " and How Does It Like

2010-04-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

So, what's a "yum.conf" can do?

yum.conf is where you can meet your specific needs and support your own local repositories. This is the route that will almost certainly be taken by most systems administrators who build their own repository. To do this, start by reading the yum.conf man pages that should have come with your distribution. Look over the default /etc/yum.conf that was installed by the RPM. Finally, browse through the additional examples below. Chances are pretty good that one of these will resources will provide a template that is adequate to get you started, and once you get things running at all a bit of experimentation will soon make you an expert. So let's look at a yum.conf file that is fairly minimal - just enough to get you started:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log

[fedora-core]
name = Fedora Core
baseurl=http://www.myserver.org/fedora/
gpgcheck=1

Systems persons who are building a fedora mirror as we proceed should note that this yum.conf uses the repository we ``built'' in the previous section, where of course the actual URL should point to that repository. Users who want to accomplish the same thing could instead paste in an entry from the list of public yum repositories linked above. For example, here is a yum.conf file containing several repositories from that list:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log

[fedora-stable-9]
name=Fedora Project Stable RPMS for RHL 9
baseurl=http://download.fedora.us/fedora/redhat/9/i386/yum/stable/
gpgcheck=1

[fedora-updates-9]
name=Fedora Project update RPMS for RHL 9
baseurl=http://download.fedora.us/fedora/redhat/9/i386/yum/updates/
gpgcheck=1

From the comments, one could hope that these two repositories contain what is effectively Red Hat 9, as ported into the Fedora project, plus updates. Note that we've turned on gpgcheck under the assumption that this is a good thing to do to ensure that the RPMs we grab haven't been trojanned.

Note that yum has many options that can be selected in the yum.conf file, only a few of which are illustrated in these examples. Each baseurl can have additional fallback repositories for additional stability and robustness. gpgchecking can be enabled (causing each rpm to be examined to ensure that it is correctly signed).

The debuglevel can be cranked up or down to help diagnose problems. pkgpolicy can be set to determine the order in which yum chooses to decide between two versions of the same package on different repositories it is using at the same time. Packages can be listed to exclude them from the automated update process.

The failover method yum uses to select a server to use from a list of servers in a baseurl can be chosen. More options may have been added since this article was written, or old options may have gone away.

So read the man pages on yum.conf. It is the only thing likely to be authoritative.
At this point we will assume that you are on a client, that you have a functional /etc/yum.conf installed that directs your system to a repository (that you built yourself or not) that is consistent with your system's existing RPM distribution, and that yum list works (as root) to list packages on the repository. Now let's see what yum can do.

CentOS php-common during updating PHP 5.2.13 version trouble

2010-04-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

I went stumble with this php-common package which errs when I tried to install the PHP 5.2.13 version.

So what I did, I do the command

yum whatprovides php-curl

And the result gives me the following lines below:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities

Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

* addons: p3plmirror02.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

* base: p3plmirror02.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

* extras: p3plmirror02.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

* turbopanel-base: p3plmirror02.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

* turbopanel-centos5: p3plmirror02.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

* update: p3plmirror02.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

addons                                                                                                                  |  951 B     00:00

addons/primary                                                                                                          |  201 B     00:00

base                                                                                                                    | 2.1 kB     00:00

base/primary_db                                                                                                         | 1.6 MB     00:00

extras                                                                                                                  | 1.1 kB     00:00

extras/primary                                                                                                          | 107 kB     00:00

extras                                                                                                                                 325/325

turbopanel-base                                                                                                         |  951 B     00:00

turbopanel-base/primary                                                                                                 |  72 kB     00:00

turbopanel-base                                                                                                                        494/494

turbopanel-centos5                                                                                                      |  951 B     00:00

turbopanel-centos5/primary                                                                                              | 2.1 kB     00:00

turbopanel-centos5                                                                                                                         8/8

update                                                                                                                  | 1.9 kB     00:00

update/primary_db                                                                                                       | 463 kB     00:00

php-common-5.1.6-23.2.el5_3.i386 : Common files for PHP

Repo        : base

Matched from:

Other       : php-curl

php-common-5.1.6-24.el5_4.5.i386 : Common files for PHP

Repo        : update

Matched from:

Other       : php-curl

php-common-5.3.2-1.i386 : Common files for PHP

Repo        : installed

Matched from:

Other       : Provides-match: php-curl

Indeed, I do have 5.3.2--the latest PHP release, as of this posting--but I do need yet 5.2 version because of incompatibilities with the code which has done thru a rigorous testing.

Since php-common has (-) dash inside the string, so I issue this command to remove the package php-common

yum remove php*5*3*

My main purpose of removing it was that, I installed the PHP 5.3 which is not the needed version of PHP I want, and php-common confuses the installation/update, indeed backward installation.

After this, installing PHP by issuing the command

yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=webtatic --exclude=php*5.3* install php

installs everything that I need. Notice the repository named "webtatic", I installed this repo from it's website, or read this link how did I grab it or you can also try this repo from remi

Issuing the command

php -v

shows

PHP 5.2.13 (cli) (built: Feb 28 2010 16:22:50)
Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

Hope this makes helpful.

Installing swftools on FreeBSD using port tools

2010-03-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

Doing a pkg_which swftools show nothing, and swftools needs to be installed. So what I did,
I changed directory by

cd /usr/ports/graphics/swftools/

then issued command

make install clean

and encountered this error

===> jpeg-8_1 depends on package: libtool>=2.2 - not found
===> Found libtool-1.5.26, but you need to upgrade to libtool>=2.2.

so I issued portupgrade command to upgrade my libtool by

portupgrade -r libtool

then

cd /usr/ports/graphics/swftools/

yet, another error I encountered.

===> An older version of graphics/jpeg is already installed (jpeg-6b_7)
   You may wish to ``make deinstall'' and install this port again
   by ``make reinstall'' to upgrade it properly.
   If you really wish to overwrite the old port of graphics/jpeg
   without deleting it first, set the variable "FORCE_PKG_REGISTER"
   in your environment or the "make install" command line.
*** Error code 1

Then jpeg needs to be upgraded, I did uninstall the jpeg tool located in "graphics/jpeg" under ports directory thru command:
cd ../jpeg
make deinstall

make reinstall

then I go back to

cd /usr/ports/graphics/swftools/

and install thru command

make install clean

After installation is finished, try issuing the command pdf2swf to test if it's properly installed and here's what I got:

Usage: pdf2swf [-options] file.pdf -o file.swf

-h , --help Print short help message and exit

-V , --version Print version info and exit

-o , --output file.swf Direct output to file.swf. If file.swf contains '%' (file%.swf), then each page goes to a seperate file.

-p , --pages range Convert only pages in range with range e.g. 1-20 or 1,4,6,9-11 or

-P , --password password Use password for deciphering the pdf.

-v , --verbose Be verbose. Use more than one -v for greater effect.

-z , --zlib Use Flash 6 (MX) zlib compression.

-i , --ignore Allows pdf2swf to change the draw order of the pdf. This may make the generated

-j , --jpegquality quality Set quality of embedded jpeg pictures to quality. 0 is worst (small), 100 is best (big). (default:85)

-s , --set param=value Set a SWF encoder specific parameter. See pdf2swf -s help for more information.

-w , --samewindow When converting pdf hyperlinks, don't make the links open a new window.

-t , --stop Insert a stop() command in each page.

-T , --flashversion num Set Flash Version in the SWF header to num.

-F , --fontdir directory Add directory to the font search path.

-b , --defaultviewer Link a standard viewer to the swf file.

-l , --defaultloader Link a standard preloader to the swf file which will be displayed while the main swf is loading.

-B , --viewer filename Link viewer filename to the swf file.

-L , --preloader filename Link preloader filename to the swf file.

-q , --quiet Suppress normal messages. Use -qq to suppress warnings, also.

-S , --shapes Don't use SWF Fonts, but store everything as shape.

-f , --fonts Store full fonts in SWF. (Don't reduce to used characters).

-G , --flatten Remove as many clip layers from file as possible.

-I , --info Don't do actual conversion, just display a list of all pages in the PDF.

-Q , --maxtime n Abort conversion after n seconds. Only available on Unix.

so it's installed now. After I see it's already installed, I issued the command

pkg_add -r swftools

However, I got an error

Error: FTP Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.3-release/Latest/swftools.tbz: File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)

pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.3-release/Latest/swftools.tbz' by URL

root@mullimps21:/usr/ports/graphics/swftools > pkg_add -r swftools-0.9.0_2

Error: FTP Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.3-release/Latest/swftools-0.9.0_2.tbz: File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)

pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.3-release/Latest/swftools-0.9.0_2.tbz' by URL

but that's ok. pkg_add command installs the package to put under pakage list

So that's all I did. Hope this helps ;-)

Using sed with backreference as the replacement pattern

2010-02-09T23:53:00.000-08:00

Tinkering with sed, I have manage to try using regular expressions using backreferences using the most common \N where N is the number of position inside the parenthesis.

Searches and replaces the zoo.color to zoo['color'] or zoo.animals to zoo['animals']:
cat zoo.js | sed -E "s/(zoo)(\.)([a-zA-Z0-9]*)/\1['\3']/g"|less

\1 = is the characters inside the first parenthesis w/c is the zoo
\3 = is the characters inside the third parenthesis which involves alpha-numeric

-E will interpret as regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions rather than basic regular expressions (BRE's)

What is Love and Importance of Love?

2010-01-31T22:42:00.000-08:00

First Letter to the Corinthians 12:31.13:1-13.

Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Mac OS X Install MySQL, Apache + mod_xsendfile, PHP with iconv, gd, pdo, and bug fixes, and PHPMyAdmin

2010-01-28T09:21:00.000-08:00

apache:
- for apache + mod_xsendfile, read the blog post regarding on mod_xsendfile compiling w/in mac os x for apache module

php:

sudo CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -bind_at_load" './configure' '--prefix=/usr' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--with-config-file-path=/etc/' '--with-config-file-scan-dir=/opt/local/var/db/php5' '--enable-bcmath' '--enable-ctype' '--enable-dom' '--enable-fileinfo' '--enable-filter' '--enable-hash' '--enable-json' '--enable-libxml' '--enable-pdo' '--enable-phar' '--enable-session' '--enable-simplexml' '--enable-tokenizer' '--enable-xml' '--enable-xmlreader' '--enable-xmlwriter' '--with-bz2=/opt/local' '--with-mhash=/opt/local' '--with-pcre-regex=/opt/local' '--with-readline=/opt/local' '--with-libxml-dir=/opt/local' '--with-zlib=/opt/local' '--disable-cgi' '--with-ldap=/usr' '--with-apxs2=/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs' '--with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config' '--with-openssl' '--with-mcrypt=/opt/local/' '--with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.42-osx10.6-x86_64/' '--with-iconv=/usr' '--with-curl=/opt/local' '--enable-mbstring' '--with-gd' '--with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local' '--with-png-dir=/opt/local' '--with-freetype-dir=/opt/local' '--with-t1lib=/opt/local' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' --with-ttf

- afer running ./configure successfully, vi Makefile, then add -lresolv in EXTRA_LIBS assignment which would avoid the "error _res_9_dn_expand" as undefined symbol (in php 5.2.12 this is fixed and won't be encountered anymore).
- save then run make

- with-iconv problem bug was "_iconv_close" undefined symbol and the fix was I did use the php 5.2.12 version and it works smoothly.
- for php with mysql, use the downloaded mysql which are located in /usr/local/mysql-5.1.42-osx10.6-x86_64/ which contains the headers and the source, then point that thru '--with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.42-osx10.6-x86_64/'
- --with-ttf and --enable-gd-native-ttf will avoid this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagettftext()
Encountering the error above, you must also make clean before issuing the "make" command, else error will still keep resuming

mysql:

- http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.0.html then chose the Mac OS X ver. 10.6 (x86, 64-bit), DMG Archive

- install

- system preferences, start mysql or start mysql on startup
- files are in /usr/local/mysql

phpmyadmin:

- PHP Fatal error: Class 'ArrayObject' not found in /www/phpmyadmin/libraries/List.class.php on line 14

- workaround is download thru PEAR though I manage it by copying the PEAR contents from my slackware linux box
- ArrayObject is part of SPL (Standard PHP Library)

Mounting A Shared Folder from Mac OS X running samba to Linux

2010-01-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

By executing the code below:

mount -t cifs -o uid=1001,gid=100,username=boboyshariff //mymacosxnetbiosname/www ws_mac/www/

-t = cifs is the filing system rather than smbfs where CIFS stands for Common Internet File System (CIFS) is a protocol that lets programs make requests for files and services on remote computers on the Internet. When trying to use smbfs, you will be prompted by a kernel warning saying "smbfs is deprecated and will be removed from the 2.6.27 kernel. Please migrate to cifs"

-o = if you specify some options specially when dealing with file permission and ownership or account credentials on accessing the smb server remotely. uid is what user id is to be used when it's shared to your linux local, gid where the group id to be used for the directory permission and username is the username from remote server running samba. Note that password will be prompted afterwards which is pretty secure.

Note also that mymacosxnetbiosname can be an ip or a domain name.

mod_xsendfile compiling in mac os x leopard and snow leopard for i386 or x86_64 arch type

2010-01-18T00:07:00.000-08:00

Mod_Xsendfile is a small Apache2 module that processes X-SENDFILE headers registered by the original output handler."

If you did encountered trouble integrating the module for XSendfile for Apache in Mac OS X, I manage to compile it by passing the flags which would suffice the architecture of the processor's model.

apxs -cia -Wc,"-arch x86_64" -Wl,"-arch x86_64" mod_xsendfile.c

-Wc the compiler flags
-Wl the linker flags.

That is applicable only if your arch type is x86_64 in Mac. I have Snow Leopard in my desktop, priorly it was Leopard 10.5.8.

For Leopard 10.5.8, It does works when you pass "-arch i386" for compiler flags and linker flags. This works like a charm and Apache doesn't end up segmentation fault anymore.

Hope this helps!

Java - make a jar file and include external classes or jar files, creating keystore, and signing a jar app

2010-01-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

Compiling java app

D:\java_apps\myapp>javac -verbose -sourcepath src_code_dir -classpath extlib\jai-1_1_4-pre-dr-b03-lib-windows-i586-28_Sep_2009\lib\ext\jai_codec.jar;"C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\plugin.jar"; -d sod sod\org\myapp\ScanDriverApplet.java

-d   destination directory for class files
-verbose   includes information about each class loaded and each source
   file compiled.
-classpath   Set the user class path, overriding the user class path in the
     CLASSPATH environment variable. If neither CLASSPATH or
   -classpath is specified, the user class path consists
   of the current directory. See Setting the Class Path for more
   details.

   If the -sourcepath option is not specified, the user class path
   is searched for source files as well as class files.

Creating a keystore

D:\java_apps\myapp>keytool -keystore mykeystorefilename -genkey -alias myappalias

-keystore The keystore (database file) location. Defaults to the file .keystore in the user's home directory, as determined by the "user.home" system property, whose value is described inKeystore Location.
-genkey Generates a key pair (a public key and associated private key)
-alias alias will be used to

Results to:
Enter keystore password:
Re-enter new password:
What is your first and last name?
[Unknown]: My Sample Inc.
What is the name of your organizational unit?
[Unknown]: My Sample Inc.
What is the name of your organization?
[Unknown]:
What is the name of your City or Locality?
[Unknown]:
What is the name of your State or Province?
[Unknown]:
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
[Unknown]:
Is CN=My Sample Inc., OU=My Sample Inc., O=Unknown, L=Unknown, ST=Unknown, C
=Unknown correct?
[no]: yes

Enter key password for
(RETURN if same as keystore password):

D:\java_apps\myapp>

Creating a jar file

D:\java_apps\my_app>jar -cvfe ../myapp.jar -C org

-C Temporarily changes directories (cd dir) during execution of the jar command while processing the following inputfiles argument. Its operation is intended to be similar to the -C option of the UNIX tar utility. For example:

jar uf foo.jar -C classes bar.class

would change to the classes directory and add the bar.class from that directory to foo.jar. The following command,

jar uf foo.jar -C classes . -C bin xyz.class

would change to the classes directory and add to foo.jar all files within the classes directory (without creating a classes directory in the jar file), then change back to the original directory before changing to the bin directory to add xyz.class to foo.jar. If classes holds files bar1 and bar2, then here's what the jar file would contain using jar tf foo.jar:

META-INF/

META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

bar1

bar2

xyz.class

Signing a jar app: This avoid "Unable to create temporary file" and permission issues, while running applet...

D:\java_apps\my_app>jarsigner -keystore mykeystorefilename myapp.jar myappalias
Results to:
Enter Passphrase for keystore:

Warning:
The signer certificate will expire within six months.

The file size of the jar file will be updated.

Happy 5th Year Firefox! Would It Still Be The Best Browser In The Future?

2009-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

Happy 5th Birthday Firefox!

Glad to hear and celebrate a prospering success of an open source browser, Firefox, in 5 years in a row beating the Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox was release on November 9, 2004 written by the Mozilla geeks which I would say, runs in a cross-platform (M$ Window$, Mac OS X, Linux/Unix) just like Sun Microsystem's Java programming language results in "software that is portable across multiple machine architectures, operating systems, and graphical user interfaces, secure, and high performance".

Due to Firefox innovative technology in the browser arena, many of the browsers that are up-to-date being innovative, and does alleviate its flaws to something more reliable User Experience, obviously, Internet Explorer 8 (I feel being cynical).

Firefox still my best choice, not to mention the fast pacing Google's Chrome browser, compared to other browsers. Safari does a good job specially loading a heavy AJAX application.

So what makes Firefox be my best choice and be my best browser of all? Well, Firefox is extensible and does has lots of add-on's, just like your favorite Youtube downloader :D. It's very helpful for a developer, it has lots of promises that can offer and bring forth to me as a user or a developer. You can check also for Firefox's "new device API for Firefox 3.6: orientation".

However, it seems that Google's Chrome is going more far from its infancy and they are really doing a pretty good job, specially on their development for Chrome OS and their Google Wave. Google focuses much more on desktop applications that is optimized for data exchange and software in the cloud. I found it more innovative in their focus on making OS in the cloud, whereas Firefox is on the user-level but extensible on making it just like Chrome.

Chrome is much better on loading AJAX requests load than Firefox. Mostly I got hangs or browser crash which I think it's because of too much add-on's I installed or there's really an underlying bug in Firefox (though I experience this in my Slack).

Well, still, Firefox is my best friend! I have firebug, I have web developer tools, I have a validator for my XHTML/CSS tags (Total Validator or HTML Validator, I have Live HTTP headers, Web Mail Notifier, Answer.com's very helpful add-on, and as well, I can transfer through FTP using FireFTP and install FireFTP if my privileges are stricted for any installation, like Filezilla FTP.

I might rather say that, Firefox still has success in the user-level and deemed to be most usable browser as an alternative to Internet Explorer. However, Google might be enthroned if Firefox cannot take the advantage of it's massive users to take thrive more on it's development tools (XUL), extensibility, and its innovative philosophy. We know Google is really kicking asses because of their cool technologies developed, and made it open source as well, which worries the Firefox community.

Some articles I've read which you might also be interested are:
Can Firefox Last Five More Years? Forecast: Cloudy
Firefox: Five Years In The Open Source Hen House

Checkout also FFEHR (an electronic health record) http://trac.afterfivetech.com/ffehr/

Enjoy reading!!! =)

Changing the Keyword Location Search Engine For Firefox

2009-11-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

If you might notice, installing Yahoo toolbars might override the settings in your Mozilla Firefox browser. I am not quite fan of Yahoo's search algorithm, as it seems quite naive to me, and I need to change the search engine using Google.

To change it, just type (see image below):

about:config 

on the location toolbar of your Mozilla Firefox browser. Then search for

keyword.URL

then double click it or right click, and select Modify and paste this
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&q=

Try typing keywords on your location bar and hit enter, you will be redirected to a particular site, or else the Google's default search page.

Happy Googling!!! ;-)

If you're viewing this blog from a feed, click here to fully read this post =)

Pacquiao vs. Cotto bout on November 14, 2009

2009-11-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

I just see the HBO's Episode for the fight of Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao over Puerto Rico's pride, Miguel Cotto in youtube.com.

Most analysts, still favors Manny Pacquiao for his abilities in the boxing ring, with speed, strong punches, and a good training along with his coach, Freddie Roach.

Miguel Cotto stands at 5'7 with with 34 winds, 27 knockouts, and 1 Loss. While Manny Pacquiao has 49 wins, 37 knockouts, 3 losses, and 2 draws.

Both of them shares the prominence and noble respect with their respective country, Philippines for Pacquiao, and Puerto Rico, for Miguel Cotto, as heroes bringing forth the name of their country on their behalf in the sports entertainment.

I both salute for these guys but only one can win on their match. I love Manny's speed and strong punches, and I love Cotto's stance, looks like a ferocious bull to me, and his devastating punches just like Manny too.

We'll see what they can do in the ring, and of course, entertain us with full satisfaction! On November 14 (15 hours ahead of our time), watch their fight which will be aired via pay-per-view.

I will try to find a live streaming for their fight, with no commercial breaks, and put the link here in my blog.

Watch the video for the first Episode of their fight. Hope you'll enjoy!

If you're viewing this blog from a feed, click here to fully read this post =)

Skeleton Prank Riding on Bike and Taxicab - Very Funny

2009-11-07T09:29:00.000-08:00

I really love this very funny prank video from Brazil. It's about frightening the people, wittingly, with those skeleton props using a remote device to obtain manipulation over the vehicles had been used for this video.

The first video, shows a skeleton--resembles like "Ghost Rider"--riding on a bike and yawping on those people walking alongside the cemetery. Watch it and, I bet no penny would be wasted on your time. It really scrumbles my stomach because of so much laughter. I can't imagine if I would be the victim, I might perhaps throw a heavy stuff I can grab on that Skeleton! LOL!!!! I put the translation on the first video below the video object.

Note: For the translation on the first video, I just relay on one of the comments where the skeleton
is saying, "Hey you, do you want a ride to hell muahahahaha, don't run I will get you one by one!",
and on the drunk or the hobo part, he said "hey you drunk let me take you to hell muahahahahaha"...
Really, hahahaha! Very funny!!!

The second video, is still the same, but on a different vehicle which is a taxicab. Very funny prank!!! Watch them, and hope you'll enjoy!

If you're viewing this blog from a feed, click here to fully read this post =)

Higante of Ely Buendia and Francis "Kiko" Magalona

2009-11-02T03:27:00.000-08:00

Have you heard of this song?

Such a great composition! I was waiting for this album to be release and hearing this significant collaboration of two
famous legendary music icon in the Philippines, Ely Buendia and Francis Durango Magalona. Their hit song entitled "Higante" (which means Giant) top at the Philippine charts at #20 in Myx and ended at #10 in the month of October.

The lyrics of the song seems embodies some political views or power because of the abusive power that the "Higante" has, oppressing "Higante's" diminutives.

Have a listen to their video, it's really a cool song!
Here's the video of their gigantic song, "Higante" courtesy of Youtube:

I posted the lyrics of the song below.

Higante Lyrics

(Ely Buendia)
Narito palagi
Di nawawala
Ang bendisyon ng pari
Laging nasakanya
'Sing taas ng ulap
Ang kanyang tindig
Nakaupo sa palad
Ang buong daigdig

Chorus:
Ahhhhhh
Siya ay dambuhala
Siya'y nakakalula
Dadalhin ka niya
Sa sukdulan

(Francis M.)
Tumingala sa langit
Kung nais mong makita
Ang higanteng panget
Tila naninindak
Sa noo nakasipa
Ang aking saltik
Sa lakas ng tira
Sa lupa siya humalik

Chorus:
Ahhhhhh
Siya ay dambuhala
Siya'y nakakalula
Dadalhin ka niya
Sa sukdulan

maliliit na tao ay walang kalaban-laban
sino ka kung makaasta
isa kang kontra bida diba
maliliit na tulad namin sinasaktan mo at kinakain
magtago ka na dambuhala kakampi namin si bathala
kung ayaw mo na maniwala sa bato mapipinsala

Ahhhhhh
http://www.elyricsworld.com/higante_lyrics_ely_buendia.html
Siya ay dambuhala
Siya'y nakakalula
Dadalhin ka niya

Ahhhhhh
Siya ay dambuhala
Siya'y nakakalula
Dadalhin ka niya
Sa sukdulan

Ahhhhhh Ahhhhh
Siya ay dambuhala
Siya'y nakakalula
Dadalhin ka niya
Sa sukdulan

Cloud Computing - What is it?

2009-10-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

"Soon thereafter, everything we are using will stay in the cloud!"

Well, what does really "Cloud Computing" means?

Salesforce.com has a pretty decent explanation about cloud computing on how this operates between the user and within the Internet. Cloud means, the Internet. Conceptually, Cloud Computing is designed to make abstracted behind the users of the software, where no need for in-depth knowledge of some specific software. Actually, Cloud Computing will be far more adapted
for so many years.

Watch this movie from Salesforce.com:

Well, why should I say that? Well, as we all know, globally, we are down with such crisis. Financially really hit many countries down, specially the United States of America (well, thanks God, this happens because alternatives are arising!). Cloud computing doesn't want you to buy or pay every applications you use. It does only counts every time you use your applications, basing on how much have you used or scaling your statistics of usage with the applications you have utilized, by either personal, business, or some social networking. It's actually ideal and of course, economical.

I would say, Cloud Computing has a vast idea behind other known computing development technology, such as Grid Computing and Utility Computing.

And what are those things might we consider as disadvantages of this?
Well, this is really tough for us, like Software Engineers. Since users behind the cloud computing, it's predictable that it's rapid
growth of traffic, and of course subscription, might deliver from pain-in-the-ass sticking in our neck. Well, it's very tough, of course, to handle such a massive amount of networks, but if a good or perfect algorithm has been appropriately applied and involved as a practice, as well as smart people are living in, well, this can be just a plain documentation.

Cloud computing is much known for running virtualization which is, typically a perfect tool because, cloud computing involves cost-cutting, of course! What's the benefit of this approach, if we don't think of a much better solution, isn't it?

As of today, various companies are really developing on these stuffs. IBM has their Autonomic Computing, which heals by itself, fix itself, and it does also optimization being transparent to the user. I actually love how their algorithm behind it's philosophies are applied. It follows actually how our motor neurons work. Sounds interesting? Well have a visit on their page http://www.ibm.com/autonomic/.

With all these stuffs, I'm so happy that these various technologies, including Cloud Computing is emerging. It phases our knowledge, mind, and impossibilities to possibilities where people can think of various alternatives for a better live, in virtual world.

Installing wpa_supplicant in Slackware

2009-10-29T01:50:00.000-07:00

Ever since I'm connecting to my wireless router WRT54GL from LinkSys, I never thought of WPA and the wpa_supplicant for my Slackware Linux box. I do connect through WEP security mode for my encryption algorithm. I know it's just a basic authorization for my wireless, instead with wpa_supplicant for WPA, until I found out that my neighbors are abusing my connection, and don't want my stuffs to be exposed.

It was funny actually when my neighbors approach me and ask me if I'm the owner of that connection that they able to detect, and say, "hey, don't put any password on that". Really, it sounds daring and hilarious but rude.

I do connect from my Slackware Linux via shell using the commands:

$> ifconfig wlan0 up
$> iwlist wlan0 scan
$> iwconfig wlan0 essid "myssid" key "8EEDEEFE41"
$> dhcpcd wlan0

The first command will take my wireless LAN card to be up, which actually down during start up. Somewhat like, disable and enable if in Windows environment. The second command will scan for available wireless connections in my area. It's actually fine to not do this, but I do usually check how my wireless status is, and if I have some available connections that I can reach through, that is lurking for some free connections. The third command will be the one to grant me access for my router and lastly, dhcpcd will connect the interface through the Internet.

WEP, which stands for Wired Equivalent Privacty, is already a deprecated algorithm for wireless connections. There are actually lots of issues with its algorithm for being weak and is also susceptible to be hacked easily. I remember, I found some videos in the Internet able to grant the WEP key but there's a lot of tools involve to achieve this. Because of those things, I choose to use WPA.

That's all about with WEP!!!

WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access. My setup is just simple, achieving to connect through my WPA setup in my wireless network. Installing wpa_supplicant is easier through Slackbuilds, though I use the binary package, the .tgz file for my installation.

So I downloaded the package for wpa_supplicant for my Slackware at http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/wpa_supplicant/pkg/12.0/wpa_supplicant-0.5.9-i486-1.tgz at http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/wpa_supplicant/pkg/12.0/ list.

Then issue the command:
$> installpkg wpa_supplicant-0.5.9-i486-1.tgz

Afterwards, I move first the original file named /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.backup and edit the contents leaving only the required things I need to have for my connection. My ssid is "myssid" and the WPA shared key is "mysecretcode".

I then issue the command:
$> wpa_passphrase myssid mysecretcode

and the output is:
network={

ssid="myssid"
#psk="mysecretcode"
psk=9130f740db6dfd521e34dd89524221d66b8be1dbeeaa0b0a2131f81807374265

}
So I edit the file with my favorite editor, vi
$> vi /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

With contents:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
#eapol_version=1
#ap_scan=2
fast_reauth=1
network={

ssid="myssid"
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
#psk="mysecretcode"
psk=9130f740db6dfd521e34dd89524221d66b8be1dbeeaa0b0a2131f81807374265

}

As you can see, I put the generated psk after I ran the command wpa_passphrase.

Afterwards, I run this command:
$> wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Where
-B = runs in the background
-D = specifies the driver to use. Mine is generic, which is shifted by Intel, so I use wext.
-i = specifies the interface to listen
-c = specifies the path of the configuration file.

In my opinion, I don't like to configure my stuffs automatically during start up, instead it would be great to create a bash script instead of putting them in somewhere else while I might forgetting them.

Afterwards I do:
$> ifconfig wlan0 up
$> dhcpcd wlan0
$> ping toytoygogie.blogspot.com

For some external resources, I recommend http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wpa_supplicant this page, so check it out.

Although there are some reports about the algorithm of WPA specially with TKIP, my guide here is to achieve installing wpa_supplicant in Slackware Linux. I will post more about the exploits that WPA encounters soon.

Prosperity - List of Countries in 2009

2009-10-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

In reference from the site of Prosperity.com, please see the image posted below for the list of country rankings for Prosperity in 2009.

As far as I've read their downloadable PDF file , Legatum are basing their surveys from an objective data and subjective responses. These involve the status quo of every country in its stance.

Prosperity embodies health, personal freedom, wealth or financial security, good fortune, as well as environmental living, success, and flourishing. My country, Philippines, is enlisted in the rank 55^th position.

I'm just curious why USA is enlisted at the 9th position. I thought, the USA are much bogged with the global financial crisis, but well, President Barack Obama did aleviate its prosperity back astir.

I've read the article from Yahoo, seemingly agreeing it's position. The country has it's economic boom, but their government and politics are too tight for me, to think of, when it comes to personal freedom.

One thing I might, in my opinion, have to be consider of, are countries tradition and the language. There are languages that are hard to learn, albeit English language is mostly used, but there are among the countries doesn't talk English. Filipinos are good though, and we have long lands too that I consider a paradise and as well, the "Prosperity" in its existence. I'm proud anyway Philippines is not too deep in the list.

Well, it is how we, humans, do create prosperity and so retain also the prosperity by our own nature and own values.

How about you? Do you have prosperity in life now?

It's Gonna Make Sense - Michael Learns To Rock

2009-10-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

My first impression for this song was from a boy band, and I hate boy band. Never knew that this from MLTR (Michael Learns To Rock) band. I love MLTR, of course, back in my younger years playing with my guitars.

Have a try to listening to their song. It's a pop song but it's actually a cool song.

I have pasted also the lyrics, so if you wanna song feeling like in a karaoke bar (so do I?), have fun singing the song.

It’s Gonna Make Sense

Life comes in many shapes
You think you know what you got
untill it changes

And life will take you high and low
you gotta learn how to walk
and then which way to go

Every choice you make
when you’re lost
Every step you take
has it’s cause

Chorus:
After you clear your eyes
you’ll see the light
somewhere in the darkness
After the rain has gone
you’ll feel the sun comes
and though it seems your sorrow never ends
someday its gonna make sense

Tears you shed are all the same
when you laughed ’till you cried
or broken down in pain

All the hours you have spent in the past
worrying about
a thing that didn’t last

Everything you saw
played a part
in everything you are
in your heart

Chorus:
After you clear your eyes
you’ll see the light
somewhere in the darkness
After the rain has gone
you’ll feel the sun comes
and though it seems your sorrow never ends
someday its gonna make sense

Release:
Someday you’re gonna find the answers
To all the things you’ve become and all they’ve done
At your expence
Someday it’s gonna make sense

Trouble WIth BIOS After a Failure Update Is Just an Easy Fix

2009-10-26T22:28:00.000-07:00

Updating a computer BIOS is really trivial. Once you come up into trouble with your BIOS, like a failure during update, or an error that will cause it a failure update, might turn you into trouble by perhaps a total replacement of your motherboard, unless you are really prepared for things to do.

In my experience, it's not that, it's actually easier than what I think before taking an attempt to update. My CPU's motherboard is PM8PM-V from MSI.

I follow the guidelines I have read from MSI, using their live update, but it comes into trouble when it goes a failure update. Now, since I did skip the "Create a disk Recovery", where it needs a floppy drive (but who uses a floppy drive this days?), and now, I'm in trouble with my BIOS.

Since I have my floppy, but have never used for almost more than 2 years, now it seemed my floppy drive is a little bit dusty inside because it always fails to ready any floppy disk I have. Luckily, I have a floppy disk cleaner I bought last 2003, so that was 6 years ago LOL! I put my floppy cleaner and it works reading my floppies.

So back again, what I did is, I found my BIOS version that bypasses that LiveUpdate (only just files) which I get from here, http://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=124428.0;attach=5328. Then I save those files into my floppy diskette, and create an "AUTOEXEC.BAT" file with its contents "AWDFLH.EXE W7222VMS.330" (without the quotes).

After I reboot and after I encountered that failure on BIOS update using the window version update, I encountered this message, like the image shown below:

Everything on my UI hardware stops to work like my mouse and my keyboard. When you encounter this trouble, the BIOS
by default will look for the floppy drive and detects if it's a BIOS program or not. If it's not a BIOS program, it will give you a message anyway.

After I put my floppy during reboot, the BIOS will be automatically be flashed and reads that content in the floppy I have stored. It will actually look or execute the AUTOEXEC.BAT and read it's contents inside that file.

Now, after flashing my BIOS, you will see a status of "complete" or a "reset" button will be colored. Now, you can push the reset button of your CPU, and everything will be back to normal.

Hence, my BIOS version also has been updated, and I conclude that, it was easier than i think of.

Geocities Marks it's Goodbye on October 26, 2009

2009-10-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

It's the mark of the end from the starter back on the early years of Yahoo. Founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner, the company is shutting down it's service effective this October 26, 2009. Maybe later, my time here is GMT +8:00.

Geocities have been a massive users using it's service. It's actually cool back then, some of it's competitors like Angelfire which was also ceased it's opertion in 2002.

One of the things they realize with Geocities is that it's free, it's famous, but they aren't much making money with their free-base service. Yahoo is encouraging it's users to upgrade on it's fee-base service, but who the hell wants to try? I'll choose anyway Googlepages, it's free anyway and it's really cool though.

Still, it would be great if Geocities would still have the archives because there are lots of pages created and was stored in their service.

Yahoo has been reported for cost-cutting and instead, focus more on customer relationship in some other areas they focus. Well, let's take it that Google is really dominating against them. Yahoo focus much more on entertainment, and marketing of their products but less technology compared with Google.

I grab some images from Yahoo showing their service will be totally of effective on October 26, 2009 and it's a goodbye.

I was really an avid user of Geocities, and now it's just a history and will be a great memory in the Internet. It's one of the greatest tools or service I have used back on the early days of Yahoo's supremacy in the Internet.

Well, I guess this is what would happen if a service would be lacking such consideration in it's future aspect. 15 years of service is huge to me and a waste if shutting down in the line of many years grabbing millions of users.

For those not much familiar with Yahoo! Geocities, checkout on Wikipedia. They have much detailed information for perusal anyway.

Make HTML a PDF via Internet

2009-10-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

There are many tools in the internet built now these days. One of the tools I mostly used is to convert a page, an HTML page, to PDF because I like PDF format to read and and shared also with my friends.

I use this tools in the net:
http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/default.aspx
http://www.htmltopdf.co.uk/

And after I grab this pdf convert pages, I stored it via Google docs.

When storing in Google Docs, I do always make my documents in order so that it would be easier for me to locate things I need to find or use.

Try it, and it's really helpful to store your documents in PDF being centralized. PDF viewer from Google too is really awesome!

CCTV in Davao City Caught a Man Murdered

2009-10-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

This video was caught on CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) where a man, who was identified as Chris Anthony Togle, a City Hall employee
of Davao City.

Just watch the video below, and this guys are really exchanging bullets with the heat they feel without thinking they might be dead or they
would kill their fellowmen.

I hope there will be more CCTV's here in Davao.

For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV

libMagickCore.so.1 No such file or directory

2009-10-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

ImageMagick is such a very cool tool for editing/modifying images through shell. However, when I ran out of trouble encountering the problem like, example running the "convert" (one of the ImageMagick tools)command:

$> convert test.png test.pdf
convert: error while loading shared libraries: libMagickCore.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

and doing:

$> locate libMagickCore.so.1
/usr/lib/libMagickCore.so.1

which means, it does exist. In order to fix this, just run:

$> ldconfig

and everything will solve the problem!

Hope this helps!

Make Youtube or AVI Movies to DVD in Linux

2009-10-18T02:20:00.000-07:00

Tools I did download:

- ffmpeg
- Dvdauthor
- dvd+rw-tools
- transcode
- Mjpegtools
- mplayer

I installed library dependencies which are libdvdread, libdvdcss, libquicktime, amrwb, libdc1394, libgsm, x264, libraw1394, and libmpeg2.

I use the online downloader http://online.movavi.com/ and enables me to download the "flv" file format of the file. Afterwards I use ffmpeg to convert the file from flv to avi with this command.

$> ffmpeg -i video.flv -y -f avi -b 1150 -s 320x240 -r 29.97 -g 12 -qmin 3 -qmax 13 -ab 224 -ar 44100 -ac 2 -acodec libmp3lame -target dvd youtube_movie.avi

Afterwards, I use transcode to convert my avi files to mc3 and m2v format where the audio and video are being separated. I use the command to convert it through:

$> transcode -i youtube_movie.avi -y ffmpeg --export_prof dvd-ntsc --export_asr 3 -o movie -D0 -N 0x55 -s2 -m movie.ac3 -J modfps=clonetype=3 --export_fps 29.9 -f 3

The fps of 29.9 can be set manually. I set that since i was trying hard to get the timing of the frames per second of the video from youtube I got.

Afterwards, I combine them together, video and audio with this command:

$> mplex -f 8 -o youtube_movie.mpg movie.m2v movie.ac3

And then to create a dvd formatted files, I use the dvdauthor to make the job done. The command I use is:

$> dvdauthor -x dvdauthor.xml

In my dvdauthor.xml file, I have two movies where the contents is:


<dvdauthor dest="DVD">
 <vmgm />
 <titleset>
     <titles>
         <pgc>
             <vob file="dvd_movie.mpg" chapters="0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00"/>
         </pgc>
         <pgc>
             <vob file="youtube_movie.mpg" chapters="0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00"/>
         </pgc>
     </titles>
 </titleset>
</dvdauthor>


Then I test my movies by issuing the command:

$> xine dvd:/my/full/path/of/DVD/VIDEO_TS


Then I burn to my DVD by issuing the command:

$> growisofs -Z /dev/hda -dvd-video DVD/


In reference from linuxquestions.org post, I arrive to make youtube or
AVI movies to DVD in Linux successfully.

Linux Using xargs to Copy All Files in Directory or Subdirectory

2009-10-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

To copy all the files, for example, mp3 files in a directory/subdirectory to another directory in Linux, you can use the xargs command and the find but by using "sed" tool to also filter the quotes of file names.

The command is pretty simple which is write down below.

$> find . -name "*.mp3" | sed -r "s/'/\\\\\'/g" | xargs -t -I '{}' cp '{}' /media/disk/Music/

What it does, is that, it will find any files that ends with *.mp3 file extension from the current directory the command is being executed, and sed will will apply a regular expression to filter the quotes and replace it with "\'" (a slash and a single quote). After this, xargs command will catch the lines outputed by the find command but filtered with sed and executes a cp command and directs it to /media directory.

find options:
-name = specifies the name to find

sed options:
-r = will do an extended regular expression

xargs options:
-t = print the command line (which is the cp) in the standard error output before executing the command
-I = replaces the brackets '{}' with the input from find and sed (or the initial-arguments with names read from standard input) and it's separator is the new line

Explaining About Bittorrent Encryption

2009-09-25T04:41:00.000-07:00

I remember I downloaded a torrent with KTorrent in my Slackware-Linux box, thinking that everything is alright, but that was in the office. After I downloaded that source, which is an ISO file, I told my boss to share that I did download an updated version of that file. Then he look at me and ask me disparagingly, "Are you downloading it securely or using encryption?". I ask myself, "dang, what did I do?" and stuck in a moment, geeze! We'll he told me to download anything since our internet is faster than a DSL.

Okay, cut the crap! I'm not digressing here.

So I did a research about encryption and other stuffs with Bittorrent and this will be explained!

I read some articles "How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic", "BitTorrent Encryption Confuses the BPI, ISPs and Journalists Who Don’t Research", and "BitTorrent Encryption Myths" and learned that encryption doesn't do anything about hiding user's end information or even the data packets being shared are not encrypted in a way that, you can hide the data being transmitted from one user to another user's end. AFAIK, in P2P system, IP is not hidden from it's origin.

Bittorrent clients that implements encryption are using MSE/PE (Message Stream Encryption/Protocol Encryption) or PHE (Protocol Header Encryption). Its purpose IS NOT TO PROVIDE ANONYMITY OR CONFIDENTIALITY of files being shared/transferred. This encryption only aims to speed up the download at full-speed using bittorrent clients which avoids the third parties (ISP's) to throttle the traffic in a peer-to-peer network.

I don't think so that a P2P system that enables a massive downloads by user's would enable the encryption that makes your data secure or anonymously hide your information from the provider, though it is but it worth a penny and I cannot call it as massive or swarm uploads.

I realize that, the thoughts that my boss he has was wrong with encryption in bittorrent clients implicitly saying that "it would provide data security or anonymity to user using bittorrent clients", sorry but it's not that way.

At least, I made it clear now. =)

Removing of Multiple Files with Exception Using "rm" command in Linux

2009-09-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

Now I get into this point. I remember I did some simple command, back then, by using "rm" command in Linux. Try searching in the net but none of it provides me the answer.

The goal was that, I have a directory named, "reports" with lots of files/directories/sub-directories inside it, and try to delete all of them but with exclusion of the files that starts with the word "report-" (ex. report-2009-10-19.html).

I thought the command issued in my shell

$> rm -rf $(ls reports/|grep -e '[^report-*]')

would enable me to delete the files but it seems it doesn't work. My expectation was the files that does not start with "reports" word will be deleted. Then I read the manual of rm ("man rm" in bash), I found that the -v would select those non-matching lines.

Now, issuing the commands in my shell

$> cd reports
$> rm -rf $(ls .|grep -v '[report-*]')

enables me to delete the files that starts with the word "report-".

Hope this helps!

Connecting Samba 3 from Linux to Mac OS X Leopard

2009-09-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

I'm so befuddled yesterday until I figured it out that it works from Mac OS X to Mac OS X Leopard with Samba 3. I thought my smb.conf doesn't work.

Now, Linux to Mac OS X was hard because I thought, I must ran smbpasswd to provide password for the username I have to used. I was thinking that Mac OS X's Samba configuration directs the use to able to check on the user's of the machine with it's account information (username and password of the Mac OS X Leopard machine).

It does able me to authenticate and access my folder via that Mac OS X machine.

I found this article also, seems we have the same issue faced.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2086667

delete multiple files/directory with exclusion

2009-07-01T16:26:00.001-07:00

I have multiple files in a directory and I was logged in thru my bash shell. Then I just issue the command below.

rm -rf $(ls|grep -E '[^(^ext$)|(mootools)]')

grep -E will execute an extended regular expression so ext and mootools will be retain or excluded upon deletion of files in the current directory.

eavesdropping in ssh

2009-06-21T05:36:00.000-07:00

This happens when we are switching from old server to another server and assigned a different IP address from the specific domain name.

bash-3.1$ ssh myname@example.com
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
The RSA host key for example.com has changed,
and the key for the according IP address 198.2.1.1
is unchanged. This could either mean that
DNS SPOOFING is happening or the IP address for the host
and its host key have changed at the same time.
Offending key for IP in /home/myname/.ssh/known_hosts:16
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
60:9a:52:78:03:1e:66:78:33:25:19:ae:44:08:01:89.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /home/myname/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /home/myname/.ssh/known_hosts:13
RSA host key for example.com has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

This is how ssh works, but if you know that your server is really which is which. Though dig-ging it might be a help.
example in your bash shell, type:

$> dig example.com
or
$> dig -x example.com
with -x if you want to know the reverse lookups, mapping addresses to names

find and perl as alternative for sed

2009-06-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

In continuation of my migration, some directories with HTML contents their are manually inputted by strings that would let a typical user to edit manually all the HTML files for just a sake of changing a text. However, Perl as an alternative for sed is quite helpful.

The command goes like this:

perl -e "s/www\.hawaiifsbos\.com/test\.hawaiifsbos\.com/g;" -pi $(find . -type f)

-p = will do a loop sequence. For more info, read the page in "Using the -n and -p option"
-i = will modify file in-place. providing after the "i" letter with a word, will be used as a back-up suffix of a file. (Ex. -pi.bak)
-e = means execute

This is the same thing as

find . -name "*.*" -type f -exec sed -i 's/www.mysite.com/test.mysite.com/g' {} \;

The above works in my Slack, but it seems weird it doesn't do in FreeBSD, but the perl is there as my alternative.

rsync: avoid overwriting of files

2009-06-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

I was migrating this stuffs we have from an old FreeBSD 4.0 Server to a new FreeBSD 6.0 Server hosted at Verio. I was fumbled and tumbled when I use this rsync tool by migrating the files to our new server.

The situation is that, in every directories we have being assigned in a virtual host and its DocumentRoot are having different owners and group assigned. The old server we have is having a version of an old Apache. Now, in order to achieve the exact ruling or permission, rsync is a tool that enables you to preserve ownership as well as its permission of the files/directories that you're going to copy--or shall we use the term "migrate".

My mistake was that, migrating with files using rsync is a little bit tricky. Ending a copy like this, for example:

rsync -r -e "ssh -l ahkmed" localhost:/home/ahkmed/documents /www/documents

is a different story than

rsync -r -e "ssh -l ahkmed" localhost:/home/ahkmed/documents/ /www/documents

Note the ending has slash in it while the first one has no slash in it at "/home/ahkmed/documents/".

The first one will copy the "documents" folder and its contents to /www/documents. So this will result into /www/documents/documents. If you're intending to grab the "documents" folder and put it in /www/documents only the contents of that "documents" folder, you need to use the second rsync command that I have shown above, i.e. with trailing slash (/) at the end.

You should really be aware of the differences between the two because you might end up fumble and tumble as what I did. The story goes like this. I have the files in /usr/local/apache/htdocs from an old server and I made the stupid thing when I issue like:

rsync -r --delete -e "ssh -l ahkmed" oldserver.com:/usr/local/apache/htdocs/ ../

where the current directory I am in the new server is at /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/. This means that, delete all the files if not existent at /usr/local/apache2/in the new server. Dang, it really works deleting it, but it's a mistake! However, I do make backups of course.

Now, here's another stuff what I learned from rsync also, you can do filter files like you don't want to be deleted or updated.

rsync -o -p -g -v -r -a -u --update --exclude={camping,journey,files.txt} -e "ssh -l ahkmed" localhost:/home/ahkmed/Desktop/pics .

-u = will tell that the receiver has the updated file
--exclude = will do a filter, excluding a directory name (whether it's a subdirectory of a directory). Appending lots of filters, I suggest to you --exclude-file=FILE_FILTERS.

This prevents an rsync copy that has contents been modified and also a directory that you don't want to update anymore, somewhat like the subdirectory is a final copy, while others needs to be copied if newer files has been copied.

Installing MySQL v6 in FreeBSD

2009-05-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

FreeBSD places its packages under /usr/ports/. Now for databases, types this command

cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql60-server

Then issue

make

after make, issue

make install

You can even specify it's configuration options like --prefix by doing "make install --prefix=/usr/local" where it will install the mysql packages.

This is applied also to the client package, just follow the steps how the server is being installed.

Create /var/db/mysql if that direcotry doesn't exist, then "chown mysql:mysql /var/db/mysql" and "chmod 770 /var/db/mysql" for security. Run the mysql_install_db command which will create default tables that mysql will used on its server process.

Run the mysql background process by issuing the command "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server start" or perhaps it might be "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh start". I think older BSD preserves the .sh suffix on the start up scripts.

Don't forget to provide password to your root. Issue this command "mysqladmin -u root password egret" where "egret" is my database password, just an example.

Hope this helps!

rsync using ssh via a sudo command

2009-05-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

My main goal for this is, I was migrating from an old server to a new BSD server. In order to make preservation of user accounts,
I manage it with this command below using rsync tool to transfer or copy the files.

"rsync -p -o -g -r -a -v -e "ssh -l normaluseraddedviasudoers" --rsync-path "sudo rsync" --delete oldserver.com:/home . --log-file=/tmp/rsynclogs.txt "

-p means to preserve the permission, -o means to preserve the ownership, -g means to preserve the group.

-r means to recurse into ts sub-directories, -a means to archive them, -v means to use the verbose mode, -e specifies the remote login to use. With --rsync-path, it makes how to run rsync which this means like run the rsync via sudo or via root.

Now, I am able to copy all the files under /home directories without prior chmod afterwards when you are on the new server. It makes the rsync set everything for you and not worrying if the files has been able to copy or not it's because you might not copy everything because files/directories was not able to read because the user has no permission. With that command, that will help you solve your problem.

Note: You must add the normaluseraddedviasudoers with no password, that is:
Let say you are on the oldserver shell issue
$root@host > visudo

then locate root, and add it below the line
normaluseraddedviasudoers ALL = NOPASSWD: ALL

Javascript catching mouse click event and know what DOM element is being clicked

2008-09-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

Asking some great encoders in irc.freenode at #javascript channel, people are having an extensive help to me.
I got this code working, but here I use the mootools JS Library but still the same as native javascript syntax.

$(document).addEvent('click', function(e){
console.info(e.target.get('id'));
});

// This works in IE
$(document).attachEvent('onclick', function(e){
alert(e.srcElement.id) // gives the id of the element being clicked
});

Through it, it does prints or gives me the id of the element being clicked. It's really cool knowing this technique.

Counting the tables in MySQL Database

2008-09-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

Finding ou how cool MySQL is, I gathered this statement that might be useful when doing a CLI tasks.

select count(*) as number_of_tables from information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema='schema_name';

OR

select count(*) as number_of_tables from information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema='schema_name' and table_type = 'BASE TABLE';

The latter one does only selects those base tables, BASE TABLE is actually a MySQL valid value of a table_type. This link can give some information about schema -> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/information-schema.html

Inline-download problem with IE browsers

2008-09-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

IE's problem again faces some criticism to my part. I came up of this snippet
that does an inline download of a file.

Adding of
header("Cache-Control: maxage=1"); //In seconds
header("Pragma: public");
heals the problem when a file is in buffer at the client's browser. Problem occurs here is when a
user attempts to open a file, it does tells that the file sort of not found or whatever Microsoft tells.

"
filename = unique_string(8);

$fp = fopen("/tmp/{$filename}", 'w');
fwrite($fp, $contents);
fclose($fp);

header("Cache-Control: maxage=1"); //In seconds
header("Pragma: public");
header( 'Content-Type: ' . 'application/pdf' );
header( 'Content-Disposition: inline; filename="' . basename("/tmp/{$filename}") . '.pdf' . '"');
// Add the rest of the headers
header( 'Cache-Control: public' );
header( 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary' );
header("Content-Length: " . filesize("/tmp/{$filename}"));

readfile("/tmp/{$filename}");
unlink("/tmp/{$filename}");

"

Viewing the file through an inline-download is over HTTPS so this is a SSL problem with IE.

Detecting plugins for pdf

2008-09-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

I just found this site that can detect acrobat reader in browser plugins.
Here's the link: http://gemal.dk/browserspy/acrobat.html

Viewing the source code of that page, i found these lines in the script which does the detection of pdf plugin.

<object id="ocx_pdf" classid="clsid:{CA8A9780-280D-11CF-A24D-444553540000}" style="display:none"></object>
<script type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/vbscript"></script>

....

<script type="text/javascript"></script>

....

<script type="text/javascript"></script>

In my previous applications, by garnering some concepts from other snippets, I came up to this:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

</script> <script type="text/vbscript">

</script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

</script>

CSS Hide Background

2008-09-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

I just found this css snippet to somewhat like disabling the elements behind if a dialog box appears.

/* Enables to disable elements behind */
.somethingDialogUnderlayWrapper {
position: absolute;
left: 0px;
top: 0px;
z-index: 998;
display: none;
background: transparent;
}

/* colors to a disabled-color */
.somethingDialogUnderlay {
background: #eeeeee;
opacity: 0.5;
}

WebFaction.com details on their tools and customer service

2008-05-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

This morning, I was spending my time looking for web hosting and I got this WebFaction.com.
Previously, it was recommended also to me by Wilson Miner (one of Django Framework's developer).

Well definitely, as a programmer, you would be glad to know others suggestions or recommendations
whom you might have to think as a guru or expert in some other fields that you would like to be.

I did send a message to WebFaction.com, and I say wow to their fast reply. They have a good customer
service and good technical staff, if you might be getting some of the topics on their forum.

Here's what I've got from them...

"
Hi Paul,

> Hi WebFaction,
> 
> I would like to know the versions of tools you have in the server for
 a shared hosting plan.
> 
> - PHP (if it's php 5 or lower, and what version is it 5.2? 5.3?)
v5.2.4

> - Apache
v2.2.3

> - Python
v2.5.1, v2.4.3

> - Mysql
v5.0.22

> - Ruby
v1.8.6

> 
> I wanted also to know if WebFaction runs the PHP as a CGI in Apache
 or if it runs PHP as a module. Or is it possible to make these both
 running or perhaps if not, possible to change like from PHP on apache
 module to PHP on CGI or vice versa.

PHP runs as a module on our main Apache instance. If you need some
 other configuration, you could compile, configure, and run your own Apache
 from your home directory.

> I'm hoping for you reply because I love to avail on your hosting but
 I need first the assurances I wanna have!

Thanks for considering WebFaction for your hosting needs :)

Regards,

Sean Fulmer
"


Well, seems like they are a type of hosting that is running for Web 2.0 standards. Great to have them!
The are ultimately gaining up their popularity in the web hosting business.

Eric Johnson's song on cliffs of dover

2007-11-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

He's ultimately gaining on the scene of fusion style of music (rock, blues, instrumental, etc.) inspired by Jimi Hendrix, Steve Ray Vaughn, Chuck Berry, James Brown and others.

Watch his video performing this soulful song "Cliffs of Dover"