Yay!

Nice!

Useful!

Wait, what?

OK, so on the Google Blog (And on IOL Technology and a bunch of other places I’m sure) I noticed that Google has made a code searching site. They seemed to grab the source code from a whole bunch of open source projects (including, so far as I’ve noticed, code for FreeBSD‘s ports and CPAN and and and), and you can now search through the code.

I’m honestly not sure what use this is? Other than maybe seeing how other people did something you’re wanting to do, but how do you search for that? Hope somebody else commented their code?

*shrug*

That’s all fine and well, I’m sure I’ll use it at some point in time for more than fun.

Fun? Yes! Check this out. Some guy on slashdot searched for “backdoor password” and came up with some interesting hits… I then tried to find some equally interesting tidbits, but didn’t find quite ones like that, but here are some searches I did (most end up finding some really interesting comments in code):

* fuck

* george bush

* john kerry

* i hate my job

* dumbass

* root password

You see the recurring theme here. Frustrated developers putting comments into their code, or just finding default usernames and/or password for systems.

Can you find any other interesting searches?

UPDATE: Just found this on he wordpress wp-hackers mailing list, about finding wordpress database usernames and passwords on google’s codesearch… Can’t protect stupid users from themselves…

UPDATE 2: After looking at the wordpress entry above, I did some more digging for more config file type searches, and found this search for phpMyAdmin’s config.inc.php file… Lots there too… Reminds me of that age-old normal Google Search for publicly accessible phpMyAdmin interfaces…

UPDATE 3: Just found another beauty at digg.com, about some winzip keygen found on Google codesearch. hehe.

UPDATE 4: Whoa, nice one! Quinton just sent me this beauty.

UPDATE 5: Damn, even more! Found this over at Chris Shiflett’s site, listing some rather bad security holes becoming apparent when searching…

UPDATE 6: Man oh man, this gets better. Harry Fuecks over at sitepoint.com pointed out a proof-of-concept mass-distributed-computing option… This is getting better and better. I wonder if anybody at Google actually anticipated this kind of response…?

Technorati Tags: codesearch, google, password, security

Opening the Cape Argus today, I found an Incredible Connection pamphlet.  On the front page of this pamphlet, there’s a bloody good deal to get an Xbox 360…

Here’s the deal.

You pay a once-off sim and connection fee of R202, and they give you a Nokia 1600, and an Xbox 360 Pro System, for free.  You will also then be paying R211.60 per month for 24 months, which gives you a “Business contract” with Vodacom.

So lets do the math.  R211.60 x 24 + R202 = R5280.40

The XBox 360 Pro System sells for R3699 at Incredible.

I suppose it’s not bad if you already have a kickass phone (let’s face it, the Nokia 1600 is not exactly the most feature-rich of phones), and you want an XBox 360, but still.  I suppose this just adds onto the console-phone deals that have made it into the light of day over the past few years…

Technorati Tags: vodacom, contract, cellphone, xbox

Well, I tried my hand at Ecto and this is a really nice piece of software, but it costs money.

So I tried looking around for some free blog management software (that will allow me to blog from my MacBook Pro), where I can save the post and submit it when I have access to the internet (OK, I live in South Africa, where the wireless networks are all commercial networks).

Read the rest of this entry »

“The above billboard was spotted near the Ralston exit in Redwood”

Found this on digg. Pretty nifty that there are now Ubuntu billboards on the side of the road… Even the sysadmin at my workplace has given up on Fedora in favour of Ubuntu, and so far he seems very happy with it…

read more | digg story

Whoa mamma!
I attended an Apple seminar/demo/evangelism session at Canal Walk, Cape Town last night. I pitch, say my name, get a free popcorn and water. Good start. Bring on the Salt&Vinegar seasoning!

Anyway. After watching the guys from Project 3 demo some stuff on a 30″ Apple Cinema (More drool here…) display, and some other people arbing around some other Mac hardware, we were ushered into the cinema for a demonstration.

Welcomed by some Apple guy, then over to Kevin Miller, a Scotsman living in Paris, head of Product Marketing or something. “Part of the product evangelism team” he was introduce as. Heh.

He started off by mentioning the Apple hardware that everybody should have. “Hands up who owns a Mac?” “OK, hands up who doesn’t own a Mac?” “Right, don’t worry you guys, this is not a cult, you are not here to be converted. But you’ll see why you want to.” it all started with. He showed some slideshows showing the hardware, the white and black Macbooks, the oh-so-much-better Intel Core Duo Macbook Pro, and some pics of the iMac too. Then onto the juicy bits.

iLife ’06
Kevin started with the different productivity apps that form part of the iLife ’06 suite. I’ve never seen these apps in action, and he took each of them (except for GarageBand) for a test drive on a Macbook Pro plugged into a projector, projecting the images onto the whole movie screen. It was awesome.
Anyway, iPhoto was great. It felt very much like Google’s Picasa, but with a whole bunch extra. iMovie also looked very good. iWeb not *that* great, but good for a quick create a webpage/photoblog type thing.
I couldn’t help but feel that most of what iLife ’06 had, has already been done by other applications elsewhere. I don’t know if there was any version of iLife before ’06, but there were things like theming and auto-create-a-movie type features that I’ve seen in Pinnacle’s Movie Studio, etc. I wouldn’t know who came up with these things first, and I’d actually guess that it would be Apple, seeing that Apple’s been in the publishing and video editing market for quite some time. But that’s besides the point.
In a nutshell? iLife ’06 is a brilliant addition to the default install of MacOSX, and made me want to buy a Mac right there and then. Anybody have R23k for me?

iLife ’06 was not the highlight of the evening though.
Kevin went on to demonstrate the sheer awesomeness of what is Aperture.

Aperture is the post-production application for professional and serious amateur photographers. It costs $299, but if you’re any kind of serious about photography, and you own a Mac (PowerPC or Intel version, as of version 1.1 it’s a universal binary), you want Aperture. And besides, those of you that can afford a R23000 (nee $2799) for a Macbook Pro, you can afford the extra $299 for Aperture. Anybody that takes any kind of photos with a Digital SLR camera (hell, even point-and-shoot digicams) would do well getting this software to manage their photos.

Aperture is not a replacement for something like Photoshop. It’s a pre-Photoshop(maybe) app. It links in seamlessly with iLife ’06, and makes touch ups and investigations into each photo (RAW format preferred, but not required). I wasn’t taking notes during the session, I was too busy gaping at the features of this app. Import management, stacking pictures based on time between shots, a loupe to zoom in and check out detailed portions of a photo, the speeeeeed of it all, the fact that you can apply a filter or touch up (white balance correction or whatever), and “stamp” that change to several other photos,to name but a few of the features that stuck in my mind.
Managing large amounts of photos is *so* much easier with Aperture.

OK, enough of the harping on about the awesomeness of Apple and their software. I’ve said enough. Go check out the Aperture website for yourself to see for yourself what it can do.

One day, I’ll have all I need to use this app. Two 30″ displays, a MacBook pro, a nice Nikon or Canon DSLR camera, lots of memory cards for the camera, and a room to put it all in. Oh, and an iPod. Just because.

Tags: Apple, Macbook, Macbook Pro, iLife ’06, Aperture

Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS
Ubuntu, which has become one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions in recent years, launched its latest version on June 1 following months of intense testing. The new release is titled Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support), and has a specific emphasis on the needs of large organisations with both desktop and server versions.

Ah yes, finally. Dapper is final, and ready for consumption.
Tectonic has an article about it, and quite rightly also points to the spot where you can download Dapper Drake.

Personally, I’ve been running the betas of Dapper at work for a few months already, and it’s been great. I’ve had next to no problems with it. I at first upgraded to Dapper to try out the new X.Org 7.0 that has support for Xgl and Compiz [tectonic.co.za], and I quite liked it. It wasn’t 100% responsive on my home machine, even on an AMD64 3000+ chip with a PCI-X 6600GT card, but that may very well have been due to some of my own user error. I’ll need to try it again sometime soon. The one big thing I love about Ubuntu is just the fact that it has so far not given me any problems with connecting any of my hardware to it, from scanners to printers to digital cameras to external USB devices to 11-in-1 card readers to PSPs. Not on problem connecting any of those to it. And now, there’s also Picasa for Linux (which, by the way, has a .deb that works 100% on Ubuntu), thanks Google!

Tags: Ubuntu, Linux, Dapper, Dapper Drake, Xgl, Compiz, Picasa

With E3 happening round about now, I wanted to keep up to date with the E3 news as it came down the wires, and my current RSS reader (I’m using thunderbird’s RSS folders thing, and then also bloglines.com) is set to update only every hour or so, so I wanted something else.

Back when I was still running gentoo on my desktop PC, I was using KDE, which had a nice newsticker that could fetch RSS feeds and tick them at the bottom/top of the screen. Now that I’m running Ubuntu, which uses Gnome by default, I wanted something similar that the KDE newsticker. So a googling I went. I found a rather poor attempt at a ticker for gnome, which adds an applet to a gnome panel. Not bad, but not quite what I was looking for. Then it struck me! I’m using Firefox! Some more googling, and I found this:

RSS Ticker Firefox Extension
RSS Ticker is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser that scrolls your live bookmarks (also known as newsfeeds/RSS feeds) across your browser, a la a cable-news style ticker.

Clickety-click, installed. Restart Firefox and voila! An extra panel at the bottom of the browser, which reads your Firefox Live Bookmarks (RSS-in-a-bookmark-format), and tickers them across the browser window. It can open the items in a new tab for you, and it can hide the items you’ve already read. Gotta love it!

Tags: E3, RSS, Firefox

Thanks to Vev, I found SimpleViewer, a very nice and smooth flash-based gallery tool.

It even has a nice Picasa web template, for very, very easy exporting of your pics into a simple, uploadable folder. It even has an Apple Mac iPhoto export option too… Very nice. I’ll be using it Real Soon Now[tm] to upload some pics of the new addition to our family (Yeah, that’s where I’ve been, the S.O. had a baby 3 weeks ago…)

Check out the SimpleViewer Demo…

mMAIM stands for MySQL Monitoring And Investigation Module mMAIM’s purpose is to make a it easy to monitor and analyze MySQL servers and to easily integrate itself into any environment. It can show Master/Slave sync stats, some efficiency stats, can return statistics from most of the “show” commands and more.

Interesting. We use MySQL at work, so this will be a valuable addition to our Nagios checks… It should be fairly easy to incorporate an mMAIM plug-in for Nagios and get alerted… The mMAIM project seems to be in beta still, but nowadays, what *isn’t* in beta? Especially Google projects… Hell, even Gmail is still in beta, and it’s close to 2 years in use already…

A related article to this one, over at xooglers.blogspot.com, about how Google’s AdWords project was built using MySQL… A decision was made to switch to a “Real Database” (meaning a paid-for one), but rumour has it they tried another database, and ended back with MySQL. What database they’re using now is anybody’s guess.

Tags: mMAIM, MySQL, Nagios, Google

I’ve been wanting to get a Planet aggregator page (See planetplanet.org) going for my blog for a while now, and whenever I had the urge to do so, I went and had a search for a WordPress plugin or some such to automatically update a WordPress page on my blog, with the Planet’s content, all with my current WordPress theme’s markups and doodats. Either I didn’t search properly, or there was no such thing…

As a short-term hack (long-term being figuring out how the WordPress plugin architecture works and getting a management interface going), I created a small shell script, together with the planetplanet.org app, to directly interface with the mysql database, and just update the WordPress page’s content.

You can see the end-result on my Bug-E’s Planet page.

The code can be found here. The shell script is the least of the effort though.

Installation instructions:

• Follow the instructions at planetplanet.org to get planet installed
• Follow their instructions to setup a config.ini file going, with all your rss feeds in the config file.
  I ended up with a single template, found here (right-click save as…), that had a very simple loop in.
• Run the planet script once (python planet.py path/to/own/config.ini), making sure that it fetches everything fine, and creates all the output files you expect it to.
• Open your WordPress admin interface, and create a new page (not a post, a page). Give it a name, leave it blank. Take note of it’s ID. You may need to have a look inside your database what that page’s ID is.
• Download my planet2wordpress.sh script above, save it someplace
• Open the script in an editor, and edit the first 8 config lines, filling in your database details, and some path details.
• Important: Make a backup of your database first, use mysqldump or something, just in case something bad happens.
• Run the planet2wordpress.sh script manually, like so:
  sh planet2wordpress.sh /path/to/wordpress.template.output.html
• If there were no error messages, all should have worked fine, and you should see your planet’s contents on your blog page.
• All that is left to do now is to play with the planet template file to make it look correct, this part took me the longest.
• Once you’ve got the template all finished, just add the planet2wordpress.sh into your crontab, for every 15 minutes or however often, and voila, you have an automatically updating Planet page.

I hope this helps anybody that’s been wanting to do this. It helps me.

Tags: Planet, planetplanet, WordPress, planet2wordpress