BigSmoke

Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Author: Rowan Rodrik (Page 20 of 27)

Rowan is mainly a writer. This blog here is a dumping ground for miscellaneous stuff that he just needs to get out of his head. He is way more passionate about the subjects he writes about on Sapiens Habitat: the connections between humans, each other, and to nature, including their human nature.

If you are dreaming of a holiday in the forests of Drenthe (the Netherlands), look no further than “De Schuilplaats”: a beautiful vacation home, around which Rowan maintains a magnificent ecological garden and a private heather field, brimming with biological diversity.

FlashMQ is a business that offers managed MQTT hosting and other services that Rowan co-founded with Jeroen and Wiebe.

Using ROT13 to circumvent Gmail’s .exe filter

February 11, 2009 /

Wiebe reminded me by mail to send him a Windows executable. I use Gmail. Gmail doesn’t allow me to send archives containing .exe files. Something to do with viruses on Windows. Wiebe doesn’t use Windows. He uses Wine. I just want to send the damn executable.

Last time I wanted to do this, I emerged net-mail/email. But that just wasn’t very cool. A while ago someone also suggested using a password-protected zip file, but I find that even less cool because I hate zip files. (I usually prefer bzipped tarballs.)

ROT13 is a variation of ROT3, the Ceasar Cipher, which is as old as it is insecure. For computer use ROT13 is even cooler, because you can decrypt just as you encrypt. Decrypt and encrypt are the same. Let’s grab the simplestshortest C implementation we can find, rot13-shortest.c:

main(a){while(a=~getchar())putchar(~a-1/(~(a|32)/13*2-11)*13);}

Compile it and use it as a filter to encode a file:

rot13-shortest < suspicious.tar.bz2 > suspicious.tar.bz2.r13

To decode (to “decrypt” is too grand a verb), just swap the input and output files:

rot13-shortest < suspicious.tar.bz2.r13 > suspicious.tar.bz2

Now, it’s time for me to hand in my Geek Card. Firstly, I confused ROT13 with ROT3 (even spending some time trying to find a ROT3 implementation). Secondly, I had never used ROT13 before, not even to by-pass a forum filter or to make a joke which is funnier if you wear a pen-protector. EBG13 wbxrf whfg nera’g shaal.

xwd, the best X11 screen grabbing tool

February 11, 2009 /

xwd (1) is my favorite screen capture program for X Windows. Usage is simple:

xwd|xwdtopnm|pnmtopng>/tmp/screen.png   # Or:
xwd|xwdtopnm|pnmtojpeg>/tmp/screen.jpeg

Entering one of these commands, will give you a special pointer to click on the window you want to capture. That’s how simple it is to grab an X window with xwd.

You can also grab the whole screen with -root or exclude the window borders with -nobdrs. The manual page contains more options.

I was pretty elated when I first discovered xwd. I didn’t like having to invoke the GIMP, just for taking a quick screenshot. KDE and GNOME come with screenshot utilities, but sometimes I prefer other window managers (e.g.: this machine has been running WindowMaker from day one). Also the GNOME utility lost the option to exclude the window borders (in GNOME’s noble quest to become an appliance). All in all, I was glad to learn about a tool that I could count on to be available on most machines that have X Windows installed. Except, Gentoo has stripped many of these useful, little tools from the base install:

emerge x11-apps/xwd

WordPress 2.7 administration panel changes

February 7, 2009 /

I really, really liked the new style of administration panel that was introduced in WordPress 2.5. In all the time since I’ve upgraded (and increasingly with every update), I’ve started to like it more and more. I hadn’t thought it possible but everything just felt at exactly the right place, while before 2.5, the whole always felt like it had been thrown together by a blind child. Had I written it myself, it would have at least felt as being thrown together by an adult (chimpanzee).

So I was happy. And I’m still happy. Yet, this time, it does take getting used to it. That’s a bit sad. Probably, it’ll be for all the better, with more space for more (plug-in) features and everything. Still… I will miss the old interface.

Gentoo update: Portage configuration confusion

February 5, 2009 /

During the first gentoo update session for this machine, I didn’t get very far. I already mentioned the problem I had with e2fsprogs, but this was not the first or the last problem that I had.

Until a few moments ago, I actually thought I made a bit of a fuck-up. I was meaning to make regular snapshots of /etc/portage files for a while now, because I was always just an echo something >> /etc/portage/package.keywords with one >-symbol too few away from destroying my configuration. Despite this fear, I thought I had already started deleting entries from /etc/portage/package.keywords and /etc/portage/package.unmask without backing up first.

Luckily, it turns out that I did make a dated copy of /etc/portage/package.keywords before starting on my modifications. I didn’t do so for /etc/portage/package.unmask, but I recovered a recent enough version from a recent full system rsync backup. So, everything is good. Still, I’m glad that I now use Git to track all changes in /etc/. All this goes to show that my methods are sometimes a bit more organized than my mind, which, I suppose, is a good thing. 😕

The point of this post—yes, there is a point—the point is that once you start mixing stable and unstable stuff, your system becomes, ehm, unstable. I have this huge amount of crap already in /etc/portage to cater to my wish to run stuff that I know to be quite stable but that isn’t yet marked as such in the Gentoo porttree. Now, after many months, I want to remove everything from package.keywords and package.unmask that is no longer necessary.

I was going to write about all the complicated upgrades, downgrades and conflicts suggested by Portage (mostly related to me removing KDE 4 stuff from package.keywords and package.unmask), because I was confused about what changes I had made. With the relevant backups readily available for comparison, I am no longer in a hurry to untangle my thoughts and I’ve moved the preliminary notes to a new draft for when I’ll actually update KDE 4.

Actual justification for this post

I’m trying to get into a blogging style were I post a lot more rubbish like this that can’t possibly be of any use to anybody except myself. I have plenty of reasons/excuses for this (about which I’ll likely post in the future), but I shouldn’t actually need any. That Ryan wanker who thinks I publish this blog for him should really shut the fuck up. Sure enough, he isn’t talking about this blog but I still think he’s a big-time asshole. Fuck you, Ryan!

Tracking /etc/ updates with Git

February 4, 2009 /

During my recent Gentoo update session, I was once again confronted with the inconvenience of not having my /etc/ directory under version management. This time, I thought I had the ideal SCM for this job: Git.

I found a blog post of a chap who has done the same. It includes a few notes I might not have thought about on my own and also a few very cool Debian tricks.

One of the steps that I might have overlooked myself is that it’s essential to make the .git directory group/world inaccessible with chmod go-rwx. If I would have forgotten this, a smart attacker might use my Git repo to access forbidden file contents.

The author also describes a cool Post-Invoke for Debian’s dpkg that will automatically stage and commit configuration changes made by apt/dpkg (although, later, he mentions that Debian has gotten a package could etckeeper that does this automatically.

Now I would like to learn how I can let Gentoo’s etc-update do as much. In its /etc/dispatch-conf.conf I can only find the option to use (of all things) RCS to track replaced configuration files in a special directory (/etc/config-archive/ by default). Hopefully, there is some drop-in replacement for etc-update which does this and which can rid me of etc-update’s awkward interface at once.

Lost my Sysop rights in the 15Monkeys wikis

February 4, 2009 /

I am constantly bugged by spammers in my 15 Monkeys wiki farm[1, 2], but I wasn’t allowed to protect the victim pages anymore. So, I wondered where my Sysop rights had gone.

Turned out they weren’t gone:

SELECT user_id, user_name, CONCAT( '"', ug_group, '"' ) AS ug_group_quoted
FROM mw_nl_user_groups
INNER JOIN mw_nl_user ON ( ug_user = user_id )
user_iduser_nameug_group_quoted
1BigSmoke"bureaucrat "
1BigSmoke"sysop "

They were just padded a bit. I have had a similar problem with MediaWiki before, so I remembered where to look within the hour this time. 😉 I tried a quick fix:

UPDATE mw_nl_user_groups SET ug_group = rtrim(ug_group);

I was surprised to see in phpMyAdmin that the values where now no longer padded with spaces, but with null-bytes (“\0“) instead. I tried to fix this untill I found out that this is the normal behaviour in MySQL 5.0.15. The MySQL documentation also mentions that, before 5.0.15, VARBINARY values were padded with spaces instead. Apparently, my mystery problems with padding were never caused by MediaWiki but by MySQL itself… PostgreSQL, where are you when I need you?

My advice: don’t run your own database-backed CMS if you don’t have at least rudimentary DBA skills.

The suckiness is: this time, the problem isn’t solved by just converting the padding. 🙁 I’ll have to look into it some further.

ImageMagick can convert PDF to anything

February 3, 2009 /

I encountered one of those scans which was shared as a single-page PDF. I don’t want it that way, because I want to include it in a web page. I want a simple bitmap image. ImageMagick comes to the rescue:

convert scan.pdf scan.jpg

If the resolution this produces is too low for you, try telling Ghostscript (which ImageMagick uses internally) that you want a different density:

convert -density 300 scan.pdf scan.jpg

Attribution

Googling linux pdf to jpg produced two useful results:

  1. Batch converting PDF to JPG/JPEG using free software
  2. Converting PDF to PNG/JPG using ImageMagick in Linux

smbmnt user needs to own the mountpoint if you want to mount rw

February 3, 2009 /

I just found out that it’s impossible on my system to mount /mnt/smb-docs as user bigsmoke, even with the following fstab:

//server/shared\040documents       /mnt/smb-docs smbfs   noauto,user,uid=bigsmoke,username=secret,password=alsosecret  0 0

I tried to chmod 775 /mnt/smb-docs; chgrp bigsmoke /mnt/smb-docs, but no luck. I had to actually chown bigsmoke /mnt/smb-docs. Does someone understand why? I noticed that I’m not the only one who noticed this.

Google AdSense + Postbank’s name registration rules = $0.0

February 2, 2009 /

In November I had expected my second AdSense payment. Simply, because they told me I would get it. But, I didn’t.

The reason was not very specifically given. The electronic fund transfer failed: “EFT not successful”. That was it. The help wasn’t very useful either: I could find only one somewhat relevant entry.

My guess was that it had something to do with the name associated with my bank account in my AdSense account, because my particular bank, the Postbank is known to be very picky when it comes to accepting names. I’m not the first AdSense publisher to suffer this kind of problem.

The name I had used in my AdSense profile was Rowan Rodrik van der Molen. When I log into my bank’s online banking service, I see R.R. vd Molen very big on top of the screen. However, nowhere it mentions if this is indeed the name I should use to receive an electronic fund transfer. I want to find out for sure and I can’t find this information anywhere on the bank’s website. So I grab the telephone and I call their customer support service. I have four questions, only two of which were provided with a somewhat clear answer:

  • Question one is: do you indeed not accept transfers where the name does not match the name you have on file, or rather the string that you derived from the name details that I supplied when opening an account?
  • Question two: how do you derive that string? How can I know for sure what the proper name is to give out to people?
  • Question three: have your rules gotten more stringent recently? (Seems logical to me because a. I did receive my first payment (and the verification transfer); and b. I heard from my uncle that he also had increasing difficulties in transferring money to Postbank account holders.)
  • Question four: do I need to include the placename in the account name and how?

Question one was answered in a pretty ignorant manner: Of course the name needs to be correct. How could you think otherwise? This was pretty annoying because I did fill the name in correctly, so this automatically led to question two to which the support dude answered that the name I see when I login is indeed the name I should use. However I don’t consider the answer answered properly because I couldn’t get an answer to question four. Question 3 was vehemently denied to my surprise.

Before calling I had already tried to find out more with the help of Wiebe, who is also a Postbank account holder. When from their on-line banking interface, you try to transfer something to another Postbank account holder, you’re prompted to verify the name you entered with the correct name they have associated with that account. If he tries to make an amount to me, he gets to pick the name R R vd Molen GRONINGEN (note the difference in punctuation). So, does the placename (Groningen) needs to be part of the name. Sadly, the grumpy telephone support person couldn’t clarify this. All he could say was that the transfer needs to mention a place name while I want to know specifically if it needs to be in the name field. Fuckers! (Actually I don’t want to know. After this episode, I just want to know how to rid myself of this bank as easily as possible.)

I was somewhat resolved to change the name associated with my bank account number in AdSense to R.R. vd Molen although I had no way of being sure that it didn’t have to be R R vd Molen or R.R. vd Molen GRONINGEN. But, I had already noticed that this wasn’t possible; there was no way to add a new bank account nr with the correct name because the old account nr was blocked (and could not be deleted by me), while the name associated with a bank account nr could only be changed while adding a new account. The impossibility of making any useful change myself was what had prompted me to contact the Postbank’s customer support in the first place, because I had no way to experiment with different settings. And if I was going to ask the AdSense support staff to make the changes for me, I better ask them for the right changes at once.

I needed help, from a person. I was somewhat glad that, when I followed the link to “Contacting support” in the AdSense help, I found that they did have limited email support. After struggling through another form, I could actually type a request for help. They replied:

Hello,

Thanks for your email regarding AdSense EFT payments. Due to the high volume of emails we receive, we’re unable to individually respond to your inquiry. However, we’ve provided some information below which we hope will address your question. If you still have unresolved issues, we encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support or post your question on the AdSense Help Forum at http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help.

– Is EFT available to me?

Currently, EFT is available for publishers located in the countries listed at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=15827 . For tax and security purposes, publishers may only submit bank information that corresponds to the country of residence which appears in their payment address. We’re currently working on expanding our payment options to additional publishers, and we appreciate your patience.

– When was my test deposit sent? Why haven’t I received it yet?

To find out the date we attempted to make the deposit, please select the ‘My Account’ tab and click the ‘Verify this account’ link in the ‘Payment Details’ section. You should see your test deposit appear in your bank account within 4-10 days of the date listed in your account. If it has been more than 10 days since the listed date, please follow the instructions at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=41237 .

– I’ve just received my test deposit. Why can’t I enter it into my account?

Depending upon how quickly your bank credits your account, you may receive your test deposit before our system has been updated. Once we receive confirmation from the bank that the test deposit has been successful, the date of the deposit will appear on the ‘Verify Your Bank Account’ page. You’ll then be able to enter the amount of the deposit in your AdSense account by following the instructions at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=15920 .

– I’ve selected EFT as my form of payment – when will I be paid?

When your total unpaid balance reaches US $100 in any month, we will send you a payment at the end of the following month, unless a payment hold exists. For example, if your earnings reached $100 this month, you’ll be paid at the end of next month. If your account balance has not yet reached US $100, your earnings will carry over to the following month and continue to accrue. You may also find the information at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=9905 helpful.

– How can I edit my bank account information within my AdSense account?

We can’t access or edit your bank account information, so you will need to re-enter it. Please follow the steps listed at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=15920 .

– How do I remove incorrect or unverified bank account information from my AdSense account?

Unfortunately, incorrect or unverified bank account information cannot be removed from your account at this time. However, please be assured that to protect the privacy and security of your banking information, we do not have access to the information you have entered. The information will also not affect your future payments.

Additionally, you might find the information at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8453 helpful.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Original Message Follows:
————————
From: bigsmoke@gmail.com
Subject: Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT)
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:17:22 +0000

The EFT payment that was issued to me in November was unsuccessful. A previous payment _was_ successful, but now I’m stuck with a blocked account and the inability to receice payments.

I’ve requested (and received) instructions from my bank about _exactly_ which notation to use for my name. The proper notation is “R.R. vd Molen”, but I can’t change this myself in the AdSense interface unless when I’m entering a new bank account and I can’t enter a new bank account because the account number has already been flagged as non-working in your interface.

My request to you is to either change the account holder name for my bank account number ending in 51 or to enable me somehow to correctly readd the account myself. The name should be changed from “Rowan Rodrik van der Molen” to “R.R. vd Molen”. Yes, we really _are_ stuck in the stone age here in The Netherlands.

Thanks for your time,
Rowan

So basically, what their mail is saying is that I either have to forget about getting any money from Google or I should switch banks. Admittedly, this doesn’t look to bad to me now because my annoyance level with the Postbank has really gone through the roof lately. Google, you suck! Postbank, you suck even worse!

Thank you Wiebe for letting me use your bank account to receive the payments while I deliberate switching banks.

Untangling WordPress’ core files from your local customizations

January 30, 2009 /

Since version 2.6, WordPress can be installed in its own directory, separate from your customizations and everthing. Needless to say, this makes upgrading a whole lot easier.

If, in the pre-2.6 days, you wanted to fetch your WordPress updates through SVN, the docs would advice you to do an svn checkout from the official WP SVN repo in your working dir and then do an svn update whenever you want to update WordPress. This works because svn update leaves local modifcations alone. However, this means that you’ll be unable to commit your local changes (configuration, themes, plugins, etc.) if you choose this route.

I used my own subversion repository for my blogs and thus had to upgrade the old fashioned way with each release (although I prefer diff/patch over rm/cp). (I could have used vendor branches, but, clearly, I hadn’t thought about that at the time.) This was pretty much a royal pain in the ass, so I was glad when I could move WordPress into a separate directory with its 2.6 release.

This process consisted of removing everything except wp-content/, wp-config.php, .htaccess. (I also kept robots.txt, favicon.ico and some other personal files.) Then, I added the current WordPress release as an svn:external.

svn propset svn:externals 'wp-factory http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1' .

.htaccess changes

In the WordPress codex, it is then suggested to copy index.php to the root dir and to change it to require wp-factory/wp-blog-header.php instead of ./wp-blog-header.php. I preferred adding some mod_rewrite voodoo of my own to .htaccess, so I did:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# This way I don't need directory indices
RewriteRule ^$ /wp-factory/index.php [L]
 
# This way WordPress can manage its own block without doing any harm
RewriteRule ^index.php /wp-factory/index.php [L]
 
# Allow easier access to /wp-factory/wp-admin/
RewriteRule ^wp-admin http://%{HTTP_HOST}/wp-factory/wp-admin/ [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

The middle rule performs most of the magic. It redirects all the requests to /index.php to the factory default index.php. This means that I can let WordPress pretend that index.php does live in the root, so I don’t have to modify the rewrite rules that are managed by WordPress itself:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

wp-config.php changes

In Giving WordPress Its Own Directory in the WordPress Codex, it is suggested to change the “siteurl” and “home” options through the administration panel. In my case they would have to be changed to “http://blog.bigsmoke.us/wp-factory/” and http://blog.bigsmoke.us“. I couldn’t do this because I override these with WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME in my wp-config.php. This is because I configured WordPress to support a development environment separate from the live production environment.

Ignoring the customizations for my development environment, these are the relevant settings in wp-config.php:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://blog.bigsmoke.us');
define('WP_SITEURL', WP_HOME . '/wp-factory');
 
define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-content');
define('WP_CONTENT_URL', WP_HOME . '/wp-content');

BTW: I really like it how WordPress disables the form controls for siteurl and home when you override these settings in wp-config.php. Kudos for that, devs!

Next time: git

In the end, this is all quite a bit of pain to compensate for what is essentially a version management problem. That’s why, on my newer projects, I’m now using git which makes forking and tracking an upstream repo absolutely trivial. 🙂

A few references

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 BigSmoke

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑