“Interest never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits nor travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours; it never has short crops nor droughts; it never pays taxes; it buys no food; it wears no clothes; it is unhoused and without home and so has no repairs, no replacements, no shingling, plumbing, painting, or whitewashing; it has neither wife, children, father, mother, nor kinfolk to watch over and care for; it has no expense of living; it has neither weddings nor births nor deaths; it has no love, no sympathy; it is as hard and soulless as a granite cliff. Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.” – J. Reuben Clark
Interest
October 26th, 2009The first 100 things to become scarce during an emergency
October 22nd, 2009Found this list online. How is your supply of these?
1. Generators 2. Water filters/purifiers 3. Portable toilets 4. Seasoned firewood 5. Lamp oil, wicks, lamps 6. Coleman fuel 7. Guns, ammunition, pepper spray, knives, clubs, bats, slingshots 8. Hand can openers, hand egg beaters, whisks 9. Honey, syrups, white/brown sugar 10. Rice, beans, wheat 11. Vegetable oil (for cooking) 12. Charcoal, lighter fluid 13. Water containers 14. Mini heater head (propane) (Without this item, propane won't heat a room.) 15. Grain grinder (Non-electric) 16. Propane cylinders 17. Survival guide book 18. Lamp mantles: Aladdin, Coleman, etc. (Without this item, longer-term lighting is difficult.) 19. Baby supplies: Diapers/formula, ointments/aspirin, etc. 20. Washboards, mop bucket w/wringer (for laundry) 21. Cookstoves (propane, Coleman, kerosene) 22. Vitamins 23. Propane cylinder handle holder (Small canister use is dangerous without this item) 24. Feminine hygiene/haircare/skin products 25. Thermal underwear (tops and bottoms) 26. Bow saws, axes and hatchets, wedges (also, honing oil) 27. Aluminum foil -- regular and heavy duty 28. Gasoline containers (plastic and metal) 29. Garbage bags 30. Toilet Paper, Kleenex, Paper Towels 31. Milk (powdered, condensed: shake every 3 to 4 months) 32. Garden seeds (non-hybrid) 33. Clothes pins/line/hangers 34. Coleman's pump repair kit 35. Tuna fish (in oil) 36. Fire extinguishers 37. First aid kits 38. Batteries 39. Garlic, spices, vinegar, baking supplies 40. Big dogs (and plenty of dog food) 41. Flour, yeast, salt 42. Matches 43. Writing paper/pads/pencils, solar calculators 44. Insulated ice chests 45. Workboots, belts, Levis, durable shirts 46. Flashlights, lightsticks, torches, "No. 76 Dietz" lanterns 47. Journals, diaries, scrapbooks 48. Garbage cans (great for storage, water, transporting - if with wheels) 49. Men's hygiene: Shampoo, Toothbrush/paste, Mouthwash/floss, nail clippers, etc 50. Cast iron cookware 51. Fishing supplies/tools 52. Mosquito coils/repellent, sprays/creams 53. Duct tape 54. Tarps/stakes/twine/nails/rope/spikes 55. Candles 56. Laundry Detergent (liquid) 57. Backpacks, duffel bags 58. Garden tools and supplies 59. Scissors, fabrics, sewing supplies 60. Canned Fruits, Veggies, Soups, stews, etc. 61. Bleach (plain, NOT scented: 4 to 6% sodium hypochlorite) 62. Canning supplies, jars/lids/wax 63. Knives, sharpening tools: files, stones, steel 64. Bicycles, tires/tubes/pumps/chains, etc 65. Sleeping bags, blankets/pillows/mats 66. Carbon monoxide alarm (battery powered) 67. Board games, cards, dice 68. D-con rat poison, MOUSE PRUFE II, roach killer 69. Mousetraps, ant traps, cockroach magnets 70. Paper plates/cups/utensils 71. Baby wipes, waterless and antibacterial soaps 72. Rain gear, rubberized boots, etc. 73. Shaving supplies (razors, creams, talc, after shave) 74. Hand pumps, siphons (for water and for fuels) 75. Soy sauce, vinegar, boullion/gravy/soup base 76. Reading glasses 77. Chocolate/Cocoa/Tang/Punch (water enhancers) 78. "Survival-in-a-Can" 79. Woolen clothing, scarves/earmuffs/mittens 80. Boy Scout Handbook, Leaders Catalog 81. Roll-on window insulation kit (MANCO) 82. Graham crackers, saltines, pretzels, trail mix, jerky 83. Popcorn, peanut butter, nuts 84. Socks, underwear, T-shirts, etc. (extras) 85. Lumber (all types) 86. Wagons and carts (for transport to and from) 87. Cots, inflatable mattresses 88. Gloves: Work/warming/gardening, etc. 89. Lantern hangers 90. Screen patches 91. Tea 92. Coffee 93. Cigarettes 94. Wine/Liquors (for bribes, medicinal, etc,) 95. Paraffin wax 96. Glue, nails, nuts, bolts, screws, etc. 97. Chewing gum/candies 98. Atomizers (for cooling/bathing) 99. Hats, cotton neckerchiefs 100. Goats/chickens
Removing Mailman list members with invalid addresses
October 7th, 2009If you have a list member with an invalid address (I ended up with one that had 2 concatenated addresses, yielding 2 @ characters which the default parser apparently does not like), the regular bin/remove_members script won’t work. You can use this trick though:
cd /path/to/mailman
bin/withlist -l listname
>>> m.removeMember('foo@example.combar@example.com')
>>> m.Save()
>>> ^D
See the Mailman wiki for more details and other things to try if even this step doesn’t work.
Deleting sendmail file pairs based on content
September 2nd, 2009This one-liner will identify files containing a string, and then use some bash string manipulation to generate a wildcard for the pair of files sendmail creates for each message (dfn for message content, and Qfn for headers). This assumes you’re running it in the mail queue directory (/var/spool/mqueue for example).
for f in `grep -l -i viagra *`; do t=${f:10:6}; rm -f *${t}; done
The ${f:10:6} extracts the last 6 characters of the filename, then the rm command prepends that with the wildcard.
Some sample output:
[root@mail mqueue]# grep -l -i cialis *
dfn7U8Rc3X020530
dfn7UD7BUh015512
dfn7VELCbV031687
But there are actually six files:
[root@mail mqueue]# ls -l | egrep "020530|015512|031687"
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 2062 Aug 30 01:27 dfn7U8Rc3X020530
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 2232 Aug 30 06:07 dfn7UD7BUh015512
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 2069 Aug 31 07:21 dfn7VELCbV031687
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 825 Aug 30 01:27 Qfn7U8Rc3X020530
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 837 Aug 30 06:07 Qfn7UD7BUh015512
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 810 Aug 31 07:21 Qfn7VELCbV031687
So we run the command, using cialis:
for f in `grep -l -i cialis *`; do t=${f:10:6}; rm -f *${t}; done
Then there are no more files 
[root@mail mqueue]# for f in `grep -l -i cialis *`; do t=${f:10:6}; rm -f *${t}; done
[root@mail mqueue]# grep -l -i cialis *
[root@mail mqueue]#
One-liner to count current IP connections
September 2nd, 2009A quick one-liner to show the IP addresses with an established connection to your server, sorted in order:
netstat -ant | grep ESTABLISHED | awk '{print $5}' | awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
If you care only about a certain TCP port, say 80 for web traffic, the command becomes:
netstat -ant | grep :80 | grep ESTABLISHED | awk '{print $5}' | awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
Output would look like:
36 14.21.23.10
8 14.21.23.107
7 14.21.23.114
6 14.21.2.34
5 14.21.23.108
5 14.21.23.106
5
2 14.21.13.120
1 14.21.2.23
1 14.21.13.147
1 14.21.13.130
1 14.21.13.128
1 14.21.13.122
1 14.21.13.118
1 14.21.13.112
Cactus
June 26th, 2009
Testing Flickr->WordPress connectivity…
This is a cactus that I saw in Anza-Borrego back in April while we were in San Diego for the girls’ Spring Break.
vim replace with newline
June 10th, 2009Just a quick vi/vim tip that I’d never had to do before now.
Scenario: a file with multiple lines, each terminated with a semicolon, that needed to be broken out into separate lines for easier reading.
Solution:
In vim, use \r in the search-and-replace command to indicate a new line:
:%s/;/;\r/g
Email forwarding to multiple recipients with cPanel
February 26th, 2009At first I thought I’d have to do something complicated like an email list. But I found out that you just have to create multiple single forwarder entries with the same “Address to forward” for each, and the different recipients in each “Forward to email address” field per entry.
Example:
boardofdirectors@example.com -> joe.blow@example.net
boardofdirectors@example.com -> jane.smith@example.org
sudo and local passwords vs SSH
February 12th, 2009Just tracked down a problem with sudo at work. The error message
sudo: pam_authenticate: Module is unknown
would show up when doing “sudo su -”
An initial strace shows that libkeyutils was being looked for:
open("/lib64/tls/x86_64/libkeyutils.so.1", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat("/lib64/tls/x86_64", 0x7fffe8902810) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib64/tls/libkeyutils.so.1", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat("/lib64/tls", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
open("/lib64/x86_64/libkeyutils.so.1", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat("/lib64/x86_64", 0x7fffe8902810) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
but was not installed on the server. A “correct” server shows:
[root@host ~]# rpm -qa | grep keyutils|sort keyutils-libs-1.2-1.el5 keyutils-libs-1.2-1.el5 keyutils-libs-devel-1.2-1.el5 keyutils-libs-devel-1.2-1.el5
Without keyutils installed, the SSH keys we had set up weren’t able to be processed. PAM then fell back to local passwords, which was not set for the particular user in question.
Anyway, just hoping this helps someone else in the future.
Subversion repository structure for web applications
January 28th, 2009If you are coding a lot of web applications, it helps to have a standard directory structure that you start with. That you always know where files should go, etc. This page contains my (current) take on the topic.
These steps assume you already have Subversion set up and working. If it’s on a remote machine, use the appropriate protocol designator (http://, svn://, etc.) below where you see file://.
Alternatively, you could just put the directory creation commands into a script and run that script every time you needed to set up a new project. But we should all be using some sort of version control system, now shouldn’t we?
Just copy and paste the commands into a terminal session on your workstation or server, and that should be all you need to do to set this up. You will need to make some changes for your actual repository path and project names, of course. I’m just putting sample stuff in my examples.
Set up your desired directory “skeleton” in a temporary directory. Note that this uses a “shortcut” feature of <code>mkdir</code> that allows you to specify multiple subdirectories at once. The format is important – no spaces after the , etc.
cd ~
mkdir -p skeleton/{branches,tags,trunk/{data,db,doc,util,www/{include/{css,js},media/img}}}
You now have a directory system that looks like this:
/home/user
/skeleton
/data
/db
/doc
/util
/www
/include
/css
/js
/media
/img
This will yield a website structure like this:
[web_root]
/include
/css
/js
/media
/img
Of course you can add other directories as needed to further organize the website, but this will give you a good beginning, and help keep things organized. You will always know the path to CSS and Javascript files, regardless of where on the site you reference them in your HTML.
/datais where any “test” data goes that you need to prepopulate the project. This may not be relevant for the app you are building, so you could leave this one out./dbcontains SQL scripts used to create and populate any needed databases and tables. Be sure to add migration or update/upgrade scripts if the schemas change at some point during the project’s lifecycle./docis for any and all project documentation. Be sure to paste important emails into text files and stash them in here!/utilis where any supporting scripts (Perl, shell, etc.) would go./wwwis the root dir for the website content./www/includeis where any included files would go (think PHP’srequireandincludecommands)./www/include/cssis where all your CSS files go. You are using CSS, right?/www/include/jsis where all Javascript goes. Javascript should be included in your HTML and PHP files via the<script src="...">, not inline./www/mediashould be pretty obvious. I like to use subdirectories for each media type to help keep things organized. Almost every project uses at least one image someplace, so I default to creating the/www/media/imgdirectory in the skeleton. Later, if I need video, audio, flash, etc., I would make new subdirectories for them as well.
Once the directories are set up, I put some “marker” files in certain directories as well, which get filled in for the specific project once I start working on it:
cd ~/skeleton/trunk touch FAQ HISTORY LICENSE README RELEASE-NOTES UPGRADE touch doc/ABOUT
I also put empty index.html files into the various web directories, to prevent direct access to them when the project is deployed on a live server:
touch www/include/index.html touch www/include/css/index.html touch www/include/js/index.html touch www/media/index.html touch www/media/img/index.html
Set up a default CSS file (customize per your own experiences, needs, etc.) and stick it in the /include/css directory. See Five Steps to CSS Heaven for more ideas.
cd include/css
touch style.css
echo "/* Design and Code (c) Company Name, Inc. */" >> style.css
echo "html, body { padding: 0; margin: 0; }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "body {" >> style.css
echo " font: normal 12px/1.5em sans-serif;" >> style.css
echo " background: #fff; }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "/* Headings H1-H6 */" >> style.css
echo "h1 { }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "h2 { }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "h3 { }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "h4 { }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "h5 { }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "h6 { }" >> style.css
echo >> style.css
echo "/* Paragraph and Link Styles */" >> style.css
echo "p { }" >> style.css
cd ../..
Note that I use the “echo >>” mechanism rather than an actual file so that you can copy/paste all these commands and it will “just work” – no file editor needed at this stage.
Next, create a new project repository:
svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repos/projectname
Finally, import the directory structure into the project:
svn import ~/skeleton file:///path/to/repos/projectname -m "Initial project 'projectname' setup"
Gives this result:
Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/HISTORY Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/LICENSE Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/media Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/media/index.html Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/media/img Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/media/img/index.html Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include/css Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include/css/index.html Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include/css/style.css Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include/index.html Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include/js Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/include/js/index.html Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/www/index.html Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/db Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/doc Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/doc/ABOUT Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/RELEASE-NOTES Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/UPGRADE Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/FAQ Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/data Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/README Adding /home/user/skeleton/trunk/util Adding /home/user/skeleton/branches Adding /home/user/skeleton/tags Committed revision 1.
Your project is now ready to check back out and start working on:
cd ~ svn co file:///path/to/repos/projectname/trunk work
Gives this result:
A work/HISTORY A work/LICENSE A work/www A work/www/media A work/www/media/index.html A work/www/media/img A work/www/media/img/index.html A work/www/include A work/www/include/css A work/www/include/css/index.html A work/www/include/css/style.css A work/www/include/index.html A work/www/include/js A work/www/include/js/index.html A work/www/index.html A work/db A work/doc A work/doc/ABOUT A work/RELEASE-NOTES A work/FAQ A work/UPGRADE A work/data A work/README A work/util Checked out revision 1.
A final note — if you are using Subversion, DO NOT mess with the .svn directories anyplace within your project! When you are deploying the project to a web server (testing, production, etc.), you can just exclude them (use the -C switch for rsync, for example).
Keywords for the search engines: subversion repository directory structure template layout example sample recommended web app webapp application
