This election was easy for me to decide. I run my own servers on the internet and I like being able to do as much with them as I can. I run web servers, email, DNS, IRC, forums, remailer, nymserver, streaming audio! torrent trackers! Oh My! Needless to say, the shit would hit the fan around here if my internet service provider started blocking me from doing what I do with my internet connection. Some ISP’s have already begun to do so.
Well, Obama was the only candidate on board with my concerns so he won my vote easily . Today I am feeling a bit reassured that I made the right decision. Obama started a new way for the government to keep in touch with us, change.gov. Within two days of the election Obama’s transition team laid out his science and technology agenda. I must admit, I am somewhat impressed.
At a speech at google headquarters Obama raised the issue.
I have been working hard on gazelle.etree.org. If you are one of my readers and would like to help out by being on our beta team I would be more that happy to invite you. leave a comment.
So we all have friends that have tried sharing wma files with us. here is a script to change them into mp3s!
#!/bin/bash
# wma2mp3
for i in *.wma
do
if [ -f "$i" ]; then
rm -f “$i.wav”
mkfifo “$i.wav”
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af volume=0,resample=44100:0:1 -ao pcm:waveheader:file=”$i.wav” “$i” &
dest=`echo “$i”|sed -e ’s/wma$/mp3/’`
lame -V0 -h -b 160 –vbr-new “$i.wav” “$dest”
rm -f “$i.wav”
fi
done
This is a stupidly simple script for sending microblogs to twitter.com using curl and spell checking them with aspell along the way. it looks like this:
It should spit out some success xml. You just sent a tweet to twitter.
Of course you will need to edit the USERNAME and PASSWD to your username and password at twitter.com. If you don’t like copy and paste you can grab it as a file here. Hope you find it useful.
If you don’t know what irc is or irssi or blowjob.pl do not waste your time trying to understand this. Move along.. Don’t Waste your time.
apt-get install irssi irssi-scripts
Try to load blowjob in irssi
/load blowjob.pl
poop, im missing something.
11:06 ,--[ScriptAssist]
11:06 | The perl module Crypt::CBC is missing on your system.
11:06 | Please ask your administrator about it.
11:06 | You can also check CPAN via ‘/scriptassist cpan Crypt::CBC’.
11:06 `–->
Guessing I need libcrypt-cbc-perl and im thinking, libcrypt-blowfish-perl
Set a test key with someone your irc’ing with, and blow something.
/setkey foobar /blow yo testing “Ciphertext does not begin with a valid header for ’salt’
Shit still not working! Seems the script is old. It needed to be updated for the newer Crypt:CBC. I changed a couple lines and came up with this fixed blowjob.pl
Well my snow report goes to steamboat.com to get updates and I noticed it was not updating. After looking into it further it looks to me that the DNS servers they are using are down, making it impossible for anyone to go to steamboat.com or email anybody with a steamboat.com email address.
A whois shows me that Intrawest has the DNS servers on the same class C block of IP addresses, this is bad. When the internet goes down on the intrawest subnet all of steamboat.com goes down because they have no backup name server on a separate internet connection.
Shame on steamboat.com’s DNS administrator. This is basic internet101stuff and could be repaired in just a few minutes if anybody over at steamboat.com had a clue. If you are reading this and you are from steamboat.com, please fix this so I can scrape the snow report successfully once again. If you need help send me@phrog.org some email and ski vouchers and I would be happy to help fix this properly.
Well some of you may have noticed the addition of the snow report and weather to my sidebar. Since phrog.org is the first thing I see in my web browser every morning while I drink my coffee I figured I may as well get the weather I needed to decide if it was a ski day or not.
The snow report comes from steamboat.com which offers up an XML feed of the report, however it has been broken for years because it has no “style” associated with it, making it useless for anyone with a normal RSS reader to subscribe. more »
Someone asked me this morning about browsing the web and masking the IP of the origin. The most effective way to do this is with tor and privoxy. These are my notes installing this stuff on windows xp.
This is about the most simple thing.
Step 1 download and install Tor
Download from our kick ass friends at EFF the Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia bundle on this page. Run the setup and hit OK a few times.. choose the defaults.
Step 2 Get the Tor Button
Well I’m assuming that if you are reading my blog you already are using firefox. If you are not using firefox, go away.. your to stupid to figure this out. or get firefox then come back and read more.
OK then, get the Tor Button firefox extension from here. Install it and restart firefox. You should notice a new indicator on the status bar. click it to change it to “Tor Enabled”
Step 3 Test
Visit whatismyip.com or similar and confirm the IP result is not your own.
Someone asked me this morning about browsing the web and masking the IP of the origin. The most effective way to do this is with tor and privoxy. These are my notes on setting this up with a debian or ubuntu linux desktop. more »
Today i’m installing ampache with a nerd in training on his ubuntu laptop heres the notes
install required stuff sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 phpmyadmin mysql-server
Go to http://localhost to see if “It Works!” if so then apache2 is running.
Then try http://localhost/phpmyadmin if it loads then ya have php5 working with apache2! requirements done. Let’s move on
I have been working hard on 
