fak3r

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Morrissey’s Birthday today, he turns 49.  It was one year ago tonight that I saw him play here in St. Louis for his 48th…time flies.  Over the weekend my wife and I watched a dvd of a rebroadcast concert from Madrid in 1984 of The Smiths, and the songs still stand.  Here’s hoping many happy returns to the man whose music has stuck with me now for more than 20 years!  In other news, it looks like PETA has put Morrissey up with Bloc Party and Paul McCartney for ‘sexiest vegetarian award‘, whatever that’s worth, and Moz’s new single will feature (another) David Bowie cover.  Meanwhile he’s said to be at work on his latest album, set to be released this Fall.

On the monit mailing list today someone asked how they could monitor a process that didn’t have a pidfile associated with it.  Without thinking I jotted this down, there’s likely a better way, but this should work and may be all I need for some init.d scripts for a couple of apps on ramon (the home server).  In the the beginning of the startup script, define the PIDFILE with the path and the cmd followed by the pid suffix and then just dump the PID number from the ps output into it:

export PIDFILE=/var/run/${1}.pid
ps -fe | grep ${1} | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f 6 > ${PIDFILE}

Once this is done, monit can monitor it just like it monitors any other process with a PID.  Later, for a shutdown hook, nuke the PIDFILE on the way out.

if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then
rm ${PIDFILE}
fi
### rest of shutdown ###
exit 0

I think that should do it, anyone see a problem with that / a better way?

Just shut down the old server, chavez, that was running FreeBSD 6.1 - an awesome server. I’ve switched to Debian, and I’m really loving it, having used it in the past I really never dug into it as a server until recently. Administration is just easier, and it’s in line with me trying to cut back on things I have to do on the computer; gives me more time for other efforts. Anywho, it’s down now, for the record here’s the uname/uptime:

FreeBSD chavez 6.1-SECURITY FreeBSD 6.1-SECURITY #0: Wed Feb 14 15:33:28 UTC 2007 root@builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386
11:45PM up 237 days, 4:30, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00[23:45:45]
[root@chavez /home]# shutdown -h now
Shutdown NOW!
shutdown: [pid 24665]
[23:55:00] [root@chavez /home]#
*** FINAL System shutdown message from root@chavez.cryer.us ***
System going down IMMEDIATELY
System shutdown time has arrived
Connection to chavez closed by remote host.

I thought the days of crashing IE with just some malformed code were over, apparently not. I just takes a misplaced wildcard in a style declaration to send it down.
<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input /></table>
This took out IE on my work computer which is fully patched. I’ve read that people running IE under Wine in Linux have it crash as well, so it’s certainly app dependant. For those of you playing at home, just click here to try it for yourself. Extra credit if you actually save the file on your windows machine and then try to open it within Windows Explorer! Enjoy.

Looking over the Debian own harden-doc guide online, (which is a monster of a resource) as well as Debian Help’s security page gave me some excellent new ideas on how to secure Debian and Linux in general.   Also today i found a netstat command with some nice switches to help you figure out what is listening on each port in an easy to read layout, -plunt:

netstat -plunt

Plus it’s fun to say, ‘plunt’. Lastly there’s a good overview of deborphan (which assists you in keeping your system clear of unneeded packages) with coverage on how to use it at Debian Adminstrator.org. But in the comments a thread talks about how it’s better to use aptitude, as this does it automatically.

This past weekend I met up with an old friend from college who I haven’t seen or talked to in many years. Back in the day we took a two hour road trip together to see R.E.M. on their Document tour, and another time saw The Replacements on their very last tour.  I credit him for getting me into other bands that remain favorites to this day like The Smiths (<3), The Cure and X. Now he’s living in Amsterdam covering soccer for a website, and loving life. He came back to visit a friend in Chicago last week, he’s in St. Louis this week, and will be in Italy in a few weeks before heading back home from there.  At one point he bemoaned that, “…at this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever have kids”, but everyone is different, and needs to find their own way in life.  I think he’s carved out a really interesting one while staying true to what is important to him and in the end he’ll have kids, if that’s what he wants out of life; that he’s made it this far assures me of that. Very cool to see him, makes me smile.

The site Bad Astronomy has a great article to reference for this Sunday’s meteor shower called, 12 things you need to watch the Perseid meteors Sunday night.  Looks like after midnight, with a clear view of the Eastern sky are two of the main points.  I’m going to try and get out for this one.

Want to learn elements that will appear in the upcoming HTML 5?  Yeah, I didn’t think so either, but it’s actually really cool.  New Elements in HTML 5 shows you how to use new tags like header, section, article, footer, menu, and such, show that you won’t have to define DIV’s all day, and laying out a page will be a snap, it’s much more CSS friendly.  I wonder how long it’ll take to actually implement and be supported by the majority of browsers?  I know when it comes out I’ll make a 5 version of my sites to show, if ppl hit them with 5 able browsers.

You get tons of spam daily, in my case 99% gets caught by various spam filters and I never see it, but I’m so glad I saw this one.  With the topic, “bimingham baggage alibi” it has to be the best spam topic I’ve ever read.  Should be a band name or the name of an art movement.

A former spammer comes forth to tell his story, an amazing look at how easy something like this is to get away with.  “Ed,” a retired spammer, built a considerable fortune sending e-mails that promoted pills, porn and casinos. At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in US$10,000 to $15,000 a week, storing the money in $20 bills in stacks of boxes.“  In his last year he pulled in $480,000.