More background on this fun from the Statemaster Encyclopedia

In the video, he performs two songs: “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and “That’s Amore” in a pseudo-operatic voice with various odd and sometimes alarming facial expressions to accompany his vocal stylings. Daker remains totally still with his arms at his side during most of his performance. Additionally, during his performance, he tends to forget lyrics and either looks angry or simply hums along until he recalls a word (often, the wrong word). Simply by watching the video, it is difficult to tell if he is embarrassed, truly trying to sing the song, extremely nervous, or slightly inebriated.

The vivacious music teacher, Reva, is apparently the one to thank for all the fun, and the Encyclopedia continues with her story…

Reva Cooper Unsicker taught singing, piano, and organ. Twice a year she would have her students perform their recitals on the local cable access channel, and the hour-long programs developed a cult following in the vein of Mrs. Miller. Videotapes of the “revafests” as they were called were sought after. John Daker was always on the Revafests. He sang among other songs the theme to “The Woody Woodpecker Show.”

As with all good memes, there is now a Facebook group, it’s called The John Daker Experience, I’ve joined, so you should probably too. Then we have the parodies, with the predictable, but enjoyable, American Idol version:

Followed by an animated singalong video (of all things), so the next time you have a karaoke night with friends you’ll have a big surprise for them:

In fact the only thing I didn’t find that I expected to was an official John Daker page on Wikipedia. This is obviously an epic oversight, and I hope someone steps up soon to right this wrong. Meanwhile, we wait for another internet meme that makes me laugh more than this one, again I really, really think this one should get more attention – it’s fantastic.

Alert: your server has failed!

The other day I got inspired to write a script that would allow me to monitor my servers via Twitter. The idea of having a column in Tweetdeck set aside to inform me of my servers’ statuses’ sounded cool, plus, it’s quicker than checking email.  I know sending tweets from the command-line had been done before, but after seeing briealeida’s post titled Tweeting Cron Jobs I really got inspired. While hers was written in Perl, I didn’t want to go that route since I had a few, self imposed, restrictions I wanted to stick to. One, I only wanted to use standard shell commands, the ones you get by default in Linux, so you would have absolutely no dependencies to install for this to work. Two, I wanted to see how much info I could stuff into a 140 character tweet, and still have it make sense. While I’m still working on adding more info, the current state of the script gives me a quick snapshot of seven specifics metrics on a selected server, which I’m quite happy with. To try it yourself only takes a few minutes.First you’ll need a Twitter account, either the one you already use, or a dedicated one that only your servers post to (this is what I’ve done). For a tad bit more security I protected my tweets and made the account private – I don’t think I’ll get hacked by anyone that sees my system load is too high, but I’d rather not hear about it from security experts that I’m leaving myself open, so I’ll continue to keep things blocked by default. Also, I’ve setup the update method to use SSL to login and transmit, so you can rest a little easier knowing that things are staying encrypted while they move over the wire.  The only option I’ve coded in is that you can use wget (by default) or curl (not installed by default in any Linux distro I’m running, but is on OS X if someone wants it for that), so you have a little bit of flexibility if you need it.  Otherwise it’s pretty much ready to go out of the box, define your username and password at the top of the script, chmod it, and away we go.  Slap it in your crontab  for daily/hourly updates, and the rest, as they say, will be handled by simple, beautiful, BASH.

[codesyntax lang="bash" lines="no" container="pre_valid" capitalize="no"]

#!/bin/bash
#
###############################
# twitter username/password #
###############################
user="1user"
pass="sekrit"
#
###############################
# run tasks for the report #
###############################
HOST=`hostname -s`
UP=`uptime | cut -d" " -f4,5 | cut -d"," -f1`
LOAD=`uptime | cut -d":" -f5,6`
PING=`ping -q -c 3 google.com | tail -n1 | cut -d"/" -f5 | cut -d"." -f1`
MEM=`ps aux | awk '{ sum += $4 }; END { print sum }'`
CPU=`ps aux | awk '{ sum += $3 }; END { print sum }'`
if [ -x "/usr/bin/lsb_release" ]; then
DIST="`lsb_release -s -i`/`lsb_release -s -c` on `uname -m`"
else
DIST="`uname -o` on `uname -m`"
fi
#
###############################
# build the report for post #
###############################
tweet="(HOST) ${HOST} (UP) ${UP} (CPU) ${CPU}% (MEM) ${MEM}% (LOAD) ${LOAD} (PING) ${PING}ms (DIST) ${DIST}"
#
################################
# check that post is <140 char #
################################
if [ $(echo "${tweet}" | wc -c) -gt 140 ]; then
echo "FATAL: The tweet is longer than 140 characters!"
exit 1
fi
#
################################
# post the report to twitter #
################################
### via wget (default)
wget -q --user="${user}" --password="${pass}" --post-data=status="${tweet}" https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
### via curl
#curl -k -u ${user}:${pass} -d status="${tweet}" https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml >/dev/null 2>&1
#
################################
# if no errors, successful #
################################
if [ $? -eq '0' ]; then
echo "Tweet sent using `echo ${tweet} | wc -c`/140 characters."
fi
rm update.xml
#
################################
exit 0

[/codesyntax]

Told you it was pretty simple, now I get updates to my ‘secret’ server account on Twitter that look like this:

(HOST) mookie (UP) 8 days (CPU) 6% (MEM) 44.1% (LOAD) 0.07, 0.06, 0.07 (PING) 29ms (DIST) Debian/squeeze on i686

So what other statistics would be helpful to gather that we can tack on to what we already have? Heck, we could even drop the (DIST) section, that just gives me a reminder if what distro each box is running; it could be shortened to just say Debian or Slackware. One thing I’m working on, I would like a monitor to report when any partitions get over 90% full, I haven’t been able to figure that one out yet without using an external app not installed by default, like monit.  So, is this helpful? Can you think of better way to do any/all of the above, while fulfilling my basic requirements? Does it blend?

So, this week we had an issue where a some of our sites were down, and the monitor that watches them were internal to our network, and relied on some of the same resources; which is lees than ideal. I have a remote server running at one of our partner’s sites, so it’s the perfect canidate to watch our sites from a ‘real world’ view. I already had monit running on the server (it’s literally one of the first things I install once I bring a server up) so it was simple enough to have it watch our sites, in Debian you just put a new file in /etc/monit/include with the syntax of what you want done, and then add the path as `include /etc/monit/include/service` in /etc/monitrc.  First in monitrc we list a global email address for the systems admin to get alerts:

set alert sysop@fak3r.com

Then, in the new include file, telling monit to watch a site is simple, for example:

check host fak3r.com with address fak3r.com
if failed url http://fak3r.com
timeout 10 seconds for 1 cycles then alert
then alert

and we’re good to go, anytime fak3r.com fails to load (with a 10 second timeout allowance) the sysop gets emailed about it.  Now this really just tells us if the service is up, so to make this a better we can add content check.  This way the check will have to be able to load the page, and then check for a content string to verify the site is *really* up, and working. For me I’ll add have it check for part of my byline, since it if finds it in the response we know the webserver, and the database server, is working.

check host fak3r.com with address fak3r.com
if failed url http://fak3r.com and content == "look out honey"
timeout 10 seconds for 1 cycles then alert
then alert

Great, this works, for me, but for my client they had other requirements.  Since we have many different sites, they want IT support to know about all of them, but only certain developers to know about certain other sites.

check host fak3r.com with address fak3r.com
if failed url http://fak3r.com and content == "look out honey"
timeout 30 seconds for 1 cycles then alert
alert it.support@company.com { connection, timeout }
alert debbie.developer@company.com { connection, timeout }
alert dave.developer@company.com { connection, timeout }

Meanwhile we may have other sites that other folks need to know about, but still have IT support be in the loop. So for example:

check host someothersite.com with address someothersite.com
if failed url http://someothersite.com and content == "Welcome new  luser"
timeout 30 seconds for 1 cycles then alert
alert it.support@company.com { connection, timeout }
alert daniel.developer@company.com { connection, timeout }
alert william.webmaster@company.com { connection, timeout }

This way certain employees can know that something is wrong with their site, while not being alerted to sites they’re not involved with, meanwhile IT support is getting all the notices since need to address outages on any sites.

Lastly I changed the email format to be a little more user friendly for support and the other users. While I’ve grown fond of the simple/to the point alert system monit has by default, it’s easy to format the message so they’re a bit more specific, and easier to categorize. In the top, global section of monitrc, we add something like:

set mail-format {
     from: monit@somebigserver.com
     subject: [ $SERVICE ] $EVENT - $DATE
     message: This is an $ACTION: $DESCRIPTION [$SERVICE], tested remotely from $HOST }

That way the subject tells them the $SERVICE (in this case the URL to the site that is down) the $EVENT (such as a connection timeout) along with the all import time and $DATE. They don’t even have to open their email to know what’s up.

So again, I’ve used monit for a long time, and I’ve always been amazed by its consistency and flexibility, not to mention it’s stability. In this case it was able to solve a longstanding support issue that would have otherwise needed to be run by a third party hosted solution. Once configured monit “just works” and is an invaluable tool. I can think of many a support calls I used to get in the middle of the night that could have easily been handled by this little marvel, but hey, live and learn. In a future article I’ll demonstrate how we can have monit alert us via Twitter, and why not, it’s all online these days.

What have you done amazing with monit? Are you like me in constantly re-tweaking monitrc to get more out of this dynamo?

The other day I came across a situation where a web-server was getting hammered, and we needed to know who the offend(ers) were. While watching a logfile tail by at high speeds is always fun, we wanted to be able to sort the web-server access log and find top users, to be able to narrow down where the traffic was coming from. While we don’t want to block users that want to access our data, sometimes we need to throttle things back so one requester doesn’t overwhelm all the available bandwidth and make the site unusable for others. So after some playing around and digging on Google, we came up with a nice, succinct one liner to do this, here it is:

cat /path/to/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

Recently it seems that piping cat output to other apps is all I do on my servers, and I’m ok with that!

another solid argument from a 'tea bagger'

Since the health-care debate brought out the worst in the tea party protesters, we’ve seen a shift from fear mongering, to the disgusting behavior of last weekend that included bigoted, racist name calling, spitting on on elected officials and finally vandalism and death threats.  If it weren’t clear before, the ‘movement’ has truly showed us what is  behind their manufactured anger, and it ain’t health care.  Case in point, how can people be mad now, when they weren’t mad when the previous administration that just walked all over the constitution, sent us into a war with a country that never attacked us and raised the debt to record highs?  Well as I tried to figure out how to condense my thoughts, who would have thought Rosie O’Donnell would have covered it so well, with a post on her blog titled We had eight years of Bush and Cheney, Now you get mad!? One of her readers was able to succinctly break down the blatant hypocrisy of this whole affair, providing a perfect platform for a tea party rebuttal, but don’t expect that, instead lets expect more gay bashing from those cowards.  I’m reprinting the post here (just like the DailyKos did) because it needs more exposure, so please pass it on.  After that, follow-up by reading Frank Rich’s Op-Ed titled The Rage Is Not About Health Care for more rational of what is the true driver for this behavior, it gives us a lot to think about.

We had eight years of Bush and Cheney, Now you get mad!?

• You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

• You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

• You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

• You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

• You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

• You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

• You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

• You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

• You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

• You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

• You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

• You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

• You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

• You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans…oh hell no.

Prototype of the school's proposed catcam 3000

Today fak3r from fak3r.com and Matt from Obtuseview.com are working together to bring you a multi-perspective piece on internet security.  Rarely are team-ups like this seen except in the pages of “Marvel Team-Ups” or “a very Special Episodes of Diff’rnt Strokes.”

So the Pennsylvania school using webcams on district provided laptops to spy on its students story just gets more and more bizarre.  The parents of one of kids is (rightfully) suing the school, “…alleging the district unlawfully used its ability to access a webcam remotely on their son’s district-issued laptop computer [...] it watched him through his laptop’s webcam while he was at home and unaware he was being observed” This is apparently proven when the school “caught” the student engaging in “improper behavior” in his home, via a webcam image.  Meanwhile the school claims it had the ability to observe images via the webcam, but that it would only be used if the laptop were reported to be lost stolen or missing, and even then “…the district would first have to request access from its technology and security department and receive authorization.” Additionally, the school claims this monitoring was all part of an agreement defining “acceptable-use” that the family had to sign to allow the student to take the laptop home, which also states that the family was required to buy insurance for the borrowed laptop.  So far, so ridiculous, but then it starts getting sillier…

Now, as for the student’s “improper behavior” that the school claims they viewed is starting to come to light, thanks to the lawsuit.  While the school claims to have used the secret remote webcam activation ONLY 42 times (and only to ‘track down’ lost or stolen laptops) it hasn’t explained what this student was busted for, after all, he hadn’t stolen the computer.  Now it sounds like the school is claiming that, “…the student was disciplined for was an accusation of either drug use or drug selling. For what? Well, the image showed the student with Mike & Ikes candies, which do have a passing resemblance to pills, but (last we checked) do not appear to be controlled substances.” Now we all know that obesity is something we need to keep in check in this country, but a school counting how many jelly beans a kid is eating at home?  Come on!  But seriously, they thought the student was popping pills at home, and they thought this would be an acceptable use of their spying capability to bring this to light?  Just who are the geniuses behind this idea, much less the plan of using the webcams to track stolen laptops of students?  While using webcams to spy on users is pretty high tech, and seems to be a unbeatable to find the perps who lifted the laptops, I can’t think of any way (*cough* black tape) to stop the webcam (*cough* reinstall) from seeing the user, plus, once they have the perps image, they still have to figure out who that is, and pass it on up the chain.  While I’m all for schools protecting their property, I’ve always thought something less compicuous be used, like having software that phones home to alert authorities not only that the laptop has been stolen, but where it’s connecting from, and other specific details of the new user.  Of course there paid software Mac options out there, free ones for Linux, and even cooler ones for the DIY geek to really hack into (a keylogger being a particularly fun way to turn the tables and mess with the privacy of these perps).  The point is, a cursory Google search reveals far more options without the obvious privacy of using a webcam to gather info.

Yummy!

What do you think, should the school have even tried to use such measures to keep tabs on their property?  Should they have done it a different way?  Or are you a parent with kids in grade school (like me) that can’t believe a trusted institution would pull such a stunt?  Then, to get coverage from the other 1/2 of this dynamic writing team up, swing over to Matt at Obtuse View with his post highlighting some other considerations of this case.

live photo of Part Chimp courtesy of Last.FM

Well 2009 was another stellar year for music if you ask me, and as usual, my yearly ‘top’ list is going on a month late. I always have these grand designs of writting a short paragragh about each selection, why I picked it, how I first heard it, etc, but you know how that goes.  I will say that this year, while I’ve gotten into many bands the way I have in years past (trolling record stores, randomly listening to anything I can find online), I’ve also found things I wouldn’t have found thanks to my Twitter account.  While those who don’t get  Twitter think it’s just folks updating what they had for breakfast, if you stick around, dig deeper and find the right people to follow, it’s amazing wealth of information.  Not requiring the effort of say a blog post allows rapid, unvarnished opinions, spouted out between people’s day to day tasks, which I always prefer since I feel I’m more lucid after a few cups of coffee while something is blaring in my ears. New this year is the reissues section, what with things like OK Computer and Young Team being reissued, I can’t help but highlight them.

As always I want to give a hat tip to the fabulous folks at my neighborhood record store, Euclid Records, where I bought almost all of these discs over the past year.  I also want to recognize people like Ryan, Anthony, Mary, @fcervantes, @plasmatron, @koppper @crankin and Yvonne for a continued stream of what has their attention at any particular time – grabbing stuff and listening to it later when I have more time always reveals new sounds to me, so thanks for that. Also, as always, this list will be added to my ever expanding Noise page here, listing my favs from 2001 to the present.

Ok enough of this babble, hell, I already have a couple of possible contenders for next years list! With that in mind, here’s my….

Best music of 2009

Andrew Bird “Noble Beast”

-



Neko Case “Tornado”

-



DOOM “Born Like This”

-



Morrissey “Years of Refusal”

-



The Clues “Remember Severed Head”

-



Disfear “Live The Storm”

-



Imogen Heap “Elipse”

-



Part Chimp “Thiller”

-



The Thermals “Now We Can See”

-



Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, David Lynch “Dark Night of the Soul”

-



Jay Reatard “Watch Me Fall”

-



Mountain Goats “The Life of the World to Come”

-



Lightning Bolt “Earthly Delights”

-



Phoenix “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix”

-



Rufus Wainwright “Milwaukee At Last!!!”

-

Reissues

Okkervil River “Black Sheep Boy”

-



Mogwai “Young Team”

-



Nirvana “Bleach”

-



Radiohead “OK Computer”

-
So what do you think?  Did I miss something that you think is essential?  Sound off, and feel free to follow what I’m listening to (in real time no less!) by adding me as a ‘friend’ at Last.FM – I’m always looking for new ways to music.  Who knows, maybe what you recommend to me will make my Best of 2010 list.

This year Mogwai will release a live cd and album, Special Moves, and a dvd, Burning, covering a three night set during the 2009 shows in Brooklyn.  Here they are doing Mogwai Fear Satan, which while from the same tour, is not from the film, but is shot by the same people (thanks for the info Stuart, pictured above) so it’s a good look into what to expect. If it’s all like this it looks like the perfect live film in my opinion, focused on the band interactions and movement, not the audience.  To find out more, and get a free mp3 download of 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong from the set, visit Special Moves.  Can’t wait to see/hear this, after taking a long time to get into The Hawk Is Howling, I’m ready to see them live again.  I was still ‘digesting’ the re-release of Young Team that I bought in London last year, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen them live as they haven’t toured St. Louis, and the Austin gigs were too long ago to count.  Just can’t wait for this release.

nice -19 srm -rfv ~/.Trash/*

Yeah, while the -v flag will slow things down slightly, I prefer to have ‘verbose’ output from the command to understand exactly what it’s doing. Does anyone have better/more secure way to do this? Leave a message in the comments if you do, I’d love to learn more about this.

While I still really dig my Dell Mini 9, even with 2Gig of RAM it feels kinda sluggish when I have my normal 50 tabs open, and I’ve always known someone could do better (since I’m too lazy to recompile a kernel for it like I would have in the past).  With all the focus on netbooks it was bound to be addressed, and while Android looks promising, it’s currently still more of a phone OS than something you’d be able to use on your netbook.  I’ve run it off a USB drive on the Mini 9 just to check it out, it was cool, but again, not really usable enough for a ‘top – maybe that’s not the target. Another I want to check is Moblin, Intel’s effort using Ubuntu as a base, but I haven’t seen a Mini 9 HOWTO (maybe I’ll have to write my own…) for that.  So, enter Google Chrome OS, Google’s idea of how to not only address this problem, but perhaps lay out how we will use these computers in the future.  It’s always funny when I start talking about cloud and thin clients, it takes me back to dumb terminals talking to mainframes, but I digress. The point is, thanks to great posts at jasongriffey.net and Lifehacker, it’s really easy to install Google’s Chrome OS on a Dell Mini 9, the only thing I really have to add is that you have to use ChromeOS Zero from the hexxeh.net site. After all, this is an open source project, so folks are going to make changes/fix things and share with everyone. Looking at the site they had a new release, yesterday (gotta love it!) The last time I tried a build the wifi on my Mini just worked, so it looks like those problems are a thing of the past.