Wi-Fizzle.com - Putting the fizzle in Wi-Fi since 2005 .. (yes, this was a poor choice for a domain name)

March 20, 2009 - May 21, 2009

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Posted by dandriff on Thursday May 21, 2009@02:29PM

So, while writing another article, I took some screenshots and had to upload them to the server. I used a unix utility called scp to upload the files through an encrypted SSH tunnel. However, after uploading the files, the permissions are NOT very friendly at all!

Administrator@hammertime:~/Desktop$ scp *.png defaultuser@wi-fizzle.com:/www/wi-fizzle.com/public/html/images/

ff_0_freshly_started_up.png                       100%   23KB  23.2KB/s   00:00
ff_1_left-clicked_url_bar.png                     100%   24KB  23.6KB/s   00:00
ff_2_pressed_shift-tab.png                        100%   23KB  23.1KB/s   00:00
ff_3_pressed_shift-tab_again.png                  100%   23KB  23.2KB/s   00:00
ff_4_pressed_tab.png                              100%   24KB  23.6KB/s   00:00
Administrator@hammertime:~/Desktop$ 

defaultuser@wi-fizzle.com:/www/wi-fizzle.com/public/html/images> ls -lah ff*.png
-rw-r--r--  1 defaultuser users 24K May 21 14:12 ff_0_freshly_started_up.png
-rw-r--r--  1 defaultuser users 24K May 21 14:12 ff_1_left-clicked_url_bar.png
-rw-r--r--  1 defaultuser users 24K May 21 14:12 ff_2_pressed_shift-tab.png
-rw-r--r--  1 defaultuser users 23K May 21 14:13 ff_3_pressed_shift-tab_again.png
-rw-r--r--  1 defaultuser users 24K May 21 14:13 ff_4_pressed_tab.png

Okay, and nevermind. I thought it did something more like -rwx------, but I just tested it and obviously that is not the case.

Now at least I have a better understanding of the behavior, I guess.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194311/change-permissions-upon-uploading-with-scp

UPDATE

Okay, so I triple-checked and noticed that it has happened again! It happened when I re-uploaded one of the image files, "ff_3_pressed_shift-tab_again.png". It's permissions were: "-rwx------".

File listing:

defaultuser@wi-fizzle.com:/www/wi-fizzle.com/public/html/images> ls -lah *.png
-rw-r--r--  1 ppx users  24K May 21 14:46 ff_0_freshly_started_up.png
-rw-r--r--  1 ppx users  24K May 21 14:46 ff_1_left-clicked_url_bar.png
-rw-r--r--  1 ppx users  24K May 21 14:46 ff_2_pressed_shift-tab.png
-rwx------  1 ppx users  24K May 21 14:46 ff_3_pressed_shift-tab_again.png
-rw-r--r--  1 ppx users  24K May 21 14:46 ff_4_pressed_tab.png

Why is this annoying? Because the permissions are nothing like the local file here on my machine...I guess this will just have to remain a mystery for the time being.


Posted by dandriff on Wednesday May 20, 2009@04:56PM

I have been running Ubuntu 8.09 for the past month on my IBM Thinkpad R50 (Very similar to a T42 in every way except that it has a thicker plastic (instead of metal) screen lid).

Background information: I ran 7.09 for a few weeks before upgrading to 8.09, which was slow. So I then did a clean install of 8.09, which helped a little bit, but not nearly enough.

Speed (as in /LACK/ of speed) has been a major issue. Overall, the situation is out of control and unacceptable. This computer has 2 gigabytes (GB) of system memory, yet switching tabs in Firefox slows down not long after my browsing has begun (within ~15 minutes of opening FF). Even just navigating files in Gnome is really slow. I have turned Compiz and all visual effects off.

Even after doing a little bit of googling to look into the general slow GUI speed in 8.09, I have been unable to get things to be even close to Windows XP. I know, I know...Ubuntu is geared mostly towards newbies...but it's package system is so baller!

So, since the latest Ubuntu is such a hog (oink oink bacon), I don't think I really want to use it as my primary computing platform. I'm going to just put Windows XP back on and then run Ubuntu in a VM..bleh I seriously tried to ditch MS but the slowness just to navigate files via the GUI is so messed up and annoying! I suspect the bloat is out of control for Ubuntu.


Posted by dandriff on Monday May 18, 2009@09:39PM

To investigate at some point in the near-ish future:

'''empty''' is a utility that provides an interface to execute and/or interact
with processes under pseudo-terminal sessions (PTYs). This tool is
definitely useful in programming of shell scripts designed to communicate
with interactive programs like telnet, ssh, ftp, etc. In some cases, empty
can be the simplest replacement for TCL/expect or other similar
programming tools.

(seen on the package listing of a router running OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09)


Posted by dandriff on Friday May 15, 2009@08:36PM

Yes!!!!!!!!!!! I finally got around to this, and the obsessively compulsive part of me is so satisfied..mmm -- A Greasemonkey script to immediately focus the search box when you load imdb.com


Posted by dandriff on Tuesday May 12, 2009@08:15PM

This is a cool approach to add-ons and modifications for the Firefox web browser. The approach that I find intriguing is a bookmark for Firefox which removes/overrodes any auto-complete-disabled forms from the current page, which enables the login/password to be stored by FF. The bookmark is actually just a little javascript - So no browser restart is needed! Nice.. (especially since I don't have the Web Developer Toolkit add-on enabled at the moment, since it does have an equiavelent feature to remove auto-complete restrictions.)


Posted by dandriff on Saturday May 09, 2009@07:21PM

This was helpful, I kind of wish I'd known sooner-

Adding a run-as context menu option (i.e. right-click) for CMD and BAT batch script filetypes:

To add the Run as... menu for .CMD files, use this REG file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\cmdfile\shell\runas\command]
@="\"%1\" %*"

To add the Run as... menu for .BAT files, use the following REG file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\batfile\shell\runas\command]
@="\"%1\" %*"

Copy the above contents to Notepad, and save the file with .REG extension (say, cmd_runas.reg). Right-click the .REG file and choose Merge.

(Notice that the differences between the two files are merely the words "cmdfile" and then "batfile".)


Posted by dandriff on Thursday May 07, 2009@10:31AM
Posted by dandriff on Monday April 20, 2009@01:01PM

Today I was surprised to realize I didn't know the definition of "Profiteering". Waack!


Posted by dandriff on Wednesday April 08, 2009@02:38PM

Factor looks pretty amazing.


Posted by dandriff on Wednesday April 08, 2009@02:25PM

http://www.google.com/search?q=dijkstra+shunting+yard&complete=1&hl=en&start=10&sa=N -> http://montcs.bloomu.edu/~bobmon/Information/RPN/infix2rpn.shtml


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=shunting-yard+algorithm+%22prefix%22 -> http://chaosinmotion.com/blog/?p=73 (guys blog is pretty dumb [Does he know the difference between a design pattern and an algorithm? Yikes!])


Just plain wrong (improper implementation? wtf, damn the internet is full of idiots): http://en.literateprograms.org/Shunting_yard_algorithm_%28Python%29



http://penguin.ewu.edu/cscd300/Topic/Stack/WikiExtract.html



(and naturally the Wikipedia article is almost complete nonsense...bad/non-working version of the algorithm)


/to be continued.. later../


Posted by dandriff on Wednesday March 25, 2009@12:26PM

A good read: Random Number Generation 102, Coding a Linear Congruential Generator

However, it should be noted that this kind of random number generation is /not/ of cryptographic-grade. See Mersenne twister (code example) instead, if you want that.


Posted by dandriff on Friday March 20, 2009@12:27PM

Pi is wrong according to Bob Palais, a professor of mathematics at the University of Utah. A fun read.


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