that is so punk rock

How to avoid SELF referential submissions on REDDIT

Comments: 0 - Date: Mart 11th, 2008 - Categories: General

Question: What can you possibly submit on Reddit that is more annoying and less useful than a link to a single JPG?
Answer: A link to nothing but the submission itself!

If you agree, then the obvious solution would be to not post to SELF. However witty the title of the submission might be, it’s almost impossible to make a decent point in the space allocated. All you can hope to achive is to provide a “sound bite” that might rattle the readers’ emotions a little bit and hope to get some karma that way. Besides, there are usually far better arguments being made in the comments that most people will never see. What makes your one liner so valuable that it should make front page as a submission? If you have something to say, perhaps you should say it within the context of a submission made by somebody else.

Yet we even see SELF posts pretty much saying what I said above. (i.e the SELF submissions are killing Reddit etc) The irony must be lost on those submitters.

So I propose the following. Rather than hitting the submit link at a whim and submitting a SELF entry, take a few minutes to write a few paragraphs about what you’re trying to say. The “internets” is pretty much dying for good cohesive content and people will read it if you take the time to frame your opinion properly and word it in such a way that it will be easy to follow.

There are various places on the Internet where you can have your own web space for free and start writing right away. Free blogs are a great way to start writing right away. Don’t expect everything you write to be treated like Pulitzer material, but you might be surprised how many people find it interesting. Just write a few paragraphs and link your submission to that instead. Who knows, maybe, if this sounds like too much effort for what you have to say, you shouldn’t say it in the first place? :)

So please try this for a few times and see what happens –as I shall see now myself.

timezones

Comments: 0 - Date: Mart 2nd, 2007 - Categories: General

I have officially configured my laptop to use Europe/Istanbul (EET) as the timezone. It used to be set to America/New York (EST). We’ll all see how this change affects humanity in the coming days.

How to spot 401/nigerian/internet SCAM !

Comments: 0 - Date: Şubat 9th, 2007 - Categories: General

This article is incomplete (i.e it delivers significantly less than it promises) but it still has stuff in it that might be helpful to some. Will be complete asap.

One day in the early nineties, before anybody heard of the Internet, the postman arrived at my father’s business address with a letter from someone in Nigeria. The letter explained in great detail that just for helping to get some funds out of the country, my father would be given a large sum of money.

This is the first 401 Scam letter I remember seeing. I don’t know how common the letter variety used to be, after the Internet became commonplace these scams have been popping up all over the place.

I would hope that anybody who wasn’t born tomorrow be able to spot a 401 scam message when they see one, but the fact that they are still being sent out is proof enough that some people are still falling for these scams.

There are a few things these scammers have in common.

1) They have no conscience.

2) They are ruthless.

3) They are idiots (except for the few people who invent the techniques they are using).

4) And last but not least, they want your MONEY!

The classic 401 Scam (so called because that’s what the penal code that deals with these crimes in Nigeria is numbered) goes like this:

You receive an unsolicited message some day. The sender claims to have placed his trust on you. They will usually evoke religious sentiments to drive this point forward. Faith. Destiny etc. He/She will be someone of importance in his/her home country. A good example of a well timed email I once received claimed to be from Mrs. Yasser Arafat, whose husband had just died. More recently I recevied one from the wife of an exiled Liberian “leader”.

Once they hope to establish credibility in such a fashion, they will confide in you that they know the whereabouts of a huge sum of cash which seems to have been forgotten by everyone else in the volatile events that happened recently. This sum may have been collected legally or illegally. Since they are appealing to the greed inherent in most of us, they don’t try to make the transaction seem overly virtuous.
They will then proceed to offer you a generous portion of this sum, if you’re willing to be the trusted foreign contact they need to help them extract this money from their country. All they need initially is your name, address, phone number etc.

If you reply to this email sincerely, you will get more emails back with more information, until one day they start asking for money. The money’s will be used for the purpose of facilitating access to the huge sum. Examples to this might be, the bribes to be paid to guards and/or poiticians/soldiers. Money needed to pay accumulated safe storage fees etc.

With the dream of much a huge ROI (return on investment) the unsuspecting victim will send this money. But the demands for more money will never cease. The more money the victim has lost this way, the likelier he is to make him or herself believe in the legitimacy of the deal. After all nobody wants to accept it when they are being stupid.

The scammers will do everything to make things look legit as well. From time to time you will receive messages and calls from other people who corroborate the story and ask for yet another transfer of money before they can finally get their hands on the funds.

I’ve heard that some even arranged for face-to-face meetings in countries such as England. The victim wants to meet the people he’s “working with” so he arrived in London with cash. This is the stupidest thing a scam victim can do since moneys can be replaced but one’s life cannot. Like I said, these people have no conscience. I am beginning to think it’s a cultural thing.
The Internet age of scam:

With the arrival of the Internet, a new kind of 401 scam emerged. This can be called the ‘wire transfer’ or ‘western union’ variety.

The scheme is simple. You have something to sell or you’re looking to buy/rent something. Let’s start with the sale example. You’re selling your car - as I am right now. You will post an ad on an online service. Pretty soon after you will get an email from a person who himself lives abroad or is representing somebody who lives abroad. This person wants to buy your car. He is OK with the price. He wants to pay with wire transfer or cashier’s check. He will send you more money than your asking price and wants to know whether you’d be able to send the remainder back to him. He will also arrange for the pick-up of the car himself via an international shipping company.
Let’s look at the psychological construction of the deal.

1) He’s abroad. He doesn’t know the market and wants to pay the asking price. Nobody wants to pay the asking price so you think you’ve found a good buyer.

2) He’s placing your trust in you by sending you the money in advance, and is even going one step further by sending you more money than your asking price. Since he trusts you this much, you’re inclined to trust him back.
3) Greed. You want to sell the car. At the asking price. Fast. With as little work required as possible. You won’t have to deal with the delivery either. I believe this to be added to latter versions of the scam as it is likely to be the first question that pops up on the mind of the seller. “If you’re abroad, how am I supposed to send the car to you? Wouldn’t that be too much work, too costly?” But no. They’re taking care of it all.

So how does it work?

They send you the money order as agreed upon. You deposit it to your bank account. It clears without a problem. Since there was no problem with the bank, you have no reason not to distrust this person. So you do what any honest person would do and send him the excess amount he included in the money order.

So far so good right? Well. Yeah. But things are about to change.

First of all. You will notice that the person has not sent anbody to pick up the car yet. But you don’t care because it’s already paid for. A week or two later you will get a call from your bank. They will let you know that they either took back the amount of money you had deposited if you had enough funds to cover it, or that you owe them that amount. You are further informed that the money order was found to be counterfeit.

You can protest all you want. Cry that if it were fake the bank should not have accepted it in the first place. How are you to know a fake check from a good one if even the bank teller is unable to do so. However, soon you will realize that it’s better to just shut up and pay their money rather than being prosecuted as the original counterfeitter yourself.

So this is what 401 scam is and how it works, but how do you spot a scam email when you get one?

Everybody but you is getting laid even as we speak !

Comments: 0 - Date: Şubat 8th, 2007 - Categories: General

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s book called “A man without a country”.

“When my tantrum, which is what I call my TV set, waves boobs in my face, and tells me that everybody but me is going to get laid tonight, and this is a national emergency, so I’ve got to rush out and buy pills or a car or a folding gymnasium I can hide under my bed, I laugh like a hyena. I know and you know there are millions upon millions of good Americans, present company not excepted, who aren’t going to get laid tonight.”

How to re-run the CONFIGURATION script for software in FreeBSD Ports

Comments: 0 - Date: Aralık 29th, 2006 - Categories: Tips/Tricks

Some of the software in FreeBSD’s Ports provide a menu based interface to configure the package. For instance, when you’re trying to install the curl package by typing make in the ports directory, the install has an option to use GNUTLS which you can select.

However if you do this without disabling OpenSSL, the port will fail to compile since these two options are mutually exclusive.

You can try to run ‘make’ again hoping to fix this configuration error. However you will notice that ports is not bringing up the configuration menu anymore. Removing the ‘work’ dir where all the source file related operations (configure, make etc) are performed, you will still not be able to bring the configuration menu up.

That’s because the initial configuration options are kept elsewhere. These files are in /var/db/ports . For instance, you will find a file called “curl” which contains a representation of all the options you’ve previously selected in a way that the Makefile (configure script is more accurate) of the port will understand.

Remove this file and the next time you try to install the same port, you will see the configuration menu again.

In my opinion make should accept a ‘reconfigure’ option that overrides the cache. If it does I didn’t find it.

an anarchist novelist’s adventures in Linuxland

Comments: 0 - Date: Aralık 26th, 2006 - Categories: General

“With Windows I would assume the problem was me–my settings, my hardware, whatever–but with Linux I immediately assume it’s the OS. Its a rare glimpse in myself of the status quo tendency to trust the powerful.”

From: No Media Kings - Blog

Sending files to Sony Ericsson K750 via Bluetooth on Linux

Comments: 3 - Date: Aralık 20th, 2006 - Categories: Tips/Tricks

I just received my Sony Ericsson K750c (c denotes an Asian model). It’s a pretty decent phone - apparently the best seller of the company last year. I decided to buy this model instead of a newer model because it uses regular memory stick duo (and pro duo) as opposed to the micro version that came out more recently. I thought it would be a cheaper to get a decent sized stick for this model and I was right. I just ordered a 2gig Sony one with MagicGate (I’m not mentioning because I’ll use this, but to make price comparison easier) for around $70 from overstock.com. There’s also better support for it on both Windows and Linux because of the relative maturity of the phone.

As soon as I got the phone I wanted to install an rss feed reader so I can read lewrockwell.com articles from anywhere I want. Most free rss readers seem to require some sort of registration the purpose of which escapes me. So I finally found one that doesn’t need registration. This one isn’t free-as-in-free-software either so I will need to find a replacement. The software is distributed as a .jar file which is a glorified .zip that java enabled devices know how to handle. You just send the file to the device and it asks you what to do with it. “Install” would be my pick :) But how do you actually send the file to the device?

First you need to have your bluetooth set up under linux. Nowadays it’s not that difficult. Then you need to download some sort of obex ftp client which is the client for an ftp-over-bluetooth kind of protocol. Then you use this client to send the file to the device and voila (or “bak şu allahın işine”) the phone installs the software and you can start using (!) it. (Come to think of it, wonder what it does with the archive file itself once it’s decompressed. Probably deletes it)

If your bluetooth is set up properly you can use the hcitool utility to scan and find your phone.

oktay@sibop:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:12:EE:90:DF:FE Kestane
oktay@sibop:~$

Next, you can use the obexftp command to send the file to this phone.

oktay@sibop:/usr/share/doc/gnome-bluetooth$ obexftp -b 00:12:EE:90:DF:FE -p ~oktay/Desktop/RSSManager.jar
Browsing 00:12:EE:90:DF:FE …
Channel: 6
Connecting…done
Sending “/home/oktay/Desktop/RSSManager.jar”…-done
Disconnecting…done
oktay@sibop:/usr/share/doc/gnome-bluetooth$

If your phone keeps asking for a PIN/Password but won’t accept whichever password you enter, you need to configure /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and set the “pin_helper” parameter in “options” to something like:

pin_helper /usr/bin/pin-helper;

You can use various other pin helper scripts like I had decided to use ‘bluez-pin’ but apparently I neglected to fix the line above and it still works. Beats me. I had tried a bunch of other stuff one of which must have worked. :)

So just ignore this post till I figure out what’s going on.

High Intensity Weight Training

Comments: 0 - Date: Aralık 18th, 2006 - Categories: General

I will add the literary icing later but here’s the raw data from my first 4 weeks of high intensity weight training.

The table below summarizes my stats for the first 5 weeks (will be updated as time goes on). In the data cells, the first number is the weight in pounds (lbs) while the second number is the number of repetitions (reps).

Exercise/Week	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
Leg Ext	60\|23	80\|20	90\|16	100\|26	120\|21
Leg Curl	30\|15	40\|20	50\|21	60\|21	70\|18
Abs Bench	40\|20	50\|20	60\|24	65\|17	70\|18
Chinup	160\|12	150\|10	140\|12	130\|13	120\|13
Dips	160\|9	160\|13	150\|14	140\|14	130\|15

* For Chinups and Dips a lower weight is better/harder because the weight helps you pull your body up.

How to run multiple Wordpress blogs on the same server using a single install base

Comments: 0 - Date: Aralık 17th, 2006 - Categories: Tips/Tricks

Intro

I have two blogs. One is in Turkish Safsata.org, the other is this one, which as you might have guessed already, is in English. I wanted to find an easy way to maintain both blogs and keep up with updates and security fixes. Running two seperate complete installs would mean twice the effort so I decided to try and see if two domains can be run from one directory of source (that is, php source mostly) files.

There's already good documentation about a similar situation I found online. If it suits your needs, you should use that more complete solution.

Scenario

OK. Here's our scenario. We have access to a web server and we have two seperate domains on this server. These domains may or may not have their own domain names. It doesn't matter. We want to install the Wordpress files on a single directory and have both (or more than two) blogs be served from this common base. You still have to have a seperate database for each blog since the data (posts, user accounts, comments, settings) etc would be different per blog.

Steps

I already had one of the blogs installed. I moved the source files from this directory to a wordpress sources directory in my home directory. Where you put the files really doesn't matter as long as the web server can access those files. Here's what that directory looks like.

-bash-2.05b$ ls -1a /home/oktay/wordpress/source
.
..
.htaccess
index.php
license.txt
readme.html
wp-admin
wp-atom.php
wp-blog-header.php
wp-comments-post.php
wp-commentsrss2.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-config.php
wp-config.php.bkp
wp-content
wp-feed.php
wp-includes
wp-links-opml.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp-pass.php
wp-rdf.php
wp-register.php
wp-rss.php
wp-rss2.php
wp-settings.php
wp-trackback.php
xmlrpc.php

There are two important files here which need to provide the different settings for each blog. These files are wp-config.php and .htaccess the latter only being necessary if you want to use pretty urls, and when I call them pretty, how can you not use it right? :)
Once we have the files in place, we need to make sure that the blogs point to these files on the filesystem.

On my setup I prefer to keep the base of the domain as a non-blog site (not that I have anything there yet) and have the blog on a subdirectory.

It looks like this for my sites:

On the document root for safsata.org there's a symlink to the source files by the name 'saf'. This way the blog ends up at http://safsata.org/saf .

saf -> /home/oktay/wordpress/source/

The link for thatissopunkrock.org looks like:

punk -> /home/oktay/wordpress/source/

Likewise, the blog url for this site is http://thatissopunkrock.org/punk . (Actually having a different subdirectory name for each blog causes a problem with .htaccess which we'll fix later on)

At this point you can access both sites on your browser. If you don't mind both blogs being identical that is. To me this feels slightly counter to the subject of this post, so we shall tackle this nuisance :).

The reason both sites are identical is because they are both using the same database. What we need to do is to create a dump of the existing database, and import it back into a database with a different name. (If you have only one database on the server, you can also play with the table prefix settings but that's not explained here). Please refer to documentation on how to actually accomplish this.

What follows is the actual meaty part of this article. If we're going to have seperate databases serving these blogs, we have to configure this in wp-config.php . However, since we're sharing this file we can't just edit it. We have to put a little bit of logic into the file. (This is but one solution. Many solutions are possible involving symlinks, more coding etc)

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

if($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']=='safsata.org') {
define('DB_NAME', 'safsata_wp');
define('DB_USER', 'safsata_wp');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'PASS HERE');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
}elseif($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']=='thatissopunkrock.org') {
define('DB_NAME', 'tispr_wp');
define('DB_USER', 'tispr_wp');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'PASS HERE');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
}else{
die("no such thing is setup here");
}

Basically the config file now knows to check the hostname of the requested blog and look at the correct database accordingly.

However, we stil do have two identical blogs. (Darn!) Worse, we can't really change the options on the web interface of the second blog because the url parameters are still set to the first blog meaning every link you click will take you to the first blog.

We will fix this with a database query on the second blog's database.

PLAIN TEXT

SQL:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://thatissopunkrock.org/punk' WHERE option_name = 'siteurl';

Now you can log into the second blog and make all the rest of the changes through the admin interface. All previous themes, plugins etc will be available. However, future ones need to be activated on each blog seperately. (You're still only downloading those once into the common source directory)

Conclusion

So what's the benefit of this setup? Why not just install two instances?

First of all. That is a valid solution as well. If you'd rather do that, please go ahead and do it. However, if you are going to repeat the same process for fifty blogs, I think there's some value in using a common source directory.

As a bonus, you'll only need to upgrade your files once if there's a security fix or an upgrade. And you don't need to download/install themes/plugins more than once.

We're almost done. Almost. The pretty urls don't work yet, because the rewrite rules in .htaccess are pointing to the first blog. Now we could fix this the elegant way by modifying our web server configuration so that each host would have a seperate .htaccess file (such as .htaccess-saf and .htaccess.punk etc). However, there's a faster hack for this. Again, if you have the same subdirectory on each of your domains (like a normal person would :P), you won't need this hack.

The reason your pretty urls don't work is because (using my setup as an example) the second blog is still seeing the rewrite rules and looking for a directory called 'saf' which is not there. (Remember the blog is at 'punk'). We work around this by just creating a new symlink with the same name, so our rewrite rules will be happy. Since this all happens in the background, we'll never see 'saf' mentioned anywhere on the second blog.

So taking my setup as an example again, the new symlink on the document root for http://thatissopunkrock.org/punk (second blog) would look like this:

saf -> punk

Well. There you have it. Sorta. Questions/Comments, use the Contact form.

Subversion umask tip

Comments: 0 - Date: Ağustos 5th, 2006 - Categories: Tips/Tricks

When using the subversion source control system with access methods other than apache2+webdav it's a good idea to create a seperate group and add all developers' usernames into this group.

Afterwards change the group of everything in the repository to this group. Assuming the group name is 'svn' the unix command to do this would be something like

chgrp -R svn /path/to/repository

Then you will also have give the group write access to the repository;

chown -R g+rw /path/to/repository

If everybody's umask's are set such that newly created files/directories will have 'rw' access for the group, then you're all set. That mask would be something like 002 (which creates a file equivalent to the chmod parameter 775).

umask's are usually not set at 002, they are set at 022 which gives write access to only the creator of the file.

So it's a good idea to use wrapper scripts for commands such as svn, svnadmin , svnserve etc. (When doing svn+ssh , a svnserve instance running as that user is spawned, so the wrapper will get called there too)

Before creating the wrapper, rename the actual svn executable to svn-real.

Assuming 'svn' is at /usr/local/bin a wrapper for 'svn' might look like this

#!/bin/sh umask 002 /usr/local/bin/svn-real "$@"

It would also make things a lot easier if you initially created the repository while logged in as a user that's in the 'svn' group. Just remember to do

umask 002

before running the 'svnadmin create' command and the permissions will be created correctly.

It's a little late in the post to tell you why you need all of this but it's better late than never. When using the file:// and svn+ssh:// methods of access, svn commands are run with the identity and permissions of the user that's running the command (in the ssh case, the username given to ssh). When multiple people are accessing the same repository, sooner or later you will get stuck with permission errors while creating or modifying the Berkeley DB files subversion creates in the repository. The above solution is needed to fix this. When using apache2+webdav this problem does not exist because once configured access to the database file is always made by the same daemon user.

Good luck.

Exercise/Week	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
Leg Ext	60\|23	80\|20	90\|16	100\|26	120\|21
Leg Curl	30\|15	40\|20	50\|21	60\|21	70\|18
Abs Bench	40\|20	50\|20	60\|24	65\|17	70\|18
Chinup	160\|12	150\|10	140\|12	130\|13	120\|13
Dips	160\|9	160\|13	150\|14	140\|14	130\|15

that is so punk rock

the DYI blog