Korey Pelton's Blog

I told my boss to hire my frands

Oculus Rift Roller Coaster

One of my servers downstairs shut itself off

MySQL 5.5 and InnoDB

Welp, this totally screwed me over today as I spent hours wondering why my Perl script's MySQL insert and update statements weren't working on some tables. If you've recently upgraded to MySQL 5.5, new tables that you create are InnoDB instead of MyISAM, and so AutoCommit must be turned on or you can just do a commit statement after your inserts and updates. FFFFUUUUUU. PHP has AutoCommit turned on by default, evidently, so it is not effected.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-io-changes.html

Windows administrator privileges

XScreensaver XFlame!

RHEL 6 to Ubuntu 12.10 workstation migration

My RHEL 6 to Ubuntu 12.10 workstation migration at ISU is complete! Here are a few notable notes I took note of for whomever's benefit it can be a benefit to:

• Ubuntu Minimal + plopping on xfce4 and whatever else you want actually works pretty well as opposed to just using XUbuntu. No bloat, fuss, nor mess.
• mount.cifs is in the cifs-utils package. ;-p
• ttf-mscorefonts-installer gives you pweeeety fonts
• Don't forget to keep your CUPS printer settings (http://localhost:631/). Then you can plop these into your new CUPS settings after you migrate and printing can resume as if nothing happened... ;-p

My Old Nasty Linux Workstation

I'm kind of a stubborn stick in the mud when it comes to my home PC. It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (single core, 1.8 Ghz) with 1 GB of memory and a Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 video card. I run XUbuntu linux on it and it works fine. But then along comes Firefox 4, that has new and improved graphics hardware acceleration, and it just so happens that it doesn't work with Linux very well. Search around on Google to read about the Firefox team's bitches and complaints about making their software work with Xorg drivers. Well, it works pretty well on Linux if you've got some new fancy hardware or something. But, hey, I run Linux BECAUSE IT IS LIGHTWEIGHT AND I DON'T HAVE TO BUY NEW FANCY HARDWARE DAMMIT. :-) So, there's this wonderful web browser test page created by the good folks at Mozilla, and it's located here: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ Go ahead, give it a try, see what you get. It's a good test to see if A) your browser supports crazy CSS stuff and B) how well your browser performs graphically. This is becoming an increasingly more important thing since sites like Facebook are using CSS to layer things like photo collections over a web page shown in the background. Yup, that feature requires some decent CPU and graphics card and it is slower than beans on an old PC running Firefox 4. And here's my results on my lovely little home PC:

• Firefox 4 - 1 FPS
• Chrome - 8 FPS
• Opera - 8 FPS

So, guess what browser I'm using right now to type this? Opera! Yup, going back to using good old snappy Opera. Opera is pretty close to Firefox in that it has lots of user preferences AND it has that search box in the upper right that I use like 3 trillion times a day. Now I just need to figure out how to add more search selections to it. I'm sure there's a web page decidated to that. The fiendish Opera fanboi club is smaller, but about 10 times as violently loyal to their chosen browser as the Firefox club. :-) Matthew Wheelock, if you're reading this, I know you are shedding a tear of pride that I am using Opera. :-p

EDIT: Wow, to add a search engine to Opera, you simply go to whatever search site you want (like imdb.com), right click in its search box, and select "Create search".  Damn, that's nice.

NVidia S-Video Problem Solved!

I love using the old PC sitting next to my television to watch various online videos with my family and friends.  It features an old NVidia GeForce MX 4000 v ideo card with S-video out.  It is perfectly matched to my old 32 inch Panasonic CRT television (stop laughing!).  Yeah, I know, I'm in dire need of an upgrade.  Recently, I upgraded the PC to XUbunt u 10.10, and that's when I starting having X problems.  When X attempted to start, I got the following error (here's the one from /var/log/Xorg.0.log):

[    12.330] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so
[    12.331] dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so: undefined
symbol: miEmptyData
[    12.331] (EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so
[    12.331] (II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
[    12.331] (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (loader failed, 7)
[    12.331] (EE) No drivers available.
[    12.331]
Fatal server error:
[    12.331] no screens found

xrandr --output TV-1 --mode 800x600

Not sure what the problem was there.

I knew before the upgrade that the NVidia binary drivers worked fine in this exact setup, so I searched google for the "dlopen" error you see in the X log above.  The first search result led me right to the answer on this launchpad page:

SOLVED (for 32-bit arch): NVIDIA released a new legacy driver ======================= Version: 96.43.19 Certified Release Date: 2010.11.16 Operating System: Linux Language: English (U.S.) File Size: 15.7 MB =======================

You may download it here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-96.43.19-driver.html

After installing this driver, everything is fine.

I downloaded the driver, made it executable, ran it, and then it complained that X can't be running during installation.  So, I put the non-working xorg.conf in place and rebooted, which booted Ubuntu into console mode.  Later, I found that using "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop" was a much more elegant method of stopping X.  Ahem.

While running the driver installation program in console mode, it asked if a new xorg.conf should be written, and I said yes to that.  After rebooting, everything was perfect.  I could then use the Applications -> System -> NVidia X Server Settings program to output video to my TV just like I was able to before.  Yayz!

After all this, a friend of mine suggested I try the "nouveau" driver which is supposed to be the new open source NVidia driver.  It didn't seem to be a drop-in replacement for nv (X gave yet another error and died), and since the NVidia propriety drivers work great, I decided to let things be.  Please write a comment if you think I should have dug into this further!

Update, December 19, 2010 - I was swapping around hard drives in a geeky frenzy this weekend and so I had to reinstall XUbuntu 10.10 on the living room PC.  I noticed that when I installed version 96.43.19 of the NVidia drivers for my GeForce MX 4000 video card, it would then remove /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1 and so that would mess up mplayer.  This is really irritating because mplayer is my all time favorite media player.  It is so minimalist and simple.  That's the way software is supposed to be, even if it requires us to read documentation to use it (ok, maybe not all the time)!  Ok, so what did I do to fix this?

aptitude reinstall libvdpau1

Alrighty then, well, problem solved.  Why did this happen?  Well, probably because the GeForce MX 4000 is rather old and no one really cares about it any more.  Well, it works fine for my needs.  With enough command line bludgeoning, anyone can usually solve any problem in Linux.  Ubuntu rocks.

Installing Linux On Your Neighbor's Computer

What Do You Use Computers To Do?

1. Facebook and Farmville!  Whee!
2. I love YouTube.  Gotta have my music vids.
3. The kids need the ability to research online for school work.
4. Document creation for school is a must.
5. Some other things like a media player and some games would be nice, but isn't terribly necessary.  Music, video, and games are an online thing nowadays.

Oooh, Aaah!!

So How Are Thing Going After A Few Weeks?

1. It breaks people out of their comfort zone and allows them to start exploring the fundamentals of computing concepts, rather than blindly following the prescribed process that Windows provides for them.  Instead of mindlessly following a wizard, they think instead in terms of "where does the data need to go and how do I access it" and "what protocol do I need to use".
2. Linux gives people options.  If you don't like a particular distribution, window environment or piece of software, you have the power to do something else.  Open source software is all about freedom and choice.

Jamie Zawinski quotes

I think my phone is running over

Introducing the hardware security device!

Welp, Intel just snagged McAfee. At first I was like "uh... what? that aquisition makes no sense." But after thinking about it, I thought that it'd be kind of cool to have a security device of some kind that you pop into one of the slots on your motherboard which analyzes everything that goes through your computer, thus taking that task off of your CPU. Yeah, software antivirus takes a significant amount of computing resources. That's actually one of the top things that makes me claw my eyeballs out about Windows. People go out and buy a modern, fast PC, then they put Windows on it, and between their antivirus and all the other bloated garbage that collects on Windows, by the end of the week their running a 486. :-)

Anywho, a device that plugs into your motherboard to analyze all the crap flowing through your PC wouldn't work. The inteligence would have to be built in to your CPU and/or Ethernet card, or else all that stuff would have to flow through this "security device" and that'd be a bottleneck. Then again, adding inteligence into your CPU or Ethernet card to do that would also slow things down. Let's face it, security on your PC slows things down just like security at the airport does.

So, the answer is for OS makers and software authors to take the time to produce optimized and secure software, so that we can all stop this madness. Everyone wouldn't have to buy new PCs every friggin 3 years if software was written with more care. But I'm sure Intel isn't a cheerleader for this effort. Optimized software would mean less hardware sales! Oh noes!!!

Meanwhile, I'm happily using Linux on 6 year old hardware. :-)

The Difference Between A Disk And A Drive

Wow, I feel retarded. I was just talking to my cow-orker (definition: http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html) about our tape backup system. He started talking about tapes and drives and such and I was trying to think about the big, fat tape library machine and where all those names fit into the puzzle. And then he said, "the machine has 4 drives" and I said, "you mean, there's 4 places inside the machine where the machine plops the tapes to read and write to?" and he said "yup."

It was then that I found enlightenment.

Tapes, floppy disks, cd-roms, and DVDs are all just plain old disks/media. Media that has no built in motor to spin or move the media, and no way to read and write to/from the media. However, a hard drive has all that stuff built in to the same device. Or at least modern ones do (I don't think the really ancient ones did).

So, is it correct to say "hard disk" or "hard drive"? Well, both! :-D Both terms are used interchangeably all the time since those devices have a disk AND a drive built into the same device. Actually HDD, a common abbreviation for a hard drive, stands for "hard disk drive", which is the correct term for them.

Now go, and teach others these valuable lessons! :-p

Simple Eggdrop Bot On Ubuntu

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::Simple;

###############################################
$url = "http://moneycentral.msn.com/home.asp";
###############################################

$html = get $url;
@html = split(/\n/,$html);

foreach $a (@html) {
    if ($a =~ /%24INDU/) {
        getquote();
        last;
    }
}

sub getquote {
@one = split(/>/,$a);
$one[19] =~ s/<\/div//;
print "DJIA: $one[19]\n";
}

/usr/share/doc/eggdrop/README.Debian

set userflag "-"
set trig "!dow"
bind PUB $userflag $trig main_func

proc main_func {nick uhost hand chan arg} {
set fp [open "| ./dow.pl"]
set data [read $fp]
close $fp
putserv "PRIVMSG $chan :$data"
}

Dirty IT job

Nasty RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 work PC

LaTeX upgrade

Haven't booted up Windows XP

Oracle finalizes Sun purchase

Bittorrent clients

Zen Of Programming

Now that I work for ISU

Recaptcha

It's Saturday and I'm working on an awful program for work.

I hate Internet Explorer.

4th of July Parade 2007

IRC Database Project: An Attempt At Finding Local IRC Users :-P

It's amazing just how much information about a person you can gather on IRC. In fact, I really can't think of any other Internet resource that automatically offers so much information about a person. From a simple IRC /whois you can usually get someone's name and IP address. And from the IP address, you can deduce their ISP and location. This is all assuming, of course, that they include their name in their IRC client setup info and that their hostname isn't cloaked. About a month ago I decided I wanted to see if I could build a database of IRC users so I could search for local geeks. Why? Well, I've met local geeks before and it's a lot of fun getting together with people of like mind. Anyway, the following is the tale of how I went about this endeavor.

Networks and Channel Lists

It was my goal to get the largest number of IRC users possible to increase my chances of finding people in my small region of the world. To do this, I wanted to find only the most populated networks and channels and not bother with the small ones. Also the larger channels and networks would be less likely to notice any silly little IRC bots I would create to gather my data, tee hee! Yes, I was rather unsure that some parts of this project were 100% legal :-P Anyway, I first went to places like searchirc.com and irc.netsplit.de to find out what the world's most populated networks were, got the hostnames of about the top 30, and then made a simple bot (I use the POE::Component::IRC module in Perl to make my IRC bots, by the way. Yes, I'm a lame script kiddie XD) to visit each one and do a /list command. Actually, before I made this bot, I was using a program written in C (written by zer0python) that performed the /list on a specified server, but I decided to write my own for the sake of flexibility of features. This worked well only about 50% of the time since many networks truncate the output of the list command. Meh. I then recorded all channels with at least 30 users in a MySQL database so that I would have maximum flexibility for manipulating the data. Perl was a wise choice of programming language for this project since it involved extensive text parsing ;-)

Venturing Into The Channels

I then wrote a bot for simply connecting to a specified channel, joining a specified channel, performing a /who, sleeping for about 2 minutes, then disconnecting. After doing a few trial runs of this maneuver, I found out that most of the networks I was connecting to cloaked the hostnames of the all the users. Drat. I needed to have complete hostnames or ip addresses of users or else this whole project would be rather pointless. So I set out to find out which of the 46 networks I had gathered didn't mess with the users' hostnames and there were only 5:

• irc.quakenet.org
• irc.undernet.org
• irc.efnet.org
• irc.freenode.net
• irc.deltaanime.net

At this point, I decided I'd better just find out the top 100 or so most populated channels of these networks, gather all those users, and go from there. So I created a script (netsplit_info.pl) to download the most highly populated channel listings for these networks from irc.netsplit.de and another script (netsplit_import.pl) to stash the channels in the database.

Lists O' Users

Next, I had to write a script to connect to a network and visit each of the channels for that network in the database. Thus I didst create *DUN DUN DUNNNN!!!* chan_spider.pl! Yes, I know, there's a lot of repititious subroutines at the bottom of that program, but I wrote it that way because POE::Component would complain otherwise. Anyway, it's just a silly Perl script, relax. :-P It's supposed to be hideous. XD And here (link removed) is the script for parsing and dumping the output of the channel spider into the database. Pretty nifty, aye?

After spidering freenode, I had about 18,000 user records in my database. But after using the SQL distinct function, I found that I only had around 4,000 distinct users. This is partially because A) most users are in multiple channels and B) my channel spider script was quite buggy and did stupid things like performing a /who multiple times in the same channel and other bizarrities. I'm not sure whether this was a bug in POE::Component::IRC or my code. If you have a comment on this, feel free to give me a holler. :-P So, to find out whether or not these people lived in my vicinity, I found out the netranges of local ISPs in my area using the whois program, which is available for all *nix operating systems. For those of you who aren't aware, when you give whois an ip address, it will look it up in one of the four Network Information Centers (NICs): APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC. The whois program then returns information about what ISP owns the ip address, the netrange that the ip address belongs to, and some other information.

However, most of the user records in the database had hostnames that needed to be resolved into ip addresses before I could do an ip address netrange search. So I created a program to do that :-)

DNS Mayhem

So, I had approximately 3,000 DNS lookups to do. I couldn't do this with my ISP's DNS servers since they might notice and shut off my net connection and that would be a bad thing ;-p Many ISPs leave their DNS servers open to anyone who happens to want to use them to do a DNS resolution, so I compiled a list of several of these servers I found in the Seattle and Denver areas. 64 of them, to be exact. I just googled for Seattle and Denver ISPs since those cities are bound to have some pretty large ISPs and probably wouldn't notice a few hundred DNS lookups :-P I found out their nameservers by, again, using the oh-so-handy whois program.

The Not-So-Exciting Conclusion

After a couple hours of dns_lookup.pl chugging along, it finished and I feverishly tried my first netrange, which was one of cablone.net's Pocatello netranges:

mysql> select * from users where ip between '24.116.152.0' and '24.116.159.255';
+-----+---------+----------+---------------------------------+-----------+-----------+----------------+
| id  | chan_id | username | hostname                        | nick      | ircname   | ip             |
+-----+---------+----------+---------------------------------+-----------+-----------+----------------+
| 523 |     211 | furuba   | 24-116-157-215.cpe.cableone.net | buckminst | buckminst | 24.116.157.215 |
+-----+---------+----------+---------------------------------+-----------+-----------+----------------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

Sigh. It's Bucky. Well, let's try another one! This time, lets try all the Qwest hostnames for Southeast Idaho! *types madly in MySQL!*

mysql> select * from users where hostname like '%bois.qwest.net';
+------+---------+----------+--------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+
| id   | chan_id | username | hostname                       | nick | ircname | ip              |
+------+---------+----------+--------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+
| 4587 |     305 | tlp      | 168-103-130-145.bois.qwest.net | tlp  | tlp     | 168.103.130.145 |
+------+---------+----------+--------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

ARGH! It's tlp! *groan* Why can't Sexy_Linux_ChiX0r be found?!?!?

Well, in conclusion, there's a lot of people on IRC.... but not THAT many. Searchirc.com records an average of a little over 1,000,000 which, spread out over planet earth, is actually pretty sparce. Ah, well, I learned a lot of nifty things with this project, even though it was a miserable failure. Ok, maybe not totally a failure... like, I can PM Bucky and tlp on IRC and say something like "w00t! my lil channel spider scriptie thingie found you!! ARRR HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!!". *ahem*