OwlManAtt’s Blog

Recently, SBC has decided that filtering traffic to external networks on port 25 would be a pretty funny thing to do. Since I don’t send very many e-mails, I’ve just noticed this.

Why would this bother me, you may be wondering? It’s simple, really. I, like hundreds of thousands of other people, use my own mail server for outgoing mail. And, you guessed it, most SMTP servers run on port 25!

After patching my settings up with the SBC server and shooting off my e-mail, I grabbed a phone and punched in a series of numbers.

I was greeted by a friendly woman’s voice, asking me if this was the phone number on my account. I shouted yes, you fucking moron, knowing full well that this was their horrible voice-driven menu system and not a real person. After about five minutes of verbally abusing their bot, I was connected with a real SBC tech.

‘Hello, can I begin by asking for the phone number on your acc…’
‘Shut up. Why are you filtering port 25? Do you find this funny?’
‘Ah, well, sir, in our recent attempts to combat spa…’
‘Shut up. I have never sent any spam, nor will you ever find any spam coming from my network. Your records clearly indicate that I know what the fuck I am doing, and that the ONE windows box on my home network has a virus scanner which is regularly updated. Again, I ask, do you find pissing off customers of 8+ years to be funny?’
‘Well, sir, please visit [he says a link] and fill out an opt-out form to get it unblocked. I’ll take care of your request personally once it has been submitted.’
‘Good. Thank you for your cooperation. I expect to be able to use my mail servers again by this evening.’
‘Thank you for calling SBC, an–’
Click. I’d heard enough of him. He can take his spam and SHOVE IT.

So, on a happier note, I’ve added some funny friends-link-relation thing. It’s just a tag I added to certain links that denotes the fact that I know the person.

Also, try out Leif’s puzzle.

OwlManAtt.com is now running on AJ-Fork release 168, which was shoved out the door on January 30 (I don’t check for updates much) by the dev.

Oh boy, if that wasn’t one hell of a trip, than I don’t know what is.

It all began like any other update. I downloaded the source, unpacked it, backed up the old AJ-Fork install, deleted it, put the new source up, ran the installer, and fixed the layout. Easy, right?

Then I started running into problems. There have been various updates in this release, including a new format for the flatfiles, the removal of all BBCode, and that sexy new archive look (check it out!).

The new format wasn’t much to deal with. It was just some crap that didn’t have any impact on my files whatsoever. No big deal at all.

The removal of all BBCode did pose a problem, though. I’ve been using BBCode for a very long time, and now that it was gone, a lot of links/images broke. I couldn’t have this, so I decided that I would just use the BBCode stuff I wrote for Evanion. A quick, three second hack to insert a few lines into the file that displays the news, and everything’s good, right?

Wrong. Very wrong. Dead wrong.

AJ-Fork is perhaps the most bloated piece of shit blogging software I have ever had the displeasure of laying my eyes on. I have only done any hacking to it on one occasion, and that was EXTREMELY minor. (Just fixing the weird password storage method.)

I begin searching through the files to see what does what. I began at index, which included some other script to display the news. This includes some other massive script to open and parse the flatfiles. I decided here would be a good place to put the BBCode stuff. I’ll be done in a second, eh?

I began searching through, looking at the comments. Aside from the ‘plugin X hack’ ones, they were few and far between.

After about three minutes, I struck gold. The code that parsed the flatfile! Oh, joy! I tried inserting my bbcode code to what looked like the variable holding the news post. No luck. Again, another variable. No luck. Once more, another variable. No luck.

Wondering what the hell those things were storing, I removed the BBCode code and began reading again. I noticed something - run_filters on a bunch of variables. Perhaps if I added my BBCode code to THAT, I could get it working again. So, I began an epic quest to find ‘function run_filters’ in a file.

After a good twenty minutes of grepping, I was turning up nothing. Not a damned thing. I screamed, and remembered a file I uploaded earlier. It was something to list hooks. I ran the script, and it coughed up everywhere that had a run_filters.

Realizing that the whole filter thing was there for plugins, I added my own run_filter. No luck again, a parse error. Ah! But a good it! It said I was redeclaring a function *IN PLUGINS.PHP*!

I ran for the file, opened it, and found the function. I bashed in my code, and refreshed the homepage. It was now converting things to HTML, but it still defanged them and made them into normal text. How annoying. It also broke the stupid rollover-transparency-omglook menu in the admin panel.

To fix the admin panel thing, I made it news-specific (the hook is nice, when run_filters is called, the first arguement that it is given describes what’s being fed in). For some reason, this fixed everything. The admin panel, and the defanging.

Not knowing why or how the hell I fixed it, I closed everything down, rather pleased with my hack.

So, here’s to AJ-Fork 168 and many more years of blogging. Here’s also to a slow release cycle. I’m in no mood for doing that again.

In other news, Zotnix’s blog has been added to the external links list. This was mainly so I wouldn’t forget to check it. You should give it a read, he’s pretty cool.

Oh, and finally, Wyatt wanted me to go and see the HHG2G movie on Sunday. But I can’t, I just remembered it’s like…Easter and stuff then. Ah well.

As promised, I’m here again. I have a review for you, but it isn’t the AO review. I think I’ll do that later in the week.

As you may be able to tell from the title, I’m once again working with Ubuntu. This time, instead of just installing it on a seperate drive and running it once, I’ve nuked Debian and put Ubuntu on as Bell’s operating system. See, after Mako’s presentation, I couldn’t resist. It just seemed to awesome to refuse.

And it *is* too awesome to refuse. The installation, which is built off of Debian’s new installer (but has been hacked to ask as few questions as humanly possible and autodetect more things), was painless. The most complex task was partitioning, but that was only because I chose to do it by hand. See, I wanted to keep my /home partition as it was, so I couldn’t go with one of the quick Ubuntu-does-it partition options. However, Ubuntu could have done it for me if I told it to.

Once Ubuntu was installed, it rebooted, installed a few final packages and updated, then went right into the login screen.

And oh boy, was that a login screen. It was pleasing to the eye and to the ear. It’s much more elegant looking that Debian’s default gdm setup.

I slapped down my login credentials, and away I went into gnome. It adapted to the majority of my old gnome settings, with the exception of the mail-notification applet. This wasn’t in the Ubuntu-supported section of the repo, so I just had to add universe and apt-get it.

Ubuntu came with a decent array of desktop applications. It sported Firefox, totem, evolution, OpenOffice, and the rest of the apps needed for a functional desktop. I installed Thunderbird, since I prefer that to the outlook clone, struggled a bit with the older mail/settings files in the newer version of Thunderbird, and got it all working. (The difficulty with moving profiles between different thunderbird installs isn’t Ubuntu-specific. I have trouble doing it everywhere, Netscape Mail for WIndows included. Gah.)

MP3/Flash/DeCSS support was only one more apt-get away. The process for getting these patent-encumbered technologies setup was MUCH less painful than what one would have to do under Debian.

Next came SSHD. One apt-get and I’m good.

There was still one minor problem, though. You see, Ubuntu uses sudo for everything that needs root. The root account itself is locked by default. So, a lot of the administrative GUIs request my password when they start. The problem is that sudo caches my password for 15 minutes, and there isn’t any obvious button to clear it.

I do not want anyone to be able to walk up 15 minutes after I enter my password and fuck around with synaptic. Really, that’s not good. The fix, however, was easy. I found it in the sudoers manpage. A simple timestamp_timeout=0 in the /etc/sudoers file took care of everything.

There are a lot of improvements over Debian. When apt is running, or when there are updates avalible, an icon appears in the notification area. The mail notification applet only displays when there’s new mail. The dictionary applet shows spelling corrections beside the defenition instead of popping up a new window. Small things like that.

The killer feature, however, is hotplug. Debian probably had it in the repos, but it would be a bitch to set up. Ubuntu has it deployed by default. And oh boy, is this nice.

Now, I do not need to mount anything. Whenever I plug in my DAP or my thumbdrive, it mounts it and displays the filesyetem. When I plug my camera in, it SEES it as a camera and offers to move the images over onto the drive. That’s a big improvement over Debian not even noticing my camera.

Oh, and the same goes for CDs/DVDs. I pop one in, and it mounts it. Boom.

So far, I haven’t come across many shortcomings. The administrative GUIs are far superior to Debian’s, and I still have access to every package in Debian.

So, Ubuntu’s rating: most excellent. Highly suggested for starting out, even better than Fedora. The only thing Fedora has over it is a a proper GUI for the installer. Ubuntu is curses-based, Fedora is a full-blown X interface. But I’m sure something is coming soon!

And on to other business. I’d just like to end this post on a tastey note.

Mm, yes, pizza. I made it from scratch. Next time, I’ll take pictures of each step so I can write the Pizza-Making HOWTO.

Greetings once again, loyal readers. I know you have all been checking for updates every day, and you’ve been becoming increasingly worried about me dropping dead.

Well, you have nothing to fear, I’m still breathing. I haven’t been too busy these past few weeks, but since I haven’t updated in awhile, I’ll tell you all about it.

One of the few things that I’ve been doing is related to World of Warcraft. Owl playing that stupid shit game? No no, not exactly. You see, there is another game called Anarchy Online. It’s an older MMORPG, and at one time, it was fairly popular.

Then WoW came along, and half of the AO userbase defected. In responce, Funcom’s marketing department crapped out a year-long trial period in an attempt to find some new users.

And that is what I’ve been up to. I’ll be doing a review sooner or later (not now, it’s one in the morning). So yea. Level 61 soldier. Woo.

I’ve also been listening to some podcasts on my brand-new SanDisk Digital Audio Player. So far, I’ve listened to the LQ podcast, Kevin Devin’s In The Trenches, and the Linux Link Tech Show.

The LQ podcast isn’t all that spectacular. All you really get out of it is the opensource news, which I get on Slashdot anyway. There were a series of interviews that were pretty good, but that’s about it.

ITT was pretty good. It’s mainly a sysadmin thing, some I’ve gotten some good tips, and heard a few good stories.

The Linux Link Tech Show has so far been the best. These ‘casts are *long*. 80-130 minutes each. It’s four people who run Linux screaming and bitching about whatever (usually related to Windows or how they fucked the webcast up). It’s pretty much the conversations that we have after the presentation at SCOSUG, except more drawn-out. It’s pretty amusing.

Yea. Expect more from me soon (read as: I’ll post again in a month or so. Go to hell.).

Morning folks, Owl here, as usual. I have a nice followup to my last entry, do not fuck with owl.

It has been some time since the whole airport incident. The driver now makes it a point to greet me and ask how I am whenever she is driving, even if I’m not getting on the first bus (I wait for everyone else to arrive, and sometimes they’re late for the first bus). Very nice to me, even compliments me sometimes. Of course, I am also very polite to her. Yea, it’s a twisted game, but whatever.

That’s good, right?

Well, for me it is. Unfotunately, she’s extremely bitter to the rest of the crew. Probably being extra mean to make up for not being able to fuck around with me, for fear of me getting her ass fired. (Indeed, I think she figured out who sent the original complaint. Perhaps she saw the email conversation, or perhaps she noticed me showing the letter around in the back. Haha.)

And when I say bitter, I mean BITTER AS ALL HELL. As soon as Margaret gets on, she starts riding on her for ‘being too loud’. You know, as if talking is too loud or something. Last time, she didn’t open the back door at Margaret’s stop until Margaret shouted ‘Back door!’. Several times.

So, I guess you can put the ph33r of Owl into one person, but there’s only enough room for a ph34r that gr34t.

This, however, is not the end of the airport drama. The driver is but one front that this battle is fought on. There is another group who takes exception to where we stop - a group of juniors from coop.

They bitch and moan every time that we are there about the airport thing because it takes an extra two minutes for them to get home. You know, us little freshmens [sic] shouldn’t be delaying the oh-so-mighty juniors. I mean, it isn’t like my family hasn’t been patronizing that bus company for the past 10+ years or anything, and all they do is get a card from the school for free once every two weeks or anything. Haha, oh no, no no no.

The funniest bit is that not /once/ have they ever asked me to not request the driver stop there. (I always ask the driver since they’ve started moaning so that their beef is with *me*. Everyone else has to go to school with them, you know.) Had they just initially said ‘Hey d00d, could you just not ask today?’, I wouldn’t.

But why would anyone do something like that? It would make WAY too much sense. Instead, they choose to bitch, moan, and generally annoy myself, Alex, and Joslyn.

Hm. If they asked now, I would probably laugh in their faces, though. There is only so much abuse I will take before I stop being civil.

However, today I struck quite a blow to them. As per the norm, they were busy bitching and moaning loudly in the back of the bus about the airport. The driver pulls over to let someone off about a block from the turn, and, by gods, the bus gets STUCK. After about a minute, everyone besides myself, the driver, and some random old lady have abandoned the bus.

And that’s when the fun begins. In frustration, the driver tries the gas once again. And just as magically as we had gotten stuck, we were back on the road again, minus the people who bitch about being home two minutes later.

Of course, now they won’t be two minutes later. They’ll be about fifteen minutes later. As the bus drives by them, I just smile and wave. I do not think that there would be a more approproate situation to declare ‘PWNED’ in.

So I shall declare it.

PWNED.