freemode.net

Rumsfeld and the imminent threat    [ Politics ]

Old news, but I saw this video up at MoveOn.org showing Don Rumsfeld on Face The Nation talking about the "imminent threat" claim.   This is like Reagan's second term, the chicanery and backpedaling are coming fast and furious now.   And it's only March.

I did vote for Bush in 2000.   Last thing I wanted to see was another 4 years of Janet Reno, Al Gore and Clinton-era sleaze pervading the White House.   Well, they're out, but now we've got THIS administration lying, politicking and doing their damnedest to limit privacy, increase surveillance and government tracking, spend money like there's no tomorrow and keep huge tax cuts in place.   Quote from last week's Economist - "in terms of employment, this recession is the worst since the 1930s".   Grumble grumble grumble.

Mouse movement script    [ Software ]

Got a request for a perl script - user needs to automate double-clicking in a GUI app at three different coordinates.   Found Win32::TestGui on CPAN, so I wrote up a little script which uses the module to move the mouse around and double-click.   It's a horrible hack right now, nothing's parameterized for command-line args, but just in case anyone may find it useful, here it is.

[update - 20040323 1902h edobbs]
Updated the script to include command-line argument handling, better error checking and a compiled executable using perl2exe.   Behold version 0.2.   Averages about 20 double-clicks/second on my Dell Latitude C840 (2Ghz P4, 512MB) running Windows XP.

mouse.pl script + executable, version 0.2, released under the GPL.

xmmsarts on Debian    [ Software ]

Playing around with the Debian install on my laptop, it's almost ready for prime time.   I can use rdesktop to get to the Windows boxes through terminal services, I can get to the files on my XP install and use OpenOffice to read/edit documents, and XMMS is working under KDE3.

Needed to jump through some hoops though - by default, the xmms Debian package doesn't include an output plugin for libArts.   Little problem if you're trying to use it on KDE3, especially since the 'xmmsarts' package that provides this plugin can't install due to dependency conflicts.   Grrggh.

Still, this isn't as much of a problem as, say, dealing with RedHat.   More or less:

# apt-get source xmmsarts
# apt-get build-dep xmmsarts

[ ... need libglib1.3-dev, which doesn't exist anymore, but libglib2.0-dev is a replacement ...]

# apt-get install libglib2.0-dev xmms-dev libglib1.2-dev libgtk1.2-dev
# cd xmmsarts-0.4
# ./debian/rules binary
# dpkg -i ../xmmsarts*deb

I needed to track down glib-config and gtk-config via the Debian packages search page, but apart from that, not too bad for back-ending around the binary package dependencies.

Using subversion    [ Software ]

Yeah, subversion's been at 1.0 for a wee bit now.   I had read over the docs and played with it for a short time about a year back, but now I'm looking at converting the CVS repos I'm using at home and work to SVN.   Atomic commits and file renames are cool! :)

There's still a bit of a learning/customizing curve when it comes to using svn, for example, to get CVS-style "$Id$" replacement in text files, you need to do something like the following (assuming you care about .c and .h files):

svn propset svn:keywords "Id" *.[ch]
svn commit -m "added svn:keywords property"

The above snippet is shamelessly stolen from http://svn.brouhaha.com/.   I haven't tried any of the CVS-to-SVN conversion scripts/utils yet, right now I'm doing 'cvs co ${blah}' followed by 'svn import file:///svn/${blah} ${blah}' and futzing with stuff.

Wipe that hard drive    [ Software ]

Every so often, I need to wipe a hard drive and don't have a specific utility or procedure proscribed for the wiping.   Then it's fun to whip out ye olde Knoppix boot CD and this shell script:

#!/bin/sh
for device in /dev/hda1 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdb1 /dev/hdb2; do
    for pass in one two three four five; do
        echo "Wiping ${device}, pass ${pass}"
        dd if=/dev/zero of=${device} bs=32768
        dd if=/dev/urandom of=${device} bs=32768
    done
    echo "${device} wiped ${pass} times."
done
echo "Done."

This takes a while, but you can generally kick this off in the evening before going home and come back in the next day to find the specified devices wiped clean.   Tricky part is getting all the right devices - for example, on a Compaq Proliant 1600, the RAID controller shows up as /dev/ida with the logical drives enumerated as c0dX and their partitions as c0dXpY (similar to Solaris).   Often a 'dmesg | grep [device]' will help track down the particular partitions you care about.

[Update 20040831] Or you could just use the 'wipe' utility, which works on block devices just as well as on files. A 'wipe -kq /dev/hdaX' should do the trick for a quickie wipeout.

TACACS + Linux    [ Software ]

I've recently had to set up TACACS+ authentication on some Linux boxes (in place of NIS, LDAP, or other distributed auth systems), so here's a bit of documentation - as much for my own records as for anyone else to use:

Cygwin + Rxvt    [ Software ]

I've been playing around with Cygwin since I'm forced to run WinXP on my work laptop. Cygwin's great, I've used it on and off since when it was GNU-Win32 by Cygnus, but there's a lot of improvements to it in the last year or two.

One of the things that's irritated me is that the default console uses the cmd.exe shell as a base - makes it hard to copy + paste with the mouse, among other things.   After some effort, I found the right combination of tweaks to get Rxvt working as a decent console in Cygwin.

Katherine Update    [ News ]

She laughed last night!   Katherine's been smiling for a long time, and has previously smiled while making little "coooahh" sounds that we thought were laughs, but she *definitely* laughed last night at dinner.   I was making "Danger Will Robinson!" hand motions and using my radio-announcer voice, and she laughed out loud with a smile from ear to ear.   Absolutely adorable!

We're trying to get her to laugh again so we can capture it on film, but no luck so far - the same things don't make her laugh all the time. :)

New photo gallery URL    [ Site Info ]

Moved the photo gallery from the webserver at home over to an external hosting provider so that pictures should download faster - you can go to http://s93502202.onlinehome.us/gallery/ for the most up-to-date photos.   I'm still futzing with the DNS delegation for 'gallery.freemode.net' and the hosting provider, so I'll update links once that's finished.