Posts Tagged ‘me’

Revoking a seven year old pgp public key

Thursday, July 11th, 2002

I’m in the process of becoming a debian developer and one thing they
require your public gpg key uploaded to one of the href="http://wwwkeys.us.pgp.net/">keyservers. No problem, fairly
straight forward to do. However, I have an href="http://pgp.dtype.org:11371/pks/lookup?search=nozell%40wildcat.mv.com&op=i
ndex">old
key from back in the stone age of 1997 with an email address that
is no longer used. Simple to just generate a revocation key and
upload that, right? Unfortunately gnupg doesn’t support revoking that
old key and pgp 5.0 doesn’t know about revocation period. So I ended
up importing the secret key into gnupg and then changing the
‘username’ from ‘Marc Nozell’ to ‘please use href="http://pgp.dtype.org:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xC30441D2">marc@noze
ll.com
instead’. Just FYI.

Anyone else remember downloading the href="http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/cryptography_article-4070.html">PGP
v2.0 from a dialup BBS located half the country away and hoping
that it wasn’t illegal to obtain strong href="http://www.cryptome.org/">encryption from across state
lines?

Blosxom patched to support icons (take 2)

Wednesday, July 10th, 2002

In answer to my question in the href="http://www.nozell.com/cgi/blosxom/marc/2002/Jul/9#blosxom-with-icons">pre
vious
announcement, another href="http://www.oreillynet.com/~rael/lang/perl/blosxom/">blosxom
fan, DJ Adams suggested a
better patch.

Here is the updated
patch
or the href="/marc/blog/marc/data/blosxom-patched-for-icons-better">updated patched
version itself.

Thanks DJ!

Geocaching

Tuesday, July 9th, 2002

I recently picked up a href="http://www.garmin.com/products/etrexVenture/index.html">Garmin
Venture GPS and started playing the href="http://www.geocaching.com">geocaching ‘game’.

The idea is you visit href="http://www.geocaching.com">geocaching.com and print out or
download into your GPS the location of a cache. Then using the GPS
navigate to the cache and see whats inside. Typically there is a log
book and some trinkets that you can swap out for whatever trinkets you
brought. Some caches have disposable cameras so you can take your
picture and leave for the maintainer of the stash. The last cache we
found was a multi-cache site in a cemetery. The first
latitude/longitude location was a grave site where you did some simple
math on the person’s birthdate and that goes into part of the next
latitude/longitude location and so on until you get to the final
cache.

In the last
week the boys and I have found href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=7183">f href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=6641">o href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=158">u href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=5008">r
geocaches all within 30 miles of home. They can’t wait until next
weekend to find some more!

Blosxom patched to support icons

Tuesday, July 9th, 2002

I modified blosxom (version 0+4i) to support icons associated with
each entry.

My first thought was to key off of the file name
(announcement:blosxom-with-icons.txt,
linux:linux-in-20-websites-or-less.txt, etc) but went with adding an
HTML fragment to the end of the first line.

So the first line of this entry is:

Blosxom to support icons <img src="/marc/blog/marc/data/topicannouncements.g
if" alt="Announcement: ">

Here is the href="/marc/blog/marc/data/blosxom-0+4i.patch">patch or the href="/marc/blog/marc/data/blosxom-patched-for-icons">patched version itsel
f.

The one strange perl thing is I wanted to collapse the following two lines:

                my ($icon) = ($title =~ /(<img.*>)/);
                $title =~ s/(<img.*>)//;

into

                $title =~ s/(<img.*>)//;
                my ($icon) = $1;

but $icon is always set to the day of the week put in $1 from
the line:

        my($dw,$mo,$da,$ti,$yr) = ( $mtime =~ /(\w{3}) +(\w{3}) +(\d{1,2}) +(\d
{2}:\d{2}):\d{2} +(\d{4})$/ );

Anyone know why it doesn’t work?

Higher Linux uptime

Tuesday, July 9th, 2002

I didn’t have the heart to shutdown i-zimbra

$ uptime
10:10pm up 248 days, 23:35, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.04, 0.01

				

High Linux uptime

Saturday, June 22nd, 2002

My no-name white box (P200, 64M, Red Hat 7.1) had 231 day uptime when
I had to shut it down to add more memory and get ready to replace it
with a home built AMD 1.8G running debian ‘woody’. The previous white
box system was a P486/33 with 24M running Red Hat 6.2. A 6x speed bump
then 9x. In a few years will the next one be a 21.6G monster?

$ uptime
9:36am up 231 days, 11:01, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.03, 0.00

				

Teaching SpamAssassin about the Microsoft KLEZ virus

Thursday, June 13th, 2002

Adding lines like the ones below does a pretty good job about tagging
the KLEZ virus as spam. It does miss some of the KLEZ variations
because the KLEZ_CONTENT is slightly different.

$ grep -i klez /usr/share/spamassassin/*
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:rawbody KLEZ_IFRAME            /iframe
 src=3Dcid:/i
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:describe KLEZ_IFRAME           Frame u
sed by the KLEZ virus
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:rawbody KLEZ_CONTENT           /TVqQAA
MAAAAEAAAA/i
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:describe KLEZ_CONTENT          Content
 of part of the KLEZ virus
/usr/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf:score KLEZ_IFRAME              10.0
/usr/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf:score KLEZ_CONTENT             10.0

GNU/Linux in 20 websites or less

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2002

There are a growing number of folks where I work who are getting on
the linux bandwagon. Most of them are coming from a commercial UNIX
background and have questions about how Linux is different, wondering
where to get information, news and software.

Here is my short list of Linux websites for commercial UNIX refugees:

  1. Free Software Foundation — This
    organization, started by Richard
    M. Stallman
    (better know simply as RMS) and where the acronym GNU
    (GNU is Not UNUX and is pronounced Guh-News) comes from.
  2. The GNU General
    Public Licence
    (aka GPL) and href="http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html">Frequently Asked
    Questions about the GNU GPL are two very important pages you
    should read and understand. When people talk about ‘free software’ in
    this context, they are refering to the freedoms the software is
    licensed under, not the lack of a pricetag. The GPL is the prime
    reason why Microsoft is having a hard time competing with
    GNU/Linux/Open Source software.

  3. The Linux Documentation Project has
    a number of href="http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Compaq-Remote-Insight-Board-HOWTO/">
    excellent HOWTO
    documents, longer and
    FAQs on quite a
    number of topics.
  4. Slashdot (also known as
    /.) — News for
    Nerds, Stuff that Matters
    . This is a great place to
    get a feel for what the hot topics of discussion is in the
    open source/free software world. You can join their daily
    mailing list of news items.
  5. freshmeat.net — when you
    need to look for open source software. This is an package
    announcement repository. This is very useful if you sort of
    know what you need (say “web log analysis”) but don’t know
    which packages are available. You can join their daily mailing
    list of new/updated packages.
  6. sourceforge.net — This
    is a site that provides all the web tools needed to manage an
    open source project — mailing list, CVS code repositories,
    bug tracking, download servers, etc. Their search engine is
    also very useful for finding particular open source packages.
    Not everyone informs href="http://freshmeat.net">freshmeat of new packages or
    projects.
  7. Linux.com — A good general
    purpose starting point for information.
  8. openprojects.net
    While not really a usefull website, they host the very useful
    openprojects IRC chat network. Point a IRC client to
    irc.openprojects.net.
    Useful/interesting channels are #linuxhelp and
    #linpeople
  9. Major Linux Distributions:
    1. Red Hat — North America,
      worldwide, primary commercial vendor.
    2. SuSE — Strong European
      presence, known for high quality and very complete distribution
      .
      First distribution to ship six(!) CDs.
    3. debian — non-commercia
      l
      distribution; has a strong university and world wide following.
      Very
      nice package manager. One simple command to find, download and
      install software for example apt-get install apache.
      To keep
      a system updated to the latest versions, simply apt-get upd
      ate;
      apt-get -u upgrade
    4. Mandrake
      — North America, worldwide, focuses more on the
      desktop and ease-of-install. A good alternative to
      Red Hat for the novice user.
  10. linuxiso.org
    “Fresh ISOs like Mom used to Burn”. If you are looking to
    download linux installation CDs, this is the one place to go.
    If you don’t have broadband, just buy some cheap cds (under
    $5) from one of the many sponsors. Also check out some of the
    niche, but interesting, linux distributions like href="http://brlspeak.net">BrlSpeak for blind users or href="http://k12ltsp.org/ ">K12LTSP which is lets you boot
    diskless workstations from an applications server and is
    perfect for a K – 12 education environment.
  11. Linux Weekly News — Nice
    roll up of the week’s news for the Linux community.
  12. newsforge.net
    more news from the open source/Linux/BSD/GNU/etc world with a
    more journalistic slant.
  13. thelinuxshow.com
    — Listen to the weekly Tuesday night webcasts of various open
    source/Linux/BSD/GNU/etc pundits talk about the weeks news.

  14. Of course the best server hardware to run Linux on can be
    found here: HP and href="http://www.compaq.com/linux">Compaq. Also see the
    technical white papers on href="http://activeanswers.compaq.com/aa_asp/Solution_List.asp?str=6-10
    0-225-1">Linux
    solutions.

Three companies, one cubicle

Wednesday, March 20th, 2002

If everything goes the way Mike and Carly says it will, I’ll have worked for three major computer vendors while sitting the in the same office with the same telephone number. Just about as many OSes, too.

First entry

Tuesday, March 5th, 2002

Blosxom looks
nice and simple. Unfortunately I always misspell it.