Schadenfreude » _why

DNS for bash

Erik — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:16:00 +0000

Today, I decided I wanted a network service that propagated variables and aliases to every login shell that subscribed to it. This is dangerous on a large scale, but perfectly acceptable on my small home network where everyone trusts everyone else.

First, I got Camping installed, bringing back fond memories of Ruby development. I then copied off the blog example, and created TreeHugger, a 427 line script that provides a web interface to edit the variables, and a plain text output for the shells to source.

This script, when run, allows some simple MVC actions to an sqlite3 database.

As you can see, I have some aliases here I want to send to all the subscribing hosts. Eventually, I want to add some detection functionality to the database (mostly reverse DNS lookups for host rule referencing). I just have to access /out to get my desired output:


# Treehugger Configuration
# Aliases
alias ai='sudo apt-get install'
alias aup='sudo apt-get update'
alias aug='sudo apt-get upgrade'

# Environment Variables

Now, to get this into bash. I looked into making the date command spit out pretty unique timestamps. Turns out you can do this with the nanoseconds format:


$ date +%s%N
1206926780157462141

I made it so wget saves the treehugger config to a tempfile using the somewhat random seed above as a filename suffix, and then I have my shell source it:


FILENAME=/tmp/treehugger-`date +%s%N`; 2>/dev/null wget -O $FILENAME  http://rofl.who/treehugger/out && source $FILENAME && rm $FILENAME

And now I have nice aliases on my laptop served up from my desktop as fresh as the shell:


hank@davros:~$ alias
alias ai='sudo apt-get install'
alias aug='sudo apt-get upgrade'
alias aup='sudo apt-get update'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

Sending Adblock Google Blockers Away

Erik — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:42:00 +0000

Of course I know that a simple Greasemonkey script can very easily thwart this, but I don’t expect most people to go out and find it to defeat this. If you don’t like my google ads, you can read this wonderful entry.


function sendJerksAway() {
      // Bye
      eval(unescape("%69%66%28%24" +
      "%24%28%75%6e%65%73%63%61%70%65" +
      "%28%27%25%35%62%25%36" +
      "%65%25%36%31%25%36" +
      "%64%25%36%35%25%33" +
      "%64%25%36%37%25%36%66%25%36%66%25" +
      "%36%37%25%36%63%25%36%35%25" +
      "%35%66%25%36%31%25%36%34%25%37%33%25%35%66" +
      "%25%36%36%25%37%32%25" +
      "%36%31%25%36%64%25%36%35%25%35%64%27%29%29%2e%6c" +
      "%65%6e%67%74%68%20%3d%3d" +
      "%20%30%29%20%64%6f%63%75%6d%65%6e%74" +
      "%2e%6c%6f%63%61%74%69%6f" +
      "%6e%20%3d%20%22%68%74%74%70%3a" +
      "%2f%2f%67%6f%6f%67%6c%65%2e%62%6c%6f" +
      "%67%6e%65%77%73%63%68" +
      "%61%6e%6e%65%6c%2e%63%6f%6d" +
      "%2f%61%72%63%68%69%76%65%73" +
      "%2f%32%30%30%37%2f%30%37" +
      "%2f%32%34%2f%67%6f%6f%67%6c%65%2d%72%65%63%6f%6d" +
      "%6d%65%6e%64" +
      "%73%2d%74%75%72%6e%69%6e%67" +
      "%2d%6f%66%66%2d%61" +
      "%64%62%6c%6f%63%6b%2f%22"));
}

Then it’s just this:

Processing: It’s totally not Flash

Erik — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 04:41:00 +0000

I’m not one to advocate Java generally, but Processing is totally hawt. Here’s something I screwed around with today:

type=”application/x-java-applet”
archive=”/assets/2007/7/20/sketch_070719a.jar”
width=”500″ height=”500″
standby=”Loading Processing software…” > codebase=”http://java.sun.com/update/1.4.2/jinstall-1_4_2_12-windows-i586.cab”
width=”500″ height=”500″
standby=”Loading Processing software…” > value=”/assets/2007/7/20/sketch_070719a.jar” />

Ball[] myBalls;

void setup()
{
  size(500,500);
  frameRate(25);

  myBalls = new Ball[300];
  for (int i = 0; i < 300; i++) {
    myBalls[i] = new Ball();
    myBalls[i].x = random(0, 500);
    myBalls[i].y = random(0, 500);
    myBalls[i].r = random(0, 10);
    myBalls[i].xv = random(-5, 5);
    myBalls[i].yv = random(-5, 5);
    myBalls[i].mycolor = int(random(0, 100));
    myBalls[i].myseed = int(random(25,100));
  }
}

void draw() {
  background(0);
  for (int i = 0; i < 300; i++) {
    myBalls[i].run();
  }
}

class Ball
{
  float x; //X acis centroid
  float y; //Y axis centroid\
  float r; // Radius
  float xv; //X axis velocity
  float yv; //Y axis velocity
  int mycolor;
  int myseed;
  int counter;

  void run()
  {
    drawShape();

    x += xv;
    y += yv;

    yv += 0.4;

    if(x < 0 || x > width) {
      xv = -xv;
    }
    else if(y < 0 || y > height) {
      yv = -1.1 * yv;
    }

    if(counter % myseed == 0) {
      xv = random(-5,5);
      yv = random(-5,5);
    }
    counter++;
  }

  void drawShape()
  {
    smooth();
    ellipseMode(CENTER_RADIUS);
    noStroke();
    fill(mycolor);
    ellipse(x,y,r,r);
  }
}

You can download it here: sketch_070719a

_why thinks I’m a bike

Erik — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 17:59:34 +0000

I got featured on
Redhanded.
Apparently, I’m a bike. Probably because of my behavior under the name
o`o in IRC. Sigh, it’s my only claim to fame. :(

Extending RedCloth

Erik — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:52:31 +0000

I wanted to put emoticons into Textile for
Beast, but to do it, I needed to use very
few lines of code since there is a 500LOC limit on Beast. After a long time
debugging, here’s what I came up with:

First, I made a new method in the RedCloth namespace.


class RedCloth
  def refs_smiley(text)
    text.gsub!(/(\s)~(:P|:D|:O|:o|:S|:\||;\)|:'\(|:\)|:\()/) do |m|
      bef,ma = $~[1..2]
      filename = ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root+"/images/emoticons/"+(ma.split(//).collect{|l|l[0]}.join('_'))+".png"
      "#{bef}"
    end
  end
end

All I’m doing here is some nifty gsubbing with a block. The resultant
replacement expression is the last thing returned by the block. This RegExp
will match any of the possible emoticons I specified as long as they are
preceeded by a ~. This prevents things like :Person from being converted
into :Person. Here is
the post about it with all the emotes I allow. Try it out. While I was at
it, I re-activated tables for Textile in Beast. This was totally necessary. ;)

Then I changed the text format helper in Beast to reflect my new method:


  def format_text(text)
    RedCloth.new(auto_link(text.to_s)).to_html(:textile,:refs_smiley)
  end

The key part here is the options passed to to_html. This allows you to
pick any rules you want for your code generation. I found that when I named
the method smiley, it wouldn’t be called. That’s because there is a
RegExp match that happens when the rule methods are called that matches on
methods that begin with refs_. I think you could get around that
somehow, but I just went with it. The default options that are implicit on a
call of to_html are :markdown,:textile, and as you can see, I left out
markdown. Also, I realized that white_list was causing my generated
tables to be ruined, so I took that out. This might be a little dangerous,
but I’m not too worried at this point. I might have to submit a patch (or
make a modification) to the white_list plugin. The possibilities here are
endless, thanks to _why.

DNS Mania

Erik — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 15:26:02 +0000

Well, I was stumbling today and found OpenDNS. I
was excited to find that I could make it coexist with OpenNIC in my dhclient
configuration. Here’s the resultant line that makes all this magic happen:


prepend domain-name-servers 63.226.12.96, 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

So now, when I use dhcp to grab an IP, I end up prepending these nameservers
onto my resolv.conf. OpenDNS makes spam sites and domain squatters disappear.
And it makes the average request a lot faster.

Yesterday, bish0p and I sat down and started
work on MyDNS. It turns out that the db structure
isn’t all that bad, so it will be fairly straightforward to build a
Rails/Camping interface for it. I already started one in Camping called
Beacon. I was going to name it ChunkyBeacon, but #camping decided
against that.

In other news, I’m going to leave Fairbanks for a while soon. It will be
exciting to go on this adventure into the real world for four months.

TryRuby Alias (For Ruby Non-Believers)

Erik — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:21:03 +0000

Today, I decided I needed a quick way for my friends who run Linux to try ruby. Using _why’s awesome curl implementation of tryruby, here is the ultimate alias for any bashrc:


alias tryruby='sh -c "$(curl -s http://tryruby.hobix.com/try.sh)"'

Parsing Amazon with Hpricot

Erik — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:07:34 +0000

_why made a really sweet HTML parser called Hpricot. This allows you to easily parse a remote document using Open-URI. Here’s how to do it:


require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
puts "Grabbing Page..."
html = open("http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844300439/ref=amb_cob_bh_194691301/002-0086113-2532879?n=283155")
puts "Parsing..."
doc = Hpricot.parse(html)
(doc.search("//table//td[@id='prodImageCell']")/:img).each do |link|
  p link.attributes
end


{"src"=>"http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1844300439.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_V54614147_.jpg", "border"=>"0", "id"=>"prodImage", "height"=>"240", "alt"=>"Cobblers", "width"=>"240"}


ruby -rrubygems -ropen-uri -e "require 'hpricot';(Hpricot.parse(open('http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844300439/ref=amb_cob_bh_194691301/002-0086113-2532879?n=283155')).search(\"//table//td[@id='prodImageCell']\")/:img).each {|link| p link.attributes }"

Amazing stuff really. The parser is so amazingly fast. All the time is spent fetching the page, not parsing!

Also, “Sunset, Sunrise” by Razor Ramon is awesome.

RubySig using Why’s Remote Require!

Erik — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:14:31 +0000

Using Why’s insane URI require stuff, I revised my sig by making a file called rubysig.txt on modzer0:


$_=[1165125995,541553253,1734811772,543711598,1799381356,1634954081,778396789,545005639,1346849637,2033852464,2016687683,825700673,48];$/="";:c.id2name.hex.times{$/<<78.chr};$/<<99.chr;$\=$_.pack($/);puts$\

and calling it like this:


ruby -ropen-uri -e 'eval(open("http://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/~hardwarehank/rubysig.txt").read)'

I just made a DNS redirect for the URL at sig.ralree.info so soon it will be this:


ruby -ropen-uri -e 'eval(open("http://sig.ralree.info").read)'

Yay for Why!

iPod Linux Journey Begins

Erik — Sun, 28 May 2006 13:08:03 +0000

Intro

I wrote a HOWTO
on compiling the iPod Linux Installer. Once I got it compiled, I could not get it to recognize my iPod, so I decided to do it by hand, which was very easy. I started with my 20GB 4th Generation iPod, which was had dead batteries for quite a while. I created a giant FAT32 Partition on it and formatted it, then I downloaded the latest iPod update software in Windows. I used the software to Restore my iPod to a clean slate Apple OS WinPod configuration. Then, I rebooted, and used the iPodLinux wiki as a guide.

I found their wiki is a bit cumbersome to use since some of the information is outdated. So, I decided to log my experience here.

Firmware

First, I needed to back up the original firmware to disk for integration into the new Loader firmware, as well as just to back it up for restoration. First, I plugged in my iPod, and saw it was initialized to /dev/sda. I then followed these instructions, backing up and patching my firmware. Basically, you need to get make_fw first. I got the x86 Linux build, which worked fine. This is basically it:


# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=orig_firmware.bin
$ ./make_fw -o apple_os.bin -e 0 orig_firmware.bin
$ ./make_fw -g 4 -v -o my_sw.bin -i apple_os.bin loader.bin

I then needed to partition my iPod to accept the Linux partition, as well as to resize the wasteful firmware partition. I used the following configuration:

Then I disk-dumped the firmware I generated onto the firmware partition of the iPod


# dd if=my_sw.bin of=/dev/sda1

That done, I partitioned.