cloudplasma

i don’t often tweet from my head­er­less debian server but some­times the mood strikes. twidge is a com­mand line twit­ter client for linux that enables users to do just that. it sup­ports all the usual fea­tures of a stand­ard client (with graph­ical lim­it­a­tions obvi­ously) but also has some extra good­ies that you might find useful. want to sched­ule a tweet to be sent in the future? twidge can do that…

at 13.30
at> twidge update “lunch­time i think“
at> ctrl-d

it can also tweet when a cer­tain system event occurs or email you when a tweet is sent to you or a con­tact replies.

all in all a very handy…albeit niche…bit of code. grab it from github or apt-get install twidge if you’re on ubuntu (debian 5 users will need to enable some squeeze repositories).

been having a lot of trouble with con­stant attacks on one of my serv­ers (see this post). the attacks have become so severe that i’ve decided that simply ban­ning indi­vidual ip addresses isn’t enough. i’m now block­ing any ip ori­gin­at­ing in poland or russia. this may seem rather extreme but as this server doesn’t actu­ally host a web­site that deliv­ers con­tent then it shouldn’t be get­ting many non-malicious vis­it­ors anyway.
just issue the fol­low­ing from the com­mand line (as root) to update iptables…replacing ‘blocked.com’ with the domain/ip address that you want to thwart.

ipt­ables –A INPUT –m string –algo bm –string “*blocked.com” –j DROP

my server is being hit by an ever increas­ing number of brute force attacks via ssh (at least 20 a day…that might not seem like a lot for some of you but it’s plenty for my wee machine that’s con­nec­ted with a domestic adsl line)…check /var/log/secure and /var/log/messages for con­nect attempts.

the best way to deal with this? well obvi­ously don’t allow root to login over ssh, allow con­nec­tions using ssh2 only and of course use strong pass­words. you could change the default port from 22 to some­thing else too. there are other, more restrict­ive, meth­ods but i won’t go into them here.

my favoured solu­tion? denyhosts. been run­ning it for 5 years or so…it mon­it­ors your logs and blocks ip addresses based on rules that you can tweak to suit your needs. it can also sync your hosts.deny file with a list of known attack­ers thus not even giving them the chance to con­nect. genius. on a debian-based system (i’m run­ning debian 5) it can be installed with apt-get install denyhosts it can then be con­figured using your favour­ite editor joe /etc/denyhosts.conf see the denyhosts faq for options. after that it basic­ally takes care of itself…you can, how­ever, set it to email you every time a new host is blocked…set this up and watch the ip addresses roll in…

just heard about googlecl…it may have been doing the rounds for ages but i’m a bit slow on the uptake.

it allows you to inter­face with vari­ous google ser­vices using the linux com­mand line. it cur­rently works with cal­en­dar, you­tube, picasa, blog­ger and some others.

to add a reminder in your cal­ender for example just issue…

google cal­en­dar add “backup wp data­base before upgrade tomor­row at 10am”

you’ll need to spe­cify your google user­name and then, if you’re logged in, your browser will open a page asking to allow googlecl access. job done. grab it here.

been having some trouble restrict­ing access to this site by ip address using .htac­cess.
the tra­di­tional method is to use a format like this:

order allow,deny
deny from 10.11.13.14
deny from 16.15.14.13
allow from all

this wouldn’t work for me at all. the only way i could make it have any effect was to com­ment out ‘allow from all’. this pro­duced a 403 error for every attemp­ted con­nect.
i con­tac­ted my host­ing pro­vider (laugh­ing squid) as i couldn’t think of any­thing else to try.
after some troubleshoot­ing it turns out that sites hosted in the cloud (at least the rack­space cloud’s envir­on­ment) require a dif­fer­ent method to ban by ip in .htac­cess. more info can be found here.
so i added the fol­low­ing to my .htac­cess file:

SetEn­vIf X-Cluster-Client-Ip “^10\.11\.12\.13″ Deny­Ac­cess
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from env=DenyAccess
Allow from all

obvi­ously replace the ip with the one you’d like to block. if you want to ban mul­tiple ip addresses just repeat line one and alter it accordingly.

so thanks to laugh­ing squid’s sup­port team…quick response as always.

after recently return­ing from up north with a rather large col­lec­tion of pho­to­graphs i thought it might be nice to com­bine them, with some music, in a slideshow. i’ve never attemp­ted any­thing like this before (prob­ably never will again) so thought i’d doc­u­ment the steps i used. under ubuntu 10.04 three tools were employed. the gimp, auda­city and ima­gin­a­tion.  if by any chance you don’t have of any of these installed run ‘sudo apt-get install gimp auda­city ima­gin­a­tion libsox-fmt-all’ without the quotes to add them…or use the ubuntu soft­ware centre.

first: resize your images. i wanted to resize my jpgs to a uni­form width of 1024 pixels and tried pho­tolab for gimp to achieve this. on the pho­tolab page grab Filer­es­ize tar.gz and extract it to your gimp plu­gins folder ‘/home/you/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins’. start the gimp and the plugin can be found in ‘filters-photolab-batch works-mages resize’. browse to the dir­ect­ory which con­tains the images you’d like to resize and choose their new width…

once this pro­cess has com­pleted there will be a new dir­ect­ory within the ori­ginal that con­tains the res­ized photographs.

second: it’s now time to import them into ima­gin­a­tion. start the pro­gram and select slideshow from the top left and then ‘import pic­tures’. browse to the dir­ect­ory where the images res­ized by pho­tolab reside and click ok. they will appear in a time line along the bottom and the dur­a­tion of slide and trans­ition can be selec­ted for indi­vidual pics or for the whole lot (as i chose).

third: choose a piece of music that almost fits the length of your slideshow and trim it with auda­city. this is a lot easier than it looks. open your mp3 (or whatever) in auda­city and, from the left, drag the cursor between the waves until the selec­tion matches the length of your slideshow (for me this was 7 minutes and 11 seconds). select ‘trim’ from the edit menu and the tune will be cut to length. now it’s time to export the file. choose ‘export’ from the file menu and in the new dia­logue box you can choose where to save the trimmed clip to. n.b  here it might be a good idea to click options and select which bitrate to use when export­ing. even com­pressed mp3 files can use a lot of space so i selec­ted a vari­able bitrate with qual­ity of 8 (60-105kbps). once you’ve decided on the bitrate click save and your new piece of back­ground music will be exported.

now it’s just a matter of import­ing the music into ima­gin­a­tion. repeat the step to add your images but select ‘import music’. the file will be loaded and the audio tab can be clicked to get a preview.

fouth: export the slideshow from ima­gin­a­tion. choose ‘export’ from the slideshow menu and you can then select the format of the file that will be cre­ated. i selec­ted a flash video file (flv) of medium qual­ity. the gen­er­a­tion of the file can take some time so be patient and wait for your cre­ation to complete.

my fin­ished (and rather shoody) attempt can be seen below…excuse the music. didn’t want to infringe any copyrights…

you might not have come across poladroid…it’s an applic­a­tion that con­verts a digital image so that it resembles those taken with  clas­sic polar­oid cameras.

it’s only avail­able for win­dows and mac…not linux. i wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. down­load the win­dows ver­sion and, assum­ing you’ve got wine installed (i’m using ver­sion 1.01),  extract the installer from the zip, open a ter­minal and enter ‘wine POLADROID Installer.msi’. this will start the usual pro­cess of installing a win­dows app.

poladroid can now be found in the wine sec­tion of the applic­a­tions drop down (at least it does in ubuntu 10.04).  start the pro­gram and it should look a bit like this…

in the win­dows ver­sion you can drag a photo onto the camera to start the pro­cess. this doesn’t work for me on linux. i have to click the blue circle and choose ‘con­vert jpeg file’. you can then browse to the loc­a­tion of the jpeg you want to con­vert. and then there’s another glitch. when i’ve run this on win­dows a small polar­oid image appears and devel­ops gradu­ally (as a real polar­oid would)…not so under gnome. there’s a buggy rect­angle with noth­ing inside it. don’t be too con­cerned by this though as the program’s still run­ning and pro­cessing the image. after a while (quite a few minutes) a new jpeg should appear in the folder along­side the ori­ginal image. this is your new poladroided picture!

i love the pro­cessing the applic­a­tion applies…here’s an example…click to view it in all it’s glory…

there’s also a flickr group devoted to images pro­cessed with this lovely little bit of soft­ware. have fun :)

future­mark (the people behind the famous graph­ics card bench­marks) have a browser test avail­able on their site peace­keeper.

you can check out other browsers res­ults or test your own.

i only have three installed at the moment on ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 and my paltry res­ults can be seen in this screenshot…