B10[mg]

Yesterday, after signing a couple of pages that contained way too long sentences, listening to even more legal mumbo jumbo and fighting sleep because of boredom, the milestone had been reached. The keys to my new house were delivered to me accompanied by many best wishes, and congratulations. (Why not be fair and congratulate me with the fact that I now owe the bank a tremendous amount of money and the fact that I just signed a paper that gives them a right to claim that money, take possession of "my" home and throw me out when I do not pay in time? ;-)

A few minutes later, my girlfriendfiancee opened the front door to our new house. Welcome to your new home! Let the painting begin! Like always, the painting progress was disappointing. For some reason, painting a house always takes more time than you plan, or would like to spend on it, so I'd better go back today and finish some more, for coming Saturday it's time to move.

After working on the walls the entire day, I still can't say I feel like home there. It has to grow on me I guess (and of course my 'puters and CDs aren't there yet! Home is where the heartserver is ;-)

As announced before, I moved my server (temporarily) to a new location. The whole process had a few problems (as usual).

The first problem I encountered was a b0rked router. The old crappy device I had left wasn't functioning too good, so I had to buy a new one. The new one luckily showed no problems (so far).

The second problem was worse. The ISP seems to be blocking port 25 (incoming; why not outgoing?!). Luckily I have a root account on another server, so a mail relay was easily added. Not too nice, but hey, mail arrives again :-)

If I remember correctly, I'm not allowed to run daemons on the line that I use now, so hopefully it all will last for the time being.

Soon I will move to my new home and because in general I distrust all companies having to do anything with phonelines, I doubt the Internet connection will be fixed and working in time.

Therefore, I am moving my server tomorrow to another location. Hopefully everything will go smooth and the server is back to online in no time, but if for some reason I run into problems, you know why all of this stuff my server provides isn't available.

Alex of eVuln.com noticed a XSS bug in HTML::BBCode. Although I'm not sure whether checking for javascript:foo(bar) links is supposed to be done by the parser, I've added the option (which is enabled by default) anyways, resulting in HTML::BBCode version 1.05.

As usual, I provide a little sandbox for you to play with/in :-)

Alex was also kind enough to point me to a piece of software called "My Blog" This seems to be using my module. Yay!

TPG Post is the Dutch postal agency and, I assume like all the others, it's a pain in the ass to work with. There are many shipping variants and rates. They do have an online tool to calculate the shipping costs, but 9 out of the 10 times I check, it's down due to technical problems.

But for a website I'm working on, I did need to calculate the shipping costs, so I went and wrote a little module to handle this: Business::TPGPost

The module works with the most important part of the 2006 rates, yet not all. See the documentation for more information.

And of course, there's a sandbox.

Joffie and I suffer the same problem. We want to study a language (Svensk for him, Bahasa Indonesia for me) yet we can't really find time to actually sit down and practice our vocabulary.

But given the creativity Joffie usually possesses, he came up with an awesome idea to do study, and make it fun (in a nerdy way) too. Joffie and I usually log in to several machines a million times a day. This all is done over SSH connections, using authorized_keys to prevent typing your passwords over and over again (we both don't even know most of our passwords anymore ;-)

Since we both utilize the ssh command so many times, Joffie wrote a little Perl script that is called before the ssh command (using an alias). The Perl script gives a Dutch word, and asks for the translation. If you're right, SSH will kick in and you will be logged in to the machine in question. If you fail ... bad luck, try again!

This looks like:

menno@immortal$ marduk
NL: een (1)
Bahasa Indonesia: satu
Correct!
menno@marduk$ 

and when I'm wrong:

menno@immortal$ marduk 
NL: drie
Bahasa Indonesia: dua
Wrong, the answer was: tiga
menno@immortal$

I use a Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) text file, while Joffie, of course, uses a Swedish file.

To check this all out, see Joffie's Svensk - learning words the nerdy way

Joffie and I suffer the same problem. We want to study a language (Svensk for him, Bahasa Indonesia for me) yet we can't really find time to actually sit down and practice our vocabulary.

But given the creativity Joffie usually possesses, he came up with an awesome idea to do study, and make it fun (in a nerdy way) too. Joffie and I usually log in to several machines a million times a day. This all is done over SSH connections, using authorized_keys to prevent typing your passwords over and over again (we both don't even know most of our passwords anymore ;-)

Since we both utilize the ssh command so many times, Joffie wrote a little Perl script that is called before the ssh command (using an alias). The Perl script gives a Dutch word, and asks for the translation. If you're right, SSH will kick in and you will be logged in to the machine in question. If you fail ... bad luck, try again!

This looks like:

menno@immortal$ marduk
NL: een (1)
Bahasa Indonesia: satu
Correct!
menno@marduk$ 

and when I'm wrong:

menno@immortal$ marduk 
NL: drie
Bahasa Indonesia: dua
Wrong, the answer was: tiga
menno@immortal$

I use a Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) text file, while Joffie, of course, uses a Swedish file.

To check this all out, see Joffie's Svensk - learning words the nerdy way

I thought it was time for a new article, so here you go: use YAML

My first introduction with Amorphis, was when my brother came home with the album "Tales from the 1000 Lakes". From the beginning, I absolutely loved this album and it was also the very first album I could completely play along with (guitar). Awesome melodies, nice clean vocals and an occasional grunt.

After that album, "Elegy" came out. A little poppier, yet also a terrific album. From that moment on, the band decided to follow a new musical path and I never cared too much for their later work. The barking of the singer was completely gone, the tracks were too sweet and awesome guitar riffs weren't found anywhere.

But with "Eclipse", Amorphis tries to take back some old, lost, and forgotten souls as fans. This CD doesn't give me the same feeling as with "Tales...", yet it is by far a step closer to "Elegy". Grunts are back in place, melodies become catchy again, let's hope the band will follow this path and take us all the way back to "Tales..."!

Label: Nuclear Blast

After messing with Last.FM I felt the need to cache and parse the Similar Artists feed from AudioScrobbler.

So I've created WebService::LastFM::SimilarArtists, and of course there's a sandbox ;-)

Fokke & Sukke are two characters from a Dutch cartoon (Dutch,yes, not Danish ;-). The daily cartoons are pretty funny, yet I usually forget to check the website.

So I created a terrible script to create a RSS feed for it. Now I can see Fokke & Sukke from my bloglines account.

Feed: http://menno.b10m.net/fokkesukke.rss

Fokke & Sukke are two characters from a Dutch cartoon (Dutch,yes, not Danish ;-). The daily cartoons are pretty funny, yet I usually forget to check the website.

So I created a terrible script to create a RSS feed for it. Now I can see Fokke & Sukke from my bloglines account.

Feed: http://menno.b10m.net/fokkesukke.rss

Jakarta can be viewed as a metropolis. According to Wikipedia, it has an area of 661.52 km² and a population of 8,792,000. Now look at Amsterdam, with 8,000,000 fewer citizens!

Indonesia, however, is seen as a developing country where the Netherlands is supposed to be developed. Living in a developed country has its' charm, yet it can also be heavily annoying.

Smoking in the Netherlands (or any European country for the matter) isn't like it used to be. Everywhere you go, you're supposed to smoke outside. Developing countries, like Indonesia, never bothered about smoking too much. You can smoke anywhere you want, basically.

But today I read an article on planet.nl informing me about new Jakarta law: no more smoking in public places.

Here we go, Indonesia is really developing fast, yet (still) punishes violators severely (USD 5300 or 6 months in jail). Taken that the GDP per capita is USD 3700, an average Indonesian will have to work two years to pay for the fine.

Guess I'll have to be careful where to smoke my kretek next time in Jakarta. Luckily the weather is better than in an average developed metropolis, so smoking outside isn't that annoying.

Lately, my blog has been suffering from comment spam and taking it out isn't too user friendly (you have to do quite some deleting work).

So I had two options. Make deleting spam easier, or stop spammers. And yes, the second options seems easier and more preferable.

After glancing at the code of CGIComment, I realized it was fairly easy to stop. All of the spam-comments so far were casino related, so all I had to do was add a little snippet of code to the SaveComment sub.

 # Spam protection
 if($CommentInfo{'text'} =~ /(casino|poker)/i) { 
    print "<h1>Nuh uh ... can't use the word: $1</h1>";
    warn($ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'}, " abused $0 with '$1'");
    return; 
 }

The first line is a comment, so let's look at the second one. It checks whether the $CommentInfo{'text'} (the comment users post) contains either the word "casino" or "poker" (case insensitive).

If that is the case, the user will see the banned word, a warning will be printed to the error log showing the users' IP address and banned word. And of course, the entry will not be saved.

Easy hack, although I fear the banned list to grow soon (I bet the word "blogspot" will follow soon ;-)

Lately, my blog has been suffering from comment spam and taking it out isn't too user friendly (you have to do quite some deleting work).

So I had two options. Make deleting spam easier, or stop spammers. And yes, the second options seems easier and more preferable.

After glancing at the code of CGIComment, I realized it was fairly easy to stop. All of the spam-comments so far were casino related, so all I had to do was add a little snippet of code to the SaveComment sub.

 # Spam protection
 if($CommentInfo{'text'} =~ /(casino|poker)/i) { 
    print "<h1>Nuh uh ... can't use the word: $1</h1>";
    warn($ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'}, " abused $0 with '$1'");
    return; 
 }

The first line is a comment, so let's look at the second one. It checks whether the $CommentInfo{'text'} (the comment users post) contains either the word "casino" or "poker" (case insensitive).

If that is the case, the user will see the banned word, a warning will be printed to the error log showing the users' IP address and banned word. And of course, the entry will not be saved.

Easy hack, although I fear the banned list to grow soon (I bet the word "blogspot" will follow soon ;-)

As usually, Bok, pushed me into the direction of a new website, Last.fm

The website is rather fun, especially if you want to expand your musical horizons a little. You can keep track of what music you're listening to, and based on that information, the site will recommend other bands/artists that you might enjoy.

This all is done through my xmms player. But, because my girlfriendfiancee also likes to listen to her music from my machine, I had to come up with a way not to mix my Hate Forest tracks with her Kelly Clarkson stuff, so I installed amaroK for her.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised to find out the many features amaroK has, actually turned out pretty well. The Album Cover Manager showed the right image for most albums, and the Dynamic Playlists turned out to be ok too. Last.fm support was already build in and to our great surprise, amaroK was able to show us the right lyrics to Indonesian songs.

The only downside is that I like the xmms interface better, but that's probably because I'm used to that for many years already.

As usually, Bok, pushed me into the direction of a new website, Last.fm

The website is rather fun, especially if you want to expand your musical horizons a little. You can keep track of what music you're listening to, and based on that information, the site will recommend other bands/artists that you might enjoy.

This all is done through my xmms player. But, because my girlfriendfiancee also likes to listen to her music from my machine, I had to come up with a way not to mix my Hate Forest tracks with her Kelly Clarkson stuff, so I installed amaroK for her.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised to find out the many features amaroK has, actually turned out pretty well. The Album Cover Manager showed the right image for most albums, and the Dynamic Playlists turned out to be ok too. Last.fm support was already build in and to our great surprise, amaroK was able to show us the right lyrics to Indonesian songs.

The only downside is that I like the xmms interface better, but that's probably because I'm used to that for many years already.