The Definitive qmail Patch

Posted on August 11, 2008 by mikegrb


I have spent quite some time working on the definitive qmail patch. So as not to keep all this goodness to my self I have decided to make this patch available to all:

http://thegrebs.com/~michael/netqmail-1.06.patch.bz2

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$20 Garage Sale Find

Posted on August 2, 2008 by mikegrb

Couldn’t pass this up, hard wood and HEAVY. Banged up from years of abuse from kids but many more years left in it, I’m sure.

photo

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i haz iphone 3g

Posted on July 25, 2008 by mikegrb

Title says it all, sent from the dock with the wordpress app.

photo

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Polite Spam

Posted on July 15, 2008 by mikegrb 
From: "claude je" <redacted>
To: <billing@linode.com>
Subject: You are about to get fired

You are about to get fired

http://[redacted]/view.exe

It is quite polite of the sender of this piece of mail to warn the recipient that they are about to get fired for infecting office machines (supposing they click the link from a suitable browser, that is).

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screen copy mode can be used to copy/paste

Posted on July 10, 2008 by mikegrb

I’m aware of many people that use GNU Screen’s copy mode to scroll back through terminal history but don’t actually use copy mode for copying text for later pasting. I was one of those people myself for some time. Screen supports some pretty nifty copy/paste tricks but a few basic key strokes will get you started.

Entering Copy Mode and Scrolling

By default, enter copy mode with

CTRL+a

then

ESCAPE

. You can use vi like commands to navigate through the scollback buffer. The arrows and

PAGE UP/DOWN

should work as well. A few useful commands some may be unfamiliar with:

  • M

    - jumps to the middle visible line

  • NN%

    - jumps to the specified percentage in the buffer (0 – start, 100 – end

  • g

    - jumps to the beginning of the buffer

  • G

    - jumps to the end of the buffer

These keys are even useful when you aren’t using copy mode to copy/paste text.

Copying Text

Once the cursor is at the beginning location, press

SPACEBAR

to set your first mark. Next navigate to the ending position and hit it again. The second

SPACEBAR

will set your end mark and exit copy mode. One neat and often useful feature is selecting a rectangle on the screen rather than full lines. Use

c

and

C

to set the left and right column margins to the cursor’s current location.

Pasting

Pasting is easy, just hit

CTRL+a

to activate screen then

]

to paste.

There’s More!

There are loads more options such as multiple copy buffers, the ability to append marked text to the buffer rather than replacing it, etc. Check out the man page for more screen goodness.

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dh-make-perl will rock your socks

Posted on July 2, 2008 by mikegrb
dh-make-perl

is the most awesome Debian package /ever/.

dh-make-perl --cpan Some::Module --build
sudo dpkg -i libsome-module-0.1-1_all.deb

Done.

Dependencies

If you have

apt-file

installed and Some::Module requires Lib::Foo for which a Debian package is available, the dependancy will automatically be created. If Lib::Foo does not have a Debian package already available, you will likely need to manually run

dh-make-perl

on Lib::Foo first.

I haven’t seen the

apt-file

trick mentioned elsewhere. Honestly when someone mentioned it on IRC I didn’t believe him. Sure enough, looking at the source for

dh-make-per

l revealed that it does indeed check apt-file for each module that Some::Module lists as required in the

META.yml

.

Why?

Now dpkg/apt know that you have Some::Module installed. If an official package for Some::Module comes out, it will likely have the same name and if it is for a newer version of Some::Module aptitude upgrade will automagically upgrade you to it. The real win is ease of cleanly uninstalling though. How many times have you found what you thought was the perfect module for task XYZ and installed it. Only to find that it isn’t so hot 5 minutes after beginning to use it. Making sure ‘

make uninstall

‘ really uninstalled every thing can be a pain.

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Rotate through Screen Windows

Posted on June 26, 2008 by mikegrb

A new command in screen version 4.00 is the

idle

command.

idle time command

Executes screen command,

command

when idle for

time

seconds. E.g. to rotate through screen windows with a 3 second interval:

idle 3 next

To cancel,

idle 0
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Superman vs. Spiderman

Posted on June 7, 2008 by mikegrb

I promise I’m not a comic book/super hero[tm] nerd, not that it’s a bad thing. I’ve never owned comic books but last night I was thinking about Superman vs. Spider-Man for some reason.

I think that Superman is the clear winner, he was super duper from the start. Spider-Man on the other hand, he just happened to get bit by a messed up spider. I didn’t consider this a highly weighted factor though. Superman is impervious to all but kryptonite, Spider-Man is way vulnerable.

Batman, though crazy cool with all the gadgets, isn’t even in the running what with no super powers and all.

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Weather in Screen Statusbar

Posted on June 5, 2008 by mikegrb


Caspar Clemens Mierau recently wrote about a nifty Debian package named weather-util and his method for embedding the current temperature into the screen status bar. Quite nifty. I did the same with one small exception, including the predicted probability of precipitation if it exists.

My one liner that runs from cron (split to multiple lines for readability):

 weather -iKACY -f | head -n 9  | \
     awk '/Temperature/ { print $2 "F" }
          /Relative/ { print $3 }
          /precipitation/ { sub (/ chance of.+$/, ""); print "POP " $NF }' | \
     xargs echo > /home/michael/.weather

More details on the full implementation in the original post over at Caspar Clemens Mierau’s blog. And yes, I stole his loadavg stuff too ;)

UPDATE:

Silly me, upon further investigation, two things to note. First, the -i option applies only to current conditions and not to the forecast. In my case I actually want weather -f ACY and /etc/weatherrc takes care of the rest. Secondly, the field number for the precipitation percentage changes, oops. I’ve correctly accounted for this in the updated awk script above.

After making these changes I decided the awk script was getting a bit long for a single line so I went all out creating ~/bin/weather.awk:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

/Temperature/       { temp = $2 }
/Relative Humidity/ { rh = $3   }
/precipitation/     { sub (/ chance of.+$/, "");
                      precip = $NF;
                      exit
                    }

END{ print temp "F " rh " POP " precip }

My crontab entry now looks like:

*/5 * * * *     weather -f ACY | /home/michael/bin/weather.awk > /home/michael/.weather

Much simpler.

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Module::Signature Rocks My Socks

Posted on June 1, 2008 by mikegrb

Just discovered the perl module Module::Signature by 唐鳳 (Audrey Tang) the other day. It’s pretty spiffy.

Implementing is easy (stolen from the docs):

MakeMaker:

    WriteMakefile(
        (MM->can('signature_target') ? (SIGN => 1) : ()),
        # ... original arguments ...
    );

Module::Build:

   Module::Build->new(
        (sign => 1),
        # ... original arguments ...
    )->create_build_script;

Don’t forget to add

SIGNATURE

to your

MANIFEST

if needed.

Then when running

make dist

you will be prompted for the pass phrase for your gpg key. For extra goodness, add 0-signature.t to your tests. It includes a single test that verifies the package cryptographically during

make test

if the

TEST_SIGNATURE

environment variable is set.

If you know waltman and haven’t heard of this module, yell at him for not telling you about it, he’s mentioned in the

AUTHORS

file for his stellar documentation patches.

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