0x0E bits

seasonal fortune

skelter — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:56:00 -0800

I had no idea that fortune had seasonal or time-based fortunes. Or is it conincidence. hmm. flash backs to an earlier more ~~innocent~~ less sophisticated age…

_/I\_____________o______________o___/I\     l  * /    /_/ *   __  '     .* l
I"""_____________l______________l___"""I\   l      *//      _l__l_   . *.  l
 [__][__][(******)__][__](******)[__][] \l  l-\ ---//---*----(oo)----------l
 [][__][__(******)][__][_(******)_][__] l   l  \\ // ____ >-(    )-<    /  l
 [__][__][_l    l[__][__][l    l][__][] l   l \\)) ._****_.(......) .@@@:::l
 [][__][__]l   .l_][__][__]   .l__][__] l   l   ll  _(o_o)_        (@*_*@  l
 [__][__][/   <_)[__][__]/   <_)][__][] l   l   ll (  / \  )     /   / / ) l
 [][__][ /..,/][__][__][/..,/_][__][__] l   l  / \\  _\  \_   /     _\_\   l
 [__][__(__/][__][__][_(__/_][__][__][] l   l______________________________l
 [__][__]] l     ,  , .      [__][__][] l
 [][__][_] l   . i. '/ ,     [][__][__] l        /\**/\       season's
 [__][__]] l  O .\ / /, O    [__][__][] l       ( o_o  )_)       greetings
_[][__][_] l__l======='=l____[][__][__] l_______,(u  u  ,),__________________
 [__][__]]/  /l\-------/l\   [__][__][]/       {}{}{}{}{}{}

In Ellen's house it is warm and toasty while fuzzies play in the snow outside.

emerge --unmerge vmware-workstation

skelter — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:25:00 -0800

portage has failed to provide a working vmware-workstation release for me for months now.

Uncle.

Today's fun with Grails

skelter — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:54:00 -0800

def service = new WebAppService(name:'ww36',externalName:'ww36',host:'c0ww36',serviceName:'_resin-indigo',production:false)
println service.save()
println service.version
println service.requestSuccessful

def listthem = {
WebAppService.findAll().each {
  print "${it.name}-${it.status},"
}
}

listthem()

println 'Deleting ww36 records'
WebAppService.findAllByName('ww36').each { it.delete() }

listthem()

Go, Josh, Go!

skelter — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:42:00 -0800

Josh is still working on the javafx web site. Looks like they are having a rough time deploying.

UPDATE: There they go, they got it now.

JavaFX presentation at AJUG

skelter — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:30:00 -0800

Last night I made it to the AJUG in time to catch some pizza and listen to Josh Marinacci talk about JavaFX.

JavaFX looks very cool for developing rich applications deliverable over the web (or locally). It makes applets not suck, and UI development looks surreally easy.

My notes from last night:

Sdk will be available on http://JavaFX.com
Linux support not ready yet! Trajedy!!! “we are comitted to supporting it!”
New site will be cut over on Thursday. (I think Josh is doing it before he gets on a plane?)
Inkscape plugins by campus? ambassador? in Brazil

Very frustrated it won’t be available on Linux right away. For Mac will require 10.5+. requires Firefox 3 and IE 7. I think but am not sure that Safari will work.

More spam viruses targeting Windows

skelter — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:14:00 -0700

As Microsoft slowly improves its software, the viruses still target human fallibility.

My father just spent a few weeks without a fully-functioning workstation because of virus-infested Microsoft software.

This morning I got a virus sent from the comcast.net ISP, titled “Your Statement number: 330709.”

In it, we see a short message like this

Good evening

As you requested, we are sending you this report with details on your account transactions made between 9/1/2008 and 10/28/2008.

Untill we meet again
Nora Connell
Attachment: Details.zip

That details.zip is the problem. Let’s take a look at it.

~/tmp $ mv Details.zip virus/
~/tmp $ cd virus/
~/tmp/virus $ ls
Details.zip
~/tmp/virus $ unzip Details.zip 
Archive:  Details.zip
  inflating: Details.doc                                                                               .exe  
~/tmp/virus $

I didn’t change or screw up the formatting. The file in the zip contains enough spaces to attempt to dis-associate the .exe extension from the rest of the Details.doc_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.exe name. It’s a dirty trick, but that’s what the bad guys do. What does Details.doc.exe do? It’s most likely a trojan. f-propt, updated today (29-Oct-2008) did not find anything, but Kaspersky Labs viruslist.com identifies it as “Worm.Win32.AutoRun.rkt”. This appears to be a fresh variant, and I haven’t found a clear description of what it does. It’s 38k. Autorun indicates it probably copies it self to usb sticks, zip drives, etc. “rkt” looks suspiciously like an abbreviation for rootkit which is a mechanism for a hacker to take over the infected machine.

Also see this site and f-secure’s description of Autorun

How is the human tricked, here? Microsoft Windows software presents an icon that appears to be a document but is really an executable program. The action for opening a document and running a program are the same.

I remember in my younger days how I found UNIX to be paranoid, with its “executable” permission. It was just right.

One-click deploy/configure for J2EE stack

skelter — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:24:00 -0700

Today was supposed to be get-home-early-and-stirfry-pork-broccoli.

I’m working on a new deploy mechanism. We have 20-25 servers that we need to be able to one-click-install-and-configure the front two-thirds of a J2EE software stack, including IIS->Resin running on Windows, JBoss on Linux. My predecessor has a mouse-trap-game of ant scripts involving telnet to do it. “As long as nothing goes wrong, it works every time.”

I started off with a verification mechanism so that once everything is up, the stack can self-check. Now I’m working on a mechanism to reliably update from version control, and run scripts and save the logs so we can A) detect when something goes wrong and B) what went wrong. The end result app will be kind of like a dashboard for 25 cars.

Just as my day starts to wrap up, something I worked on a couple of months ago blew up. Now that we have the capability to run our builds so quickly, a new trend has started: running more than one build at the same time on the same machine. This means that JUnit tests that open temp files in the temp directory collide with each other. Well, I wrote a utility a while back to help dodge that. It wasn’t a complete fix; it was just unlikely…very unlikely, to happen. Except when you are running enough builds that the number of dice you roll overwhelms the randomness of the dice. This was already supposed to be unlikely. Every once in a while, two copies of the same tests come up with the same random directory number, even with a test-specific prefix. So I spent an hour with the guy who ran into it, or rather had it dropped in his lap, writing a mechanism that actually exclusively locks access (native io) to the temporary working directory created in the temp directory for the test. We’ll see if it works tomorrow.

Dinner was late.

apache commons exec

skelter — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:24:00 -0700

Not finding an available commons-exec module in the maven repos, but found one by criticalsection.org. Thanks guys!

     <!-- dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-exec</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
        </dependency --> 
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.criticalsection.commons-exec</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-exec</artifactId>
            <version>1.0-cs-01</version>
        </dependency>

Wicket quick start

skelter — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:02:00 -0700

Evaluating wicket via a maven quickstart.

First I ran into a strange mvn problem:

$ mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.wicket  -DarchetypeArtifactId=wicket-archetype-quickstart -DarchetypeVersion=1.3.5 -DgroupId=com.mycompany -DartifactId=useradmin
 [INFO] Scanning for projects...
 [INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix:  'archetype'.
 [INFO]  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [INFO] Building Maven Default Project
 [INFO]    task-segment: [archetype:create] (aggregator-style)
 [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [INFO] Setting property: classpath.resource.loader.class => 'org.codehaus.plexus.velocity.ContextClassLoaderResourceLoader'.
 [INFO] Setting property: velocimacro.messages.on => 'false'.
 [INFO] Setting property: resource.loader => 'classpath'.
 [INFO] Setting property: resource.manager.logwhenfound => 'false'.
 [INFO] [archetype:create]
 [INFO] Defaulting package to group ID: com.mycompany
 Downloading: http://private-artifactory.drillingxxx.com:8081/artifactory/combined/org/apache/wicket/wicket-archetype-quickstart/1.3.5/wicket-archetype-quickstart-1.3.5.jar
 [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [ERROR] BUILD ERROR
 [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [INFO] Error creating from archetype

 Embedded error: OldArchetype does not exist.
 http://private-artifactory.drillingxxx.com:8081/artifactory/combined/org/apache/wicket/wicket-archetype-quickstart/1.3.5/wicket-archetype-quickstart-1.3.5.jar
 [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch
 [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [INFO] Total time: 52 seconds
 [INFO] Finished at: Mon Oct 27 10:04:26 CDT 2008
 [INFO] Final Memory: 10M/162M
 [INFO]  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

This may have been a problem with artifactory locally; not sure. I tried pulling down different versions and even the quickstart pom itself (which didn’t build readily due to not being able to resolve a component). Then I got a complaint that the directory already existed. At some point it worked. So, maybe our local artifactory couldn’t hit the original repo. Dunno. Ok…it’s working.

jConsole and jmx

skelter — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:20:00 -0700

I now have a real-time peek into heap and non-heap memory usage on a production server. PermGen dooms us.