I got this email from Atmel yesterday. This is the first time a company has ever emailed me to let me know that they would stop sending me promotional emails if I didn’t respond. This is way all companies should do this. It’s not like Atmel sends me a ton of email anyway, maybe one a month at most. I’m so impressed with being treated like a human that I’ll go ahead and click that YES link to ensure I keep getting info from them.

Instead of using S3’s recently released apex domain support, I’m instead putting my site behind CloudFlare. In CloudFlare, I have configured a Page Rule to redirect all requests from duksta.org/* to www.duksta.org/$1. Since I maintained my site structure in the move to Octopress/Jekyll, this has the added bonus of redirecting anyone’s old bookmarks to the right place.

Yes, I’m not truly hosting my apex domain in S3 like this, but rather redirecting it to www with CloudFlare, but it gets the job done for what I need.

These days virtualization of systems and remote management has made racking our own equipment not only exceptionally costly (by the kindness of others we have largely been immune to these costs) but inconvenient as well since we aren’t young nerds with all the time in the world for hobbies and fixing computers in the middle of the night.

Since I update this blog so infrequently, I’ve always been a fan of statically generated site content. I’ve run Moveable Type for the last ten years and it’s done quite well for me. As an information security professional, I was always worried about vulnerabilities in MT, of which there have been a few, but not so many as in WordPress. With this move into S3, I removed the last bit of attack surface for this site. I’m now using Octopress to generate the site content and jekyll-s3 to push it into S3.

So, it’s done now. Fairly painless. The hardest part was editing all my old posts that I imported from MT to standardize the random collection of paths where my post images lived.

This past weekend, I noticed that Drobo was flashing all sorts of unhappy blinkenlights at me. I could still access my data, but it was telling me that one of the 1TB drives had failed. So, I ran down to Fry’s and picked up two new 2TB drives. I replaced the bad drive with one of the new ones and let it do its thing. 48 hours later, RAID redundancy was restored to the array and all was well.

I just slotted in the other 2TB drive in place of one of the 750GB drives, which will up my net storage capacity to 3.6TB. I’ll also replace the one remaining 750GB drive with the 1TB drive that I’ll get from Seagate because the one that failed was still under warranty. This all worked out to my advantage, as I was starting to hit 85% full on the 2.2TB I had. Now with the upgrade to 3.6TB, I’ve got 40% free space.

A lot of my geek friends give me crap for buying a Drobo and not building some Linux RAID box instead. I work hard at work. I don’t want to have to play sysadmin when I get home. I want my home gear to “Just Work”, which is exactly what Drobo does for me.

Ok, that’s six things. I got carried away. Needless to say I’m enjoying the change of venue.

Photo by zoonabar on Flickr, because I haven’t gotten around to taking my own picture of the Space Needle yet.

It’s funny what you find when you’re doing renovations on your house. This morning, we were cleaning up the old baseboard heat covers upstairs in preparation to give them a coat of spray paint to freshen them up. As we were cleaning them, these betting slips from Lincoln Downs slid out from behind. Looks like the previous owners had spent New Year’s Eve 1982 betting on the horses or dogs. Obviously, they weren’t a winner.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Hide ArcSight Solved Tickets
// @namespace      http://duksta.org/userscripts/hideArcSightSolvedTickets
// @include        https://arcsight.custhelp.com/
// ==/UserScript==

// Instructions: 
//
// Install GreaseMonkey - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/
// Install this script
// Apply it to "https://arcsight.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/arcsight.cfg/php/enduser/myq_ilp.php*"
//


tdc = document.evaluate('./descendant::tr/td[5][contains(.,"Solved")]', document, null, 7, null);

for (I=0; I<tdc.snapshotLength; I++) {
    tdc.snapshotItem(I).parentNode.style.display = "none";
}

If any of you have upgraded to Firefox 3.6, you may have noticed an annoying change to how new tabs get opened. Instead of opening as the rightmost tab in your tab bar, they get opened just to the right of the page you’re on. If this new feature annoys the hell out of you like it does me you can restore the old behavior like this:

• Enter ‘about:config’ in your location bar.
• Accept the warning about possibly breaking stuff
• Filter for ‘browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent’
• Double click that entry to set it to ‘false’

Done. Tab open where you’ve come to expect them to open, all the way on the right.

Bug Report: 
Phone book match fails for incoming calls and SMS 
messages if phone book entry contains dashes

Version Info:
300.21.012
18-06-2009
RM-346
Nokia E71-1 (27)

Details:
When a phone book phone number entry contains dashes 
(and possibly when it starts with a +), the calling (or texting) 
party name from the phone book is not matched properly. 
It seems that there's a regex failure.

Steps to reproduce:
Enter phone book entry in the form +1-NPA-NXX-NNNN. 
Receive call and text from that number. Observe that the 
entry is not matched properly.

Desired Behavior:
The lookup algorithm should strip out the dashes before 
matching to the phone book entries.

Other Notes:
This worked properly on my E61i. You might want to check 
that code tree to see what changed between releases.

In preparation for the Arduino Class I’m teaching this month at AS220 Labs, I made this breadboard template in Inkscape to make it easier to layout circuits for the presentations.

I figure this will be useful to others, so you can grab the SVG here. Enjoy!

For those who don’t know, a statically linked binary is an executable that does not require any support libraries. All the required support libraries get included in the binary itself. This results in a binary that will run on any system of the right CPU type (i386, x86_64, ppc, etc.) The downside of this is that the resulting binary is going to be quite large. If you’re doing forensics on a system, it’s always handy to have a set of system utilities (ls, ps, sh, chown, chmod, netstat, vi, cp, rm, mkdir, rmdir, etc) that you have built yourself as statically linked binaries so you can trust them in case a system is root kitted.

Normally, when you download a tarball of source code, you’ll do the standard “configure; make; make install” to build it. If you want a statically linked binary, replace the plain “make” with:

make SHARED=0 CC='gcc -static'

Besides being a computer geek, I’m also a bit of a foodie. I was doing a little yardwork today, planting some plants, weeding, and cleaning up our overgrown herb garden. After trimming all the blooms off the chives, I started in to do the same on the sage, as that had gone and bloomed. Thinking to myself that sage was tasty and edible and that its flower must be as well, I tasted one of the sage flowers. I was overtaken by this delicious subtle blueberryish flavor. I then proceeded to trim back all the sage blooms and took them inside. I plucked one off and gave it to my wife to try. She thought it was tasty too, so we spent the afternoon making jelly out of them. What you see above is a portion of the process.

I’d been wanting to pickup a Meggy Jr from the fine folks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs for a while. When I saw that the MakerShed had them on sale last month as they were cleaning out inventory in preparation for Maker Faire, I decided that it was time to spend the cash and pick one up. Then I saw that they had free shipping for orders over $100 and I was reminded of the quote from Contact: “First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?” The first thing I was to code up for it is a Battleship game, so I would need two anyway.

When I built the first one a couple of weeks ago, I was so excited that I dug right into it and built it right up. This time, I figured I’d do some unboxing shots since the packaging is very well done and downright hysterical. Unfortunately, they’re kind of blurry because I was using my phone camera.

Choice bag labels are as follows: * Electronics Goodies * Pointy Parts * Giblets Bag * ALL YOUR BASE RESISTORS ARE BELONG TO THIS BAG

It used to be that ice cream trucks would ring a loud bell to call the children to the curb. There still is one in the neighborhood that does that, but for the most part they have these crappy musical horns. Those things should be banned for a multitude of reasons. First off, they sound like shit. Second, they have Christmas music built in. Third, these dumb asses driving the ice cream trucks don’t bother to exclude the Christmas songs from the playlist.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good Christmas carol in season. I seriously do not need to hear them from mid-May through late-September. I fear that all this overexposure to them may ruin them for me come the holiday season. Only time will tell. In the mean time, I’d like all the ice cream truck drivers of Providence to start playing Michael Hearst’s Songs for Ice Cream Trucks.

First, here’s the link to WJAR’s page for the segment, where you can watch the video.

How to Watch HDTV for Free

Not bad, huh? I was a little nervous and forgot to mention a couple of things during the interview. While I did mention that I get all the Boston stations with my OTA antenna, I forgot to note that Cox doesn’t carry any of them, whether in standard def or high def. Also, despite what the operations guy from Cox said, you can totally tell the difference between the recompressed HD signal on cable and the pure OTA signal.

For the most part, 98% of what’s on regular cable is crap. I will admit that I love the original series on HBO and Showtime like Deadwood, Rome, Weeds, Six Feet Under, etc. I see them when they come out on DVD. I like watching a whole season of something in one shot anyway. Except for those few series, how many times can you watch Beverly Hills Cop on HBO? There are also a few of those reality competition shows on Bravo (Top Chef, Top Design, Project Runway) that we don’t get to see live. But if we’re really dying to see them, we can always get them from the iTunes store.

When you figure that I’d pay about $100 per month for the pleasure of having all that entertainment piped into my house by Cox every month, I’m way ahead of the game by going OTA for network television and then buying everything else a la carte.

I spent the better part of yesterday digging up about 24 square feet of the side yard to make room for a raised bed garden. Late in the afternoon, a friend stopped by and helped with installing the raised bed frames and getting them level. I’m pretty sore today in places where I forgot I had muscles.

Today I’ve got to go get a whole boatload of peat moss to fluff up the soil. Our soil is really sticky and clay like.

Link

Later on, I get home and check out the receipts and such. Much to my amazement, Staples has actually made it easy for you to file for rebates now. It seems that now on any Staples rebate offers, there will be an offer code and an Easy Rebate ID code. To file for your rebate, you simply go to stapleseasyrebates.com, enter the two codes and fill in your mailing address info. Ta Da! Done. No stamps, no envelopes, no bullshit. This is so easy, my friend Emory would even use it, and he never files rebates. Let’s hope that everyone else follows suit.