Sean’s Obsessions

A comment in a Slashdot article lead me to iploc.org, specifically Country names zone which lets you get the country for a given IP address over DNS. I wrapped it in a bash function… throw this at the end of your .bashrc: geo() { dig +short TXT `echo $1 | \ awk -F. ‘{print $4″.”$3″.”$2″.”$1″.cc.iploc.org”}’`;} [...]

Much hoopla has been made over Github stopping their gem building service, and for people to use Gemcutter. All the stuff I’ve read has been that gemcutter is much better for publishing Gems, and that it’s easier to find the canonical gem (instead of deciding whether fred-mygem is better than barney-mygem) Fair enough, but what [...]

I’m sitting in a course on call centre design, and yesterday there was mention of Erlangs, which are a unit of measure of the volume of traffic on a telecommunications network. These Erlangs can be used to calculate how many agents a call centre needs (or, given the number of agents, what service level can [...]

After more work on a CakePHP app I wanted to host it somewhere. Because this is a fairly low volume app I went with a shared hosting provider. One problem was that I needed two different database connections, one for my development site, and one when I push it to the server. It was fairly [...]

b5media has launched an entertainment gateway Our dev team worked around the clock (literally… you go Brian!) to get this ready for launch. I think it’s a great evolution of the channel concept. Rather than just having a bunch of blogs in a channel, we have this portal to help showcase the best posts, and [...]

I had a need to put password protection on a web site, but allow a certain section to be unprotected. The other way around is easy because permissions are inherited to subdirectories, so a child directory won’t affect a parent. According to Configuration Sections, merging, Locations containers are processed in order, so the second container [...]

Over at b5media we have some internal code that ties all the blogs together to make us a network. This was initially implemented as a brilliant little REST API, only requiring minor changes in some database tables that could completely alter how the network was arranged. Additional functionality could be added easily to the API, [...]

There’s lots of documents out there on how to download the latest time zone data and apply it manually. In the interests of proper management though, I like using RPM to do pretty much everything. The problem is that Fedora Legacy has disbanded, so I can’t get patches for my FC1 and FC4 systems. The [...]

I like to cook. The other night I wanted to make some caramel corn so I started searching for recipes on the Internet. All I found was crap, or the same recipe rehashed (using 1 cup of butter, no less). I’ve also been on mailing lists where the same point gets debated, or the same [...]

A co-worker pointed me to (ISC)2′s rebuttal of my earlier article. https://www.isc2.org/download/SearchSecurityArticleCounterpoints.pdf I’m still not convinced by their arguments which are largely arguing semantics. You’ll note “Student” is in quotes. I’m not claiming it’s the official title. One of my arguments is that these new “(ISC)2 associates” will be confused with regular CISSPs. (ISC)2′s argument [...]