xrayspx.com

Dear Internet Advertisers

Wed, 03/10/2010 - 12:00am — xrayspx

[music | Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - All Tomorrows Parties]

This week both Ars Technica and Fark, both of whom get decent traffic, have basically begged users not to use ad blockers. I think people would be less likely to use ad block if your ads didn't kill our browsers, below are some examples.

On Fark, the square ad at the top of the right-hand navigation bar demolishes WebKit based browsers on Linux. Doesn't matter what the ad actually is, but if I hit Fark in Arora or ReKonq without Flash turned off, they die as soon as they hit that ad, every single time, write it down. Fix that shit.

Sprint ads. Sprint ads have been consistently crippling Mozilla based browsers on Linux as well, both Firefox and Flock. "Occasionally", using autoscroll (mid click scrolling), the browser will just crawl and become unresponsive. It will continue to slowly scroll until the ad is off the page, then become responsive again. I can't tell if this happens on Mac, since I mainly use Safari.

Holy fuck, it's the Perfect Storm(or perfect Curve I guess)! Luckily this session is in Chrome on a Mac or else my machine might have just shot itself in the face

I realize these are both Flash issues, and that the state of Flash on Linux and Mac is pretty abysmal, I use both platforms. So…. you want people to stop blocking your ads? Show ads that don't break my goddamn computer, is it a deal? Maybe stop dealing Flash ads? JS only? Maybe?

Now, I honestly don't use ad blockers. In the case of Arora or ReKonq, the only way is to turn off Flash, which is annoying, and in a general sense I don't mind getting ads. I do hate ads that break my browser, or which open popups, resize my browser, redirect me, etc. Stop that shit Fark, stop trying to open pop-ups, and fix the ad in the right-hand nav on the homepage and we'll be buds.

One more time: Don't complain that no one wants to view your ads when your ads are harmful.

Gutter's Redemption

Mon, 03/01/2010 - 11:15am — xrayspx

-- Update: Seeing the reaction this has generated is driving me to demand one of these for all upcoming concerts, get ready Natalie.

Last week we got to see George Clinton at the House of Blues. Thanks to HoB policy of a rectal exam for every male customer, I have no photos of this event, which is why Natalie whipped out the following illustration:

Click for massive

I'm really happy with the way that came out, she really went nuts considering I counted 21 on stage at one point!

We were so happy to see this circus on stage, but it was hard knowing how tough it's been for Clinton. For a family that's gone through so much in the last couple of months to be up performing with that much energy was awe inspiring.

This was also easily the best sounding show we've been to at the HoB. I attribute that to the venue finally getting everything dialed in, and the fact that these guys are just that good.

Also, introduced us to local keyboardist Danny Bedrosian, who opened the show before playing the main set, and who has several local dates coming up. We'll be there, definitely.

Find LDAP groups with obsolete users

Sun, 02/21/2010 - 11:04am — shart

OpenLDAP has a nice "feature" that allows for group members to continue to exist, even if the user does not exist any more. Really handy! Problem is, if you, say, have a user in the "Domain Admins" group, and you delete that account, and then some normal user comes along with the same username, they will end up with unexpected elevated privileges.

So I created a script that I run weekly that finds group members that no longer exist, and sends me a report. It also tells me which groups are empty.

This relies on my toolbox... Find it here.

Using some of our new tools

Sat, 02/20/2010 - 11:30pm — shart

Ok... Now that we have our toolbox Let's do something with it. Today we'll look at a simple solution to an everyday problem. Resetting a password.

Part 4: Wrapping up the foundations

Sun, 02/14/2010 - 2:02pm — shart

Just to wrap up, and in case you are lazy like me, give you a whole file worth of subroutines. It's my toolbox and I'm giving it to you. I put this in a secure location and just call it from my other scripts. This makes the code much shorter in my other scripts, nearly auto-commenting, and avoids bugs because if it works in one, it will work in others.

NOTE: This uses the foundations in parts 1, 2 and 3. You can find them here: Part 1 Part 2 Part3

Part 3: The SubRoutines

Sun, 02/14/2010 - 1:45pm — shart

Now for the tools. There's a lot here, but in further articles you will see how this can be useful. I'll go through each tool with what it does, how to call it, and then the code itself.

NOTE: This uses the foundations in parts 1 and 2. You can find them here: Part 1 Part 2

Part 2: Some Standard declarations and personalizing for your site

Sun, 02/14/2010 - 11:10am — shart

More foundational work. This stuff will configure for your site, and the routines that follow will regularly rely on them.

Part 1: Foundations

Sun, 02/14/2010 - 10:26am — shart

In our journey of code, it is always useful to have a foundation. For starters you will need to make sure that you have the following PERL packages installed, as we will be using them regularly.

Net::LDAP
Authen::SASL
IO::Socket::SSL
Digest::SHA
Mail::Sendmail
Crypt::SmbHash
CGI

I have found that some of these are much easier to install via packages (yum or apt-get), specifically Authen::SASL, as it requires Net::SSLeay, which requires it be compiled with the same compiler as your original perl installation. Most of the others can be installed from cpan.

Opening Message

Sun, 02/14/2010 - 10:12am — shart

Hello and Welcome!

Over the course of my time as an Admin I've done a lot of Google searches and writeen a lot of code that has been very helpful to me in my work. I will be posting things here that hopefully will help you in your quest to master some of these technologies (Or simply stand on the shoulders of midgets).

I by no means consider myself a Perl or LDAP expert. It has been a "Learn as you go" ordeal. No formal training, just get things done on an as-needed basis.

I assume that you have a basic knowledge of PERL and LDAP.

Enjoy!

-Sean

HOWTO: Properly SPAM A Blog

Sun, 01/10/2010 - 5:21pm — xrayspx

For anyone spamming blogs, especially my blog, this is the proper way to do it. This comment is vaguely related enough that it seems like maybe the person just missed the point they were trying to make, or is a bad writer. In fact, it was copied from this Amazon review of a DVD from 2007.

So rather than general Russian cyrillic nonsense, how about you morons try a little harder. I'm leaving that comment up as a monument to the way you idiots should be working. Put your damn back into it once in a while.