Steve Kemp's Blog

Russell Coker has recently started posting random tech-tips and recipes in his blog :

To improve things in this regard I plan to increase the number of posts I write with solutions to random technical problems that I encounter with the aim of providing a resource for google searches and to randomly inform people who read my blog.

This is nice to see on Planet Debian - although I hope we continue to see the personal entries.

For anybody else who is considering posting things like this I would be delighted if you'd copy them to the Debian Administration website. There have been numerous times when I've been just about to write something on a topic, seen it posted elsewhere and figured I shouldn't do so:

• Because it would be duplication.
• Because it would look like plagiarism

(Notable examples off the top of my head: Introduction to OpenVZ, Introduction to GIT, several Xen pieces.)

I don't get many submissions, which I'm getting resigned to, but it is easy and people really really are greatful for new posts.

In other news linuxlinks.com are a bunch of spammers and will be reported as such. I utterly fail to care that they've added "my software" to their list; if I cared I'd join their site and agree to receive emails from them..

In the next week I intend to drop the search engine which archives content posted to Planet Debian.

It appears to have very little use, except for myself, and I'm significantly better at bookmarking posts of interest these days.

If you'd like to run your own copy the code is available and pretty trivial to reimplement regardless. There are only two parts:

• Poll and archive content from the planet RSS feed - taking care of duplicates.
• Scanning for /robots.txt upon the source-host, to avoid archiving content which should be "private".

Once you've done that you'll have a database populated with blog entries, and you just need to write a little search script.

ObRandom: In the time it has been running it has archived 15,464 posts!

After recently intending to drop the Planet Debian search and recieving complaints that it was/is still useful it looks like there is a good solution.

The code will be made live and official upon the planet debian in the near future.

The DSA team promptly installed the SQLite3 package for me, and I've ported the code to work with it. Once Apache us updated to allow me to execute CGI scripts it'll be moved over, and I'll export the current data to the new database.

In other news I'm going to file an ITP bug against asql as I find myself using it more and more...

Been a week since I posted. I've not done much, though I did complete most of the migration of my planet-searching code to gluck.debian.org.

This is now logging to a local SQLite database, and available online.

I've updated the blog software so that I can restrict comments to posts made within the past N days - which has helped with spam.

My other comment-spam system is the use of the crm114 mail filter. I have a separate database now for comments (distinct from that I use for email), and after a training on previous comments all is good.

Other than being a little busy over the past week life is good. Especially when I got to tell a recruitment agent that I didn't consider London to be within "Edinburgh & Surrounding Region". Muppets.

The biggest downside of the week was "discovering" a security problem in Java, which had been reported in 2003 and is still unfixed. Grr. (CVE-2003-1156 for those playing along at home).

Heres the code:

#!/bin/sh
#
#  Grep for potentially unsafe /tmp usage in shared libraries
#


find /lib -name '*.so' -type f -print > /tmp/$$
find /usr/lib -name '*.so' -type f -print >> /tmp/$$
for i in $(cat /tmp/$$ ); do
    out=$(strings $i | grep '/tmp')
    if [ ! -z "$out" ]; then
        echo "$i"
        echo "$out"
    fi
done
rm /tmp/$$

I've uploaded a new make package to fix the memory corruption bug which I recently tracked down, with kind permission from the maintainer.

I've also been working on a Debian Planet filtering/exclusion system. I've put together a (working) online demo, and I think I could probably inject it via greasemonkey without too many problems. (I'm a little reluctant to install that addon, because I suspect the security implications are severe).

Still it was a nice hack, and actually reminds me that I like javascript these days. The demo will probably disappear in a week or two, but otherwise works as expected - just a couple of GUI issues to solve.

(As with the Debian Planet search this isn't tied to our install, and could work on any PlanetPlanet installation.)

Maybe it isn't the friendliest of ideas, but I think it is a good one regardless.

ObQuote: Last King of Scotland

Planet Debian now has Javascript to facilitate the persistent hiding of particular feeds.

The code is still in flux, but appears to work.

Comments welcome, especially from people better at Javascript than myself!

The way it works was chosen to minimise the changes requred:

• Each entry is wrapped within a new <div>
• The DIV has an ID & a CLASS attribute added.

At load-time the function hideHosts() is called. If a comma-separated cookie called "excludes" is present this is split and iterated over.

For each domain-name in the list the current document is searched for elements having a class prefixed with that hostname - if any match and they have an ID defined (regardless of what that might be) they are hidden.

And thats it.

The changes to the template were minimal; each index entry already has a "link" attribute, so I just had to add this:

 <div class="<!-- tmpl_var name='link' escape='html' -->"
         id="<!-- tmpl_var name='link' escape='html' -->" >
 ....
 </div>

Because the ID and LINK attributes are URLs there is a little mangling, and inefficiency. But I didn't want to change the core of the PlanetPlanet to define a "hostname" attribute for each feed member...

In an ideal world I'd add "class='feed, $link'" and then iterate over that at load-time to attach handlers, and an ID appropriately. But that is a little scary.. If it works in IE great. I've tested Firefox & Ephinay

ObQuote: Terminator II

Update: Moved javascript into external file, and removed the image toggling, it seemed to fail and I'm not sure why. I will investigate.