Posts

Tue, Dec 23, 2003

http://patrick.wagstrom.net/mythTorrent/mythTorrent.rss You’re all bright kids, I’m sure you can figure out where this is going.

Thu, Dec 11, 2003

So with finals comes another great time of the year. The time when I look at my web page and try to fix things that are broken. Most recently I’ve been waging a war over 404 pages. Most of these pages actually exist but were not moved into the new layout of the website. For the time being all of this is being fixed via directives in my httpd.conf file and mod_rewrite.

Tue, Dec 9, 2003

GNU Source Highlight is a nice little piece of software that makes it easy to highlight the code that I might want to include in my blog. It doesn’t work for everything, but works well enough and tends to generate prettier output than VIM does. However, it doesn’t quote element attributes and therefore does not generate valid HTML. Here is a patch for it that makes it properly quote attributes:
Because PyBlosxom builds the dates for the entries off the last modified time for an entry and CVS has a tendency to muck these up I decided to build a little tool fix these. This tool will look for a string like: <!-- Date: 2003-12-09 22:23 --> In a file and if it finds it then it sets the file date to the date contained. Works wonders for rebuilding an archive after a mess with CVS.
I’m having to use the AT&T Graphviz tools quite a bit for generate graphs for my research. As I like programming in Python, I decided to write a simple wrapper that would go and call the actual tools. This wrapper lets you create and save neatly-formatted dot files and also provides and easy interface to render them. I use it on an interactive web page to generate graphs on the fly.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is holding a seminar on December 10-11th to talk about voting systems. One of the issues they will address is computer security and openness. Unfortunately, I cannot make it down there because I’ve got finals that day, anyone else going that would care to provide a report on this?

Thu, Dec 4, 2003

In the same vein as the lasturls plugin, I created a nws/nsfw plugin. Now this one monitors the stream of urls entered in the channel and records them. If someone types “nws” or “nsfw” on a single line by itself, the url is added to the list of URL that are not safe. In this way you can return home and easily get just the pr0n urls (or stuff that other’s might find questionable) without having to filter everything else.
I wrote a couple of new plugins for PimpBot last night. The first is a module that will take any URL that is posted in the channel over a certain length and submit it to TinyURL to get a tiny version of the URL. The result usually comes shortly after a message as the bot has got to submit the request to TinyURL. I should add some timeout functionality to it in case TinyURL goes down so the bot doesn’t miss stuff.

Tue, Dec 2, 2003

Reject was recently updated and as a result of the upgrade some software that was installed on there no longer works, among them the antiquated TCL-SQL module that powered the explain module of B|shop (the ircbot of #zoes). Being as I don’t have access to fix it myself, I just decided to write my own bot. So here comes PimpBot. PimpBot is a simple Python script that works with Twisted to provide a plugin based framework for the creation of an IRC bot.

Tue, Dec 2, 2003

The latest update of Fedora from the APT streams appears to break pyPgSQL. This really sucks for me as my research uses this setup. Luckily, I patched the program to understand that a -RH version is okay. Just run this patch against your source archive and rebuild. I’ll submit it to the main project when sourceforge comes back up. --- ./temp2/pypgsql/pgversion.c 2002-12-01 17:10:51.000000000 -0500 +++ ./pypgsql/pgversion.c 2003-12-02 00:07:00.000000000 -0500 @@ -188,6 +188,9 @@ if ((*last == 'r') && (*(last+1) == 'c') && isdigit(*(last+2))) return (errno !