The Site of Mike

Just to be clear, there is no such thing as a terrorist. It is a bullshit marketing term along the lines of “cyber warfare,” “cloud computing,” and “synergy” that is overused to the point of being meaningless. If the incidents are rare or the group behind them is small just stick with “mass murder” or perhaps “heinous crime.” This applies to Boston, London, New York, etc. If attacks are common and part of a larger movement then call it “war” or “total war” if you want to be specific. This applies to parts of the Middle East and Africa.

If you must use the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” please remember that there are two fairly broad definitions in use. A technical definition: the motive is political and the target is the general public rather than an individual (assassination) or military (war). And a blatantly racist definition: those behind the attack are Arab, Muslim, or what ever other overly broad group of people we feel like dehumanizing and vilifying. Official government statements seem to at least try to stick to the technical definition, the media and people in general seem to prefer to just be racist. If you doubt this then try to explain “they hate our freedom” that I’ve heard so often over the past dozen years. (Hint: no one hates our freedom.)

End of rant…

In other news I’ve got a bunch of photos of some of the various memorial sites that have appeared around Boston to post online soon. Hopefully some turned out well, I found it to be a particularly difficult subject matter to photograph.

It has been years since I’ve really done much with my website and its neglected Drupal instance was further out-of-date than any PHP web application should be. However I don’t like deleting things so I’ve migrated the posts over to Tumblr. (That’s where the cool kids are these days right?) Maybe I’ll start using it again, maybe not. :)

For something a bit more interesting try my other site: Geeky Knot

Google’s instant search is kinda dangerous, now you don’t have to even finish typing a search before getting distracted and forgetting the original task at hand. Today’s distraction (so far) is seeing what sites come up for just a single letter:

A: Amazon.com
B: Bank of America
C: Craigslist
D: Dictionary.com
E: ESPN or eBay
F: Facebook
G: Google
H: Hulu
I: iTunes
J: JetBlue
K: Kayak
L: Lowe’s
M: MapQuest
N: Netflix
O: Orbitz
P: Pandora
Q: BrainyQuote
R: Red Sox
S: Southwest Airlines
T: Target
U: UPS
V: Verizon Wireless
W: The Weather Channel
X: Xbox 360
Y: Youtube
Z: Zillow

This list isn’t global by any means, Google’s location detection has a big influence on what results it shows. I tried the same after setting my location to Google Central (Mountain View, CA). That area seems to be more interested in the IRS, Kohl’s, and Redbox.

I am pleased to announce the first public release of Nagcat! This is a project I have been working on at ITA Software over the past several months for monitoring the complex applications we run. It is intended to be used with Nagios 3.x and is written in Python.

I just finished cutting the release and setting up its new project site and now I think it is time for a beer so this announcement is rather short. I’ll be posting some HOWTOs and other information here in the future.

I recently reconfigured my server to run Squid in front of Apache in hopes that it will hold up under load a little better now (Polvi’s site is just too damn popular with web crawlers). To keep people who like reading their Apache logs happy I wanted to make Apache log the original client instead of 127.0.0.1. Here’s the best I’ve come up with so far:

# Set using the normal REMOTE_ADDR value first
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "(.*)" TRUE_REMOTE_ADDR=$1
# Pick the last ip address off the proxy list if we can
SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-For "([0-9\.]+)$" TRUE_REMOTE_ADDR=$1

LogFormat "%{TRUE_REMOTE_ADDR}e %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

Seems to be working so far :-)

Vim’s built in encryption feature is pretty handy but it’s algorithm is only strong enough to protect against a casual observer. For good encryption something else is required but I still want something that is fairly transparent. I’ve come up with a little solution using GnuPG, just add the following to your .vimrc to automatically encrypt and decrypt *.gpg files. (Replace GPGKEYID with your key id of course)

au BufNewFile,BufReadPre *.gpg :set secure viminfo= noswapfile nobackup nowritebackup history=0 binary
au BufReadPost *.gpg :%!gpg -d 2>/dev/null
au BufWritePre *.gpg :%!gpg -e -r GPGKEYID 2>/dev/null
au BufWritePost *.gpg u