August 2007 Archives

Ok, that so obviously didn't happen. As I'm sure you can probably tell.

I'll be doing it at some point... instead I bought a new computer to use at PAX. It's hella sweet. More on that later. I'm about to take off of work to go home and install Windows Vista (heh!) on it so I can game.

FreeBSD isn't a gaming platform. Yes, I play WoW on it - in fact, I prefer using WoW in FreeBSD to using it in Windows, but there are other games out there. I know it's hard to believe; I was shocked when I found out.

I must prepare for PAX. I must train. My game-fu will be strong. Oh, yes. The time of FPS reckoning has begun.

I recommend that you all go out and listen to Kidneythieves at once.

I'm migrating to MoveableType 4.x today (hopefully). Expect the site to be down for a bit.

I get hit by a lot of blog spam - depending on the time of day, up to 3 attempts per second. It's one of the reasons I moved to MT. While I really liked using WordPress, I couldn't ever get the junk filtering the way I wanted it. MT catches about 90% of the spam if not more. I moderate comments, so I'm able to catch that extra 10% when I'm checking my approval queue. Even so, it gets annoying. I'm tired of reading about Viagra. My solution? I wrote a script to go through and pull the IP's of every comment marked as spam. I've noticed only 1 false positive in my entire time running MT, so I'm mostly confident in only pulling abusive users' IP addresses. I populated my bannedip's table with this list. If you're having problems posting comments because your IP is banned and you're a legitimate user, let me know and I'll fix it. If anyone is interested in doing the same for their blog, I can provide the script I used to do this as well as a list of the offending IP address.

I was interviewed by Geek Entertainment TV at Linux World - you can check it out here. I'm on about 1/3 of the way through.

I was completely frozen up and nervous the entire time. Matt/Denise put me in front of the camera, and 5 seconds later it was on - despite my protests. You can tell how nervous I am (and how much of a ditz I am). Regardless, it was kind of amusing. She totally played with my tail. :P

If you haven't heard the news yet, SCO got fucked. Heh. Point and laugh. I nearly fell over laughing when I read this:

According to Judge Kimball's ruling, Microsoft paid SCO approximately $16 million for license rights and Sun paid approximately $10 million. SCO neglected to turn over the licensing fees to Novell, which "gave SCO its first profitable year in history," Kimball notes.

Props to Kimball.

Today, I'm working on capacity planning. Capacity planning is by far one of my least favorite aspects of my jobs. It's an exercise in futility, in my opinion. It reminds me of shopping for pants. I find the perfect cute pair, and then I'm reminded of how much soda i drink, leading to the question "Will these pants fit me a year from now?" Capacity planning for large networks like I'm responsible for now is the exact same way. Will this number of servers still properly support my butt after so many late night coding sessions? Hmm.

It's been quite a while since I wrote a post about getting flash working under firefox in FreeBSD. It's gotten fairly popular, but I've also gotten a lot of emails and comments telling me that it was out of date. I hadn't set up flash on my computer at home yet, so I just went through the steps and revised them a little.

linuxpluginwrapper will prompt you with a config menu for multimedia/linux-realplayer and print/acroread7 support. I suggest not enabling acroread - as of mid 2006, linuxpluginwrapper was having some issues with unresolved symbols. It appears this is still the case.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linuxpluginwrapper
# make install clean

If you try to compile linuxpluginwrapper with acroread support, you'll get something like this when you try to use it later:

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so [/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/ intellinux/nppdf.so: Undefined symbol "__ctype_b_loc"]

rltd has to be patched if we want any chance of getting flash7 to work properly.

# cd /usr/src
# fetch -o - http://people.freebsd.org/~nork/rtld_dlsym_hack.diff | patch
# cd libexec/rtld-elf
# make clean && make && make install

Install www/linux-flashplayer7. Do not use flashplugin-mozilla.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flashplayer7
# make install clean

Although linuxpluginwrapper does supply an example libmap.conf, it's old. I mean, just look at the version number. 2005? I'm going to assume that you actually bother to run somewhat updated software, so here's a libmap.conf that will work with the prefix change for X.Org when we bumped major versions.

# My sample /etc/libmap.conf
# Flash 7 with Mozilla/Firefox
[/usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so]
libpthread.so.0 libpthread.so.2
libdl.so.2 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
libz.so.1 libz.so.3
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
# Helix RealPlayer
[/usr/local/lib/linux-mozilla/plugins/nphelix.so]
libstdc++.so.5 libstdc++.so.5
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libgcc_s.so.1 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so


We're almost done. Create a symlink for the flash player.

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/lib/browser_linux_plugins/