Carmike Cinemas – Having a Bad Day
Thinking I might like to order a gift certificate for my mother for her birthday, I headed to the Carmike Cinemas website to see if I could get her movie tickets for a show or two. Unfortunately, it seems someone on their admin staff left his pager at the office and hasn’t gotten the notification that their entire site is down because they’ve run out of disk space. Either that, or perhaps those torrents finally finished downloading.
Using Amazon S3 to Store Sunbird/Lightning Calendars Online
I’ve been following the development of the Mozilla Calendar application for several years now, and what for awhile seemed an abandoned project has seen much development and improvement over the past several months (or so it seems to me).
Tonight I downloaded the pre-release build of the forthcoming 0.7 release to test it. The standalone client — Sunbird — looks very nice, but further testing will determine how stable and functional it has become.
Regardless, since I like to access my calendars from the office as well, and I don’t like having to carry a laptop back and forth, I was about to configure another WebDav section on a server when I remembered that the Jungledisk client for Amazon’s S3 service provides a WebDav interface when it is running (making it easily accessible via Gnome)… Since I have Jungledisk installed and running both at home and at work, I thought I’d give that a try. A little bit of trial-and-error later, and it seems to be working as expected.
To use this method, you must first have Jungledisk installed and running, which is merely a matter of downloading the client for your particular OS, unpacking it, and running it. In my case, from Ubuntu:
wget http://downloads.jungledisk.com/jungledisk/junglediskbeta.tar.gz
tar zxf junglediskbeta.tar.gz
cd jungledisk
./junglediskmonitor &
The first time you run it, it will ask for your S3 credentials. Once it is running, you should have a WebDav server running on localhost:2667. To check, from Ubuntu Gnome simply go to Places > Connect to Server. Use Webdav (HTTP) as the Service type, and in the Server: field enter localhost and in the Port: field, enter 2667. Feel free to also enter a Name for the connection, and then click Connect. If everything is working, you should now see a display of the contents of your Jungledisk.
Now, if you haven’t already, fire up Sunbird or open up your Lightning-enhanced Thunderbird. From the File menu, choose New Calendar.
On the first screen of the Create New Calendar window, choose On the Network and click Next.
On the next screen, select iCalendar (ICS) for the Format, and in the location field, enter http://localhost:2667/the_name_of_your_new_calendar.ics and click Next.
On the last page, simply give the calendar a meaningful name and pick a color for the entries. In this example, I created a calendar of TV shows which I want to try to remember to watch. Having them in a separate file allows me to turn it off when I don’t want to see those entries.
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Pownce Invites
If anyone is still looking for Pownce invites, let me know and I’ll get one out to you.
CentOS 4 and Subversion
Installing Subversion from source on CentOS 4? If so, build neon before building Subversion, and be sure to enable shared libraries in neon while building it, or you may not be able to use the Python bindings later on.
./configure –with-ssl –enable-shared
After you’ve built and installed neon (0.25.5 in my case), remove the neon directory from the Subversion source.
New Jaiku App For Linux: Pjaiku
Last night, purely by chance, I noticed a post on Jaiku by Techsyslonghorn requesting assistance in getting a linux application named Pjaiku working on Ubuntu. So, as my never-ceasing quest to find the latest and greatest software continues, I had to check it out.
While the application does not yet have a formalized installation procedure, here are the steps I took to get it running:
First off, the application requires two python modules (and some ancillary modules which will also be installed for us), so install those first:
sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-simplejson
Next, download the file either through your web browser or via the command line:
wget http://h.ordia.com.ar/pjaiku/pjaiku_020.tar.gz
Then unpack it by either right-clicking on it in Gnome and choosing Extract Here, double-clicking on it and using File Roller to extract it, or, being a command line junkie, do it the easy way:
tar zxf pjaiku_020.tar.gz
Now, change into the directory created above and try to run it:
cd pjaiku
./pjaiku.py
If all has gone according to plan, the application should open up and present you with a request for your Jaiku username and your API key which is available at http://api.jaiku.com.
After entering those pieces of information, you should be presented with the main Pjaiku window and the application should go fetch your friends recent posts. So far I am enjoying the app. It has full support for post icons, allows posting to the new’ish Jaiku groups, and generally presents information in a nice way.
Some of the things I’d like to see which are currently missing or simply not yet implemented:
- A way to follow the public timeline
- The ability to reply or submit a comment
- An ability to minimize the icon and have popup notification boxes, a la libnotify, etc
Give it a try, I think you’ll like it!
More Twitter Downtime
Twitter has been down most of the day, or at least under such loads that none of the apps I use to interact with it will work. . . Not good, and certainly not a glowing recommendation for Ruby on Rails.
JaikuBerry – Jaiku on the Blackberry
While I much prefer Twitter over Jaiku, I have been following along with things on the Jaiku side. One of the biggest things Jaiku has going for it is they have an amazing applet for S60-based mobile phones (primarily Nokia) phones.
On the other side of the coin, one of the weakest points of their service from the US/Canada, etc is that they have an amazing applet for S60-based phones only. Since it seems to me that there are a far greater number of Motorola and (especially) Blackberry users on this side of the pond, that application does us no good. Nor does the fact that they do not (as yet) have a US short number for posting updates via SMS. Additionally, they have no XMPP/Jabber interface up yet. All of this combined means that most folks I know can post only from their desktops/laptops, which is usually where I don’t care what they are doing.
To partially remedy this situation comes Richard Todd and his new JaikuBerry app for the Blackberry family brings some much needed mobile access to the mix.
Pidgin with Libnotify
One of the things I missed most since I built Pidgin from source for my Ubuntu laptop was the gaim-libnotify plugin which pops up a small notification window with the text of incoming messages, buddy notifications, etc (a la growl on the Mac).
Fortunately, someone at getdeb.net has released a version of the plugin in .deb form, but this probably works only if you are using their Pidgin build. Even more fortunate, however, is the fact that they released a large diff for the changes between gaim-libnotify and the new pidgin-libnotify!
So, in a couple easy steps, one can have it up and running. First, install libnotify-dev via apt:
sudo apt-get install libnotify-dev
Then, fetch a copy of the latest gaim-libnotify from the Sourceforge site. As of this writing, version 0.12 is the latest, despite the site indicating that 0.11 is the most recent. Unpack it and move to that directory.
Next, save the diff file (which comes gzipped) to the gaim-libnotify directory, unpack it, and patch the source:
gunzip pidgin-libnotify_0.12-1~getdeb1.diff.gz
patch -p1 < pidgin-libnotify_0.12-1~getdeb1.diff
If all goes right, you should see something like the following:
floozle@omega:~/src/gaim-libnotify-0.12$ patch -p1 < pidgin-libnotify_0.12-1~getdeb1.diff
patching file src/Makefile.am
patching file src/gaim-libnotify.c
patching file src/Makefile.in
patching file Makefile.am
patching file Makefile.in
. . . snipped . . .
From that point, you can simply configure the plugin, build it, and install it:
./configure –with-gaim=/usr/local/bin/pidgin
make
sudo make install
Next, restart Pidgin, go to Tools | Plugins and enable Libnotify-popups. This is a great way to receive Twitter notifications without having to continually look at the chat windows. My daily Twitterings can be found here.
Pidgin 2.0.0 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn
Here’s my 10-minute install guide for getting Pidgin 2.0.0 (ex gaim) running on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04):
Step 1: Download the Source Code bz2ball from
Step 2: Install the required libraries
sudo apt-get build-dep gaim
Step 3: Unpack the source code and switch to that directory
tar jxf pidgin-2.0.0.tar.bz2
cd pidgin-2.0.0
Step 4: Configure, build, and install it, for most, the defaults are fine. For this step, I let it put it in /usr/local/bin so that I could easily remove it should Ubuntu release an official package.
./configure && make
sudo make install
For safety sake, you might want to backup your .gaim directory in case something awry (as pidgin uses other files for configuration information). For the rest of us, charge ahead and fire it up:
/usr/local/bin/pidgin &
It creates a .desktop file for you, but I’m a command line junkie anyway.
Microsoft: Trouble in Security Paradise
A week ago announcements were made that Microsoft Windows was the most secure OS available. Today, the SANS Internet Storm Center has published a report entitled Chinese Internet Security Response Team Reports ANI Worm regarding the discovery in the wild of a “worm-like payload installed using the ANI-exploit:
“It has the same behavior as Worm.Win32.Fujacks. It also can infects .HTML .ASPX .HTM .PHP .JSP .ASP and .EXE files, and inserts the malicious links which contained Windows Animated Cursor Handling zero-day vulnerability into .HTML .ASPX .HTM .PHP .JSP .ASP files. It also can send out Chinese spams which are include the same zero-day vulnerability link.”
The ANI exploit was reported to Microsoft in December but has not yet been patched, and involves their animated cursor handling routines. Unfortunately, blocking most of these animate cursors will also modify the user’s experience on myspace.com. On the bright-side, companies can use this as an excuse — as if they needed one — to completely block that flea-bitten dog called myspace.com.
I’m glad I get my secure systems elsewhere, but since I support the beast for a living, this is just more job security goodness.
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- Alright Ubuntu, what the heck is up with the Sqlite3 bindings (or lack thereof) in Jaunty (PHP)? 1 day ago
- More sleet falling... How lucky we are. 3 days ago
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