My wife and I are please to announce that we will be expanding our family this year. We’re expecting our first towards the end of September. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about it.

This one I thought was pretty easy if you are a geek. And seeing as my blog is pretty tech related, I figured that a lot of people would get this one. Maybe its just me, but when I see certain encoded lines, I can pretty much guess that they are encoded with base64. Maybe I’ve been around email too long.

So if you took our fabulous line and pasted it into any one of a million base64 decoders out there, you would get the following:

With faith and hope, the dream begins anew

It was also a somewhat recent facebook status of mine. The new cryptogram will be coming out in a few days. Stay tuned!

Without further ado, here is the first cryptogram.

V2l0aCBmYWl0aCBhbmQgaG9wZSwgdGhlIGRyZWFtIGJlZ2lucyBhbmV3

Good luck!

For each cryptogram, the solution will be posted the following Monday.

Update: Answers are posted on Wednesday, not Mondays.

Important message, well done video!

For one part of this project, I got the chance to get my hands dirty with my old friend monit. Monit, for those that don’t know, is a UNIX system administrators dream.

Here’s a brief run down of what monit can do from the web site:

Monit can start a process if it does not run, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources. You can use Monit to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamp changes, checksum changes or size changes. You can also monitor remote hosts; Monit can ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols. Monit is controlled via an easy to use control file based on a free-format, token-oriented syntax. Monit logs to syslog or to its own log file and notifies you about error conditions and recovery status via customizable alert.

So…with that little bit of unnecessary advertising going on. What was I trying to do? It was pretty simple really. Monitor a process, if it is not running, restart it. However, there was a twist that I hadn’t done before. It needed to restart as a particular user. My past experience had always been monitoring applications such as a ssh server or smtp server. I hadn’t gone down the path of monitoring an application that a user could start. But if you are doing anything like a kiosk, this type of functionality might come in handy for you.

The solution is ridiculously simple. All you need to do is add an “as” line to the start portion of your script. Here’s an example I found online:

start program = "/etc/init.d/tomcat start"
as uid nobody and gid nobody
stop program = "/etc/init.d/tomcat stop"
# You can also use id numbers instead and write:
as uid 99 and with gid 99

I’m sure I’m not the only one that has run into this so I figured I would help spread the word on a very obvious and probably overlooked monit feature.

If you haven’t had a chance to read their first book, its all online at gettingreal.37signals.com. Its well worth the read.