bascht.com/tech

Checking SSL certificates with SNI via OpenSSL

2014-05-18T01:46:06+02:00

To check the ssl certificate of a site which has SNI enabled, just add the -servername parameter to the s_client:

$ openssl s\_client -servername site.example.com -connect example.com:443

To see only the relevant parts of the certificate – well – grep for it:

$ openssl s_client -servername site.example.com -connect example.com:443 2>/dev/null|openssl x509 -text|grep -e "DNS:\|CN="

Choosing a Vagrant default provider

2013-12-12T18:10:06+01:00

If you are using the VMWare Fusion or Workstation Providers with Vagrant, you are likely to have VirtualBox Installation left on your machine. At least that’s the case for me.

So if you’re annoyed about the Vagrant default behaviour

$ va status
Vagrant could not detect VirtualBox! Make sure VirtualBox is properly installed.
Vagrant uses the `VBoxManage` binary that ships with VirtualBox, and requires
this to be available on the PATH. If VirtualBox is installed, please find the
`VBoxManage` binary and add it to the PATH environmental variable.

I might be the last one to find out, but there is a Vagrant setting to override the default provider:

$ export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=vmware_workstation # (or fusion)

Source: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/providers/default.html

Adjusting the Crunchbang cursor size

2013-10-17T13:17:06+02:00

Firing up Crunchbang in dual screen mode (via arandr) made the cursor appear huge on some windows. A quick duck duck go search revealed this forum post, which had the correct solution: Just adjust your ~/.Xdefaults file to your liking:

Xcursor.size: 16

(I guess the additional xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults is just cargo culting)

Building a Vagrant VMware base box for CentOS 6.4

2013-10-07T18:17:06+02:00

If you followed the ‘semi official’ guides for installing the vmware-tools in CentOS 6, you might end up with a box that has all necessary tools installed, but won’t load them at boot time.

Vagrant doesn’t like it that much:

[default] Configuring network adapters within the VM...
The HGFS kernel module was not found on the running virtual machine.
This must be installed for shared folders to work properly. Please
install the VMware tools within the guest and try again. Note that
the VMware tools installation will succeed even if HGFS fails
to properly install. Carefully read the output of the VMware tools
installation to verify the HGFS kernel modules were installed properly.

For me the official RPM repositories did a good job here and I would recommed giving them a try. So this is my current packer configuration for building a vmware box:

rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub
rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

echo -e "[vmware-tools]\nname=VMware Tools\nbaseurl=http://packages.vmware.com\
/tools/esx/5.1latest/rhel6/\$basearch\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1" > /etc/yum.repos.d\
/vmware-tools.repo

yum -y install vmware-tools-hgfs vmware-tools-esx-nox

And to make sure the module is loaded at boot time:

echo "modprobe vmhgfs" > /etc/sysconfig/modules/vmhgfs.modules
chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/vmhgfs.modules

Unzipping encrypted (win)zip files in linux

2013-07-17T13:04:06+02:00

Last week I got my hands on an »encrypted« .zip file, the built-in zip command wouldn’t eat:

$ unzip vpn.zip
  Archive: vpn.zip
      skipping: vpn/my-config-file.ovpn  need PK compat. v5.1 (can do v4.5)

The solution is pretty simple: Just install 7-Zip. It’s free software and should come with every decent linux distribution.

$ 7z x vpn.zip 

 Processing archive: vpn.zip

 Extracting  vpn
 Extracting  vpn/my-config-file.ovpn
 Enter password (will not be echoed) :

Done.

Emulate a robots.txt file with a simple nginx directive

2013-06-20T13:09:06+02:00

If you use nginx as a reverse proxy, you might want to emulate a simple robots.txt file just to be sure that Googlebot doesn’t traverse into each and every location.

So why bother serving those bytes from a file when you can answer requests directly from nginx:

location /robots.txt {
    return 200 "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /";
}

Bootstrap a Vagrant VM before running the provisioner.

2013-06-08T21:54:06+02:00

This might not be the most elegant way to deal with this problem, but often enough I find myself in a situation in which I try to run bootstrapping-stuff in my puppet-manifests or run a simple apt-get update command before provisioning with Puppet.

One way to solve this dilemma is to bootstrap custom Vagrant boxes with a tool like Veewee, which has served me well for more than a few times now.

But if it is a really simple task I’d like to get done, then I just fall back to the shell provisioner, and touch a file when I’m done, so the provisioner only runs on the very first time.

In your Vagrantfile

Add a provisioner right before your puppet or chef provisioner.

config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "your/path/to/bootstrap-vagrant.sh"

In a separate Shell-Script e.g. bootstrap-vagrant.sh

Add your bootstrapping-code and wrap it in a conditional expression.

#!/bin/bash

STAGE="/etc/first_stage"
if [ ! -e $STAGE ]; then
  # Your bootstrapping-code
  # * Add a user
  # * give sudo rights
  # * add ssh key, etc.
  touch $STAGE
fi

Not that fancy, but it gets stuff done for your dev boxes.

Subsonic won't play MP3 or AAC files

2013-06-05T14:34:06+02:00

I’m currently running my private trial in hosting Subsonic as my personal Spotify-Replacement. So far everything worked out well unless I noticed that it kept skipping all the songs I’ve bought in iTunes.

A quick peek at the logs reveals

Log: (/var/subsonic/transcode/ffmpeg) Encoder (codec id 86017) not found for output stream #0.0

so what was missing, was just the standard evil codec package. E.g. for ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

That’s it.

Importing Posterous archives into Jekyll

2013-06-04T11:14:06+02:00

As I got dropped from posterous I was searching for a simple solution to import my old posterous content into a simple Jekyll Blog structure.

All the other importers I tried had problems importing my posts directly from posterous (as they are probably already down at the time you are reading this). Gladly Paul McCarthy already got this covered with PR 12.

So just checkout out his branch (or the Jekyll-Importer master if it got merged meanwhile):

$ git clone https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-import.git
$ git checkout initial-migrator-import

Extract your posterous archive and run the importer:

$ unzip /tmp/space-691755-techbascht-02f0c75da3aece386d91260.zip -d /tmp/
$ ruby -r './lib/jekyll/importers/posterous-archive.rb' -e '
>> Jekyll::PosterousArchive.process("/tmp/space[…]")'

Check and extract the files. Enjoy.

re-init

2013-06-03T21:14:06+02:00

Let’s get this started again. Ever since Posterous shut down their platform I’ve wanted to move my old tech.bascht.com snippet-blog to my own site. I am using Octopress for my main blog at bascht.com but there is no simple solution for splitting up the _posts directory into multiple sub-sites I went back to trusty ol’ Jekyll.

Enjoy reading.

Getting the EPSON CX11NF to work with Linux

2012-12-10T16:18:06+01:00

Linux. And printing. Well that’s another chapter. In my current office there is a EPSON AcuLaser CX11(NF) - the setup is fairly simple (if you know the hoops you’ll have to jump through).

Get the driver from the (horrible) EPSON Download Section.
Install the .rpm / make install the .tar.gz.
Create proper symlinks to the epson binaries

$ ln -s /usr/bin/pstoalcx11.sh /usr/lib/cups/filter/
$ ln -s /usr/bin/alcx11_lprwrapper.sh /usr/lib/cups/filter/ 
$ ln -s /usr/bin/alcx11 /usr/lib/cups/filter/

Talk to the printer via a direct socket (If prompted by your GUI use something like socket://10.10.0.11:9100)

Voila.

Fixing apache2 on Ubuntu 10.04

2011-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Everything went well after upgrading my Ubuntu LTS installation to 10.04 LTS until I noticed that apache and lighttpd won't come up after a system reboot.

I thought it might be a small hickup with the upstart-migration.

Well, turns out it wasn't: In /var/log/boot.log i have found

Cannot assign requested address: make_sock: could not bind to address

Yep. Ubuntu wouldn't bring up my virtual network interfaces on time…
Gladfully someone else had this problem before.

The MIT Hacker Ethic

2011-10-13T00:00:00+02:00

Steve Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution," outlined the hacker ideal at MIT as consisting of the following principles:

Sharing

Openness

Decentralization

Free access to computers

World Improvement

via hangger.com

Slicehost Articles: Ubuntu Lucid Setup - Part 2

2011-10-02T00:00:00+02:00

If the code doesn't match what it should be for the localization you would like to use for your slice (or if it uses a generic locale like 'POSIX'), run something like the following commands:
sudo /usr/sbin/locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

via articles.slicehost.com

I should get these two lines tattooed somewhere, as I always end up on google, when setting up some new lucid boxes…

fguillen/simplecov-rcov - GitHub

2011-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

SimpleCov Rcov Formatter gem

Is a Rcov style formatter for the ruby 1.9+ coverage gem: SimpleCov.

The target of this formatter is to cheat on Hudson so I can use the Ruby metrics plugin with SimpleCov.

So if you are looking some kind of workaround to integrate SimpleCov with your Hudson + Ruby metrics plugin this is a beginning.

via github.com

tmux settings for screen + vim fans

2011-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

If you don't mind, I'd share my tmux config with you. I have mapped the control key to <ctrl> + <a> because I also got some boxes with GNU Screen flying around and I just can't remap my fingers…

The pane movements are adapted from the standard VIM movements.

setw -g window-status-current-attr underscore setw -g mode-keys vi set -g status-keys vi set -g prefix C-a


 
set-window-option -g utf8 on
set-window-option -g mode-keys vi
set-option -g mouse-select-pane on
set-option -g status on
bind h select-pane -L
bind j select-pane -D
bind k select-pane -U
bind l select-pane -R
bind C-d detach

Fuzz Box: Resign Patterns

2011-05-18T00:00:00+02:00

2.5 Fromage

The Fromage Pattern is often full of holes. Fromage consists of cheesy little software tricks that make portability impossible. The older this pattern gets, the riper it smells.

via fuzz-box.blogspot.com

Installing the ruby-filemagic gem via bundler on OSX

2011-03-28T00:00:00+02:00

If you're running into trouble when installing the ruby-filemagic gem on Mac OS X:

Installing ruby-filemagic (0.4.2) with native extensions /Users/bascht /.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/installer.rb:483:in `rescue in block in build_extensions': ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError) /Users/bascht/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin/ruby extconf.rb checking for magic_open() in -lmagic... no *** ERROR: missing required library to compile this module

You might wanna hand over the path to your macports installation of file.

--with-magic-dir=/opt/local

Kudos to @Xylakant who stumbled over the correct way how to do this with bundler:

bundle config build.ruby-filemagic --with-magic-dir=/opt/local

Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%

2011-03-03T00:00:00+01:00

By the way, it's because of this phenomenon—the fact that many of the great people are never on the job market—that we are so aggressive about hiring summer interns. This may be the last time these kids ever show up on the open market. In fact we hunt down the smart CS students and individually beg them to apply for an internship with us, because if you wait around to see who sends you a resume, you're already missing out.

via joelonsoftware.com

An interview with Andrew Plotkin : The Setup

2011-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

Because if your typing doesn't sound like a hailstorm on a tin roof, you're not typing.

via andrew.plotkin.usesthis.com

Quiet amusing usesthis Interview with Andrew Plotkin.

Hudson's future | Hudson Labs

2011-01-11T00:00:00+01:00

Second, out of respect for Oracle's trademark claim on Hudson, we will move our infrastructure off of Oracle-owned and hosted servers, and we will rename existing independent components of the infrastructure to no longer use "Hudson" - i.e., mailing lists, Github repos, etc. This would be a gradual process, obviously.

via hudson-labs.org

Say Something Nice About Every Language You’ve Used

2010-12-09T00:00:00+01:00

In Michael Easter’s recent post, I was struck by his comment that Guy Steele like all languages. Seems like a pretty chill way to live a programming career. So I wondered, do I like all languages? Can I say something nice about every language I’ve used? As the saying goes, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

via blog.darevay.com

Expedia on how one extra data field can cost $12m

2010-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

Online travel firm Expedia has found that data analytics can deliver a multi-million dollar kick to a company's bottom line.

The company used analytics to identify a single change to a web page that generated an overnight surge in sales, Expedia's VP of global analytics and optimisation Joe Megibow told the Premier Business Leadership Series conference in Las Vegas last week.

via silicon.com

FBI drive for encryption backdoors

2010-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

According to the proposal, any company doing business in the States could not create an encrypted communication system without having a way for the government to order the company to decrypt it, and those who currently do offer that service would have to retool it. It's the equivalent of outlawing whispering in real life.

Cryptographers have long argued that backdoors aren't a feature—they are just a security hole that will inevitably be abused by hackers or adversarial governments.

via arstechnica.com

Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines

2010-09-27T00:00:00+02:00

“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”

Upon hearing this, the programmer was enlightened.

via catb.org

lolbash.sh

2010-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

# LOL!!1

alias wtf='dmesg'
alias onoz='cat /var/log/errors.log'
alias rtfm='man'

alias visible='echo'
alias invisible='cat'
alias moar='more'

alias icanhas='mkdir'
alias donotwant='rm'
alias dowant='cp'
alias gtfo='mv'

alias hai='cd'
alias plz='pwd'

alias inur='locate'

alias nomz='ps -aux'
alias nomnom='killall'

alias cya='reboot'
alias kthxbai='halt'

Germany.rb 2010 in Leipzig

2010-09-16T00:00:00+02:00

Germany.rb 2010 in Leipzig

Am 18. und 19. September 2010 findet im sublab in Leipzig zum ersten Mal das Ruby User Treffen Germany.rb statt. Eingeladen ist jede an Ruby Interessierte Person – vom Beginner bis zum Experten.

via ruby-lang.org

Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant

2010-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

Google today launched an ambitious effort to speed up searching. But what they really did is kill SEO.

Google says:

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type."

The most important consideration for marketers or anyone who creates content, however, is in the bullets...

"Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need."

via steverubel.com

Compass CSS

2010-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

via compass-style.org

Compass is a stylesheet authoring tool that uses the Sass stylesheet language to make your stylesheets smaller and your web site easier to maintain. Compass provides ports of the best of breed css frameworks that you can use without forcing you to use their presentational class names. It’s a new way of thinking about stylesheets that must be seen in action!

Secured Typing - The Daily WTF

2010-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

Gary's company has an "enterprise" application, and like any enterprise application, it was built to be all things for all people, by people that didn't have a clear picture of which things it was supposed to be to whom. While a customer could, in theory, install and configure it on their own, pretty much everyone paid for a consultant to handle the setup for them. Gary was one of those consultants.

via thedailywtf.com

Skip closing Brackets in VIM

2010-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

I love VIM and I recently stumbled upon a feature that you probably know
from TextMate: Skip the Closing bracket when typing.

Sure. VIM can do that.

inoremap ( () inoremap  ) strpart(getline('.'), col('.')-1, 1) == ")" ? "\" : ")"

This just skips the closing bracket and you can go on typing without
having to leave insert mode or do some awkward Emacs movements.

Found at http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Automatically_append_closing_characters

Kill Your To-Do List | Zen Habits

2010-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

Those who don’t have a to-do list probably feel they should, because they’re swamped and feeling overwhelmed.

I’m here to suggest: kill your to-do list.

via zenhabits.net

Good read. Especially If you are stuck somewhere in the middle of your Allen Bible (like me).

Solve the Problem, Calm the Client & Save the Project

2010-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

We’re always talking about tough clients, bad clients and boring clients. But what about the great clients who are simply having a hard time? When you work remotely, it can be difficult to tell when clients or colleagues — good or otherwise — are having serious trouble achieving a task you need them to do.

via webworkerdaily.com

A must-read for every freelance worker / artist.

Mac & the iPad

2010-04-20T00:00:00+02:00

Unlike Microsoft in the early days, these guys move fast, and they add real additional value along the way.

via asktog.com

Good essay on the parallels between iPad and the first Macs. (via Slashdot)

Ksplice - Hello from a libc-free world!

2010-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

As an exercise, I want to write a Hello World program in C simple enough that I can disassemble it and be able to explain all of the assembly to myself.

This should be easy, right?

via blog.ksplice.com

Don’t be afraid of PHP 5.3 | Juozas devBlog

2010-03-02T00:00:00+01:00

While attending PHPUK conference in London, I noticed how much talk there is about PHP 5.3 and “when to upgrade?”, there was even a presentation about that. Because I have been using PHP 5.3 for more than half a year, I decided to share my views on this topic. This topic is very important as the earlier PHP 5.3 is adopted, the sooner second iteration of frameworks can be released

via dev.juokaz.com

Scott Chacon | The Geek Talk

2010-02-20T00:00:00+01:00

At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches thier own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it.

via thegeektalk.com

Interesting (and amusing) interview with scott chacon of github.

Symfony Live Conference, Symfony 2.0 and DI

2010-02-19T00:00:00+01:00

Now if some people cannot accept that Symfony 2 is really fast and if they cannot accept that Symfony 2 is great step forward for PHP, that's sad. The web evolves very fast. Competition is everywhere for PHP. We should all be in the same boat.

via fabien.potencier.org

Applying Mathematics To Web Design - Smashing Magazine

2010-02-09T00:00:00+01:00

Mathematics is beautiful.” This may sound absurd to people who wince at numbers and equations. But some of the most beautiful things in nature and our universe exhibit mathematical properties, from the smallest seashell to the biggest whirlpool galaxies. In fact, one of the greatest ancient philosophers, Aristotle, said: “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

via smashingmagazine.com

Spamassassin FH_DATE_PAST_20XX test buggy in 2010

2010-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

It seems there is an issue with the Spamassassin FH_DATE_PAST_20XX test. This test checks whether the email has a date in the future and, if this is the case, raises the message’s score. Apparently, this test is falsely triggered by all emails that have been sent in 2010, producing several false positives.

via g-loaded.eu

Due to a bug in the Spamassassin ruleset a lot of messages fail the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX check 'cause they are sent in 2010(!).
The resolution is quite handy: just run sa-update.

5 Scary Things That Facebook Knows About You

2010-01-28T00:00:00+01:00

Amidst the privacy policy debacle that Facebook is facing, another tip off from one of their employee is definitely not helping their current situation. An interview with an anonymous Facebook employee conducted on blogsite The Rumpus confirms that Facebook knows your every move. They know who you are stalking and when you do it; this information is stored permanently.

The full interview can be found here, and not all the information are new but there are a few shocking statements included.

via omgzam.com

Just a short reminder.

Soon to come: Symfony definitive guide for 1.3 and 1.4

2010-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

Hi all,

I'm listening... but I needed some time to think about the topic a bit
more before answering. Here are my thoughts(…)

via groups.google.co.uk

Looks like Fabien is definitely one of those guys with 48 hours / day.
No matter how he manages his time, this step looks really promising.

Run Effective, Google-Style Meetings - Lifehacker

2010-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

via lifehacker.com

Exclude .svn subdirectories in your grep search

2009-11-24T00:00:00+01:00

Just a little reminder for myself: In 93 of 95 cases i want to exclude all of the .svn subdirectories lying around in my working copy.
Andreas brought that one to my mind again with a nasty forest of grep pipes. ;-)

grep -R --exclude \*.svn\* your_pattern

gives me only the output I really need.

Update (2:42pm):

Gosh. After @denderello got nudged about my last blog post I gave http://betterthangrep.com/ a try.
It came via macports and I'm already loving it's colorful output and the per-file groups. Neato.

Apaches little helpers

2009-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

I installed my mamp stack via macports, so the normal GUI-tools of Mac OS won't let me toggle any services. Coming from the Linux / init world thats my bumbling approach to have a quick startup-script for Apache and MySQL: #!/bin/bash if [ "$1" == "start" ]; then /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start& /opt/local/bin/mysqld_safe5& else /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop /opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 -u root shutdown fi

Thank you, Rails

2009-11-06T00:00:00+01:00

This is all pretty understandable: it’s easy to define community in terms of what we’re not. A common enemy focuses and drives us. Competition can take a positive form: when it’s friendly and constructive both communities benefit.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed the tone of the arguments in the Django community getting nastier — especially when it comes to Rails. Again, I’m far from innocent in this regard: I’ve certainly done my fair share of Rails-bashing, and I regret it.

via jacobian.org

Neat article - seeing Rails from a Django persons view.

Hello, Posterous.

2009-11-05T00:00:00+01:00

Though there's a permanent need to post tech stuff to my primary blog at http://blog.bascht.com, I wanted to keep that place more like a personal weblog, e.g. clean. So what you're seeing here, is the workaround for that: It's the Tech-Blog of Bascht.

This is the place where I want to post code snippets, rants and beautiful findings around the world of Symfony, Doctrine and other fancy stuff.

And, beware: It's got syntax highlighting!

#!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- if __name__ == "__main__": print "Hi Posterous!"