What is cURL good for ? - Stack Overflow

What is cURL good for ? - Stack Overflow

Quite a nice list! Let it inspire you!
The other week is attended a presentation, where curl was used for triggering all sorts of actions on a data base engine through an HTTP server. curl is really the swiss army knife of web-2.0.

Apple is a ‘mutant virus’ says Acer founder | 9 to 5 Mac Apple is a ‘mutant virus’ says Acer founder | Apple Intelligence

Apple is a ‘mutant virus’ says Acer founder | 9 to 5 Mac Apple is a ‘mutant virus’ says Acer founder | Apple Intelligence

the ISP doesn't let you ssh

Did that occur to you before? Your (new) Internet connection seems to work instantly, but then you recognize, that you do not succeed with ssh connections. (Search engine question: "Why does my SSH connection not work?") That may have different reasons.

1. The ISP block connections on certain destination ports like 22.
   If you can, get the sshd you want to connect to, to also answer on port 23 e.g. . You achieve this with an additional line like this in sshd_config there: "Port 23".
   Usually the "Port 22" has not been explicit there so far, so if you add another Port line, you would also have to make that "Port 22" explicit, otherwise that sshd will not answer on port 22 any longer.
2. The ISP does not like TOS flags in IP packets, that do not equal 0, or they just don't like the TOS flag chosen by your openssh.
   The following bullets should actually be "2.1" …, but blogger doesn't easily support this, and I am just to lazy to enforce it HTML-wise.

• If you are using Linux and iptables, this may be your quickiest way to achieve this:
  iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -p TCP --dport 22 -j TOS --set-tos 0x0
  It did not work for me though, so I had to find another way.
• I decided to adapt openssh to my needs, and here is the recipe:
  Get yourself an openssh TAR ball, unpack it, configure it!
  Add this line to config.h : "#define IP_TOS_IS_BROKEN 1" in order to leave the TOS flag untouched!
  Build it, and install it to a safe place, i.e. not necessarily to the standard place, so you will still be able to use the standard installation!
• A friend of mine built himself a utility to run on the router (a FRITZ!Box 7050 router) and selectively adapt the TOS flag according to his needs.
  Migrating the utility to our FRITZ!Box 7390 models cost us too much time though, so we abandoned that solution.
  If you are still interested in this approach, he might forward his sources to you, so let us know!

my 1st hummingbirds on Martinique

Sitting on the sofa on the balcony / terrace at my customer's place, thinking about sad IT issues, my eyes got aware of a very nice and lovely "irregularity" in the garden: 2 black+blue hummingbirds. I hope, they will return soon.

a very nice pier, but unluckily connected to a construction area and not open to the public

The location given here is not precisely, where I was standing and what I was referring to. I was standing right by the waterside, which was rather close. And the pier went between 50 and 100 meters into the ocean. I would have loved to sit their with my MacBook hooked to the Internet and writing about my journey and the lovely place.

just completed some part of my overseas communication with Europe

I video-skyped with son#1 and his mother, and for the first time the timezone shift was the other way round: I was in broad daylight, and they at Berlin were already in the "darkness of the night". Quite funny.

Facebook locked me out from Facebook chatting, because they found my IP-address weird

Once I logged into Facebook on their web-site again, they confronted me with "weird" activities on my account with them, showing me a log-in attempt from Gouadeloupe. For them Gouadeloupe and Martinique seem to have something in common. After I confirmed that as OK, they also let me log into their XMPP style chatting again. That's quite amusing.

returning home the 1st time on Martinique

Longing for my 2nd shower "inside" and still for the 1st shower "outside" for today. There is a lot of delightful sweetness here.

Update / 2010-11-19:
It is so hot and humid on Martinique. My host had told me, there are a couple of showers each day, and I was eagerly waiting for them to come over me.
What made this one of my most popular posts in 2010?
Originally through a typo it said "ans still …" instead of "and still …", which made it rather hard to understand.

first things first on Martinique

Got the router working and hooked up on the Internet again, before I went to bed. The customer's ISP imposes non-default PPPoE parameters. which we sorted, but the ISP seems to not want SSH connections, so the packets need a change of tags. Against my hunger I am eating guave, nice baby bananas, and later avocado from the market. Phone battery went below 20%, and reminded me of getting home. I am going to post the journey story so far then. So return here a little later, funny and exciting things wait to get told and read.

outspoken media: "6 Ways to Lose Customers, Credibility & Friends On Social Media"

6 Ways to Lose Customers, Credibility & Friends On Social Media

FRITZ!Box 7390: a USB printer serving as network printer on a computer running Windows

The instructions in the (German) user manual imply, that the printer was first properly attached to the computer itself. The user manual explains, how to change the settings of the printer configuration, so that you can make use of that printer, which is now attached to the FRITZ!Box.

You can also install it as a network printer right away, but be patient and trust in the Windows set up wizzard.
Let it retrieve the complete list of printers from the Internet, in case your printers are as ancient as mine!
You won't need to tell it, it's port 9100, the Windows installation procedure takes just as long as it announced: several minutes.

FRITZ!Box 7390 "20002484" with Annex A and Annex B and English GUI – it's available right now

I got "mine" this afternoon, found it "somewhere" at the AVM headquarters like 10 minutes away from my place. I got officially numbered "1". It's going to get shipped to Martinique on Sunday (really!).

It comes with a German 220V power supply, "but" with modem and telephone "Bell" adapters. So I guess, you will have to get an appropriate power supply adapter yourself, depending on your country.

I would really love to keep one for myself, I love computers that talk to me in English, and a router/modem with Annex A wouldn't be bad for the next holiday to "Annex A"-land. But then, the firmware for AVM's flagship will always be best-maintained in German. And I do love to press the FRITZ!Box update button on my MT-F. A couple of minutes offline 3 times a week or even more often (you wouldn't believe, how often they provide you with firmware updates!), and there you are: a newborn 7390!

The Pinging Makes My Ears Bleed: Apple Succumbs to Synergy · trenchant.org daily · September 7, 2010

The Pinging Makes My Ears Bleed: Apple Succumbs to Synergy · trenchant.org daily · September 7, 2010

Quotations from the text:

• (on Facebook) "biggest asshole tech company run by a Harvard drop-out" (ROTFL)

The 'premature optimization is evil' myth – Joe Duffy's Weblog

Joe Duffy's Weblog

pdfforge.org | The free PDF Creator and Converter

pdfforge.org | The free PDF Creator and Converter

I love installing this on Windows machines.

my Twitter timeline at bedtime

I feel so much better, if I go to sleep pretty much in sync with my Twitter timeline. That just implies, it's pretty unlikely, I will lose something, until I will be able to catch up again tomorrow in the early afternoon.

Cyberduck FTP client adds Google Storage support - The H Open Source: News and Features

Cyberduck FTP client adds Google Storage support - The H Open Source: News and Features

c-base 2010-09-08 HTML5 presentation in German

Html5

looking forward to a Rosh HaShana service at the Berlin Rykestrasse synagogue

This will be son#2's second "event" in a synagogue. I think Rykestrasse is quite a wonderful place for that, and I hope he will like it (the shofar and the chasen and all that), and it will have some kind of long lasting effect on him. I hope, his ancestry will have some influence in the background on him as well. I am really happily looking forward to this.
To all of you out there from Berlin: Chag Sameach! Shana Towa!

Official Google Blog: Google now allows OpenID for sign-up

Official Google Blog: Simpler sign-ups for Yahoo! users and others with OpenID

APRESS.COM : Learn Objective-C for Java Developers

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Book Details

• By James Bucanek
• ISBN13: 9781430223696
• ISBN10: 1430223693
• 520 pp.
• Pub Date: 2009-09-25
• eBook Price: $27.99

Learn Objective-C for Java Developers will guide experienced Java developers into the world of Objective-C. It will show them how to take their existing language knowledge and design patterns and transfer that experience to Objective-C and the Cocoa runtime library. This is the express train to productivity for every Java developer who has dreamed of developing for Mac OS X or iPhone, but felt that Objective-C was too intimidating. So hop on and enjoy the ride!

• Provides a translation service that turns Java problem-solving skills into Objective-C solutions
• Allows Java developers to leverage their existing experience and quickly launch themselves into a new domain
• Takes the risk out of learning Objective-C

What you'll learn

• Apply Java experience to Objective-C and Cocoa
• Use elegant alternatives that increase productivity
• Maximize the powerfully unique constructs of Objective-C, like class clusters
• Think like an object-oriented C programmer to create more reusable code
• Use all of the things in Java and Objective-C that are actually quite similar, like MVC design patterns
• Learn how to do all of it within Apple's powerful Xcode programming environment using Cocoa frameworks

Who is this book for?

Experienced Java developers interested in developing native applications for Apple's Mac OS X operating system, iPhone, and iPod touch.

"Your nerd knows very little about a lot"

From: Michael Lopp's book Being Geek - O'Reilly Media


In chapter 23, the author addresses the nerd's significant other.

Here are a few pretty significant sentences:

Your nerd knows very little about a lot. For many topics, his knowledge is an inch deep and four miles wide. He’s comfortable with this fact because he knows that deep knowledge about any topic is a clever keystroke away.

I would seriously appreciate, if prospective clients and employers shared this perception. I think, he is completely right with this. After more than 25 years in IT, do you think, that any module in Lisp, Perl, Ruby, or whatever is slightly close to rocket science?

local Perl Monger admin boards: do you want them to behave the democratic way or does Democracy not really matter there?

• Shall the admins of mailing lists be publicly known?
• Shall their decisions get filed to somehow public places, shall these decisions be reviewable by committees?
• Shall they ask for permission for disciplinary acts (like elimination of group members) at more central instances?
• Shall it be possible to appeal their decisions?
• Shall it be possible to sue them in democratic courts for misbehavior? I mean: you do like your legal system somehow, don't you? Or do you prefer anarchism over you country's legal system?!?
• Shall it be possible to ask this kind of questions?

To be honest with you: I personally prefer the democratic and transparent way, and I certainly answer all those questions simply with a straight "yes, certainly, of course!".

For almost 20 years I had no doubt, that Larry Wall's followers are just nice and certainly also democratic and well-behaving fellows.

I actually hate wasting my and your time with this kind of "trivial" and basic things, as I used to think, that educated people are certainly convinced of democratic principles anyway.

I certainly agree, that discussing technical things in a foreign language means quite an obstacle to also many Perl programmers, so having "a place" for every indigene language does of course make some sense. There have long been Usenet groups like fr.comp.lang.perl.misc, de.comp.lang.perl.misc, and so forth, so why are there dozens of national Perl Monger groups all over Europe anyway? Who invented them in competition to the indigene Usenet groups? Why were they invented in the 1st place? Sorry, but I missed that bit of Perl history during the last 20 years. I mean, local Perl Monger groups don't discuss, how to get Perl into secondary schools in suburbs of Munich (e.g.), that would even get discussed more appropriately on a Bavarian level anyway. What sense does it make, if every village or town has its own Perl Mongers, if the only local issue discussed on that mailing list is the monthly call for "let's come together for a beer!". But if nothing serious at all occurs between "let's come together for a beer!" and "let's discuss this in our native language!" on a local mailing list, what's the reason for maintaining it? And in the end, the formal mailing list maintainer may even regard the mailing list her private property. Don't you laugh! That seems to be the sad reality. I can tell you names, if you want.

I personally think a single indigene (Usenet) group is enough per language. And actually you can subscribe to them via Google Groups, if you don't like NNTP. And there is no legal requirement for any of us to moderate a Usenet group. Less administrative work, more time for the family or for coding, as you want. Yes, we would have to look up again, on how to ignore flame wars on the Usenet, but there is plenty of literature and to-dos on that out there.

Furthermore: It looks to me, as if the Python mail manager used by quite a couple of local Perl Monger mailing lists goes together with a lack of democracy far more than Google Groups. The board is obscure, board decisions are obscure, almost everything is obscure there. But technically seen they work well, you may think.

Yes, Google Groups also suffer from deficiencies: they don't enforce public resp. reviewable decisions on article moderation and member elimination, but they are a far more suitable platform. Please prove me wrong!

Usenet groups got created somehow at the end of the 1st third of my IT life time, I sort of know, how to cope with them, as long as they don't get moderated by weird company staff. I always thought, they are good enough for almost every discussion, as long as HTML mails are not necessary.
Mailing lists got created quite a little later. I am not sure, why they got created in the 1st place. I mean, you can maintain local NNTP servers for local and secret Usenet partitions, you can also have the distributed variant of that, and let your corporate NNTP servers talk to each other.
I seriously have no idea, when and why indigene Perl Monger groups got invented, and why there are even village oriented Perl Monger groups.

I am interested in reading your comments.

And, yes, it's true: this is a blog, it's my blog, and of course I am non-publicly moderating the comments to my blog. Maybe we should continue this discussion somewhere on perl.lang.misc or so. As you want, just let me know!

Update after Brian d Foy's comment:
Brian is falsely assuming that the group knows and likes the board or even knows about the board's decisions. Through the technical nature of the mailing list (e.g. Python mailman) the board's identity is absolutely obscure.
If a board goes mad, and if it removes "disturbing elements" on the spot, then irregular board decisions can't get discussed on the local mailing list, and the "disturbing elements" can't even show up on group meetings, as they are no longer aware of them. So these irregular board decisions never get discussed in the local group, and disagreement never comes to the surface. Doesn't that remind you of certain political systems?
Brian also ignores the fact, that local Perl Monger groups are something, that you don't just tear down and re-build. The process of setting up a second Perl Monger group in "a village" might be more than just quite confusing, and if you don't reach the agreement and cooperation of the "owners" of the web sites, where the "national" Perl Monger groups get listed, than nobody will ever even notice, there is a new Perl Monger group in "that village". So in a way local Perl Monger groups need cooperation upstream to some extent, but there is no surveillance on local activities downstream. Well, there is some in a way: new local groups don't get easily listed.
Brian is right in that he proclaims, that local Perl Monger groups are good for local activities only. But what if the local board only calls to pub and beer garden events, with no technical equipment and facilities for presentations or just any kind of serious interaction possible. But through the nature of the organization and linking, they resp. their board are still the one and only local Perl Monger group standing for that village. They are pretty able to mute, extinguish, and prevent any activity, they don't like.
Back to the main issue: the board members are not (necessarily) known and defined in a public place, they don't get elected, their decisions are obscure as well. This just doesn't sound good for the reputation of Perl.
If you grant the brand Perl Mongers, you should also surveil its proper use. Use proper rules! Don't change the rules on the fly, as parents do with their kids! Manage transparent processes! Make legal prosecution possible!
I don't see a powerful organization backing the brand Perl Mongers, that imposes rules and surveils the processes.
So things are bound to go wrong sooner or later without rules and surveillance. And things are already going wrong.
Although since the Antique philosophers called humans the zoon politikon, geeks aren't. Geeks don't want to bother with group politics, neither with benevolent or other dictators. Geeks want to get back to their computer or their bed after the group meeting as soon as possible, they hope everything goes well with the group management, and they don't pay for it anyway, so why should they bother?
Maybe as long as you don't personally experience a local Perl Monger group, where things don't work out properly, you don't really understand what I am talking about. And the issue does not get solved by settling a single disagreement.
My request again: remove obscurity from local boards, remove "moderation" and all other disciplinary abilities from local boards, allow appeals, don't fear but support the interaction with the local states legal system! I don't really see the need for local Perl Monger groups below the "indigene language" / national level anyway. I mean: Simply calling for the monthly beer on the "national level" mailing list will leave the callers ashamed sooner or later, which certainly is a positive effect. And calling for the monthly event shouldn't really involve a lot of noise on the "national level" mailing list anyway. So removing the brand Perl Monger below the indigene language / national level looks to me like a step towards the right direction, if you don't want to impose a proper system together with rules and processes. And also on that level, these rules and processes must seriously get imposed.

Now I am tired, and I think everything is said more than once.

Update / 2010-09-09 02:37 local time:

I changed the title after recognizing the old one actually caused quite a stir.

MST let me know on 2010-09-08, he removed my blog from ironman.enlightenedperl.org; and I somehow agreed to his reasons; but of course I am sorry to see this happen.
But then I still see an article of mine on that super-blog.
So did MST manage to remove a single article of mine and actually leave my blog on ironman.*?

I must actually say, that in 2010 I regard it a necessary feature of "Democracy-compatible" public organizations (such as PM.org at HQ level) to tolerate inner-organizational critic in public.
And then: after 20 years with Perl I still feel a little unwell with any truely incorporated Perl organization.

"Wasted" a couple of minutes on "my indigene" Perl usenet group during the last 48 hours or so, and I must say: that feels fare more right than any local PM group (that I know). Wherever bashing leads on the Usenet, you just don't have to fear, that your article does not appear or even that you get removed from "the public". Maybe some of you don't really understand how much that hurts. That's why they call my statements whining.

True: looking at whatever "bad" resp. just silly things may happen in local PM groups, compared to what KKK made happen, that's completely and utterly irrelevant. I guess for saving a single life "deleted" during KKK actions, I would entirely do for the remainder of my life w/o any PM involvement. Just to make a point. I am not kidding. I still have no real idea of how bad my idea was to quote KKK in my title. I am sorry for that. I mean it.

Update / 2010-09-11:
Renee, I am sorry, I disagree with you. Mailing list owners resp. (obscure) admin boards are not democratic per se. They didn't get elected, they don't resign by themselves regularly resp. at all, members cannot enforce changes on the board, their decisions and actions are neither public nor reviewable, members cannot appeal against (incorrect) sanctions.
Renee, do you seriously think, there's already enough democracy, if members can suggest and organize events by themselves?!?
Renee, I quoted the "board", because I know a PM "owner", who referred to people she seemed to involve in her decisions as "the regulars", which I rephrased here as "the board". I thought, I should assume there is at least a board and not just a single owner.
It looks as if you don't seriously expect proper democracry in local PM groups. If you are fine that way, that's alright, but that amount of democracy does not satisfy minimal expectations.

Moritz suggested, I should reason of why groups moderators or mailing list owners play bad. Well, I had already spent a lot of time on that, and I came to the conclusion, they just shouldn't be able to play bad at all. There positions and powers should be pretty similar to the ones of governments. Rather short legislations periods (maybe a year or so), their decisions should be public and reviewable, their powers should be separated, they shouldn't play law maker, judge, and prosecutor at the same time.Of course, there are more members than board members resp. group owners, and therefore there are more members to play wrong. Disciplinary sanctions may get applied against all of them, of course. Please read it up above! And no, I don't like dictators, neither benevolent ones nor others, none of them. But geeks think, in front of their computer screen they have no need for democracy. I completely disagree with them. There is no place, where democracy is unnecessary. And in our democracies I would like to be able to take kindergarden dictators to court. As simply as that. And public courts may then decide, who is right and who is wrong. Maybe a little more expensive, but that's the very reason for the incorporation of clubs. To provide some rules and also some protection against unserious actions against board members. There is no need to reinvent the democratic wheel for geeks in 2010.

Update / 2010-09-14:
That Moritz got actually a little angry with me, requesting me to unconditionally letting his comment through here. He seems to confuse a personal blog with something really public. I am sorry, but I won't let comments through here, that I don't like, simply put. My public statements may well get responded to, but not necessarily on my blog. A public mailing list or newsgroup or a pub really are something quite different.

how to test procmail rules?

This may sound utterly silly, but within all these years, that I have been using procmail, I never came around to find a way of testing procmail rules other than by testing them in production for my incoming e-mail. The problem is, procmail gets called through sendmail and they deliver the messages. If I resend messages, sendmail changes the Return-Path header field, on which my rules are based. All other relevant looking header fields can get tweaked and faked, Return-Path seems alright (???).

I'll try to find out on the procmail list, ie. on http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.mail.procmail .

Update / 2010-12-26:

Setting "VERBOSE=on" within your .procmailrc shows a lot of helpful output.

Yes, a message, that my .procmailrc does not deal with, as I think it should, must get copied to another IMAP folder; from there I copy it back to the IMAP folder, which I direct fetchmail to. I can repeat that endlessly, until I find out what's going on. Maybe that also works somehow with formail, but I haven't figured that out yet.

Hacking: The Next Generation - O'Reilly Media

Hacking: The Next Generation - O'Reilly Media

a recruiter asked for some changes in the style of my CV, and I changed the XSL stylesheets

Quite a couple of years ago I picked up xmlresume as my way of maintaining my CV.
A while ago I had to recognise, that xmlresume should be regarded vaporware nowadays. I started looking around, considered to migrate to HR-XML and its CV resp. profile style, but that didn't really convince me either.
In the course of the changing economical situation I decided to regard XSL no longer as rocket science. It's not more powerful that attribute grammars in compiler construction, so why should it be more complicated?
So now together with the pressure of that recruiter I dared to have a look into xmlresume's XSL stylesheets, and I actually achieved, what I attempted to achieve:

• I changed the order of per-project details,
• and also changed the indentation of the project period,
• and all that for the FO and also for the HTML output.

I was rather satisfied with that success, and that encouraged me to also announce an XSL course quite soon.

Sunday late evening some guy dragged me into an absurd emacs/vi/textmate war

OMG, I decided long ago not to waste any 10 seconds time on any such foolish thing, but sometimes the devil comes in disguise ...

had a problem executing "ssh -X" into my new Linux box

Googled for the obvious messages, found myself in an Ubuntu forum, and I must tell you this:
Never look for help in any such forum! More incompetence than competence, you only find yourself fooled by school kids.

This solved my problem. It had to do with IPv6, which was set up for the kernel, but not for the network devices. I switched it of for the kernel then.

AVM - FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7390 (20002448)

AVM - FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7390 (20002448) (That's the "castrated" Germany-only version.)

Both amazon.de (web shop) and Saturn / Berlin / Europa-Center sell it not for EUR 215 resp. EUR 210 (Saturn).

BTW: The Annex A version is due within a couple of days.

zsync fills a gap in the technology available for large-scale file distribution

zsync

Found this through an openSUSE-11.4 announcement.

Songbird 1.8.0 adds support for more devices - The H Open Source: News and Features

Songbird 1.8.0 adds support for more devices - The H Open Source: News and Features

Google helps you OCR-ing your document

DocList API OCR Demo

Google SketchUp 3D modeling tool

Google SketchUp 3D modeling tool