Shit happens

Blatantly stolen from the Shit Happens website. It’s funny though. Too bad it’s in Dutch. The doctor is operating on a guy hit by firework in the face. They had to use another body part to fix his face…

Renault Kangoo

Today I bought my new car. And there was much rejoicing.

Kumishifts: The Release

[Repost from Kumiblog]

One of my personal missions within Kumina is to decrease the amount of noise. We work fairly event-driven, responding to everything that gets reported. Although I believe our customers like this very much, it can be a bit of a bother in the case where someone is not on helpdesk duty. One of my pet peeves was the fact that Nagios sent SMS alerts to everyone, instead of the person who was on duty at the time.

Since we have multiple Nagios instances, it would be a bit of a hassle to change the config everywhere all the time, so we stuck with the current way. At least you can be sure that someone received the message. But since we get some false positives too, at time, it does add to the bill.

So I decided to create Kumishifts. This little Python script takes a Google Calendar (or any ical you point it at) and distills who’s on duty. It generated a Nagios contacts file based on that information (and then some). We can now actually work with escalations to make sure that if the first person responsible doesn’t respond fast enough (bad person!), a second one will get the message after a little while, too.

We’re not yet deploying the script everywhere, but will soon, after it’s properly tested. I’d appreciated any feedback on the app!

Converting m4a to mp3 on MacOSX

I only have a mp3 player in my car and I wanted to play the songs I bought at iTunes Music Store. Took me a little while to find out, but eventually I found the way to do it (or a way, at least):

• Install ffmpegX, follow their steps.
• Copy all the songs you want on one CD to a single directory.
• Run the following command:
  find . -name "*.m4a" -exec /Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -i {} -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 "{}.mp3" \;
• Wait until done.

LRB op TV

Aagje en ik trainen bij de Limburge Reddingshonden Brigade. Behalve dat het nuttig is, is het ook erg gezellig. De LRB is afgelopen donderdag op TV Limburg geweest. Ik was er zelf niet bij en Aag staat er ook niet op, maar voor de mensen die het interessant vinden:

Trained too well

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t trained Aagje as well as I did.

During my lunch today (I’m working from home) I decided to mow the front lawn. Aagje noticed me getting my jacket and she misinterpreted it as “we’re going for a walk!”. So she got all excited and I told her to go lie down on her spot.

Mowing the lawn took me less than half an hour and afterwards I went back to work. About 5 minutes ago I heard her whine. When I looked around she was still on her mat, just like I told her. She apparently was very thirsty, because as soon as I told her she was allowed to get up, she ran to her water and started drinking for a minute straight.

I mowed the lawn two hours ago.

Internet + Love = Great Things

Love this talk. Not TED, but good enough for TED anyway.

Got this link via LibraryThing’s Blog, which points out another great example of what Clay Shirky is spelling out in the talk above. I’ve become a lifetime member of LibraryThing yesterday. Started to catalogue all my books. See the link on the right.

OpenPGP V2 card and Ubuntu Karmic Koala

If you’re trying to get it to work on Jaunty or Debian, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but I’ve not been able to get that to work properly. If you have, please let us know in the comments below.

The key is using gnupg 2.0.12 (with the Ubuntu patches) and installing libccid, which seems not to be pulled in by default. After that, it’ll work as expected. We’ve been using a SCM SCR335 to attach it to the computer, but any other supported smartcard reader should work.

We spent a whole day on this, trying to get it to work. I don’t get why kernelconcepts already sells these exclusively if the support in GnuPG is still so fresh. Bit of a shame.

Error we got were things like:
scdaemon[85270]: updating slot 0 status: 0x0000->0x0000 (0->1)
scdaemon[85270]: sending signal 31 to client 85269
and:
gpg: key operation not possible: Unknown IPC command

Hope this helps someone!

[crypto] OpenSC seems to break GnuPG?

So, I’ve been trying to get a SCM SPR532 working yesterday, but that didn’t really want to play nice. Today, I wanted to use my trusty old SCM SCR335 again, but GnuPG kept giving me sharing violations like so:

$ gpg -d secretdocument.gpg
gpg: detected reader `SCM SCR 335 00 00'
gpg: pcsc_connect failed: sharing violation (0x8010000b)
gpg: kaartlezer is niet beschikbaar

(The last line read “card reader not available” in Dutch.)

Very annoying. I tried shooting down the running pcscd, but that didn’t help. Then, I uninstalled OpenSC, which seemed to have helped. No idea why, but honestly, the documentation is so very vague, I hardly know how all these components work together.

Anyway, I hope it helps someone.

[crypto] Not getting SCM SPR532 working on MacOSX Leopard

Anyone out there that got the pinpad of the SCM SPR532 working for gnupg? I’ve followed a lot of advice from the OpenSC project, but I’m unable to get it to work. Didn’t try it with any other service, since I’m only interested in the GnuPG application to support my smartcard for the time being. Any advice is really appreciated.

Stuff

I might have blogged about this before, but I really like the way the message is presented. People who know me, know I’m fairly “green”-minded. That’s because simply, I think we’re going the wrong way and need to double back. That doesn’t mean cut back on everything we like (for example, my iMac is on 24×7, just for my convenience), but does require us to make the right choices (my screensaver turns off my screen, I pay for renewable energy only). And sometimes the best option isn’t viable (I’d so want to buy a good, electric car like the Mitsubishi iMIEV, but it’s probably way out of my budget), but then we take the best next one (a small, cleaner car like the Suzuki Alto, which serves my needs and uses way less gas then most other cars in that price range).

Anyway, the link I wanted to post: The Story of Stuff

Enjoy!

[FunkLoad] Random tests for benchmarking

I’ve recently started using FunkLoad to do benchmarking of websites. It works quite okay and I love the fact that it’s Python, since that’s my language of choice.

One thing that kept bugging me was that since FunkLoad is more a unittester, it can by default only run a single run multiple times against a site. That won’t do. You want several different kinds of users visiting your website when you’re benchmarking. But since everything is Python, I was able to solve that like this:

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# -*- coding: iso-8859-15 -*-
"""loadtest FunkLoad test
 
$Id: $
"""
import unittest, random, sys
from funkload.FunkLoadTestCase import FunkLoadTestCase
from webunit.utility import Upload
from funkload.utils import Data
#from funkload.utils import xmlrpc_get_credential
 
class LoadTest(FunkLoadTestCase):
    """ Loadtest for website.
 
    This test use a configuration file LoadTest.conf.
    """
 
    def setUp(self):
        """Setting up test."""
        self.logd("setUp")
        self.server_url = self.conf_get('main', 'url')
 
    def doTest(self):
        # Picks a test at random
        tests = ["8081","8082","8083","8084","8085","8086"]
        rnd = random.choice(tests)
        return getattr(self, "test_"+str(rnd))()
 
    def test_8081(self):
        # The description should be set in the configuration file
        server_url = self.server_url
        # begin of test ---------------------------------------------
        # end of test---------------------------------------------
 
    def test_8082(self):
        # The description should be set in the configuration file
        server_url = self.server_url
        # begin of test ---------------------------------------------
        # end of test---------------------------------------------

(I left out the test themselves, but I’m sure you can find where to place them.)

The recorded tests are in the same class, and they’re called test_8081, test_8082, etc. up to test_8086. These corresponded to the proxy ports on which fl-record was listening when the session was recorded. Line 27 makes sure that the test that was chosen gets run.

You can of course expand this as much as you like, for example adding weights for certain tests. Kinda neat, python.

Kiki de Kumquat

Afgelopen weekend wilde ik dit al doen, maar het is er vandaag pas van gekomen. Vol trots presenteer ik u de laatste telg in mijn kleine familie: Kiki de Kumquat!

Tethering MacOS X.5 Leopard with Nokia E51 via bluetooth

Bought myself a new phone (well, the company did so, because not being able to use ssh via my old one really sucks if you got a subscription to mobile internet just for those cases), a Nokia E51. Cool thing is that it supports up to HSDPA, which really has a lot better ping times than GPRS. Not sure about throughput, but I don’t care about throughput. I mainly check email and ssh, both use little bandwidth but really benefit from better latency (lower ping times).

Took about 30 minutes, with help from my coworker Kees to find how to tether my BlackBook with MacOS X.5 (Leopard). Writing it down here, because I couldn’t find it explained anywhere, really.

First, go to Network Settings and select Bluetooth. Now configure the Bluetooth device. From the little cog-menu in the bottom, select “Change serial devices” (name might be a little off, I’m using a Dutch version of MacOS X). Add a serial device with a name you can remember, privding service “Dial-Up Networking” and protocol RS-232. Close that window and select Advanced in the bottom right. Add a device in the bottom, using protocol RS-232 and changing the name to whatever you chose before. Close that window and go back to the Bluetooth connection setting.

Now choose Advanced from here and make sure your device maker is Nokia, but the device itself is “GPRS (GSM/3G)”. Not “E51″, at least it didn’t work for me with that setting. Now connect with your regular settings (which are empty for KPN in The Netherlands) and presto, you’re done.

Please leave a comment if this helped you!

[Safari 4] PubSubAgent wants access to KeyChain

But I have no reason to give it that access. This is a Safari 4 thing, I think. It keeps giving me a popup asking permission to access KeyChain for the login details of some internal website of ours. I don’t use anything from PubsubAgent, so have no reason to give access, but when I click “Deny”, it just gives me the same dialog again. Very annoying.

After some searching, I found the solution by disabling RSS in Safari. I use NewsFire for reading those, so this is a good enough workaround for me.

If anyone else has the same trouble, this is the command to disable RSS in Safari:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSyndicationEnabled 0

If only Apple would add a “Never allow” button to that window, it might be something useful…

Timezone in Java

A customer just called asking why his ColdFusion sees the time as being UTC, while the rest of the system and his own tests seem to indicate that the system is properly set for Europe/Amsterdam. Apparantly, java (or at least Sun’s JVM 1.4.2_09-b05, which is bundled with ColdFusion MX 7) only checks the system variable TZ to see which timezone it’s in. Since ColdFusion is started from initscript, this variable is not set yet. It’s in nearly the last of the init scripts.

So we had to add the following line to the initscript, somewhere near the beginning, to make sure ColdFusion uses the correct timezone:
export TZ="Europe/Amsterdam"

Thanks Geoff Mottram for pointing it out to me.

Resumé

Bart’s put his resumé online and it looks great, frankly. If anyone would apply to us with a resumé like that, he or she would score high marks based on that alone! Just look at it!

Aagje and other dogs

It’s always been a problem. Aagje is quite dominant towards other dogs and as a general rule I keep her away from other dogs, to prevent fighting. But it has always bugged me. I’d so much love to have a dog I could allow to run free without worrying for other dogs. Last Sunday I had a friend over who took along her dog and for the first time in a few years I tried convincing Aagje that she didn’t need to attack the other dog.

It went suprisingly well. After we walked a little while with both dogs on a leash, without them being able to get to each other, Aagje seemed to get a little more relaxed. Se we slowly allowed them to get closer and nothing happened. They just sniffed a bit. I was so relieved! So a little while later we untied the leashes and let them run. As I expected, Aagje had no interest whatsoever to play with the other dog, which is fine. I don’t need her to play with the dog, I’ll be happy if she just doesn’t attack it. She kept focussed on us and there was no problem. Only after she noticed no one was about to give her orders and play with her, did she get frustrated and started harassing the other dog, so I took her on the leash again. But she wasn’t really aggressive, just annoying the other dog. She still came for me after I called to her.

I’m mostly happy about this because it means she’ll be able to walk in line if we ever pass the exam for rescue dogs. That’s a prerequisite for being allowed to help in rescue missions. We can pass the exam without her being able to work next to another dog, but if we’d ever get called on to help, she’ll have to disregard all other dogs in the area she’s assigned to work on. So, good news

Rescue Dog Training

Sunday May 31st, Aagje and I joined my dad with Daantje to the training for rescue dogs. Although Aagje was a little bit nervous, she did quite well. The next Wednesday we went again and she actually impressed the trainer (“you should’ve started years ago”). She likes doing it and she’s already very good at the basic steps. We’re still a long way away from actually being able to rescue people, of course, but still, I’m glad that we’re having such a good start.

We’re training with the Limburgse Reddingshonden Brigade and I hope to be able to take the SIN exam in about a year. Or 18 months. I don’t know, we’ll have to see how well Aagje keeps doing this. But I’m very excited and Aagje is having a lot of fun, which is the most important, of course.

Spam record

A new personal spam record in my gmail: