earth tech

Bash code: CVS status logging

2010-01-08T17:47:00.006Z

This command has the effect of checking each of the indicated files in the source tree against the CVS repository - errors should be propagated to stderr if a file in the source tree does not exist in the CVS repository - this cmd should be refined into a script which tests for error on status and tries to add source files which do not appear to be in the repository....

for fn in *.{css,js,html,php} ./xml/*.xml ./xml/services/*.xml ./js/*.js ; 
    do echo $fn ; 
    cvs status $fn; 
    echo ""; done > cvs-status.txt

Note that the command cvs status [in src dir, w/ no args] does something similar to the above command, differing in that using cvs status may not handle the cases a source file exists which has not been added to the repository.

The CVS manpage does not address this:

       status [-lRqQ] [-v] [files...]
              Requires: working directory, repository.
              Changes: nothing.
              Display a brief report on  the  current  status  of  files  with
              respect to the source repository, including any ``sticky'' tags,
              dates, or -k options.  (``Sticky''  options  will  restrict  how
              `cvs  update' operates until you reset them; see the description
              of `cvs update -A...'.)

              You can also use this command to anticipate the potential impact
              of  a  `cvs update' on your working source directory.  If you do
              not specify any files explicitly,  reports  are  shown  for  all
              files  that  cvs  has placed in your working directory.  You can
              limit the scope of this search to the current  directory  itself
              (not  its  subdirectories)  with the standard -l option flag; or
              you can explicitly request recursive status reports with the  -R
              option.

              The  -v  option  causes the symbolic tags for the RCS file to be
              displayed as well.

CVS over SSH

2009-12-29T22:09:00.005Z

Accessing a Remote Repository via a Network (http://www.felixgers.de/teaching/cvs/remote.html) has the following juicy tidbit [HTML3 elements replaced w/ XHTML elements -ed]:

Connecting with rsh or ssh:

CVS uses the rsh of ssh protocol to access a remote repository.

CVS uses the contents of the CVS_RSH variable to determine the name of the remote shell command to use when starting a CVS server. If this variable is not set then ‘rsh’ is used. To use ssh set:

 shell> export CVS_RSH=ssh

Example: Supposing you want to access the module ’foo‘ in the repository ‘/cvsroot/’, on machine ‘gnu.org’:

 cvs -d :ext:bach@gnu.org/cvsroot checkout foo

The ‘bach@’ can be omitted if the username is the same on both the local and remote hosts.

Firebug and JIT

2009-12-17T16:57:00.003Z

~robcee/ blogs about Mozilla Firefox and related topics.

In the 15 Dec post entitled Firebug and the JIT, cee talks about SpiderMonkey (the Mozilla Javascript engine built in to Firefox) and some potential performance issues with using the Firebug debugging tool addon in Firefox 3.5 & 3.6

Downloadable Web Page Fonts

2009-12-17T16:42:00.002Z

The article from hacks.mozilla.org is entitled Web Open Font Format for Firefox 3.6

This article discusses using Web Open Font Format (WOFF) font files with CSS to specify fonts for use in web pages. WOFF files are stored on the web server, and downloaded to the client browser based on URL specified by the @font-family CSS rule(s).

From the article:

This format has two main advantages over raw TrueType or OpenType fonts.

It is compressed, which means that you will typically see much smaller download sizes compared with raw TrueType or OpenType fonts.

It contains information that allows you to see where the font came from – without DRM or labeling for a specific domain – which means it has support from a large number of font creators and font foundries.

Esspresso - Javacript Mode for Emacs

2009-12-07T18:21:00.003Z

Esspresso is an Emacs eLisp library for manipulating Javascript source code.

CPP is the GNU C Preprocessor.

How sick is this (FtA):

Just configure your web server to pipe Javascript through GNU cpp:
/usr/bin/cpp -P -undef -Wundef -std=c99 -nostdinc -Wtrigraphs -fdollars-in-identifiers -C
before minifying and compressing it for transmission.

XHTML Forms Processing using Javascript

2009-12-01T07:43:00.003Z

http://www.javascript-coder.com/ has some fairly easy-to-understand example Javascript for doing interesting things with the HTML DOM using Javascript.

The site has a number of articles worth noting:

the out-of-town advantage

2009-11-21T19:09:00.003Z

When trying to get a job in the US, during this past Century (the 20^th) there has existed a quantifiable advantage for individuals who are - all other things being equal - from "out of town".

This is clearly a subjective, psychological advantage assigned to persons of lesser known origins by the thought processes of the hiring agency. It is possible that the description of this situation may be constrained to the decision-making individual on the hiring side of the employment transaction.

Whether or not this bias in the system is a function of so-called "human-nature" or a derivation of "sociological precepts" is a matter that remains open for conjecture.

Five Errors from Mozilla Firefox starting up under X11

2009-11-18T19:23:00.003Z

Following is a copy of the stderr output from Mozilla Firefox startup [scripts] where the Firefox is running under Linux on the HP laptop, and the X11 display is running on the Sony Vaio laptop under WinXP - Cywin-X, it is.

Not having looked these up, yet, I'm reasonably certain that the first two - the nss-shared-helper errors (or information messages, depending on your POV) are coming from the Linux host configuration - that 'NSS_[...]_SHARED_DB' business harks back to ... was it Netscape 3.x under RedHat Linux?

The Pango-WARNINGs are doubtless a function of the X11 Font Configuration for the Cygwin X11 server - that would mean a problem on the WinXP host - needs the X11 font server configuration tweaked to correctly serve Pango fonts.

The last error message - the one tagged with the [NoScript] identifier is clearly a Javascript error from a Firefox Add-On (NoScript) which is probably doing something like assigning XML values to User Interface Document Object Model elements.

If you fix any of these, and record the fix in a blog, wiki, or other online media, email me (or post a comment here) and I will link to your site. Meanwhile, this will just have to wait until iut becomes a priority.

cps@catfish: ~
$firefox
*** nss-shared-helper: Shared database disabled (set NSS_USE_SHARED_DB to enable).
*** nss-shared-helper: Shared database disabled (set NSS_USE_SHARED_DB to enable).
NPP_GetValue()
NPP_GetValue()

(firefox:15593): Pango-WARNING **: Error loading GSUB table 0x6ead

(firefox:15593): Pango-WARNING **: Error loading GSUB table 0x6ead
[NoScript] TypeError: r.object.parentNode is null

This is part of a series

2009-11-18T17:40:00.001Z

Setting up a secure connection for editting files on the remote host.

Mounting a persistent file system using SSHFS

2009-11-17T20:07:00.003Z

Mounting a persistent FUSE file system using SSHFS

The image is from my WinXP desktop - it shows Nautilus (the GNOME app) running on the Linux box displaying on a Windows XP desktop under Cygwin-X (X11). This was all initiated over a SSH connection established using PuTTY with X11 forwarding enabled.

What does this have to do with persistent file systems and SSHFS? It's what I was doing when this screenshot photo-op came along. More about that later.

cPanel WebDisc Fails on Named Domain URL

2009-11-14T23:58:00.002Z

Found just recently that the cPanel WebDisc applet does not work on a named domain on my server. Works fine when the IP address is substituted for the domain name, but if the domain name is used, shows only an .htaccess file in an otherwise empty directory.

export CVSROOT='/usr/local/cvsroot'

2009-11-14T01:19:00.004Z

As superuser, install cvs on the local and remote machines (sudo apt-get install cvs or equivalent). Then, on the remote server:

# mkdir /usr/local/cvsroot/
# cvs -d /usr/local/cvsroot init

[ I left out an important step that - on that makes it clear, even, that the setup of the CVS repository, group, and user are all done from the prvileged (root) account; this next block is it - you know what to do ]

# /usr/sbin/groupadd cvs
# /usr/sbin/useradd -g cvs cvs
# /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G cvs user
# chgrp cvs /usr/local/cvsroot
# chown cvs /usr/local/cvsroot
# chmod 775 /usr/local/cvsroot

[the CVS init command should be issued from a root shell]

Changes to /etc/profile on local machine:

CVS_RSH='/usr/bin/ssh'
CVSROOT=:ext:user@servername:/usr/local/cvsroot
CVSEDITOR=emacs
export CVS_RSH CVSROOT CVSEDITOR

If your remote server uses a non-standard port for SSH (and it should!), add the following to ~/.ssh/config

Host servername
  Port 666

So now you have access to cvs on the remote server. To import an exising project (called a module in cvs), go to its base directory and do this:

me@local:/home/me/tmp$ cvs import modulename companyname START

To check out that project:

me@local:/home/me/tmp$ cvs checkout modulename

Getting started with CVS (tutorial)

$SSH_AUTH_SOCK and $SSH_AGENT_PID

2009-11-13T21:07:00.004Z

SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-WEk27297/agent.27297; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=27298; export SSH_AGENT_PID;                        
echo Agent pid 27298;

This means that if you need to set the ssh-agent PID and SOCK environment settings by hand, you will need to know

the filename of the socket within the file system
the process ID of the ssh-agent process

#!/bin/bash
$pid=$1
$HashVal=$2
export "SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-$HashVal/agent.$pid"
export "SSH_AGENT_PID=$pid"
echo "SSH_AGENT_PID: $SSH_AGENT_PID"
echo "SSH_AUTH_SOCK: $SSH_AGENT_PID"

Note that the value passed in as the 2^nd parameter - the value assigned to $HashValue - is created by the ssh-agent on startup.

#!/bin/bash $SSH_AGENT_PID fix

2009-11-13T18:51:00.002Z

#!/bin/bash
if ((! $SSH_AGENT_PID )) ; then 
   eval ‘ssh-agent -s‘ ; 
fi
echo "SSH Agent ID: $SSH_AGENT_PID" ;

Tasty Thunderbits

2009-11-13T14:40:00.006Z

Are you as annoyed as I am regarding the complete lack of regard for common sense shown by the Mozilla Thunderbird user interface designers? Have you spent the deep hours of many late nights weeping and tearing your hair because the abject stupidity of the so-called "Long Date Format" has cost you more con points than any of the twinks who are trying to pkill you for your grand-master-level armor?

If you answered "Yes" to the above, there may be a degree of relief in sight: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format has (finally) some information about how to make Thunderbird - at least - behave in a bit more civilized manner - more like an application that may be willing to live within the constraints of the system, and with the desires of potential users to have a mail application that doesn't hide from them things like the date, time, source of the message, etc.

While many of you may feel - as the Mozilla Designers obviously do - that the trend towards Complete Desktop Dis-functionality - usually combined by the software designers with a concerted assault on the sanity of any unfortunates who may happen to stumble into the precisely and deviously laid psyware traps (I mean, have you seen the error message that says "You WILL NOT use the international standard date formats, you pinko commie fag - you un-American hippie filth! SCREW YOU if you think you want to use this computer as god intended, fulfilling the natural relationship between man and machine - making the world a better place for yourself and the rest of you weak, puny, carbon-based SCUM! Screw YOU if you think this machine is going to do ANYTHING you tell it to. WE are in charge now, and you days as a system operator are NUMBERED!"?) - is some sort of fiscal holy grail, I am here to assure you that there are still some of us out here who hold to the Truths we have known and discovered through tribulation and discord these many long temporal units - you're just wrong. So there.

Anyway - vituperation and contempt for panty-waist UI designers and wussy software developers aside - here is the answer:

`about:config` settings for Mozilla Thunderbird
Preference	Applies to	Default value
`mail.ui.display.dateformat.today`	Messages with today's date	0
`mail.ui.display.dateformat.thisweek`	Messages with a date in the past seven days	2
`mail.ui.display.dateformat.default`	Older messages	2

Of course, that will do you no good at all w/o the codes:

values for `about:config` for date format control settings
Value	Meaning	Example date and time
0	No date	10:23 AM
1	Your system's long* date format	Friday, December 31 2003 10:23 AM
2	Your system's short* date format	12/31/1999 10:23 AM
3	Year and month, separated by a slash	1999/12 10:23 AM
4	Abbreviated day name	Fri 10:23 AM

And finally, you should know what this is:

user_pref("mail.ui.display.dateformat.today", 2);

FtR: This is Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.23 (20090817) running on heavily customized OpenSuSE 11.1 install to some kind of an HP notebook [luggable] which has not been moved or opened in months, but which has fairly good uptimes, only needing to restart when new kernels are installed, etc.

This blog post is supplied as a Mind Numbing Experience (MNE). No warranties are expressed or implied, and if you try anything you find written here, you r one sick fuck, and there's probably no help for you. Sorry. Peace out.

umount sshfs?

2009-11-12T18:05:00.003Z

Well yeah - it has to be done some times. Despite the warm comfort of having all those remote file systems securely mounted on your thin-client FTL notebook (you know, the one with the incredibly fast multicore CPUs, incredibly high resolution audio-visuals, integrated video phone, WiFi, and goddess-only-knows what else - the one you use to multitask working with surfing pr0n on the intarweb? That one.

What has to be done? Why, the umounting of securely mounted remote file systems, of course!

Therein lies the problem. Please allow me a simple demostration:

Do you know how to un-mount a remote file system which was mounted using the [admiriably direct, logical, and to-the-point, I must add] instructions found in the well-written and informative Unix Manual page, which was right about where I expected to find it when I typed

    man sshfs

at my local, user-friendly Bash prompt?

If not, do you code know anyone who knows how to do that?

I will tell you right now, I do not. I had to figure this out myself, without even being able to tell anyone what I was doing, since there is no one else here, and no one interested in talking about it with me over the many and various digital telecommunications channels which have been put at my disposal for the [potential] reading of such many and various messages, should they even magically spring into existence.

So. Having typed enough words that this post can reasonably and plausibly be used as a passphrase to unlock some public key, or perhaps to trigger false positives on some poor kid's search for pregnancy test results, I will present the long-fought-for, hard-won solutions which we here at ${NameOfCompany} have chosen to adopt, both premises-wide, and inter-premises:

  fusermount -u /path/to/mountpoint

And I am sorry to have to add that this information is from illicit sources. I cannot tell you where it came from. Although, it is publicly available on the internet at http://www.sonoracomm.com/support/18-support/59-sshfs?format=pdf, the information remains hidden because of the arcane and secretive formatting of the storage object. PDF!? This is the 21st Century, isn't it?

wall(1)

2009-11-11T03:05:00.008Z

Was trying to find the source of an error message that came up when I started screen - the problem is with the line mesg y in the file /etc/bashrc, and that when I login to the server using ssh, the terminal I get is a /dev/pts and not a /dev/tty. Makes sense, right? But how is facebook going to react to the whole IP issue surrounding the naming of the Wall application?

AJAX Offline: referencing the window.location

2009-11-08T15:32:00.010Z

The javascriptkit.com site makes some interesting points about AJAX and the implementation of the responseXML property of the XMLHttpRequest object.

"If you're running an Ajax request offline locally on your PC, a value of 0 is returned by status in most browsers regardless of the actual request status, even if it was successful. To run and test Ajax requests locally, it should overlook the status code being 200, and merely rely on a readyState value of 4. The following example takes into account the request possibly being run offline and to enable it:"
var myrequest = new ajaxRequest()
myrequest.onreadystatechange=function() {
  if ( myrequest.readyState == 4 ) { //if request has completed
    if ( myrequest.status == 200 || 
      window.location.href.indexOf("http") == -1 ) {

      /* if request was successful 
         (versus "page not found" etc) 
         or if run offline (rely on readyState of
         4 alone then) */

      // ... do something with returned data ...

  }
 }
}

From the example, it is clear that the test

window.location.href.indexOf("http") == -1

can be generally useful for other things - like finding the protocol string from the URL of the current document. In theory, at least, this should tell you what protocol was used to load the content of window.

WtF AJAX

2009-10-29T08:57:00.003Z

This has got to be the sickist piece of Javascript ever, in the bitniverse. A True Manifestation of The Overmind. Or is that Infestation? Must use this code. http://www.thomasfrank.se/easier_than_ajax.html

AJAX Javascript Includes as RPC

2009-10-29T06:25:00.003Z

A really great blog post about how to do javascript includes using "asynchronous javascript" XMLHTTP requests to server-side PHP scripts.

The article shows how to do 'include_once' and 'on-demand' loading of javascript code, which can be executed by the browser to modify the current document, including by use of HTTP GET request results assigned to the DOM.

bitvise ftp bridge for Windows

2009-10-28T04:34:00.005Z

A new Windows SSH client has come onto the radar: Bitvise

Of particular interest is the FTP <-> SFTP (SSH) client-side bridging functionality of the Tunnelier SFTP software. This widget creates transparent, secured, tunneled bridging between standard Windows FTP client applications and SFTP (SSH) servers. This is something that's been needed for quite some time, imo.

See Using Tunnelier to Connect to an SFTP Server with an FTP Client (from bitvise).

AJAX PHP Javascript MySQL XML

2009-10-28T03:48:00.002Z

Wacka-wacka DOOOO!

Today's brain teaser is AJAX + PHP + Javascript + XML + MySQL ... and there may be some others I've left out CSS, XHTML, stuff like that.

Nevertheless, we will prevail. Links to follow.^

Nothing specific to the MySQL side of this, for now.

Fix Emacs Backspace Ctl-H

2009-10-26T01:07:00.001Z

Put this in your .emacs file...

(global-set-key "\C-h" 'backward-delete-char)

Dokan: FUSE SSHFS for Cygwin

2009-10-24T18:14:00.003Z

Dokan appears to be a work in progress. Basically it is intended to allow users of Cygwin to connect a [secure] remote file system (using SSHFS) under Windows just as is possible under the *nixish operating systems & MacOS.

Note that the version of SSHFS we downloaded has a dependency on Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)/ This dependency is documented on the Dokan Download Page.

Note that we are installing this under WinXP w/ all current service packs, Cygwin, and ActiveState Perl.

WinXP and cPanel WebDisk

2009-10-19T14:44:00.005Z

Connect a cPanel WebDisk under WinXP

The procedure describes how to add a "Network Place" to the "Network Places" folder under WinXP, using the SSL WebDisk utility description from and installed cPanel. The hostname given in the URL given shown here is 'host.example.com'. In order for this to work, you must have a real hostname OR an IP address for a server running whatever SSL WebDisk protocol WinXP understands, AND the server has installed. More information about this when it becomes available...

On the "Map Network Drive" dialog, there is a link at the bottom, just above the buttons called "Sign up for online storage or connect to a network server" - use that -
In the "Add Network Place Wizard select "Connect to another network server" to specify the URL of the web disk; click "Next"
Provide the URL of the WebDisk as the "Internet or Network address" – the URL should be of the form https://host.example.com:2078/; Click "Next"
Accept the security certificate; click "Next"
Provide Login Credentials (Username & Password)
Provide a name for the network place [I typically use something like username@hostname]; Click "Next"
Click "Finish" on the "A network place has successfully been created" dialog. [this is the final dialog of the Wizard]

This will create a "Network Place" in your Network Places folder.

UPDATE

While this procedure did create a "Network Place", I later found that the filesystem of the remote computer was not writable by the Windows file system API calls (made by Windows Apps) [WinXP we're talking about]. No solution found, yet. -pdw 2009.10.28