Older blog entries for wardv (starting at number 16)

touch -- -i will create a file called '-i' in the current directory. This will cause rm to _always_ ask for confirmation when it is issued in this directory: '-i' is the first file it meets to delete, but it sees it starts with a - and hence assumes it is the option -i, for 'interactive'.

Excellent protection from the accidental rm -rf command. I just love unix...

A bit of an intensive day today. Did some paid work this morning (using WeSQL, of course :), and then I ventured off into UK-ifying my CV. Which turned out to be an all-afternoon project. But I'm happy with the result, it must be said.

Brighton

Called some more folks with flats for rent this evening. They are either taken, too small for two, or just not interested in letting them only from September. Sigh.

Advogato

Now how strange is it to wander about Advogato, randomly picking people and reading their stuff, rating them, and to meet a reference to my own diary on Stevey's page?

Well, 0.53 has seen the light. Of WeSQL, that is. It's a bugfix-only release, but it's an important bugfix if you run MySQL :)

Cool tools

Cronolog is the final solution for all log-rotation trouble. It doesn't rotate the logs, it just saves them properly in the first place.

If you need to build a (S)RPM, Thomas' excellent bitches is your friend - though the name is a bit.... well it's an acronym that didn't turn out very well.

Meatspace

July 21st is the Belgian national holiday. Also, the 'Gentse feesten', one of the biggest street festivals in Europe, have kicked off here yesterday, for the next 10 days. Neither of these two events mean much to me. I wish I was in LA.

Brighton

I'm still looking for a job and a place for 2 that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. My CV is coming along but it needs more work to UK-ify it.

Nothing much to say today. Ngrep is very cool - and Ettercap is even more amazing.

Also, an interesting discussion about ARP and what one can do with it is going on on Bugtraq.

My friend Thomas is flying to Boston tomorrow for the Gnome Boston Summit. Now how cool is that? Boston is a nice place - I've spent most of the last half year there and I really like it. With San Francisco, my favourite US city.

I've been having fun with hackerslab.org. It's a 'cracking contest', where you have to get through 17 or 18 levels. There's a tutorial here, in French (I hope that's not a problem for you ;) but only use it when you really don't know how to continue. It only goes up to level 8 anyway.

Time for some real work now.

If anybody has some information about living/working in and around Brighton,UK, I'd like to hear from you!

I have to look into the honeynet project. The concept is simple, but it's just too cool. This guy built one and caught a couple of crackers within 28 hours. With his whitepaper, it's trivial to find out name/age/location of the 'cracker' - just a kid -, even though he tried to obfuscate it a bit.

Yesterday was the big day - I've released WeSQL 0.50!

This version is a complete rewrite, with many enhancements. In particular the code is now a standard Perl module (installable with the usual 'perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && su && make install'), and there is an RPM for Redhat users. But that's just the packaging, there are also much improvements under the hood.

For instance:

• Extensive logging in web server logs.
• All code has been moved to Perl modules, which results in greater performance and portability.
• The three level structure (WeSQL.pm, yourmodule.pm, action.cgi) has been reduced to 2 perl modules in the Apache namespace: WeSQL.pm and AppHandler.pm, and a number of other modules for the rest of the functionality. Virtually all intelligence is now contained in WeSQL.pm and its helper modules. AppHandler is the only module that needs to be duplicated to run multiple WeSQL sites on one server. See the Apache::WeSQL man page for more information.
• These modules can now also easily be used from ordinary perl programs, bringing the power of all the (journalled) database subs to your scripts!
• A set of subs, available from EVAL blocks, is now available to read/write/delete values from the current session. See the Apache::WeSQL::Journalled man page for more information.
• Much more complete documentation.
• All documentation (except for this changelog) is available as man pages.
• The code is much cleaner!
• ...

Enjoy!

Discovered Brainbench today. Have a look at some of my scores here.

So, some time has passed again. I've released WeSQL v0.28.02 a while back, which is another polishing, bugfix release - but not without some nice new features of course :-) Have a look at the homepage if you want more information. WeSQL is becoming very useful now - I manage to build quite complicated database driven websites with it in very little time - but I have to admit that the documentation is lacking big time. Anyone feel like doing something about that?

I have been checking out some browsers lately. Opera on Linux is a very, very nice browser - still beta, but fast, and lacking only 1 major feature existing in good old NS4.7x: the roaming bookmark support...
Alternatively, Mozilla v0.9 has been released, and though heavier than Opera, it is of course open source, and much improvements have been made on the speed and efficiency front.

One of my friends has started the 'Dave and Dina' project. It will be pretty cool - a home entertainment centre that is fully open source. Have a look at http://davedina.apestaart.org!

Released WeSQL v0.28.01, a maintenance release, with mainly bugfixes, but also 'superuser' support in the journalling code, through a 'suid' field in the database. Upgrade is strongly recommended as this release fixes some more security issues.