Site Updates

2019-07-23: Site Update

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I might start posting more shorter posts more frequently. I have been thinking about writing some longer posts on a few topics, but I have not gotten started. Perhaps putting smaller posts online and then combining them later is the way to go.

I also might start posting more images on the site as well. Even if they have nothing to do with the text. Someone suggested it in one of the few useful comments that I get. I might post some art, since I think I should know more about art. I should probably know more about a lot of things.

You’re welcome.

Image from the Rheinau Psalter, a 13th century manuscript housed at Central Library of Zurich. Image from e-Codices. This image is assumed to be allowed under Fair Use.

Making a Little Twitter App

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For a long time I have used a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools to create a weekly post of tweets. It was pretty neat. I was tweeting web sites so I could use my blog to bookmark sites. (See more pages about it here and here.)

I also use it on a few other sites I help run, and recently Twitter Tools “upgraded” from 2.4 to 3.0. And it seems to have stopped working. There are no more weekly digest posts.  I am not the only person who is having problems with it. There is a plugin called Twitter Digest that I might look at.

Right now I am writing something in Ruby that will get tweets and format them in HTML. So I can copy and paste my tweets into my blog. (I don’t think there are APIs for WordPress, but I could be wrong.) I will put it on Github. I guess it’s redundant, but I am doing it as a bit of an exercise.

Image from Gospel of Passau, a 12th century Gospel manuscript housed at Bavarian State Library, webpage information here, image from World Document Library, image assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Looking Into Pluralsight

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I am still looking into Ruby, but there might be a pause in the Ruby posts for a few weeks.

I was at a Meetup a while ago, and I got a free month of Pluralsight. They have digital educational content for technology training.

They seem to lean pretty heavily towards Microsoft technologies, but they do have a few courses on Clojure and Android. So I will be going through those for a couple of weeks in addition to looking into Ruby.

Twitter Tools Notes

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At the time of writing this post, I am using two widgets to put tweets on this blog. One is the default widget that Twitter provides. Another is Twitter Tools by Alex King. The plug-in page says that it is compatible up to WordPress version 3.05. I am running 3.10. I tried to get it to work, but I could not. I assumed that it no longer worked with the latest version of WordPress.

Then I got the bright idea of checking the Apache logs. There was a line that said something about not being able to find some PHP function.

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function curl_init() in /blah/blah/wp-content/plugins/twitter-tools/twitteroauth.php on line 201, referer: http://www.MAacAdie.net/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=twitter-tools.php

So I hit the google. It turns out I needed to install another PHP pacakge. I found this page, that told me I had to install php5-curl.

Of course, you will also need curl on your system as well. I checked the docs. There is nothing about curl.

If you are using a shared hosting service, this will probably not be a problem.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Cotton Genesis, a Greek manuscript of the Book of Genesis created in the 4th or 5th Century. It is called the “Cotton Genesis” because at one time it was owned by a man with the surname “Cotton”; it is not made of cotton.

 

2012-01-11 Update

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I have decided to learn other technologies during my job search. I applied to Code Academy here in Chicago. It is a 12-week program that teaches Ruby on Rails and entrepreneurship. I am also interested in Clojure and Android, but I decided that I needed to sign up for some training to give myself some focus.

The only Clojure training that I could find was only a week. I did not look for Android training. Code Academy is three months, and a lot of people in the Chicago technology and startup communities are involved to provide mentors, equipment and advice. I think that getting training of longer duration will be better because there is more time to absorb the material. Plus there are a LOT of people involved. I will still be jumping off a cliff at the end, but I think that the chance of success is a lot higher.

The current class is the second class to go through.

The original intent was to teach web technologies to entrepreneurs since a lot of startups fail since most founders do not know technology and do not always communicate well with their developers. Plus a lot of developers do not know much about being on the other side of the desk. I plan on staying a software developer, but I would like to know more about what makes founders, investors and VCs tick. A few people have suggested that I go freelance, but then I would have to deal with sales, and paperwork, and all the things that software developers do not like. What is the difference between an S-Corporation and an LLC? These will be covered in addition to Ruby on Rails.

There were also some people in the first class who were software developers who wanted to transition to Ruby on Rails. After speaking to a couple of them, I decided to apply. When I had the interview I also spoke to another developer transitioning to Ruby on Rails.

I will still be posting about Java. I am finally getting around to some posts about things that I have been thinking about for a while.

Lastly, to use some pseudo-Java notation,  “Code Academy” != “CodeCademy“.

Image from Code Academy, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Upcoming Plans

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Recently I went to No Fluff Just Stuff. I learned a lot, and I will write up my thoughts on some of the presentations. A few of them dealt with a topic I had started exploring: concurrency.

I am also looking at Clojure. So there may be a LOT of posts on concurrency.

 

Looking for a Twitter Plugin

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I am looking for a Twitter plug-in. I would like a plugin that will grab my tweets for the past week and put them on my site. I tried Twitter Tools by Alex King. I cannot get it to work. Perhaps it does not work with the latest version of WordPress.

Doing a search on “Twitter” on the WordPress site gives a lot of results. I must be the only person who has NOT made a WordPress plugin for Twitter.

So if anyone can point me to a Twitter plug-in  that can publish my tweets once a week, let me know.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Vatican Virgil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

Linux Firewall With Comcast

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I use Comcast to connect to the internet. I use Linux on most of my machines, and on my firewall as well. Comcast does not officially support Linux, so if you want to run Linux on the machine that connects to the internet, you are on your own.

For the installation, you are required to use Windows to run a program that connects your machine to the internet. This does not need to be run on the machine that will function as your firewall. This program seems to register your ethernet card’s Media Access Control address (a unique identifier for each ethernet card) with Comcast’s servers. This means every request from your machine or network must be from a card with that address.

But the address can be faked. You can configure your Linux/BSD firewall to use the registered MAC address. To do this, you must get the MAC address of the card that has been registered. To do this on Windows, you can type “ipconfig /all” in a DOS prompt.

<em>C:\Documents and Settings\ericm&gt;ipconfig /all</em>
<em>Windows IP Configuration</em>
<em>Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : COMPUTER-ONE
Primary Dns Suffix  . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : hsd1.il.comcast.net.</em>
<em>Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:</em>
<em>Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : hsd1.il.comcast.net.
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : <strong>00-50-2C-A5-F5-73</strong>
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.176.224.100
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.254.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 172.20.1.102
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 172.20.1.10
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 172.20.1.130
172.20.1.131
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, May 15, 2007 1:55:25 PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Saturday, May 19, 2007 1:55:25 PM</em>
<em>Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:</em>
<em>Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 4A-4B-4C-5D-0E-0F
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 169.254.1.3
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :</em>

The line that has the information we want is the “Physical Address” line for Local Area Connection 1. Take that information and reformat it slightly and put it into a script that will run on the Linux firewall. You have to deactivate the outgoing ethernet card, and reactivate it with the MAC address from above.

<em># update-rc.d firewallScript.sh start 80 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 S .</em>
<em>echo running /etc/init.d/firewallScript
TIME_VAR=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M.%S`
ifconfig eth0 | cat &gt; /root/ifconfigArchive/ifconfig.eth0.$TIME_VAR
ifconfig eth1 | cat &gt; /root/ifconfigArchive/ifconfig.eth1.$TIME_VAR
# spoof ip address for comcast
ifconfig eth0 down hw ether <strong>00:50:2C:A5:F5:73</strong>
ifconfig eth0 up
# restart network
/etc/init.d/networking restart
# restart firewall
bash /etc/fwbuilder.sh
# restart ssh
/etc/init.d/ssh restart</em>

You then need to reboot your firewall, and you should be good to go.

 Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Roman Vergil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

Switching Network Configurations with netsh

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When I use wi-fi at at the coffee shop, I have to set up my laptop to use a dynamic IP address. When I am home, I like to use a static IP address. Going back and forth can be kind of a hassle. I used to have to change it by hand every time. I thought there must be a better way.  (I am not much of a networking expert, and setting up DHCP for one machine seemed like a bit of a hassle.)

I did some searching, and I found out about a tool on Windows called netsh. There is a very long page about is at Microsoft’s site, and a page at Wikipedia. You could make the changes in the GUI, and run the command netsh dump > $SOME_FILE_NAME to put them into a file, and later run netsh exec $SOME_FILE_NAME to set the interfaces.

I did a little bit of messing around, and I figured out all the commands I need to change back and forth. I put them in a text file, and I just copy and paste them into a DOS window when I need to.

To use a dynamic address:

netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" source=dhcp
netsh interface ip set dns name="Local Area Connection" source=dhcp register=PRIMARY
netsh interface ip set wins name="Local Area Connection" source=dhcp

To use a static address at home:

netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" source=static addr=192.168.1.7 mask=255.255.255.0
netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" gateway=192.168.1.3 gwmetric=0
netsh interface ip set dns name="Local Area Connection" source=static addr=192.168.1.3 register=PRIMARY
netsh interface ip add dns name="Local Area Connection" addr=192.168.1.5 index=2
netsh interface ip set wins name="Local Area Connection" source=static addr=none

 Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Roman Vergil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

2010-06-29 Update

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I started a new job yesterday. So I may not be posting too much new stuff lately.

However, I may post some old stuff. My desktop came back from Best Buy. They had to replace the motherboard, and I had to re-install Ubuntu. So I lost all of my files. (I have been making DVDs of the really important stuff all along.) So I no longer have an OpenCms server running. I may take all of the files in the static content portion of my site and copy and paste them on the blog portion.

 Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Roman Vergil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.