GizmoLA.com

Linux shell scripting: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:22:39 -0700

This error pops up for a couple of reasons. At the top of the script there will probably be a line that looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

This is telling Linux that this script should be interpreted using the /bin/sh program. So your first step is to verify that program exists. I tend to use:

which sh

This will typically come back with a response like this:

/bin/sh

This is telling us that the path to the sh program is in fact /bin/sh, matching the path specified at the top of the script. Ok, so what gives? Well, it's possible that this script was made on an operating system that has line ending characters different than linux. This could have been on on a Mac or PC, or the file could have been converted when it was packaged. In this case, you get the relatively misleading bad interpreter: No such file or directory message, which is really trying to look for sh, although you don't get any indication of the fact.

So, how to fix? Read on.

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EA's Spore DRM fiasco

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:57:00 -0700

EA's big fall PC gaming release is the long awaited "Spore" from Maxis, beloved studio responsible for all things Sim. Spore has been in some form of development since 2000, and finally hit stores on Sept. 7th, 2008, accompanied by predictions of the title living up to its hype and transcending it from EA brass.

I took a look at the Amazon user ratings for the game, and was shocked to see that it has been absolutely shellacked -- currently 2300+ reviews and only 1.5 stars. The primary reason for the low ratings? Customer outrage over EA's employment of the Sony SecuROM copy protection system, that allows someone purchasing the game, to activate it 3 times. As was pointed out in an amazon review:

Then there's the DRM. Let me just clarify what people are saying by adding, it not only counts installations, but changes to your hardware ! Upgrade a system component (memory, CPU, vid card) and you are out an installation....Basically I just paid $50 for a coaster.

When will companies learn that treating their customers like thieves is never a good business practice?

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New Lula/Lampsig Coop Server

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:55:09 -0700

So the UML Coop has finally after 3 years of talking about it, acquired a new server from Silicon Mechanics. Read the rest of the article for the complete specifications. We will be moving off User Mode Linux (UML) and on to OpenVZ. This change will allow us to accept some new members to the coop, so if you're interested drop me a line.

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AT+T Wireless XPress Mail Courier IMAP setup problem - Trash Folder?

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:40:17 -0700

Having recently left a company that had Exchange, the removal of Goodlink from my Samsung Blackjack left the phone in a fairly broken state. I fixed this by doing a full reset (Turn on phone while holding Up Arrow) and choosing 1. This put things back in basic working order.

My efforts to use the built in email client to access my Courier IMap Email had never been successful, so I decided to explore AT+T's XPress Mail system. This consists of client software you install on the phone, and a desktop application that connects through AT+T's servers to give you access to your email remotely, and also can be used to give you access to files on your PC.

Upon install of the client you choose your mail server (in my case IMAP) and input the basic settings required by most IMAP client softare (Account name & Password, email address, the IMAP server, SMTP server, security settings, etc). I did notice an unusual configuration box asking for "Root Folder Path" which I left blank. Here's where the fun began.

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LAMP Tutorial Series originally published on PHPFreaks.com

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:52:58 -0700

A few years ago I published a 3 part LAMP tutorial series entitled LAMP, MySQL/PHP Database Driven Websites on the well known php community website PHPFreaks.com. This series dealt with a slew of practical issues including how a LAMP server works, relational database design using MySQL, many to many tables, SQL inner and outer joins, practical PHP debugging, php documentation tools, basic PHP classes, css, interactive javascript & DHTML with a chooser widget, php HEREDOC and php basics like how to process forms and utilize GET and POST methods.

The series was fairly successful, (a 4.5 of 5 after hundreds of ratings), many pages of comments and questions, and page views to the 100k's+ although PHPFreaks auditing system was turned off at some point and stopped recording views.

Unfortunately, some years ago PHPFreaks.com suffered some fairly catastrophic issues with its publishing system. There were also some bugs, and the site was exploited with some XSS, and the admins simply decommissioned the majority of the site. My series was part of what disappeared. At that point, a couple of college Computer Science courses on web development had taken the series and integrated it into their curriculum, and the professor of one of these courses had converted it into a Word document, which I was able to download and convert to pdf.

I plan to write a compatible publishing addon for gizmola.com so that I can take the original markup and republish it here, but in the meantime, here is the series in pdf format. The conversion utility they used stripped out the original markup, and page breaks are gone, but the text, source code, and illustrations are all still there.

I also offer all the source code for parts 2 & 3 of the series. I'm not sure what happened to the source for part 1, however, it is all included inline in the tutorial. The LAMP, MySQL/PHP Database Driven Websites series is now available in pdf format. Click here.

Free Apple Mac style Dock with Windows Vista and RocketDock

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:32:25 -0800

One of the distinctive features of Apple computers is a piece of software called "The Dock". The Dock is sort of an always there menu with big icons that spawn your most frequently used programs. Docks also can run small programs or docklets that can do things like display a clock or show you the weather. Docks also can be configured to display running programs that have been minimized in a mini window. You bring a running program to the front, or launch a program by hovering over the dock with your mouse, and clicking on the icon.

I suppose that people who don't know any better might think that this is something you can only get from Apple, but as it turns out there are docks for Linux and Windows. At home I have a Gateway computer running Windows Vista business, and I wanted to add a Dock. After a bit of hunting, I found some recommendations and settled upon RocketDock from Punk Labs. Punk Labs as it turns out is really a couple (he's a programmer, she's a designer) who go by the pseudonyms of PolyVector and Skunkie respectively. The about screen describes RocketDock tongue in cheek as a "peace offering" from the pair of self admitted Apple fans to Windows users everywhere.

The RocketDock website provides links to the various versions and a straightforward online manual. You get most of the features of the Apple Dock program, and it's very easy to work with. Once installed and running, the RocketDock appears at the top of the screen, with a set of default icons. Right click on the RocketDock and you get a menu that lets you adjust Dock settings. There are various themes that will style the look and feel of the RocketDock, and the RocketDock site offers an Extra's link with downloads to styles and docklet programs other people have contributed. While it's just a quibble with this otherwise great program, there's not much in the way of Docklets available, but I found it hard to resist adding on the simple analog style clock.
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West Texas UFO sightings, Cloverfield promotion?

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:39:50 -0800

Only days before the virally marketed JJ Abrams film Cloverfield is due to open, does anyone else find it suspicious that a major news outlet like ABC news would be drumming up a UFO sighting story, based solely on a handful of "eyewitness" testimony? Seriously -- this is 2008? You mean to tell me that not a single person had a digitial camera, video or even a run of the mill cell phone on em? Precedence for this goes back at least 80 years, to the infamous War of the Worlds RKO radio show. What would it take to get such a rumor going? A few people in cahoots, and a gullible local news affiliate? What could possibly explain this making it to the national news?

Chuck Norris Facts.... by Chuck Norris

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:32:08 -0800

The Movie-Gurus.com archive.

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:42:48 -0800

*Update*
Since i wrote this, my hosting account ran out of juice and took to thrashing and locking up on a regular basis due to the number of mysql processes it required and the amount of buffer memory being used. I run this site on a coop server under UML and we have been talking for two years now about moving to a new server with a different virtualization solution, probably OpenVZ. I currently don't want to invest the time and effort I'll need to rebuild and reconfigure the server (no more Gentoo this time, as I don't have the personal bandwidth to stay up with the maintenance and don't use Gentoo at work).

I spoke with David of MG and we agreed to resurrect MG officially, since he still owns the domain and gets a fair amount of traffic to the review urls, which redirect to his community site Movieloons.com. I'm hopeful we'll get there soon, but for reasons I'll keep to myself, there can be no movement on this project until David sorts an issue with his hosting company.

Movie-Gurus.com went down for the count when the hosting company wiped the site. As we'd lost around a months worth of reviews, I didn't feel like resurrecting it at the time and starting fresh. Then I started thinking about the 1500+ reviews in the database, and all the time and effort that went into the site, so I decided to see if I could resurrect it from backups. I quietly put it back up, and left a little message at the forum run by the MG originator, but that generated no interest, so I left it up and largely forgot about it. Only one little problem there --- search bots found it, and what did they want? They wanted pictures! Mostly pictures of actresses! So I suppose that MG lives again, even if for now it's only as a shadow of its former self, visited by people who are only interested in a small picture. You can find the site for now at Site taken down.

Fun with Windows Vista and the Maxtor Shared Storage Drive

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 23:48:49 -0700

I have a pair of 200 gigabyte Maxtor Shared Storage drives -- which are relatively inexpensive network storage drives that integrate with windows client machines. They come with an ethernet port you use to connect to a switch or hub on your home LAN, and will plug and play by negotiating an IP via DHCP. Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) provided a windows client that helps with finding and setting up the drives, since they advertise themselves as Workgroup peers that can be shared. I use the drives to store things like digital camera pictures and DVD's I've ripped in order to play them through my Tivo Series 2. They also come with some software that makes it easy to backup the My Documents area of our windows machines.

With Windows XP, the Shared Storage drives worked fairly reliably, but after I upgraded my Gateway desktop to Vista Business edition, I found myself unable to connect to the drives I'd mapped to it. Trying to mount them manually, I'd receive a login dialog. The name and password I use from my XP Pro based computer works fine, but on Vista the drive would reject the same credentials.

It took me a while to sit down and dig into the issue, and my first guess was that firmware might fix the problem. The Shared Storage drive predates Vista, so it wasn't a total surprise to me that authentication didn't work. The bundled web interface allows you to login with a browser, and administer the drive, setting up user accounts and mounting and unmounting USB devices you can connect to either of 2 provided USB ports. We have a printer attached.

After logging into the webserver, it displays a menu that includes the Firmware version -- mine was 1.2. A quick search of the Seagate site, and I found Maxtor offering version 2.6.2 firmware! The Advanced Settings | System Maintenance menu | System update menu provided a simple upload and update process that was completed in about 2 minutes. Despite the major point upgrade to the drive bios, I still was unable to login to the drive from Vista. What made this even more confusing is that I somehow had been able to successfully find the unit on the Windows network, authenticate to it and map a drive when I had first done the Vista upgrade. A bit of googling on the problem, and I discovered something surprising about the Maxtor unit I'd never suspected -- it is actually a linux box....
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Xen 3.0 Fedora Core, RHEL, Centos 4.x How-to

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:28:03 -0700

I gave a talk on the use of Xen for web developers at Lampsig. It took me a while to get my notes transcribed, but here at last they are. This prescription has been used by me to install Xen successfully on a Fedora core 4 box, Centos 4.3 and 4.4 boxes, and should probably work on RHEL, assuming you can figure out how to get the packages you need.

I cover use of file backed file systems, and how to mount and edit them, as well as expanding a file based filesystem.

I have run gentoo and Centos guests I got from jailtime.org and have found them to be very stable. I even was able to use this on a 64 bit server, although I did have to build my own guest. Many people who have had trouble getting Xen to work reliably when using the packaged (rpm) versions of Xen may find this prescription fixes their problems.

Xen 3.0 Centos How-to

Install Xwindows and Gnome on Centos with Yum

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:55:43 -0700

I recently had need to add XWindows to a Centos 4.x install that didn't have X or Gnome. I was doing this under VMware which added slightly to the degree of difficulty. As it turns out, using Yum makes this a very easy process, although you probably end up with some bloated packageware.

# yum groupinstall X Window System GNOME Desktop Environment

Pay close attention to the capitalization -- Yum is picky. "Gnome desktop environment" won't work, for example.

CAPTCHA busting -- A sucker born every minute

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:50:14 -0800

I have a small phpBB2 forum attached to this site, that I used briefly to support some of my side projects. phpBB has had a checkered past in terms of security, having been the victim of many exploits. To be fair that's one of the costs of having been one of the first and most widely successful php based community projects. The number of phpBB deployments is staggering even to this day. With so many forums out there, spammers quickly figured out that if they could write a bot to create an account and auto post messages, they'd be able to spread their spam messages far and wide. I was getting so much spam, I ultimately disabled the ability of people to authenticate their own accounts, and despite this change, still see as many as ten new signups for the forum every day. Who would bother to sign up for an account they can't use? There had to be a way of determining the bots from the humans who wanted to post to my forum.

CAPTCHA, as the conventional wisdom of the day was concerned, would provide a useful deterrent to this annoyance -- bots arent' smart enough to decipher the captcha images and extract the right combination of numbers and letters depicted in the image, and type them back to into the form in order to unlock the account. Without the account, the spammers couldn't have their bots post their spam messages. While phpBB introduced a CAPTCHA capability relatively late in the game, it is now something you get out of the box, and there is at least one mod that improves on the quality of the CAPTCHA image, which is to say, makes it harder to read.

The problem is that CAPTCHA's are there to defeat dumb machines, but not dumb humans. And as the old saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute who is more than happy to help your local spammer defeat the CAPTCHA image on your site. How might you ask? Well, the scam works something like this: John Q. Sucker visits some site that informs him he's getting something for free -- it could be a free ipod, porn, or an xbox 360. All that is important is that this person believes they will be getting access to this free stuff once they register.

They visit the spammer's site, and are presented a CAPTCHA image in order to register, only, this image didn't come directly from the spammer's site -- it came from YOURS. The spammer writes a simple bot that goes to your site and hits the registration page. It takes the CAPTCHA image your site provided, and presents it to John Q. Sucker on the spammer's site.

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Pirate Name

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:26:36 -0700

My pirate name is:

Captain Davy Flint

Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.

Scrappy

nospam@example.com (David Rolston) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:18:25 -0700

I woke up the morning of tuesday August 15th, 2006 at 6:45am, and after looking around for a minute, realized that Scrappy wasn't on his dog bed. As I had an 9am meeting that day, I went upstairs to find him, and discovered him on his side, having passed away probably in the early morning hours. He lived to be twelve years old, and his death was a great surprise and shock to us. Although he hadn't been eating well, and was on some medication, we never suspected that anything was seriously wrong with him. He had been acting fairly normally and was as animated as ever especially when any "people" food was involved. He'd been up to all his usual tricks, jumping on the couch, and trying to steal things off Niamh's plate whenever she might put it down for a minute.

We decided to have a laboratory do a post mortem exam, and later that day, they called to inform us that Scrappy had a number of cancerous growths on his liver and pancreas. One of them had ruptured, and according to the lab, although it was a sudden upredictable event, it nevertheless was inevitable. They assured us that there was nothing we or they could have done, and that he wouldn't have suffered much.

We bought Scrappy from a Pomeranian breeder located in Riverside county, which is east of Los Angeles. We'd recently moved to an apartment in West Hollywood, and wanted a companion to keep Gizmo company during the days while we were at work. Tracy had spoken to a breeder over the phone and negotiated a deal for a Pomeranian puppy who they hadn't been able to sell and was now too big. My recollection is that he was already five or six months old, but perhaps a bit younger. It was a friday after work, and we jumped into Tracy's old VW rabbit, and headed out on what would turn out to be a two hour soujourn which included our getting lost, driving up and down lightless suburban streets, and giving serious consideration to turning around and heading home. At the end of a dead end street, I finally pullled the car over and got out. The address seemed to be in the vacinity of the one we were searching for, but we were expecting a ranch or warehouse rather than the rows of tract houses. We couldn't find a street number. Then I picked up the faint sound of dogs yapping. I followed it to the garage of a house and rang the doorbell. An elderly woman answered the door holding a tiny white pom in her hands.
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