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dready — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:14:45 CST

This is Dready's braindump - ideas, masterplans and scratchpad.

In FreeBSD, if cron is not able to send email of results (with postfix complaining "No recipient addresses found in message header"), check /var/log/cron. One possibility is that the /etc/nsswitch.conf file contains references to "nis", but nis support is not installed.

Oracle I18N

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:08:00 CST

Here I note down the battles I have with Oracle dealing with I18N data:

Then you can try RAWTOHEX(col) and DUMP(col) which should show you how it’s encoded in the database.

Also, to find out if a column contains non-ASCII characters, use LENGTH(col) <> LENGTHB(col)

To set the connection charset...
I finally managed to get the right environment variable to use to do the load:
dos> set NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8
dos> sqlplus ….

Tell sqlplus to exit on error:

WHENEVER SQLERROR ROLLBACK EXIT 5
WHENEVER OSERROR ROLLBACK EXIT 10

WebDesk

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:18:33 CDT

WebDesk
A desktop application that can open up custom sized windows containing a web page, minimize it to tray and set always-on-top.

As more and more useful Web 2.0 applications emerge, users find that they need to keep too many web browser windows (or tabs) open. Web browsers are typically used to access the applications, but lack the controls that make a streamlined desktop experience.

Example web apps include: office applications, home page applications like netvibes.com, productivity applications like SlimTracker, and many more.

The solution is to have a desktop application that lets the user opens URLs, customize the windows behavior and remember it!
Customizations include:
- minimize to tray
- close to tray
- no frame
- always-on-top
- use as deskbar
- etc..

It does the following:
- Click on the tray icon to bring up the list of "bookmarks". Click on a specific bookmark and it opens up the right browser in the right window settings to the URL.
- Shape the browser in the way you like it, then click the icon on the system tray to save a bookmark for it.
-

Mozilla Development

dready — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 04:12:56 CDT

Error codes

Often you don't see what an XPCOM error code means from Javascript console - it just shows up as Unknown. After Googling around and not finding what I wanted, I dug into some seamonkey code and understood that itsy bit more about error codes:

I started with 0x804b000f showing up as

[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x804b000f [nsIChannel.asyncOpen]" nsresult: "0x804b000f (<unknown>)" location: "JS frame :: file:///c:/wil/src/foxri/components/xrdsContentHandler.js :: anonymous :: line 249" data: no]

Not a whole lot of information there. Yes, I got the line number but it is a call to asyncOpen which I have checked over and over and saw no reason why it should fail.

Searching LXR gave me:

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpcom/base/nsError.h

And I found that nothing matches my error code but there seems to be some offsetting done for module-specific error codes using the NS_ERROR_GENERATE_FAILURE macro. The module offsets are defined on line 68-98 and they are added to NS_ERROR_MODULE_BASE_OFFSET (0x45). So, my error code being 0x804BXXXX means that it is module #5 - NS_ERROR_MODULE_NETWORK. Makes sense, nsIChannel does belong to necko.

So, I found the network errors here: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/netwerk/base/public/nsNetError.h#130
Yes, it's NS_ERROR_IN_PROGRESS.

There you go!

OpenSSL Cheatsheet

Anonymous — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:49:09 CDT

Generate the Key with the following command:
$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out www.virtualhost.com.key 1024
This command will generate 1024 bit RSA Private Key and stores it in the file www.virtualhost.com.key.
It will ask you for a pass phrase: use something secure and remember it. Your certificate will be useless without the key. If you don't want to protect your key with a pass phrase (only if you absolutely trust that server machine, and you make sure the permissions are carefully set so only you can read that key) you can leave out the -des3 option above. Backupyour www.virtualhost.com.key file and make a note of the pass phrase. A good choice is to backup this information onto a diskette or other removeable media.

Generate the CSR with the following command:
$ openssl req -new -key www.virtualhost.com.key -out www.virtualhost.com.csr
This command will prompt you for the X.509 attributes of your certificate. Remember to give the name www.virtualhost.com when prompted for `Common Name (eg, YOUR name)'.
Do not enter your personal name here. We are requesting a certificate for a webserver, so the Common Name has to match the FQDN of your website (a requirement of the browsers).

Generate a temporary self-signed Certificate:
$ openssl x509 -req -days 30 -in www.virtualhost.com.csr-signkey www.virtualhost.com.key -out www.virtualhost.com.crt
This command will generate a certificate a self-signed certificate in www.virtualhost.com.crt which can be used as a temporary certificate while you are waiting for a real certificate from Thawte.

XBar

dready — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 04:25:53 CDT

XBar (eXtensible toolBar) is an idea to build a browser toolbar that is customizable using a variety of methods:

Statically built
User-customization
Site-based: a meta tag on the current page can point to a config file that describes the search URL and options available

Status: idea-only

SIP P2P (Siperoo)

dready — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 02:13:38 CDT

Good white paper on NAT traversal: http://www.kayote.com/web/docs/WhitePapers/KayoteNetworksWhitePaper-NAT_Traversal_in_SIP.pdf

RTP Proxy:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Portaone+rtpproxy

OpenSER nathelper module code showing the use of rtpproxy commands:
http://openser.cvs.sourceforge.net/openser/sip-server/modules/nathelper/nathelper.c?revision=1.21&view=markup

SDP syntax summary:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/jon/mmbook/book/node182.html

Portable Address Book Exchange Format

dready — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 04:28:08 CDT

Address Book Format

We are in need of a standardized address book format, sort of what RDF or OPML did to blogging. Before we can decide on a format (which will probably be an XML-based format) we need to decide on a schema. What fields we need. Vcard is one such format but seems to be just a single entry (needs research.)

Address Book Access Protocol

This is the counterpart to the address book format. While LDAP seems like the way to go, it is designed to be a global (network-wide or enterprise-wide) directory protocol.

Centralize Address Book Storage

This will be the del.icio.us of address books. I'm not sure if there is API access to it. And if there is, it could well be that all our problems are solved. But it would probably be non-standard.

Application Support

All of the above is really leading to this. We use address book in a wide array of applications, from cell phones to mail clients and PDAs. My goal to keep all my addresses in sync, and store an authoritative copy in a secure location. One place where I'd really like to see the address book being used is the mail server (MTA). It would be nice to get my mail server to deliver mails coming from people in my address book, and rejecting or placing lower trust levels for all others.

Address book is also particularly useful in social networks or privacy broker (think XDI and XRI data broker).

Links

The Address Book - open source address management system
IMC Personal Data Interchange - http://www.imc.org/pdi/

Mail

dready — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 04:06:36 CDT

Mail Setup

Goals

To receive spam-filtered and virus-scanned emails without fear of losing them.

Introduction

On an average day, I get between 100-200 spams on my personal email address. I used to run SpamAssassin and ClamAv on my qmail system but that has sucked a lot of processing power on the system.

The domain is question is "dready.org".

I have set it up to have 2 MX records, one to my mail server on a colo host, and a backup MX to my FreeBSD box behind my home ADSL connection.

So, I'd like to keep it that way.

1. Mail comes in to my mail server (either directly from the sending MTA, or via my backup MX)
2. To save processing power, I don't want to run any spam filtering or virus scanning software.
3. So the mail gets delivered to my Maildir, from which I can POP using Thunderbird.
4. However, this mailbox has too much spam in it. I'd really like to take advantage of GMail's processing power.
5. Did I mention that I hate sifting through the Spam folder? So, even if I could use SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's spam filter, it's not good enough because I don't want to have to go through the false positives.
6. One way of doing it would be to forward it to Gmail, and POP it back out.
7. The problem with that is - if Google incorrectly marks a message as spam, I will have to go into Gmail's Spam folder to retrieve it. That's alright.

Final Solution

primary@example.com is the primary email address that I receive mails for.
This is forwarded to temp@example.com and my.account@gmail.com
Mails on temp@example.com are kept for 30 days, but provide a way to recover Gmail false positives as well as a quick way to access fresh mails (in case gmail is down)
All mails on my.account@gmail.com is spam filtered and forwarded back to filtered@example.com.