A couple of weeks ago I bought an Acer Aspire One! It never even made it to the “Welcome to Windows” screen; it was boot up with an Ubuntu USB key. I tried desperately to get used to gnome 3, and unity, and I just couldn’t do it. Besides painfully slow, I’m just not a fan of fullscreen apps, dynamic desktop space allocation, lack of customizability, etc.

After a couple days of that I decided to try out Xubuntu. I wanted to get a Linux experience I was used to, but have a window manager that I actually like using. Xfce has turned out to be amazing! it’s extremely light weight, and it has the full customizability that I loved from Gnome-2.

I upgraded the ram from 1G to 2G, and upgraded the internal 250GB hard drive to a 60GB SSD. After doing some tuning in the system to disable atime, use a different queue scheduler for the disk, and offload the chrome cache directory into a tmpfs, this thing flies. It’s still a little difficult getting used to the small size of it.. but i love it.

Check out my scripts repository on github. I have written a bunch of random scripts that needed a home, so I put them up on github. These scripts are put on all of my servers in my ~/bin folder, controlled through puppet. In the repo you’ll find a flac-to-v0 script that acts just like cp, in that you give it 1 or more source files, and a single destination, and it will convert the given input files (as flac) to mp3. I also have a php rss parser, a shoutcast/di.fm parser/player, and other random stuff, check it out!

https://github.com/bahamas10/scripts

Check out my github account at github.com/bahamas10. Right now I don’t have much code on there, only a single repository for my various dot files. As I write more code I’ll be pushing it up to github, in the works right now is a script to automatically rename mp3/flac files based on their artist/album/song tags.

Puppet from Puppet Labs is a utility for controlling multiple machines from a single point. It allows for easy server roll outs, as well as keeping multiple servers in the same state. I have a server dedicated for Linux KVM virtualization, and because of this I have spun up about 10 VM’s, so 10 individual Linux installations. I use puppet to make sure that they all have the packages installed that I use on a daily basis, as well as a to make sure that anytime I make a change to my bash or zsh rc it gets populated out to all my servers. Also I store my public key in puppet, so any new server I provision will automatically be populated with it so I can easily SSH into it in a more secure manner.

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This update was in the works for a couple of weeks now, but just a couple of minutes ago I finally pulled the switch, and switched my webserver over to nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache. Nginx can serve up static content faster than you can blink, so that is why it is the first responder to all web requests on 80 and 443. I have a regex line that looks for static content and tells nginx to deliver it without hitting Apache. If the request does not match this regex it will simply be forwarded to Apache to handle it like a normal request.

This update has allowed me to move my webserver from a physical host with 8GB of ram and 2 Intel Xeon processors to a Virtual Machine with only 2 virt cores and 2GB of ram. Putting my server under a stress test I see that I can’t max out the 2 cores, or get the ram to go above 500mb, whereas with the old machine I could max out all 4 cores and get the ram up to 4-5GB’s used.

Static Content Regex

location ~* ^.+\.(png|jpeg|jpg|gif|css|js|ico|txt|swf|zip|rar|html|htm|pdf|flv|mov|mp3|m4a|woff|eoff)$

Kippo

I have been running Kippo on my server for a couple weeks now, and from it I have a lot of funny logs from people connecting to my server and thinking that they have logged in successfully as root over ssh.

Kippo is an SSH honeypot, according to their website:

Kippo is a medium interaction SSH honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and, most importantly, the entire shell interaction performed by the attacker.

– Kippo

Perhaps later I will post a tutorial on how to get kippo installed and secured on a server, but for now this tutorial will focus on how to install Ajaxterm to watch the logs that kippo captures.

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I think about how my macs battery can’t last a whole day at school… and all i really use it for is terminal for ssh, and full screen chrome.. i really wish i got a cr-48 netbook.. it would have fit my needs perfectly!

Check out this text document of sed one liners, i’m mirroring it on this website. (thanks for alex levinson for sitting on my couch… where all sed wizardry happens).

http://www.daveeddy.com/sed1line.txt

For an iPhone development class I took in the fall I began developing an iPhone Ampache Client. It was for my final project, so what you have here is the result of me learning objective-c and cocoa touch, and in 10 weeks coming up with this app from scratch.

You can check out a page with all of the details of this application and the source code at http://www.daveeddy.com/iphone. I have released this project under the BSD 3-Clause License in hopes that somebody might pick this project up, as I have ceased development on it after my class was over. If nobody decides to pick it up, I still hope that someone can at least benefit/learn from my code.

Check out this video from the band BEING! I just found them a couple days ago and they are creeping their way up to my top played on last.fm!