Zaphod for President

Dear United States of America,

congratulations, you have just turned a whitehat computer security professional into a politically motivated one, so this will no longer be a tech-only blog.

Reasons? Oh please there are so many, you probably already even know most of ‘em, but questioning Jacob Appelbaum because he stood in for Julian Assange at a security conference was the last drop this barrel needed to overflow.

Agenda? It hasn’t changed a bit. The goal still is to make sure the internet stays free from politicians and lawyers in the long run, but you made me realize that i needed to give this a top priority.

Take good care of the internet or i will.

So i haven’t posted anything on my blawg in a long time and there have been quite a few changes.

I moved to Berlin — and probably should update the address in this blogs imprint.

I quit my job with Freenet Cityline GmbH and started nice and fresh with SysEleven.

I drank a Bitburger Pilsner yesterday and actually liked it — must be the Berlin Air 7 Stories up in Charlottengrad. ;-)

Also i wonder if anybody even reads this..

You do know there is the possibilty to leave a comment if you’re not reading this on your RSS reader, right? ;)

790:~# lilo -v LILO version 22.8, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2006 John Coffman Released 19-Feb-2007, and compiled at 18:52:11 on Sep 21 2009 Debian GNU/Linux

Writing boot sector. /boot/boot.6800 exists — no boot sector backup copy made.

Today, while on the train, i finally took some time to extract some Lua scripting examples to run in PowerDNS recursor from my code.

UPDATE: because someone asked if they could use my code for their presentations i hereby declare the code examples linked in this article licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

ANOTHER UPDATE: These examples assume that you are using the latest and greatest svn trunk version of PowerDNS recursor, for v 3.1.7.2 and below (you really should update) the scripts will work if you remove any occurence of the destination variable. Also please note that the Packet Cache for the recursor in svn trunk will collide with said destination variable, you will have to disable it to use the lower two scripts in their original form.

YET ONE MORE UPDATE: With the upcoming version 3.2 of PowerDNS recursor instead of

function preresolve ( ip, destination, domain, qtype )

you would need to write

function preresolve ( ip, domain, qtype ) destination=getlocaladdress()

Would you like to know more?

So here we go.

The first one is a simple override.

The second one is about query logging with some conditions.

And finally this should be a working example for NXDOMAIN Redirection aka the Sitefinder way. Yes i know, i know, one does simply not do such an ugly thing but i fear these days many ISPs actually do it. sigh

Just in case if you wanna mock about me using iframe ins this article, i simply was tired of integrating javascript code highlighting into it and turned to pygmentize: for file in ls *.lua; do rm $file.html; echo '" >> $file.html; pygmentize -l lua -f html -F highlight -O style=trac $file >> $file.html; done

grr

It has been so long since i last posted something in here that i really think it’s time for action here. ;)

For Part one of my Snow Leopard findings i’ll just post these two images.

First is the Lua preview icon. I must admit i did it wrong in the past too but got corrected by the kind people in #powerdns on IRCnet that this is not a language to pronounce in uppercase. And here is why. (See the “What’s in a name?” section.)

My other find is that well yes the Safari QuickTime integration now is just as anthracite as in QuickTime X (or 10 if you like) in general, but has obtained a button that you can hit to go back 30s instantly. I’m not sure if i’ll really make use of that feature but i did notice that i occasionally have to rewind some because a distraction let me miss some important part of a video clip.

I was a bit surprised when i saw product placement taking place in newer Lady GaGa Music Videos and toyed around a bit with iMovie after that, here is the result:

It’s my first time with iMovie and the first time i’m embedding a flash video into my blog, so don’t get hazy on me mkay? I’m a systems administrator, not a media guru. ;-)

I am using a customized version of the TextMate Midnight theme for some time now and just thought i should put it online.

This is the link where you can get it.

And here is how it looks:

Although i secretly launched the site quite some time ago, my new just for fun project INTURLR aka the Internationalized Non-Sanitizing Tiny Uniform Resource Locator Redirection accessible at http://zap.li aparently needs some promotion.

Why did i do it?

Well, a certain someone registered the german umlaut domain sorry cannot display this here.de and just then realized that most web applications like for example various tinyurl redirection services are unable to cope with that kind of character gibberish. I tried several of those myself and was unable to find even a single one that does it alright so i thought i’d just try punching something up myself.

That however was not all that simple as i found out you cannot simply redirect to any URL someone punches in, you have to encode it to punycode because HTTP seems to be 7bit-clean for the header part. No i haven’t really looked into it at all, maybe i should. ;)

It’s written in Python Django and kept very simple for now.

Thats just about it. Maybe i’ll even add personalized accounts where you can avoid expiration of the redirection later, for now please do not hesitate to send feature requests.

Ok, so not long ago i though, hmm my laptop battery is rapidly degrading, and Mini Battery Logger claims it has like 4 months of life left, now i’m not so sure anymore…

This is a bit weird right?

No there has not been anymore battery ‘firmware’ patches by Apple as far as i can remember.

for table in mysql more_power -e "show tables;"|grep -v "\-\-\-"|grep -v ^T; do mysql more_power -e "ALTER TABLE $table ENGINE=InnoDB;"; done