Points without Tangents

Fixed Width Font in gmail after labs

2010-02-25T00:00:00Z

I am a fan of the google labs. Gmail labs in particular is a fav of mine, since I tend to use gmail a bunch. In a gmail dev blog post I read this morning, I saw that google had decided to retire some of the lab feature. The list of “graduated” and “retired” can be found on the post. What irked me at the time, was the “retirement” of Fixed Width Fonts.
So I fixed it.

I had just only recently started to use this feature and was initially pissed. I then followed links to get to the feedback form, intending to give them a pleading letter of objection. I then started reading the posts in the Fixed Font threads. There I found a greasemonkey to perform the Font switch without the need of the labs. Long story short, Chromium supports greasemonkey scripts, I modified the script to match Chrome’s standards and it works well for me YMMV. You can find the script at the gambit files repo. You can install directly from the page, or download and mess with it yourself, and then later install it.

CSS and Old stuff

2010-02-23T00:00:00Z

I learned a little bit about markdown, css, and took a quick stab at an export of old posts. My script was based off of swenson’s.

At somepoint I used hpricot to parse the xml since I was having issues with sequel, but I am not sure why used hpricot instead of nokogiri. It was early 2009 when I last attempted the blog migration, what can I say it was a different time. Will be cleaning the layout more in the coming days.

Might help if I ...

2010-02-22T00:00:00Z

take a few mins and learn markdown at some point. I am failing at it today.
I setup a toto based blog, I followed these steps at rubyinside.

I signed up with heroku and did the following:

following:

sudo gem install toto
sudo gem install heroku
…
git clone git://github.com/cloudhead/dorothy.git my_new_blog
cd my_new_blog
heroku create
modified config.ru to my needs
heroku addons:add custom_domains
heroku domains:add blog.skoutsec.org
heroku domains:add blog.gambits.org
added CNAME’s to point to ‘proxy.heroku.com.’
rm articles/1900*
rake new
- answered the questions
added what you are reading now to the resulting file
git add .
git commit -am ‘Initial post’
git push heroku master

Now I need to get to work on the layout and old posts.

AWS forced detachment and fully automated backups of volumes

2009-02-09T00:00:00Z

Just a quick one today. More uses of the ec2 gem. Here is a command to force a volume to detach via ec2sh:

@ec2.detach_volume(:volume_id=>“INSERT_YOUR_VOLID”, :force=>‘true’)

And here is a script to handle all your backup needs. It deletes snapshots older than 2 weeks and then takes a snapshot of all your current vol’s . (attached or not) (you can play with this pretty easily).

EDIT updated the script to delete first, and then snapshot, also added some comments to the code.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'EC2'

ACCESS_KEY_ID='YOUR_KEY'
SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='YOUR_SECRET_KEY'

# Target date 2 weeks = (60 secs * 60 mins * 24 hours * 14 days)
targetDate = Time.now - (60 * 60 * 24 * 14)

# instanciate a class object connection to ec2 
ec2 = EC2::Base.new(:access_key_id => ACCESS_KEY_ID, :secret_access_key => SECRET_ACCESS_KEY)

# access all snapshots associated with your aws account
# from the class object then delete the snapshots
# older than targetDate

ec2.describe_snapshots.snapshotSet.item.each do |snapshot|
  if Time.parse(snapshot.startTime) < targetDate
    puts "About to delete #{snapshot.snapshotId}"
    ec2.delete_snapshot(:snapshot_id => snapshot.snapshotId)
  end
end


# access all volumes associated with your aws account 
# available from the class object then create a snapshot
# of each volume (attached or not)

ec2.describe_volumes.volumeSet.item.each do |volume|
  puts "Creating SNAPshot of #{volume.volumeId}"
  ec2.create_snapshot(:volume_id => volume.volumeId)
end

Hope someone finds this useful, let me know if you are doing interesting stuff with AWS or various gems that interact with it. Lets automate this stuff and get busy having fun.

Weekend in Vegas

2008-12-02T00:00:00Z

So my friend TommEE Pickles is a streaming media guru/whore, illusion enthusiast, sometimes ninja, UCB performer, magician in training, functional alcoholic, degenerate gambler, oh and a dirty haxor… you may have heard of him if not check out his blog. Well because of his many talents, he was invited out to Vegas to put on a nightly display of skills at the craps table. It’s mesmerizing. :) Tommee, was nice enough to see if I wanted to head out there an visit sin city, and since I had some money burning a hole in my pocket, I accepted. Tommee drives a spiffy Tiburon, with a very nice HUD. During the 5 hour trip, I ended up watching most of the reality tv series “Celebracadabra”, from Tommee’s ipod, as well as a documentary “Street of Cards”, so was a bit overloaded on magic by the time we arrived in Vegas, but still found it really entertaining. We arrive, got some drinks, gamble a bit, meet up with Nick, and Ryan (co-workers of Tommee), and proceed to walk around and gamble/goof off for the rest of the night. The tables are not so nice to us for most of the night, Nick and Ryan decide to call it in at about 4am, so Tommee, and I head back to the tables…. and I ended up hitting 3 points in a row, making back some of my losses for the night. There was some bad mojo on my side of the pit(jerks betting on the no pass line, without odds, yelling for a seven), so I moved over to where Tommee, and another gambler Craig were standing. During my move I decide to color up, and hang back for a bit. The bad mojo gamblers are 3 rolls and out… Tommee puts on a show hitting 4 points in a row, and during it I feel that me “not jinxing” the streak is a good thing, so I stay out. Kinda wish I had not stayed out, but can’t know that what happen next would not have been different. Craig winds up hitting 9 points in a row… it was sick. NINE TIMES… During the 9 point streak, some new rollers come to the table, and do pretty well. I ended up getting back into the action after Craig’s streak :( , but still ended up doing well. Funniest part was at about 6am, we decide to get some food. The bad mojo folks color out at $23, and combined T and I color out well over 2k.

FYI betting on “no pass”, the min bet and nothing else is lame. Learn to gamble please. Heck they offer craps lessons at 11am most places.

So some drunken conversations over food, and a really silly tip for the waitress, it’s time for sleep. Crash, fast forward to 4pm, time to wakey-wakey eggs and bakey. We had time to waste before a locals party, and so we ended up eating at an italian place in the NYNY. Blah… So insert a very surreal event here. We ended up going to a wunderground magicians party… lets just let that sink in… wunderground magician’s party. Including a cave match tournament featuring heads up trick against trick battles. It was a ton of fun. Met Jeff Mcbride ( an awesome magician, and also a judge on “Celebracadabra”), and AJ (producer for the “Street of Cards” Doc) . The party was at AJ’s house which was spectacular with a great view of the strip. Had some great conversations, and met some really interesting folks. Most of which were professional magicians. The cave matches were streamed live on S.O.C.tv( look under “the cave” on the media player), and were a great laugh. I think Bizzaro should have been in the finals, but Chris did have to perform like 5 different tricks during the matches. Ended up Chris and Scott (not me) in the final match and Scott won doing some rubber band magic. The party was a blast and I was stoked that I got to attend.

Back to the casinos, kinda fuzzy, I know Nick and Ryan hung out for a bit, but otherwise the night was pretty tame. Ended up crashing about 4am, and sleeping in late. Tried to be sneaky and leave later to avoid traffic, boy was that silly… It took over 10 hours from the time we started. We stopped 3 times to eat, and hang out at stateline for a bit to avoid more traffic (monopoly slot machine can be fun). Got back home about 3:30am and got to sleep about 4:30… crazy. Looking forward to resting this week.

About last night... linkfest

2008-11-21T00:00:00Z

So last night I geeked out, I … upgraded to NXE on the Xbox restarted my netflix account played around with netflix streaming on the xbox (watched some anime, and a really bad kungfu flik) activated a new verizon usb727, said goodbye to the usb720 built a “drinkup” hotspot with a cradlepoint ctr500 and the usb727 (WPA2 + capture portal got 407k down with bad reception) I added an at bootime menu item to on the laptop to select the “drinkup” or “home” wireless. I recently did a rebuild of my laptop, with a focus on minimal install, using ArchLinux. From boot to logged in at desktop, including background WPA2 association takes 28 seconds. Speed demon woot!

Site update

2008-11-20T00:00:00Z

As mentioned earlier, I updated the backend WP install, and I have just added my twiiter and “google reader shared” feeds, so that this becomes a one stop shop for various means of tracking me. Have at.

Refreshed the WP install

2008-11-20T00:00:00Z

Did a clean install of latest SVN WP, removed the plugins I was no longer using, and changed the theme. You know just to spice things up. Possible posts if I get enthused, AWS, Rubygem EC2, my latest endeavors regarding kungfu, media reduction, Iphone apps, etc.

Child's Play 2008 redux...

2008-11-20T00:00:00Z

This may look familiar, that’s because it’s what I posted last year about this time. I still think it’s an awesome charity, and highly recommend you check it out.

I am pretty certain most of my few readers know about Child’s Play from my past posts or emails, if not it is a charity from the folks over at penny-arcade. This is the fifth year and it’s about that time, so I thought I would write my annual post about the great charity. http://www.childsplaycharity.org/

“Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over two million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

This year, we have continued expanding across the country and the globe. With over 45 partner hospitals and more arriving every month, you can be sure to find one from the map above that needs your help! You can choose to purchase requested items from their online retailer wish lists, or make a cash donation that helps out Child’s Play hospitals everywhere. Any items purchased through Amazon will be shipped directly to your hospital of choice, so please be sure to select their shipping address rather than your own."

It’s pretty simple, you go to the site, click on a hospital ( I picked 2 last year, and am thinking 4 this year ), shop for some toys/books/dvd’s whatever peaks your interest at amazon, and then purchase, and it is shipped to the child’s hospital you picked earlier.

I can’t describe to you how cool it feels. I highly recommend you try it for yourself.

AWS quickie snapshotting all EBS volumes

2008-11-20T00:00:00Z

So this might be of some use to some folks. I use AWS a bunch for work, and am really happy that EBS is now very stable. Recently I have been moving away from using RightScale as my main interface to AWS, and getting more interested in available command-line and API level tools. The one that has caught my fancy this last week was the rubygem amazon-ec2, it provides ruby methods for most if not all exposed EC2 API calls, and also comes with a nice tool ec2sh, which is a shell for using AWS. Problem is that besides the basic tutorials, and the source code, there was not many docs providing practical usage for this gem and shell. So to help remedy that I am posting a quick command I use daily. Here is a command you can throw at the ec2sh shell to get it to snapshot all your attached volumes.

@ec2.describe_volumes.volumeSet.item.each{ |volume| puts “Creating snapshot of #{volume.volumeId}”; @ec2.create_snapshot(:volume_id => volume.volumeId)} == true

I have tried putting this into a simple ruby script, however I apparently fail at gem updates. if you have some practical tips in dealing with AWS, feel free to post comments, or send me a link.