The Daves Collective

The most terminally stuffed-up warez release... Ever!
2003-11-28 12:04

How did this start? Well I saw something in alt.binaries.test that looked like a bit of a laugh. Yes I shouldn't, but once in a while, why not. So I dl'ed it. Thats where the fun starts.

Actually it was posted twice. The first pass was labelled '(01/85)' to '(85/85)' and the second was labelled 'Repost (01/85)(01/85)' to 'Repost (01/85)(85/85)'. Hmmmm. Went for the 'Repost', like you would. Tried saving them. Lots of errors. Looked at the raw messages. It's yEnc and PAR2 (the mark of the Beast IMHO). The 01 was the PAR2. 02-13, when joined, make part1.rar; 14-25 make part2.rar; 26-37 make part3.rar; 38-49 make part4.rar; 50-61 make part5.rar; and 62-4 make part6.rar. 65-6, 67-70, 71-77 and 78-85 are the usual PAR2 junk. Nice subject lines maestro.

What's in the rars then? Another set of rars, part01 to part04. Idiots.

What's in *that* set of rars? Looked at the first one. In there was, woo hoo, *another* part01 - but this one was a self extracting .exe. In *there* was -

• a setup tree (hoorah!);
• an HTML file with content in Chinese plugging the warez group's webshite, and a bit of marquee text in English scrolling along at Warp 6 plugging some crap HTML editor;
• two .txt files with Chinese names and Chinese content;
• a .txt file with Chinese name and pseudo-English content, to wit, a mostly uninformative .nfo.

But on closer inspection *this* rar wasn't complete - it needed (at least) a part02. Well, to cut the story short, using this triply-wrapped part01 with the doubly-wrapped part02-04 finally yielded a complete setup tree, including a *second* copy of the html and text files and a proper .nfo from the originating group. Sigh. Lusers. Predictably the warez-lust had long since left me, and I couldn't be arsed actually installing any of it.

Is it too much to ask that warez should be customer friendly?

MRTG graphs
2003-11-25 20:11

I've installed MRTG. As a start, you can admire a snapshot of the traffic graph of my router, automatically updated on a daily basis.

Week to 23 Nov
2003-11-23 14:14

Thursday, Drill - Slewins La - Hornchurch - Harrow Drive - Osborne Rd. That is all. For one thing its bloody pouring with rain today. Unnatural hazard of the week: spotting a brand new Penny Farthing for sale outside a shop in Hornchurch and having the Prisoner music sloshing around in me head for the rest of the day.

Cyveillance
2003-11-23 00:51

So whats this traffic from 63.148.99.229 then? A quick Sam Spade and then Google dishes the poop - Cyveillance, a private snooping business in Arlington, Virginia (an interesting neighbourhood: CompTIA and dead hegemonist oppressors). Their bot goes looking for anything their corporate and government customers wouldn't like, whether that be filez, trademarks or freely held opinions. (Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.) Cyveillance are a seriously big operation. They have no reverse DNS and are proud of it. Their public statement about robots.txt is at odds with other peoples' observations and their bot deliberately conceals its own identity. Of course, as a free enterprise they are not publicly accountable. No surprise that they're in the homeland security racket. Their motto is "Minding your business on the Net", and indeed they are minding my business, whether I like it or not. Cyveillance say they "enable businesses to capture revenue by taking control of their brand identity, digital assets and corporate reputation online". Their customers should consider whether their own reputations are enhanced by being associated with, and should consider the value of intelligence received from, a company that behaves in such a manner. Related information:

• I've got a bone to pick with Cyveillance
• What to think about Cyveillance?
• How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell

A rich source of info about this is in the fora of Webmaster World. However, they are a tiny bit unpleasant themselves - the site throws a wobbly about abuse if you surf in on a deep link and disables Google cacheing of forum messages freely donated by other people. And for the paying punter they have "Private Forums" - to the Daves Collective those words denote a chain of sex shops and a long defunct dirty mag. Anyway, there is posted an interesting Perl CGI script which is supposed to sit somewhere excluded by robots.txt. As soon as Bertie Bot gropes Cecil CGI, Cecil plops Bertie's IP into a .htaccess deny list. Hah! but not really recommended, as a CGI script with write access to a .htaccess file is truly repugnant from the security angle. Anyway I'm too tight to pay for hosting with CGI.

Pudsey
2003-11-21 19:49

Well obviously anyone with sense will avoid Children In Need like the plague, fair enough. But for some never explained reason every year we have to put up with ignorant southerners referring to Paddzey. Thank god the bloody place is now firmly settled in Leeds. Antidote at Martian FM.

info2html
2003-11-16 01:32

Its a long story but info2html wasn't working (broken when I moved it from /opt/local to /opt/net). Anyway there is now a nice page for it at http://info2html.sourceforge.net/. In my day it was damn difficult to find, now the FSF actually carries a link to it. But its still the same old version 1.4.

Week to 15 Nov
2003-11-15 20:31

Monday, anticlockwise via what is apparently Carlton Rd. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, just to the Drill and back. Saturday: via the Drill to Emerson Park and back on Osborne Road. Note to self, need to suss out how far that is. Right leg hurt a bit today.

This week's unnatural hazards: getting distracted by stuff in skips that's too good to chuck away, sinuses (or is it swollen turbinates), and lungfuls of smoke from antisocial bozos burning their autumnal garden rubbish.

Acknowledgements
2003-11-15 14:31

For the record, the following resources have been useful in building this website.

Core applications

• Content management: Blosxom and plugins iconset, update, categorytree, headlines
• Photo library management: Gallery
• Offline preparation: Apache, PHP, lftp, wget

Graphics

• 80x15 buttons: Taylor McKnight
• Fonts: Jason Kottke's Silkscreen, Nathaniel Porter's Road Sign Fonts
• Apps: TweakPNG, png2ico

Reference

• PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows (it bloody doesn't)
  and PNG Alpha Transparency

You've Got Spam
2003-11-15 02:14

It looks like a second spamhaus has picked up my Yahoo addy. Also, YoSucker threw its CPU loop trick again, it took me over 3 HOURS to notice. CPU temp was 57 deg; clearly it's stable... Anyway, so today's King Cnut exercise is to install SpamAssassin, sa-exim and the new YoSucker. It must be World InterPolatedCaps Day.

Tangentially, there is apparently a YoSucker for Hotmail, called Gotmail. Moral dilemma: is it OK to dally with M$ if you are just spongeing off their free services? I think not - they must get something out of it otherwise they wouldn't bother - suspect it's ad revenue, traffic analysis and the chance of lock-in down the line.

Later: well I was seriously offended that SpamAssassin unconditionally plops itself into /usr/bin, typical bloody Perl-head etiquette. The sa-exim config file is fearsome, but it works. Sods law determined that Yahoo's login was timing out all afternoon. Fab. The new YoSucker is flakey, but fair enough, there was a warning that it's not stable. I'll revert it tomorrow, and see if retrieving en clair avoids the loop problem.

Bobby is a Booby
2003-11-13 21:27

I thought it would be nice to check out this nice new webshite for accessibility, so I moseyed on over to Bobby to run the validation check. Well, what a performance, not a single genuine problem but 1001 "manual check" items. Well, to cut a long story short, I ran some of their own pages through the W3C Validator, and they failed. Badly. Then I ran some of their own pages through their own validator and it raised most of the points I'd been stuck for. Hahahahah. There was some worthwhile advice there but it'll be a while before I care enough to work on it.

The Human Sinus, a User's Guide
2003-11-12 15:50

Bad sinus day today (LHS) following overnight rain. Went for a jog to see if that would help. Got back, too knackered even to take contacts out so had a bath instead of a shower. Unfortunately, whereas when your sinus gives birth in the shower you can just gob it out, in the bath you can't. Let me know if this is too much detail.

How this site works
2003-11-11 22:38

A brief writeup about how this site works. It is entirely served as static pages from my ISP, there is no server side scripting at all. The reasons for this are (1) it's cheap and reliable, (2) I could use the same stuff on my old 486 which would creak a bit if it were laden with PHP and (god forbid) MySQL. So it's Blosxom for content management and Gallery for picture management as they both have the capability of local rendering into static pages.

A site update consists of combining three sets of pages into a single tree: (1) a set of static files, (2) pages rendered from the locally hosted Bloxsom installation, and (3) a snapshot of dynamic content (Gallery and anything else I fancy) created using wget. The combined tree is then incrementally mirrored to my ISP using lftp. Lastly, the local tree is retained as a handy backup. And it can all run from cron. Sweeeeet.

Note that I'm using some cunning tricks with Blosxom. As my pages are intended to be 100% static, I don't need to worry about getting a mixture of static and dynamic working. The only purpose the local installation fulfils is for preparing and verifying new content. So, local pages are accessed as normal via the Blosxom CGI script at /opt/local/share/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi, and its $url setting is empty so that it only accesses Blosxom content on the local host. But for rendering static pages I use a second copy at /opt/local/bin/blosxom, in which $url is set to http://www.daves-collective.co.uk/. And I don't use the static_file plugin; all static files are merged from my parallel static tree, either (in the CGI context) by Apache aliases, or (in the static case) at render time.

Updated

For quota reasons I've now split the Gallery content to a different ISP site, but the same principles apply. Also, a bit of tweaking now means only changed content needs to be mirrored to the ISP sites. So the script now looks like this:

#   First mirror Blosxom content to site1
mkdir /srv/www/dc/new-site1
blosxom -password='1of2' -quiet=1 -all=0
for d in /srv/www/dc/static-site1/ /srv/www/dc/rendered-site1/
do
    cd $d
    find . ! \( -name '*.orig' -o -name '*.$$$' \) -follow -print \
    | cpio -pdm -u -L --quiet /srv/www/dc/new-site1
done
cd /srv/www/dc/new-site1
lftp -c "open -u user,pass ftp://site1.isp.example.com; mirror -p --delete -R"
mv backup-site1 backup-site1.prev
mv new-site1 backup-site1
rm -rf backup-site1.prev

#   Now mirror Gallery content to site2
mkdir /srv/www/dc/new-site2
cd /srv/www/dc/rendered-site2
wget -m -k -K -E -q -np -nH 'http://dsds/gallery/?set_offline=true'
cp 'gallery/index.html?set_offline=true.html' gallery/index.html
for d in /srv/www/dc/rendered-site2/ /srv/www/dc/static-site2/
#   Note different order (cf above), for reasons I won't delve into.
do
    cd $d
    find . ! \( -name '*.orig' -o -name '*.$$$' \) -follow -print \
    | cpio -pdm -u -L --quiet /srv/www/dc/new-site2
done
cd /srv/www/dc/new-site2
lftp -c "open -u user,pass ftp://site2.isp.example.com; mirror -p --delete -R"
mv /srv/www/dc/backup-site2 /srv/www/dc/backup-site2.prev
mv /srv/www/dc/new-site2 /srv/www/dc/backup-site2
rm -rf /srv/www/dc/backup-site2.prev

exit 0

Bradford trolleybus pics
2003-11-11 21:41

Wonderfulness of the week! (well, last week)

From: "John Law" <xxxx@xxxx>
Newsgroups: uk.transport.buses
Subject: Trolleybuses
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 21:41:11 -0000

Haven't fully linked it to my web site yet, but I have set up a trolleybus 
page on http://website.lineone.net/~john-mightycat/trolleys.html
Only a few pics so far, Switzerland & UK, but might be of interest. 
More to come soon
John

Utterly wonderful. Matters arising - (1) these photos must have been taken late 1970 or early 1971, cos behind No 745 (withdrawn May 71) is an Atlantean or Fleetline (introduced from Aug 70). (2) No 745 is interesting, according to J.S King's book this was driver training No 060 (which I remember well from its time at Bowling depot in 1968), but subsequently reinstated to full service! (3) Looks like Duckworth Lane depot, not Thornbury.

YoSucker, OpenSSL and Why Perl Sucks
2003-11-11 16:05

There's a new YoSucker out. I noticed this because once again YoSucker threw an infinite loop on me, and I didn't notice for more than an hour (the price of improved scheduler responsiveness) and my CPU temp got up to 58.5. So I went looking at the mail archives and the answer turns out to be the Perl module IO::Socket::SSL which needs to be reinstalled against a new version of OpenSSL (and those seem to be coming out far too often these days). Why the **** is this so? How was I supposed to know this? How does Perl (as an interpreted language in a dynamically linked environment) manage to combine the disadvantages of compilation and static linking? Why is its failure mode so insidious? Why Why Why?

Of course the advice in the mailing list turns out to be a tiny bit inadequate; it is necessary to force a reinstall of the module, like this (and don't get me started on finding documentation about the commands in the CPAN shell) -

perl -MCPAN -e 'force install IO::Socket::SSL'

Havering Palace
2003-11-11 14:48

Radio prog last week about the seriously defunct Havering Palace: hav-pal.mp3. Visions of King Hennery taking young Broody Mary to the Pizza Hut in South St for his weekend access. More info at:

• BBC Radio 4 "Making History"
• Romford Now & Then
• The Sealed Knot

Netcraft Uptime Report
2003-11-11 02:14

Courtesy of Netcraft, you can see a report on the uptime of my hosting at Zen. At the moment they are showing an uptime of over 200 days, mmmmm nice, though their current Apache version is looking a wee bit tarnished.

Curriculum Vitae
2003-11-10 15:22

Here is an updated copy of my CV in MS Word format. I really ought to do an HTML one as well. Doesn't look like the headhunter will be getting back to me any time soon, ho hum

Grand Inauguration
2003-11-10 03:10

Here is the Grand Inauguration of the new Daves Collective website. Hoorah! Lots of it is currently missing and/or doesn't work, and the HTML and CSS are unvalidated, but hell fire you have to start somewhere. And the front page tickles a bug in Konqueror. Tsk. It's probably wrong in Safari too. Well tough shit.

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