So this has been a bleak year for internet freedom. ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and in Canada Bill C30. Everyone’s angry, but what are we doing about it? Sharing links on facebook? Signing petitions. It is clearly not enough. It’s barely anything. Meanwhile, the oposition is pouring tanks of money onto the battle. They can afford to do so because they are rich, rich off us no less. But we have the advantage of vastly out numbering them. So let’s do something to actually be heard. We have agents of our own, and if we can help them, we should. So to that end I’ve donated to the following:
All in all I may not have lots, but I have some to spare, and you may have even less, but if you can spare even $10, spend a bit to help fight for our free internet.
During the course of updating my home computer I rebooted it because of a kernel update. Later that week at work I went to connect to my home computer and discovered that it’s dynamic IP had changed and it’s DNS name was invalid.
So following common advice to “fix a problem two ways to prevent it in the future” I fixed the DNS, but I also wanted an automated way to track my computers when and if their IPs changed.
So the first thing I needed was shared place to store the IP information. Thinking about it I realized that Dropbox would work well for that. So all I needed was a simple script.
So the solution was to put a script that determined the IP of the computer in Dropbox and have cron on all the computers run it. Each user can call cron with
And I created a crontab directory that I could add more scripts to later if need be with and run them hourly with the following entry
0 * * * * cd /home/dan && run-parts Dropbox/cron |
The script itself was a file called getip and it used whatsmyip.com’s automation detection script.
getip
#!/bin/sh
wget -O /tmp/`hostname`.ip http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp
tmp_file=/tmp/`hostname`.ip
dst_file=Dropbox/var/log/`hostname`.ip
if ! diff -q ${tmp_file} ${dst_file} > /dev/null ; then
`cp ${tmp_file} ${dst_file}`
fi |
Then I just created Dropbox/var/log and installed the crontab on all my computers, and volia, homebrew IP tracking for all my compters accessible to me from anywhere.
So I’m setting up a new website for a client (an artist) so the easiest what I’ve always done is use Gallery. I’ve used 2.* for years and now 3.0 is out, and has been for a few months. So I figured why not give it a try.
I’ve never knows a website to have intermittent bugs, but Gallery3 has a good couple of them. Sometimes the spacing around photo/album items is just way too big, and after a mouse over, they jump position. A good half the time trying to delete an item takes you to a blank white page with a single option, “delete” and then that takes you to a dead end page with clearly an AJAX reply. But only sometimes. How do you track down bugs that only happen half the time? The default theme, wind, seems to lean heavily on jquery and I think, but am not sure, this is where the instability is coming from, but having not boned up to the level of jquery master, I certainly can’t dive in. Also apparently some of these issues aren’t even unknown, but still haven’t been fixed so we could assume better minds than mine have looked.
So that’s a bit disappointing and a waste of a days work that I get to eat. Gallery3 is not stable and usable. Back to Gallery2.
(Also, I’m not even really a fan of hiding things like item names by default and only showing on mouse over, it’s bad for the kind of galleries I’m putting up, but there isn’t even an option about that, and again, not recoding a ton of jquery code.)
Frustrated.
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