Geek Stuff: November 2006 Archives

I was updating an old Fedora Core 5 image (old = 5 months without updates) and the rpm database went ka-boom when it tried to update 500+ modules! So, after Google-ing around, I found a couple of possible fixes. This is the one that worked. As root, use the following commands:

% rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
% rpm --rebuilddb
% yum clean all

Note - the filename in the rm command is [underscore][underscore]db*. The rpm rebuild took about 20 minutes and, after running the yum clean-up, the yum update worked like a champ.

On one of the web sites that I manage, I noticed a high influx of email bounce messages. That lead me to investigate one of my email scripts which, unfortunately, was vulnerable to one of those idiot email injectors. Now that I have deleted the 20,000 or so email messages from the adminstration account, I can get back to normal operations. If anyone is interested in the relatively easy solution, please contact me.

And now for a break in the revolution! The elections are over for another cycle, classwork is pretty much up to date, and the holiday season is still a few weeks off. So, it is time to shake things up here a bit. New layout? Maybe. I do have to get MT up to the current release and I want to tidy up the web site in general. I also want to include a few new features like my latest bookmarks from Blinklist and a blogroll of stuff that I read on a regular basis. So, stop back in a few hours (or days) and see what's what!

Ok, have I become a Blinker? Damn straight! It is now obvious with the addition of a Blink It! link at the bottom of every post. The Blinklist team has instructions for adding a Blink It! link for Blogger and WordPress, as well as generic instructions for other blogs. Well, since I use MovableType, I took a few minutes to hack into my templates and figure out how to do it. So, here's the way to do it. You have to open up to four templates, depending upon the archiving method you use: Main Index, Category Archive, Date-based Archive, and Individual Entry Archive. i placed the Blink It! link right after the Permalink in each entry. You can opt for either using the Blink graphic or a text link. I opted for the latter since it fit in better with my layout. Here is the code you need to paste into the template to generate the link with your entry's title, permalink, and tag. Note that I am terrible about tagging the category for entries so I just used the blog title entry. So here is the code required: Blink It! with the graphic: <a href="http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&Title=<$MTEntryTitle$>&Tag=<$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$>"><img src="http://www.blinklist.com/Theme/Graphic/Blink_Small_Button.gif" alt="Blink It" style="border-width:0px;" /></a> Blink It! with a text link: <a href="http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&Title=<$MTEntryTitle$>&Tag=<$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$>">Blink It!</a> Remember that when you are done modifying your templates, you must rebuild your site for the changes to take affect! So, share the love! Feel free to steal the code for your MT blog!

Blinklist gets another gold star, a big one in my book. It all has to do with backup, something that most geeky types forget about until they hit an oops. So, like a good boy, I backed up my Blinklist and what did I get but an RSS feed of all my links! No more IE/Netscape favorites, but a well thought out XML feed. Here is a sample entry:

<item>
<title>Virtual Network Computing - Wikipedia</title>
<description>VNC Wikipedia entry</description>
<link>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vnc</link>
<guid></guid>
<pubDate>1162749883</pubDate>
<private></private>
<favourite></favourite>
<category>Geekdom,Remote_Access,VNC</category>
</item>

The field names have obvious meaning and are easily parsed. The publication date is based on the standard UNIX epoch. The fields private and favourite are either blank or have a value of on and the field category is easy to parse with simple comma delimiting. Now I am off to pull together a few perl modules to play with this puppy! Kudos to the Blinklist team!