re: 10 Obscure, Thought Provoking Reads

Found a blog post today by a random. The author suggested 10 obscure books. The list wasn't all that obscure imo (not saying that i really think that some of them on the list deserve to be on any list, let alone a list of 'thought provokers'), but there was one book splattered on there that I haven't thought about for years and read maybe a decade ago?? The book: Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. It actually was a thought provoking book. I'm not a fan of books that spew folkloric revenants, nor a religious fiction fan, but this book did it for me. Read it.

"bullshit" in sign language

I have to admit that I only learned of Rives after TED started posting video feeds. 'Twas a very video intensive part of my life... Anywho, thought some might enjoy this:

Mike Doughty vid

And that last post prompted this....

for those w/ no patience, skip to the 40 second mark.

Your Arturo clip du jour

Lame story of the day: I was on the search for a song from a cd of mine that I lost oh-so-long ago. I knew a Brecker brother and Arturo Sandoval played together in it, and simply couldn't find it... that's the lame part. The cool part is that I found a Bobby-McFerrinesque clip of Arturo singing. Here ya go:

CARB: It was almost a year ago now, but...

Last year I read a blog post from the (former?) CEO of Tesla Motors. Definitely worth the read if the relationship between state governments and the auto industry interests you.

If you're too lazy to read the page-worth, his short testimony pretty much says, "As long as CARB and the auto manufacturers here seem to keep pushing for a technology that is 10 years away (and has been '10 years away' for over 15 years), I'm simply here to say thank you and keep doing what you're doing because we're making a killing... oh, and it would be nice to have some competition if anyone is interested."

The Reubenstein is the coolest Ruby developer I know

I'm not kissing your ass Ben, but it's pretty cool that your mod_rails setup post made this week's Rails Envy Podcast. Go team!

Flash exploit explained... really well written.

Even if you have only a slight working knowledge of how a compiled app talks to and works with your computer's memory, this is a totally awesome article that quickly summarizes a report by Mark Dowd at IBM Security Systems (the 25 page report shows how some malicious AS code might use ActionScript's VM to allow access to any of the billions of OS-independent computers that have Flash installed). Yes, a bit geeky, but at least he talks about cyberdine, skynet, the koopa family, and has some nice pitfall animations.

Music music music

I'm a music geek and I thought this was worth a share: Today TED posted Machover's TED talk:

Island of Garbage

So there's been a lot of chatter about the island of garbage the size of Texas floating inches below the surface of the Pacific. A small group of people took it upon themselves to sail 2000 miles out and check it out for themselves. Trash Island.

Shostakovich's Symphony no. 5 - 4th mvt

One of my favorite orchestral pieces. I had never heard Shostakovich's 5th under Bernstein. I get a little bit of an un-easy feeling at around the three-minute mark. I think this is because I'd like a bit more tempo contrast -- but this is an awesome 'version.' Fantastic conducting decisions all around:

google appengine vs aws (or just ec2 and simpledb)

Check back soon for the SmashedApples.com Public EC2 AMI. Also, we hope to quickly incorporate google appengine into the framework to allow usage for either aws or appengine behind your smashedapples flex front-end.

What is Flex?

Today, someone asked me what Flex is. This person has a pretty decent understanding of web technologies though had never used or even heard of Flex. My response, via email, was this simple video (along with a brief explanation):

Click here to watch the video.

April Fools day is interrupting my blind-belief!

April Fools day has officially been an interruption. I have maybe 500 articles that I sift through daily in my Google Reader. Today has provided a great deal more interesting headlines that I've clicked through. Many more than usual at least.

It's April Fools day, so now I'm stuck trying to decipher whether or not members of the AWS team truly developed a Dog Computer Interface. Why can't I just go about my day blindly believing everything I read as I usually do? Damn you April Fools day!!

SmashedApples has a constantly running ec2 instance!

More news to be coming soon, but all traffic for all developers and all applications are going through this guy: http://dev.smashedapples.net:8400/v099/

Tomcat init startup script and su for restricted users...

Normally, when I create init scripts in linux, I simply look for one written by someone who has taken the time to create one. A couple quick google searches and I'm in like Flynn.

I found a few some time ago for Apache Tomcat for our SmashedApples.com concept. Most were either over-written to include tcp/ip jive that would have been overdoing it for EC2, or the scripts were poorly written. The one I chose was incomplete. I needed to re-write large chunks of it, and ran into a couple of problems along the way. What I ended up with wasn't exactly the greatest script in the world, but it works and gets the job done.

Also, in the past, if a startup script called for another user, I'd simply create the user and get to a point where I could log in as that user, make the password ridiculous, and restrict use of the system for/by that user. WELL, in EC2 you can create new users and allow them to login via ssh, but it's not suggested. That makes sense. So I discovered a little argument to the "su" command that I've either never heard of, or simply forgot about.... at 30 I'm starting to lose the ol' marbles.

I ran groupadd to add my 'tomcat' group.
useradd my 'tomcat' user.
chown/grpown to take ownership of my tomcat directory.
created and edited my init.d script.

To stay within the EC2 security paradigm, when I added the tomcat user, the "-s" argument looked like this:
-s "/sbin/nologin"
... something I'd never done before.

Started testing through everything and when running the 'su' command to execute tomcat I was getting an error that said, "This account is currently not available." Makes sense. /sbin/nologin instead of bash or the like.

I did searches for about15 minutes... 15 minutes too long IMO. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to a nice little su argument that I didn't see in my man pages (well... i should learn to use the man pages in my os instead of a google search). "-s" If you execute su as root, you can bypass /etc/passwd with this smooth little arg. "-p" preserves the environment variables, which are definitely needed... ahem... JAVA_HOME!

su -p -s /bin/sh tomcat -c "wget http://smashedwebapps.s3.amazonaws.com/smashedwebapps.zip -O /opt/blazeds/tomcat/webapps/smashedwebapps.zip"

(o.k., so showing the random wget command is semi-worthless, but you get the point. do the same thing for "catalina start" or "startup" or whatever you're trying to do. fyi: we run that wget command so that brian (le mieux FLEX developer du monde) could simply slap all our webapps code into a zip file and upload it into an s3 bucket.) The point is, now we have a totally secure and loving model of tomcat running on an EC2 instance at startup (or at least will when the ol' symbolic links are made in the correct runlevels... MAKE SURE TO INCLUDE RUNLEVEL 4, just in case!... I could be full of it but I think EC2 uses XEN for these virtual machines. I haven't tested through, and sure inittab say default is 3, but I'm crazy and did 4 as well.)

Anyway, life is good. Go team!

aaaaand Digg is down, check it w/ the following link.

It'll probably be up by the time you see it -- But, she's down now.

War Made Easy

I only really watched until the part detailing the 'good vs. evil' premise in war. Totally true today. Most people don't even know why we went into Vietnam or Iraq. All they hear is 'evildoers' and 'bad guys.' Come on man... we're all just people!

Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt

I first saw this video in the summer of 2001. If you've never seen it, you should... some things never get old. Yes -- twisted at times, but everybody needs a little twisted from time to time.
Rejected - Don Hertzfeld

Ubuntu (or any flavor o' linux) NEEDS a good, easy and free remote support application!

Ubuntu (or any flavor o' linux) NEEDS a good, easy and free remote support application.

I would turn into an Ubuntu evangelist if only they had a good remote support app. Windows has it built-in (though it stinks). CrossLoop.com has the perfect remote support application that anyone can get into with little to no knowledge of computers. It's simply awesome.

That is all.