Archive | August, 2006

Geotagging Flickr

by R.I. Pienaar on 30. Aug, 2006 in Photography, Usefull Things

Yesterday Flickr announced the previously leaked new feature, an integration of Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
It is very slick, the integration between Organizr and the maps is way kewl and it does not suffer from the problem of making a mess of your Tags like some of the other options as it maintains an internal data structure.
Their map placing method isn’t too accurate but if you open up a photos properties you can type in exact coordinates which is nice. Searching for photos is now even greater, you can search for photos matching a keyword near a location, or simply explore photos at a specific spot which is great.
The problem is of course that they use Yahoo! Maps, it’s crap unless you live in the states. Resolution and street level maps in Europe and elsewhere leaves much to be desired. It is also much slower than Google Maps.
Today Flickr posted an update to their blog firstly pointing out the amazing uptake in use of this feature in the first 24 hours:

When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!

That is impressive! they also acknowledge the Yahoo Maps problem and I hope they can work with the maps team to quickly address this, though I am not holding my breath, more likely is someone will take the new API calls that Flickr provide and write a mashup using Google Maps that uploads data into this new internal data structures.
I dragged a couple 100 photos onto the map, you can take a look at a map of these here.

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MySQL Query logger released

by R.I. Pienaar on 25. Aug, 2006 in Code

I previously blogged about a parser for pcap files that will show all SQL queries, you can now get the code for this tool here. It’s very simple, help is in the comment block right at the beginning of the file.

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I am sick of Librarything.

I am sick of Librarything.

by R.I. Pienaar on 24. Aug, 2006 in Rantings

I’ve previously blogged about Librarything and said I quite like it.
Feature wise it’s fine, I would have liked to also include my DVD’s etc but mostly I just want the book feature to work.
The authors have been introducing all kinds of new wonderful features like groups etc, but the site is incredibly unstable. Each time I want to go add a new book, I am subjected to 2 hours of downtime, maybe I just have bad luck, but tonight I wanted to add 2 books again and the site was down for a hour again.


No planned notices on the blog (ever) no explanations afterwards, its just down indefinitely. This time it lasted an hour or so. It’s like the image above is their actual home page and the working one is the exception to the rule.
Anyway, other things that annoy me, they have these blog widgets, for putting in your site, but they don’t have a API that has enough features, so I parse the blog widgets to build my current reading list, of course they can’t stop messing with the HTML in these widgets so things keep breaking. I know this isn’t really something that will affect someone who use it on their website, but still it’s irritating.
In that hour I used my backup that I made a while ago of the data (librarything have previously had a disaster where their machines failed, their backups failed and they lost data!) and just imported it all into Delicious Library. It cost me more, but it indexes books, DVDs, games, CD’s etc and it actually works. I guess you get what you pay for and it seems $10 or whatever I paid for Librarything just isn’t enough to actually get a working site.

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Switching Back?

by R.I. Pienaar on 17. Aug, 2006 in Front Page

People are starting to realize a thing or two about Ubuntu and Linux on the desktop in general it seems. One of the big profile Switchers have gone back to OS X, Tim Bray details why he is going back to a Mac. He has some gripes with Ubuntu, frankly they are not huge gripes but apparently for him enough.
I think the bottom-line is he hates the Apple applications and never thought of trying Thunderbird and friends on a Mac, shocking, anyway so now he realized he can get those same apps on a Mac and not be data-locked into them he feels happier going back to the Mac

Well, I don’t know. Weirdly, now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.

He also touches on some of my general issues with Linux on the desktop, people seem to think they have to retain it as a free thing so they don’t bundle useful stuff and they don’t buy decent sets of fonts etc, I bet if Ubuntu releases a pay version that has fonts, flash, codecs and all that sorted out they’ll see a huge bunch of people switching, I’d pay for it.

Then there are the fonts. Anti-aliasing is an optional extra on Linux, and I wasn’t willing to do the sources.list wrangling to get the bleeding-edge allegedly-anti-aliased Emacs. Also, lots of fonts Windows & Mac people use every day just aren’t there on Linux. There are apparently some gyrations and downloads and things you can do to get some of them.
I couldn’t get Flash working (complaints about the amd64 architecture), which meant lots of irritating little holes in Web pages everywhere. Not being able to watch YouTube is a real time-saver, though.

I think people want to just get on with it and not have to muck about with bullshit options these-days, I’m sick of fiddling with fiddly software to get simple things working, and that’s the achilles heel of Linux Desktops.
UPDATE: Scoble also sounds in on the font issue, he mentions the cost of real fonts and so forth and also calls them the achilles heel for Linux, freaky.

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Monitoring PIX Failover using SNMP and Nagios

Monitoring PIX Failover using SNMP and Nagios

by R.I. Pienaar on 10. Aug, 2006 in Code

I’ve several pairs of Cisco PIX failover clusters, till now I’ve never really monitored their status because I do not have snmp-trap servers but today I discovered one pair did a failover due to a cable problem a while ago so I figured it’s time I do something about it.


I’ve written a quick guide on using Nagios, Net-SNMP and a few MIBs from Cisco to monitor it and to alert you if any change in the status of your failover clusters happen.
You can get the full document on my Wiki at http://www.devco.net/pubwiki/PIX/MonitorFailoverWithNagios

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MySQL Query Logging

by R.I. Pienaar on 09. Aug, 2006 in Code

MySQL has an option to log all queries to a log file, stupidly though you need to restart the server to start/stop this log, its a bit lame, it also adds a lot of overhead to your box. I had the idea some time ago to use libpcap to figure out what gets sent to the server and started the code, I’ve mostly finished this now.
The MySQL protocol is undocumented but there is a reverse engineered protocol doc here. It is a tad outdated and I’ve found some queries that does not get parsed perfectly using the info there, I’ll look into those some more.
Here are some sample outputs from my code:

# ./mysqldump.pl -i mysql.cap
17:08:44: SET autocommit=1
17:08:44: SELECT last_insert_id()
17:08:44: rollback

It also has a more verbose option:

# ./mysqldump.pl -i mysql.cap -v
MySQL Packet:
Length          : 24
Packet Number   : 0
Packet Command  : 3
SQL Command     : SELECT last_insert_id()
Packet Header:
Source   : 192.168.1.1
Dest     : 192.168.1.2
S.Port   : 47241
D.Port   : 3306
Length   : 77
Timestamp: 1150128523.750337

I could make the script do its own dumping using libpcap it’s pretty easy but I prefer to only let it read tcpdump files, we get a LOT of queries (> 600 per second) and I don’t want slow perl code to affect the servers, tcpdump is pretty fast and efficient.
I use Net::Pcap and NetPacket::TCP to extract the packets from the file, decoding the MySQL commands is pretty easy then:

$plen = ord(substr($pkt, 66, 3));
$pnum = ord(substr($pkt, 69, 1));
$pcmd = ord(substr($pkt, 70, 1));
$cmd  = substr($pkt, 71);

The offsets etc is defined in the documentation linked too above, $cmd will now hold the actual query ran against the server, but only where $pcmd == 3.
I’ll upload the code for this in the next few days just letting a few people do some beta testing for me first.
UPDATE: You can now get the code here.

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AppZapper

AppZapper

by R.I. Pienaar on 06. Aug, 2006 in Apple

I’ve heard about AppZapper from Mike and had a look at it but wasn’t quite sold on it.


Today I got the latest release of the Neat Little Mac Apps podcast and it reviewed this app, it also includes a promo code for the next 3 weeks which gives you $3 discount. For less than 6 pounds how can you say no after listening to that review? I grabbed a copy and really like it, if you’re into installing and uninstalling apps a lot on your mac, you should get it too.
The basic idea on a mac when it comes to installing and uninstalling software is simply to drag the application anywhere you want and thats all. When it comes to uninstalling, just drop it in the trash, simple. Unfortunately most applications have a lot of support and related files, things like preferences, logs, caches etc and the typical uninstall method does not get rid of these.
This is where AppZapper comes in, it hunts down all the crud that an app puts everywhere and deletes those along with the app, neat. Using the example in the image above, if I had just done the usual drop-in-trash method of uninstall I’d have left on my drive 57MB of crap.
My home directory is full of junk, should have bought this app ages ago.

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Why I don’t use Ruby On Rails.

by R.I. Pienaar on 05. Aug, 2006 in Rantings

It’s simple, the community around it are a bunch of bigots. See this post on macslash.
The poor guy asks for something simple and gets flamed to death by a bunch RoR idiots who are acting like they need to justify their choices, no thank you. You’d swear its the new third reigh.
There are countless reasons why someone would want to stick to PHP, why does he need to face up to this kind of abuse just because he made a choice?

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Spotlaser

Spotlaser

by R.I. Pienaar on 01. Aug, 2006 in Apple

Spotlight is the supposedly all-singing-and-dancing desktop search tool from Apple, it is pretty neat and supports a ton of useful things relating to meta data and so forth, I’ve blogged about it before showing how you can use it on the command line to gain access to these functions.
On the GUI side of things it’s a bit crap, you have the top-right spotlight box that you can type into and it features a pretty dismal command language for doing power searches. You can also use Finders tool to do finds using Spotlight, it’s OK I guess but not kewl enough to convince me to actually integrate Spotlight into my daily life.
I toyed with writing a GUI frontend to Applescript this last weekend and got pretty far, you could restrict searches, do AND or OR searches, date matches and the like, and it would open the results in the Finder find interface but coding Applescript GUI’s doesn’t really excite me so I didn’t go further with it.
Today over at FreeMacWare.com I saw mention of Spotlaser and it’s pretty sweet, its a full frontend to all the features of Spotlight and using it you can really see what is possible, hopefully Apple will soon introduce their own advanced front-end to Spotlight, till then, Spotlaser is the way to go.


Above is a screenshot of it in action, its donationware, so grab a copy now.

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