Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!

I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:

There is a screen on: 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.

The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.

It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

The International Institute of Business Analysis is an independent non-profit professional association serving the growing field of Business Analysis and is for individuals working in a broad range of roles – business analysis, systems analysis, requirements analysis or management, project management, consulting, process improvement, and more.

The 2010/2011 kickoff meeting for the Rochester NY chapter will be held on Wednesday, September 8, from 5:30p to 7p, at  NimbleUser, 656 Kreag Road, Pittsford NY 14534

Refreshments will be provided with a $5 to $10 suggested donation. Assorted sandwiches, soda and dessert will be served.

The meeting will include a Study Group Orientation along with a review of the application process for the CBAP® professional certification.

For more, or to register, visit the chapter web site.

If you are interested in what the IIBA® Rochester Chapter has to offer or becoming CBAP® certified, please check us out on line at: Professional Development. We are accepting membership to the Rochester Chapter as well.

Membership benefits and advantages are outlined online. For more information, please visit our membership page: Membership.

If you have any questions about the chapter or the IIBA please contact us atinfo@rochesterny.theiiba.org.

Russel Garlick writes on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee:

“KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details.

KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new.

The conference is split into 2 parts.

The community conference will be held over 3 days – 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer’s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike.

The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October.

For more information see our website

KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place.

Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken.

If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day.

Registration is quick and easy via the website.

We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!”

Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?

The next 4th of September, the Portuguese Debian community will gather at the University of Aveiro for the third edition of the DebianDayPT

There will be several talks about about Debian/Free Software in Portuguese and as special guest, Martin Milchmayr will deliver a couple of talks titled “Contributing to Debian” and “Project Management in Free Software”. Like last year, there will be DVDs with Debian Live so people can discover, try and install upcoming Debian stable ‘Squeeze‘.

You can find more information of the event and information of how to arrive at: http://debiandaypt.debianpt.org/.

While perusing the statistics of wordcube, I was wondering how many 9 letter words have multiple anagrams (using all the letters in a single word) and what was the maximum number of anagrams. So I wrote a quick and dirty python program to find out. I will first show the results as they are interesting followed by my coding and methods to improve the efficiency of it.

Results
Here are all the nine letter words with more than 2 anagrams:

• 1. auctioned cautioned education
• 2. beastlier bleariest liberates
• 3. cattiness scantiest tacitness
• 4. countries cretinous neurotics
• 5. cratering retracing terracing
• 6. dissenter residents tiredness
• 7. earthling haltering lathering
• 8. emigrants mastering streaming
• 9. estranges greatness sergeants
• 10. gnarliest integrals triangles
• 11. mutilates stimulate ultimates
• 12. reprising respiring springier

I only found 12 sets of 3, there may be more with a larger dictionary. I was also disappointed that there were no words with 4 anagrams yet not entirely unsurprising. My personal favourite is number 10

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Python

I recycled an anagram checking function that I have used before:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # Anagram checking function def anagramchk(word,chkword): for letter in word: if letter in chkword: chkword=chkword.replace(letter, '', 1) else: return 0 return 1

First program

Firstly I created a dirty program that created a loop to cycle through the 9 letter word dictionary and another loop nested inside to check against every word in the dictionary again. This is a terrible and inefficient method and will create duplicates, I will follow with a more efficient method.

g=open('eng-9-letter', 'r') for l in g: wordin=l.strip() f=open('eng-9-letter', 'r') count=0 w="" for line in f: line=line.strip() if anagramchk(line,wordin): count+=1 w+=" "+line f.close() if count>2: print wordin, count, "(",w,")" g.close()

This program took 80.42s to find the 12 solutions. On the path to better coding I decided to load the dictionary into memory, this sped the code up about 20s to 63.88s.

# Load dictionary into memory dic=[] f=open('eng-9-letter', 'r') for line in f: dic.append(line.strip()) f.close()

I then attempted to create a method that loops over and removes words from the dictionary as it loops, however I don’t know the correct way (if there is one?) of modifying the loop variable while inside the loop without causing problems.

for word in dic: if ....: dic.remove(word)

If anyone knows a good method of doing this please let me know! I did managed to hack together something using slices so that I could modify the dictionary each time, however I imagine this is still quite inefficient.

for word in dic[:]: w="" count=0 for word2 in dic[:]: if anagramchk(word,word2): count+=1 dic.remove(word2) w+=word2+" " if count>2: print w

Even so this method now avoids duplication of results and completes in 31.87s (machine running at 3.15Ghz). Please let me know of any improvements you think can be made and I’ll happily benchmark to see how much better it is.

You will be missed so much. You were kind, you were fun to be around.
It is a privilege to have met  you. Debian is privileged for the effort and time you put in it.
Your contribution will remain with us and will inspire others for a long time.
You made a difference in this world, one that will last and outlive you. I can only thank you.

Rest in peace, my brother. See you at the other side of the Firewall, and thanks for all the FLOSS ;)

I’m flabbergasted!

Not that The Liar has published memoirs: we knew they were coming.  Nor the mindboggling arrogance of those memoirs (at least as reported): again that’s as expected.  But the chattering classes once again seem to give them credence.  Or at least, to believe that he believes them.  I mean, good grief, haven’t we learned from all those years of bitter experience?

I’d sooner take the Prince of Darkness’s word on the history of New Labour.  Obviously not at face value, but Mandelson seems the more interesting and less megalomaniac(!!!) of the two.  Perhaps more to the point, Mandelson has some presence in the real world as opposed to his own pure fantasyland.  Or for a spot of plain speaking, reconstruct fragments from the working-class mascot John Prescott: he’s not articulate enough to lie Blair-style, and what he says (where sufficiently coherent) is at least likely to be what he means.  Prescott has already rubbished what Blair says about Brown: I guess he’s too honest to let that pass when the meeja asked him.

Interesting historic question: could Brown have made a competent leader, if he hadn’t been driven (quite literally) mad by being number two to The Liar?  I mean, back in the 1990s: it was clear by about the time of the second Labour term (2001) that Brown’s grasp was failing in some matters, and in retrospect he was evidently already quite mad.

I have been wanting to post for several days already, at least since this last Sunday. I have repeatedly bragged about taking part in the Ciclotón: The last Sunday every month, the city's government closes to automotive transit a ~33Km circuit, for cyclists to enjoy. And by cyclists, I mean people from all expertise ranges — Well, the very elite bikers will not take part of such a massive thing, but there are people pedalling a couple of blocks, people taking their small kids to drive a bit, and I recognized an amazingly large proportion of people doing the whole route.

Well, this last Sunday one lap was not enough for me — I did two laps, ~65Km.

(oh, and just for keeping the complaint current: After all, SportsTracker did release a version of thier software for the N95... But it requires Flash for using the webpage at all. I have several pointers at other applications... but am time-starved right now to start reviewing :-/ )

Anyway, I decided to do this double ciclotón in order to train for next week. If you are anywhere near Mexico City, you are invited - this is meant to be a large group ride, and looks very fun!

Doble Maratón Ciclista Urbano del Bicentenario

We are two weeks away from the 200 year conmemoration of the beginning of the Independence War in Mexico. A group of cyclists came up with the idea to organize a Double Marathon to celebrate! 84Km of biking in Mexico City:

For some reason, the distance numbers in that map were made... in miles :-P Anyway, the planned route will be:

1. Jardin de los periodistas ilustres (Delegación Venustiano Carranza)
2. Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México
3. Circuito Bicentenario ( antes circuito interior )
4. Monumento a La Raza - Hospital La Raza
5. Río San Joaquin
6. Viaducto Bicentenario ( carril confinado sin interrumpir la circulacion )
7. Torres de Satélite 50 aniversario
8. Presidencia municipal de Tlalnepantla
9. Presidencia municipal de Naucalpan
10. Anillo Periferico Sur
11. Secretaría de la Defensa
12. Bosque de Chapultepec 1ª y 2ª sección
13. Segundo Piso del Distrito Federal
14. Ciudad Universitaria patrimonio cultural de la humanidad
15. Insurgentes Sur
16. Miguel Ángel de Quevedo
17. Calzada de Tlapan
18. Zócalo centro historico del distrito federal
19. Calle 16 de septiembre fin del recorrido

It looks very fun. Besides, although it is not that flat, it is one of the flattest long distance routes you will ever have. The toughest part will be IMO the Northern part of Circuito Bicentenario and possibly some bits of Periférico towards Naucalpan. Then, a long flat stretch, with one long but not steep way up in Segundo Piso (near Las Flores), and a little stretch towards Ciudad Universitaria. Other than that, it looks very doable if you are in a moderately decent condition. And taking part in such a thing is very very worthy!

As a final note... This same Sunday, it has been somewhat publicized the first Día Nacional de la Bicicleta (Bycicling National Day) will be held all over the country, kickstarting the National Cycling Crusade. Sounds nice, right? Even impressive? Yeah, but... If you look at the published information (in the page I just linked), you will see several cities are opening cyclist circuits. For one day only, which means, it does not build awareness among the population on how easy, how convenient and how fun it is to use the bicycle as means of transportation. And not only that — The cyclist routes clearly make a point that cycling is a good way, at most, to have fun... But not a general habit we should all embrace. Lets see, as an example, the distances offered (only for the cities quoting route length):

• Guerrero: Chilpancingo, 2Km; Chilapa de Álvarez, 4.5Km
• Sinaloa: Culiacán, 4.7Km
• Nuevo León:Monterrey, 1.9Km
• Querétaro: Querétaro, 3.2Km
• Sonora: Nacozari, 1.5Km; Naco, 1.5Km; Huasbas, 1Km; Granados, 1Km; Imuris, 1.5Km; Huatabampo, 1.5Km; Yecora, 1.5Km; Sahuaripa, 1Km; Caborca, 2Km; Navojoa, 3Km; Santa Ana: 2Km; San Luis Río Colorado: 2Km; Cd. Obregón: 3Km; Hermosillo: 3Km; Nogales: 4Km; Magdalena: 3Km; Guaymas: 4Km; Empalme: 2Km
• Morelos: Cuernavaca: 2Km

...And so it goes. As you can see, several very important cities (i.e. Monterrey, Chilpancingo, Cuernavaca) put only a 2km route. 2Km by bike is... Nothing. 2Km is done at a leisurely pace in less than 15 minutes (I often sustain 20Km/h, which would mean 2Km in 6 minutes). And, in this short sample (the linked page has the information for several other states, but the pattern holds), most states are only making this in the largest city or two, completely forgetting the bulk of their territories. In my opinion, this "effort" was done backwardsly, and ends up delivering the exact opposite message to what should be done.

I just found out about Python Koans by Greg Malcolm (thanks dude) after listening to the from python import podcast podcast (which I find amusing, thanks guys).

It's an awesome way to learn Python. Instead of just reading tutorials and/or books you learn Python by coding.

The interactive tutorial is built around unit-tests and you advance and gain new skills by passing tests and it's really funny. You do learn a lot about the Python language when doing the Koans so I recommend it even if you've been using Python for a while.

Another cool thing is that you learn how to do unit testing in Python, if you're not already familiar with it.

Getting the git-pbuilder script included in git-buildpackage has significantly increased the usage, which means lots more people finding new features and facilities that they need. I love that part of free software work. Here's a new version with a few new facilities.

Since the previous release announcement (for 1.13), this adds:

• New support for an ARCH environment variable, which sets the architecture to use for the build chroot. This appends the architecture to the base directory name and passes the --architecture flag on to cowbuilder and pbuilder.

• When called with update, create, or login, pass any additional arguments to cowbuilder. Patch from Svend Sorensen.

• Say what distribution and architecture we're building for if DIST or ARCH is set. Error out if /usr/sbin/cowbuilder isn't available, telling the user to install the cowbuilder package. Based on patches from Guido Günther.

You can get the latest version from my scripts distribution page.

• _Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick — or possibly re2c, as used in “sa-compile”. On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn’t perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
  (tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)

• SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
  (tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)

• _Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick — or possibly re2c, as used in “sa-compile”. On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn’t perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
  (tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)

• SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
  (tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)

A while back I needed to be able to use SSL connections in async_chat, but I found it to be horribly incompatible. After quite a bit of investigation I found a suitable solution.

import asynchat import socket import ssl import errno   class async_chat_ssl(asynchat.async_chat): """ Asynchronous connection with SSL support. """   def connect(self, host, use_ssl=False): self.use_ssl = use_ssl if use_ssl: self.send = self._ssl_send self.recv = self._ssl_recv asynchat.async_chat.connect(self, host)   def handle_connect(self): """ Initializes SSL support after the connection has been made. """ if self.use_ssl: self.ssl = ssl.wrap_socket(self.socket) self.set_socket(self.ssl)   def _ssl_send(self, data): """ Replacement for self.send() during SSL connections. """ try: result = self.write(data) return result except ssl.SSLError, why: if why[0] in (asyncore.EWOULDBLOCK, errno.ESRCH): return 0 else: raise ssl.SSLError, why return 0   def _ssl_recv(self, buffer_size): """ Replacement for self.recv() during SSL connections. """ try: data = self.read(buffer_size) if not data: self.handle_close() return '' return data except ssl.SSLError, why: if why[0] in (asyncore.ECONNRESET, asyncore.ENOTCONN, asyncore.ESHUTDOWN): self.handle_close() return '' elif why[0] == errno.ENOENT: # Required in order to keep it non-blocking return '' else: raise

It should fit in place of typical use of asynchat.async_chat. In order to specify that you're wanting to use SSL, just set the flag in:

connect(host, use_ssl=True)

It would be nice if SSL support with asynchat.async_chat worked by default. Hopefully I'm not the only one who finds the above solution useful.

And as always, if you see any errors above, I encourage you to post a comment explaining the it!

TagsDrupal Planet

It’s by sharing knowledge with others that the Drupal community continues to grow and flourish. In that spirit, DrupalCon Chicago will be offering pre-conference training courses and workshops to attendees interested in gaining additional hands-on knowledge on a variety of topics related to Web and Drupal development. We are looking for talented, professional trainers who can share their knowledge at pre-conference training courses and workshops.

These courses will take place on March 7, 2011, before the main conference begins and will be held in the classroom facilities of the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center, located steps from the conference venue. We are looking for sessions and workshops that touch on all aspects of Web development, from Drupal site-building, module development, user experience design, and beyond.

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Marble is getting closer and closer to become a navigational aid on the N900 (or whatever you want to carry around with you). Todays patch adds support for the generation of turn instructions -- verbal and iconic driving instructions at appropriate points -- to Marble's gosmore and routino plugins, two offline routers. Currently it looks like this (turn instructions displayed on the left):

Turn instructions are useful as a written summary when printing routes. They're even more important in turn-by-turn navigation mode, the feature Siddharth Srivastava added recently during his GSOC project. If you know the routing support in Marble 0.10, you may wonder how these new turn instructions differ from those displayed there. The first difference is that there are different icons, each indicating the turn type. Icons are a great time-saver in stressful situations -- e.g. when navigating through an unknown city. The second difference is that we have full control over the generated text: Marble (or you) can decide whether to include street names, remaining times or distances. Last but not least the awesome KDE translation teams will take care of translating all texts into your native language!

With turn instructions available for offline routers, we can work on the next logical step: Detect a deviation from the route in turn-by-turn navigation mode and automatically trigger a re-calculation of the route in the background.

Are you good at drawing icons? The turn indicator icons above are OK for a start, but some polishing surely wouldn't hurt. After all, I'm not an artist Feel free to work on the existing svg or redesign it from scratch (oxygen style, please) and send a new one to marble-devel@kde.org. Looking forward to any contributions!

This is a howto for wrapping a div around a few of your view fields (and not others). This is useful, for instance, for being able to group all one's content so that it floats left but does not float around an image.

First, create a template for your view.

Create a template file in your theme directory with the same name as the views and paste the code from the level of specificity that you desire. For more information, read this introduction to views template files.

Here is the code from the stock Row Style Output:

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This week on KDEMU, Lydia giggles a lot, Gamaral releases early and Jos wears black underwear after sharing what KDE Promo and his new job at OpenSuSE are all about.

IMPORTANT

Want to join the KDE resistance? you didn’t hear this from me… but you can join the #klluminati channel on FreeNode (it’s a secret) Punch and Pie

More: http://webbaverse.com/media/kdemu-0x000F

Don’t forget to comment in the show page and follow @jospoortvliet, @nightrose and @gamaral on Twitter/Identi.ca. Let us know what you think!

To learn more about this show or all our other shows in the Webbaverse Broadcast Network, visit http://webbaverse.com/shows/.

OGG Feed - MP3 Feed

Check out this wild story on Mike Arrington's TechCrunch today. Here's a snip:


Sources close to Google tell us that about 80% of people stay when they’re offered a counter to a Facebook offer. But some still leave.

Earlier this year I delivered a series of talks and workshops on how to use "advanced" modules to create Drupal layouts without ever having to crack open a PHP file. The slides from my CMS Expo talk "Advanced Design for Drupal" were uploaded to SlideShare. Now, for the first time ever, the notes from this talk (which became a three-week workshop) are available for sale.

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