Viewing 6 posts tagged with 'google' (Oldest First :: Newest First) Show related: del.icio.us links, tags

Saturday, March 17 2007, 8:21 PM

My new phone totally rules. Over the past few weeks I've found some pretty neat apps to make my phone even more useful. The neatest could easily be the Google Maps client for Windows Mobile devices. It brings all the features of Google Maps into the phone, and integrates pretty tightly with standard phone functions. For example, I can plot maps based upon addresses for people stored in my contact list, or call businesses that are found via searching. It also can interface with a bluetooth GPS unit and plot your course, or get directions to and from your current location. It's quite cool.

I've also found a full-featured IM client, a weather app, a RSS reader, a media player that plays shoutcast streams, and a newer release of the windows mobile PuTTY SSH client. Combine that stuff with the normal features of the phone, and I can do most of the things I could do from a regular computer. I'll probably put together a more comprehensive list of the neat stuff I've got installed in the wiki somewhere. It seems like it could change a lot.

Aren't gadgets fun?

google ppc6700

Sunday, January 07 2007, 12:11 AM

Over the past few days, I've been setting up a new Xen environment for my Jabber server and getting everything working with it. It proved more difficult than I would have imagined, mostly due to the fact that I wanted to be as seamless as possible. I used jabberd2 on the new environment, which uses a completely different storage backend than jabberd1.4 did. Jabberd1.4 uses a series of XML files, while jabberd2 uses a database backend (mysql in my case). This basically means that there was no direct upgrade path. There was a script included in the jabberd2 sources that was supposed to perform the migration, but it wouldn't even run due to coding errors. I found another script that did the job, but it required that I install Ruby and mysql support for Ruby before it would even run. The former was pretty simple since it was available in RPM form, but the latter needed done manually. Since I have no experience with Ruby, this took a while. Once I got the script working, migrating things was easy.

There are a few differences that I found strange as well. Jabberd1.4 allowed for serving multiple domains just by adding a few lines in the configuration file, but jabberd2 requires that you run multiple session manager (sm) processes, one per domain. It seems like it could be a waste of resources if only one server is involved, but I believe that jabberd2 is made to be modular so it can be distributed across multiple servers to spread load or achieve redundancy. When considering it in that light, it makes sense. I also had to make a few DNS changes to get things working properly as well. The new Xen environment doesn't have the same IP address as the neir.org domain, so the DNS records provide the link between the two.

One of the main benefits of the new Jabber server is that it allows for end-to-end encryption right inside the protocol. The old version had SSL support, but it didn't cover the transmissions between servers, and settings had to be altered for client-to-server encryption. One thing that I found curious is that only one server I connect to actually performs server-to-server encryption - Matt's server. Not even Google has it turned on with its Jabber-based Gmail/Google Talk system. Kind of surprising in my eyes. At least I can talk to Matt securely!

google jabber linux xen

Saturday, May 13 2006, 4:09 PM

Firefox is awesome. Firefox combined with cool extensions is even better. I've been using the Adblock Plus extension for a while, and I certainly dig it. It allows you to filter out advertisements (or other content, if you wish) using regular expressions, or just simple filters. Generally ads don't bother me that much. I've just learned to look around them.

The ones that really bother me are the ones that interrupt the content I'm reading. There are two schemes that drive me bonkers. The first is Google Adwords. People seem to have zero reservation about placing the adword boxes right in the middle of their content, with the exact same styling as the content they're surrounded by. How annoying. The second just appeared recently, and uses a piece of JavaScript to edit the document client-side so that certain keywords appear as links, but are really just advertisements that pop up on your screen as soon as you mouse over them. Since my sight is somewhat impaired, I do the "highlight a line so I know where I'm reading" trick quite a bit, and clicking on one of those keywords is a really quick way to piss me off.

Adblock Plus has given me an avenue to get rid of these annoyances. The following two rules seem to block all of the crap I mentioned above. I wouldn't call them perfect yet, since I've only tested them on a few sites.

The first blocks the Google Ads, and the second blocks the faux-link pop-up ads. Enjoy.

adblockplus annoyances firefox google tips

Monday, March 28 2005, 11:29 PM

A lot of people tend to like tax time because it means refund time. I am one of those people. It makes for a good time to pick up some of those little things that you wanted to pick up throughout the year, but really couldn't justify spending the extra cash on. Well, this year is different. With all of the various checkups and the surgical procedure done on my eye, I'm wishing my income tax refund a fond farewell before I see one cent of it. My refund came in at around $900, and the first round of medical bills that I'm going to have to eat is weighing in at around $1200 so far. It's nice that I'm getting the kick in the wallet at the right time to help with the bills, but it really sucks that I won't get to know that $900 and use it to buy many neat and cool things.

Perhaps I should sign up for Google ads or something.

google righteye

Thursday, May 13 2004, 11:37 PM

There's definitely some computer dork stuff happening here... first is the current uptime on my webserver.... pretty interesting that I happened to catch it at just the right moment...

The second thing is that I think I've got a good setup going for securing my wireless network much more than it currently is... I'm in the process of setting up each legitimate wireless client to use IPsec tunnels to encrypt all of their traffic to the internet or my wired LAN... I hit a few hurdles, but I'm getting there... Everything's working right on my laptop in linux, but I've yet to try to make it work in windows... I think I need to make a different kind of cert for that. We'll see when I get there.

I hit two main snags, the first being that I forgot to modify my IPsec ruleset beyond my model ruleset (from the VPN at work), so it was only encrypting traffic directly between the laptop and the gateway box. Once I figured that I was being too restrictive, a.k.a. not encrypting everything except the traffic destined to stay on the wireless subnet, I fixed the rules and things started working right. The second part I was having trouble with was the fact that my decrypted traffic was essentially hitting the firewall twice... it would pass through successfully as ESP packets, as intended, but when they were decrypted, they were sent back through the firewall again, and filtered because they weren't IPsec or DHCP related. After a couple hours of searching all over Google, I came across the magic newsgroup post... It mentioned that you could use the MARK target in iptables to mark the ESP packets coming in with a particular mark value, and also noted that each decrypted packet also carried that mark value. So, if you allow the regular packets carrying that mark value, the problem is solved! I was really pulling my hair out over that one...

Now that I've got it working as intended, I'm going to test it for a while to make sure it's stable, and then hopefully, I'll whip up some certs and get Joe's laptop on the encryption, and everything will be cool like the other side of the pillow. I could probably even open up the wireless LAN as a honeypot, and then mess with people that enter... Heheh...

encryption google ipsec linux projects security tips

Sunday, June 22 2003, 10:14 PM

I've been cleaning up the session code the past couple of days since it pretty much broke when I upgraded the server (and more to the point, PHP). I just got ultra-scanned by Google the other day, so it must have made the page a bit more friendly. Any other time the Google crawlers came by, it would hit the index page and die. I also combined the About the site and about the server pages into one, since they're essentially the same thing, and were both pretty thin content wise.

google php siteupdates

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