BenV's notes

This morning my mailbox opened up with an email inviting me to the Diablo 3 Beta. After checking the headers
to make sure it wasn’t another battlenet phishing scam I noticed that the Received headers really came from blizzard.com, and they even signed the mail with a domainkey. Also they didn’t include some link but simply told me to go to battle net and get the goods there.

Diablo 3 Beta Invite

We also invite you to share your Diablo III beta experience with the world! All participants can take screen shots, capture video, and/or publicly disclose information about their beta test experience.

(instead of the usual non-disclosure agreement). So thanks Blizzard and a friend who works there who is no doubt responsible for getting me this invite in the first place 🙂 (continue reading…)

Today I decided it was time to get rid of both backscatter and the useless spamfiltering of mail that will bounce anyway.
Obviously I’m not running a vanilla qmail, but a patched version (by John M. Simpson) of Qmail that adds lovely antispam features such as checks for reverse dns records, SPF records, fixes a ton of annoyances and generally makes Qmail a lot nicer.
On top of that I run Spamdyke to apply graylisting for some domains, add blacklists/whitelists and do some more spam checking. (continue reading…)

Obviously dealing with windows isn’t my favorite, but it comes along as part of the job.

Today my boss wanted to view some car site in internet exploder, because “Some sites don’t show properly in Firefox, Internet Explorer does a better job sometimes”. So I was like “You mean garbage sites that still write IE specific html… oh never mind, show it :)”

First he showed his problem in Firefox. As far as I’m concerned it looked like a failing search engine on the site and nothing html related, but whatever. (continue reading…)

While trying to craft a custom firewall traffic logger using iptables and syslog-ng to run it through a script I ran into this lovely error.
Syslog-ng is happy to spam 2458734597 lines (or more if you have lots of diskspace ;)) like this into your syslog:

Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'

The reason was -not- that it could not be executed…. the reason was that the program (“test.sh”) quit (or at least closed its input) instantly.
Good to know for next time.

And here we go again (and again!)!

Get 5 games, donate to charity / the EFF, and support developers at the same time. Or only get the games. Or only support the EFF. Or whatever 😉
Do it now! Humble Bundle 3 is here!

The games this time: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves.

The last one has an interesting graphics style: it looks like it’s all put together from ripped up magazines.

As for weird graphics, the first one features drawings made of crayons… which you draw yourself!
Here’s a video of it:

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

The rest you’ll have to find out for yourself.
Did I mention you get them on Steam / Desura as well for that price? 😉

Firelands!

Today the 4.2.0 aka Firelands patch was released for World of Warcraft.

First thing to notice: where did all my inventory space go? And why do I have tons of ingame mail? Well, they removed the keyring, making a bunch of keys obsolete (which they send you gold for in return through ingame mail), and the rest of them are stashed in your inventory.
Gee thanks assholes. Guess those keys are really a lot bigger than those 128 axes I carry in my backpacks.

Apparently this is needed to make room for the Dungeon Journal, which shows you the stuff you would normally check Wowwiki etc for, things like boss abilities and drop lists. Don’t know why that requires the key ring to go away, but leave that to Blizzard.
Of course with new content comes a new daily grind guide. Wonder how long I’ll manage to put up with that.
(continue reading…)

Another note for future reference!

Unfortunately CMake is something I run into way too often these days, and since I can never remember how to tell it to do certain shit, here’s how.
They should give me a configure along with the product.

The equivalent of

./configure --prefix=/usr
=>
export CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr


Destdir seems something CMAKE does understand, so just

export DESTDIR=`pwd`/tmp

and it’ll work just fine.

Finally, for the interactive configuration of something we have:

cmake -i


Another reason to avoid MySQL

Today MySQL has managed to piss me off enough to get rid of it for something I was working on.
The case:
I just created a brand new database. In that database I want to store items, and those items should be linked to users.
So as a first stab I had this CREATE TABLE statement:

CREATE TABLE user (user_id SERIAL, username varchar(255) UNIQUE NOT NULL, password char(32) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (user_id));
CREATE TABLE item (item_id SERIAL, name varchar(255) NOT NULL UNIQUE, user_id bigint unsigned REFERENCES user(user_id),PRIMARY KEY (item_id)) ENGINE = InnoDB;

Guess what MySQL said? Of course, it said “Sure thing dude!”. And to make sure you believe me, here’s the verbatim:

mysql> CREATE TABLE user (user_id SERIAL, username varchar(255) UNIQUE NOT NULL, password char(32) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (user_id));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.36 sec)
mysql> show warnings;
Empty set (0.00 sec)
mysql> CREATE TABLE item (item_id SERIAL, name varchar(255) NOT NULL UNIQUE, user_id bigint unsigned REFERENCES user(user_id),PRIMARY KEY (item_id)) ENGINE = InnoDB;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.32 sec)
mysql> show warnings;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

Well guess what….
IT LIED!
Those references to the user table? What references? (continue reading…)

Another day, another plugin (aka package) for Check MK.
This time it’s a check for Daemontools, the daemon that keeps other daemons up and running.
Personally I use it for a lot of services on my servers, like Apache and Tinydns. However, sometimes a service is flapping in Daemontools
because of a configuration error or something similar and you fail to notice for hours because the service seems to be ‘up’ (but only for a few seconds before it restarts again).

This check makes sure all services that are supposed to be up (“normally up”) are up, and also it checks for how long they’ve been up.
If the uptime is only a few seconds it’ll issue a warning because it might be flapping.

Check_MK - Daemontools Perf-o-meter

Just a tiny update for my Check_MK qmail package.
It still checks the qmail queue size 🙂
New in this version is the added Perf-O-Meter. Shiny shiny!

Check_MK Qmail Perf-O-Meter

[Download not found]
[Download not found]