It seems, the person getting this very IP-address by the ISP before the poor soul in question used it to send spam and was blocked for doing so by the RBL. Is it that hard to check for the own address-range when getting the data-stream of an RBL (I’m 99% sure, that the ISP in question is using this very RBL to protect its own servers)? Obviously so. Hint: grep [my_ip_range] does the trick.

Again, just a quick reminder.

[No, I won't name names.]

The idea was to use another (scripting-)language readily available on OS X. As I said already, it works like the Perl-version:


#!/usr/bin/ruby

#output information for copying
puts "customer|topic"
puts "Start: #{starttime}"
puts ""


start_record.rb gets the current time in epoch-seconds and writes it to a file called timetemp.txt in the same directory. Nothing new here, but I like the construct timetemp.puts epochtime, Ruby is very clean.

When you’re done, end_record.rb is used to read in the starting time and to perform the necessary calculations:


#!/usr/bin/ruby

# output results
puts "Start: #{starttime}"
puts "End: #{endtime}"
puts "Seconds: #{timesecs}"
puts "Minutes: #{timeminutes}"
puts "Hours: #{timehours}"
puts ""
puts "Bill: "
puts ""


If you don’t want to copy and paste from the terminal-window, simply pipe the results to a file like this:

$ > ruby start_record.rb > my_file.txt

and when you’re done

$ > ruby end_record.rb >> my_file.txt

Remember though, > means overwrite the file if it exists. If you want to append, use >>. This might be obvious to most people fluent in UNIX, but should be noted as a “just in case you need to know”.

Technorati Tags: Ruby, epoch-seconds, calculating with epoch-seconds, OS X, Linux

The first one, start_record.pl, writes the epoch-seconds to a temporary file and prints some information to the terminal-window.

Update: Thanks to Hebikai for pointing out a problem with the relative path, the scripts are using the environment-variable $HOME to determine the path now.


#!/usr/bin/perl

open(MY_HANDLE, ">$DATA_dir/time.log") or die "$0: something went wrong: $!\n";
print MY_HANDLE $start_time."\n";
close(MY_HANDLE);


The script assumes, that there is a directory called time_control_stuff in ~/work/. Its output should be copied or piped into a file, it records the time you started. If you want, feel free to modify the customer|topic and Remarks lines to taste.

If you are done with the task, the end_record.pl script comes into play.


#!/usr/bin/perl
$HOME_dir = $ENV{HOME};
$DATA_dir = "$HOME_dir/work/time_control_stuff";
$end_time = time;

print "Total: ".$total_time."\n";
print "Mins: $total_mins\n";
print "Hours: $total_hours\n";
print "\nBill: \n\n";


Its output is pretty much self-explanatory, copy or append to the same file and you are done.

I use an USB-stick to carry the scripts with me all the time. If I need to record billable time and don’t have access to one of my machines, these scripts are my way to go. I input the recorded data into my accounting-package as soon as I’m able to do so.

Granted, they could be a lot more sophisticated, but remember KISS (Keep It Simple S…) rules. Use the scripts as a starting-point for you “accounting on the road.”

$ date "+%s"

Will return the current epoch-seconds, at the time of this writing 1191687083. This should work with most incarnations of the date-command. For the restless (a.k.a. the ones not willing to read the post linked to above), converting from epoch-seconds to human-readable time works like this:

$ date -r 1191687083

Or whatever second-count you want to convert, of course. One last thing to try:

$ date -r 0000000000

Returns the time your system deems to be the beginning of its time, usually January 1st 1970.

I have no idea, if some of this works on Windows™, it should though, if you’d install cygwin on it.

Technorati Tags: OS X, Linux, epoch conversion, epoch seconds

sed 's/\\</\\&lt;/g' file1.xml | sed 's/\\>/\\&gt;/g' > file2.txt

Let’s have a detailed look:

1. sed is called and
2. and told to perform a substitution s of all occurences of < to < globally g in file1.xml.
3. The output goes via | to the second call of sed which
4. perfoms another substitution similar to the one in 2. This time for all occurences of >.
5. The resulting text is written to file2.txt.

Now you’re able to cut and paste snippets like this

<figure>
  <title>Tags Window</title>
  <screenshot>
<mediaobject>
  <imageobject>
    <imagedata fileref="pictures/ch03/ch03-02tagswindow1.png"
      format="PNG" />
  </imageobject>
</mediaobject>
  </screenshot>
</figure>
<para>The menu of the <quote>Tags</quote> window
allows us to create a new tag.</para>

into the HTML-editor of your choice.

Technorati Tags: displaying XML in HTML, XML, HTML

• Written in Erlang
• Flat-file and document-centered
• Replication built in
• Runs on
  1. Linux
  2. OS X
  3. Windows
• Open Source

What’s not to like? And since the local database is replicated with the peers, no backups. But don’t forget to put two or three machines in another building.

echo "nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" | resolvconf -a mytemp

Obviously, you’ll have to change the “xxx” into a valid DNS-address and, as a bonus, you are free to choose another name instead of “mytemp”, just remember the name.

If you want to get rid of the nameserver-entry again, use the following command:

resolvconf -d mytemp

Again, if you replaced “mytemp” with a name of your choosing, use it.

Yeah, I know, but why should I memorize stuff like this if I can look it up here?

Well done Zonker, you gave me a couple of hours outside, THNX a million.

Let’s clarify first, what I mean by synchronizing: Assume we have a directory called fooboz, said directory contains two files, one named fooboz1.txt and another called fooboz2.txt. We want to create a mirror of the directory in fooboz_bu and use the following command:

rsync -vaR /fooboz/ /fooboz_bu/

After the successful completion of the command, the directory fooboz_bu contains the directory fooboz with the two files fooboz1.txt and fooboz2.txt. You might have guessed it, the -vaR-option means: be verbose (v), run in archive-mode (a), and do it recursively (R). Archive-mode means, that pretty much everything is a perfect mirror of the source.

If I modify a file in fooboz, it will be copied during the next invocation of the rsync-command shown above. What if I delete one of the files? Right, nothing. The file will be missing in the source-directory, but will prevail in the backup-directory unless we add the --delete-option to the command, that is:

rsync -vaR --delete /fooboz/ /fooboz_bu/

Now the two directories will be in sync, means, after the latter command completes, both directories will look the same.

Disclaimer: Do a test-run on data you could afford to loose, seriously. If you should get something wrong with this command, you might destroy the very data you wanted to backup.

Technorati Tags: rsync, syncing directories

date -r epoch_seconds

it returns a date-string readable by humans (and other beings familiar with the time-system used on earth). An example says more than any complicated explanation:

$ perl -e 'print time."\n";'
1157445071
$ date -r 1157445071
Tue Sep 5 10:31:11 CEST 2006

BTW: The perl-comand shown above comes handy if you need to know the current time in epoch-seconds.

But, the fun doesn’t stop here. Recently I had to convert epoch-times and do some calculations with it. Lazy as I am (you already got that, didn’t you), I decided to use AppleScript to do the calculations, but since I could not find an AppleScript-function capable of converting epoch-seconds, I used its capabilities to access the *NIX-brain beneath the pretty GUI. Without further ado, here is a handler to do the calculation:

on epoch2datetime(epochseconds)
	set myshell1 to "date -r "
	set myshell2 to " \"+%m/%d/%Y %H:%M\""

	set theDatetime to do shell script (myshell1 & epochseconds & myshell2)

	return date theDatetime
end epoch2datetime

The return-value is fit to be fed into an AppleScript-command which converts it into a date-time value AppleScript can work with.

Hope this helps. BTW: I’ll try to figure out how to color the AppleScript later. Be careful if you do a copy and paste with the code shown, WordPress insists on messing up the quotes, sorry.

Technorati Tags: OS X, AppleScript, epoch conversion,