From the dev.suckless.org mailing list,

From: Thayer Williams
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:10:56 -0800

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 1:25 AM, Jason Ryan wrote:
> It points to a deficiency in the way Wikipedia views notability: it is quite
> at odds with the notion of influence and derivation that powers free and
> open source software…

Agreed. I said as much too. Under the current Wikipedia guidelines,
the vast majority of FOSS (and some proprietary) articles should be
deleted. It’s unfortunate and more than little ironic that a
community-based ‘open’ encyclopedia would undermine the exposure of
other community-oriented projects.

My hero and dependable source of entertainment for the day, Uriel, replied back with:

From: Uriel
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:42:03 +0100

The only thing that matters in wikipedia is your bureaucratic skills. You Germans should be able to master it!

uriel

Good job, Wikipedia. If you guys are going to start purging GNU/FOSS related pages, why don’t you go ahead and sign an advertising contract with Microsoft? dwm is one of the few window managers worth using and because dwm is “possibly non-notable” and lacking third-party sources (for what?), “the article clearly fails Wikipedia:Notability.” Wikipedia has become a money hungry community that seems to have lost focus, especially when pages are up for deletion because,

I can’t find anything myself via Google, though perhaps someone with better Google-fu can turn something up.

So let me get this straight: no Google = non-notable = no Wikipedia page. Wikipedia, you’ll never see a dime from me you greedy corporate sell out whores. You beg your users for money and purge pages that lack corporate sponsorship? Next time you’re looking for hand-outs, hit your big rich corporate buddies up. Wikipedia user “Psychonaut” – eat sh-t and live you nosy, racist, biased, deceptive prick. Seriously.

Relevant Links:

• http://jasonwryan.com/post/409379904/wikipedia
• http://dwm.suckless.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dwm#Dwm
• http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1002/index.html

See Also:

• 07/31/2009 — Howto: Lock Your Screen in dwm with WindowsKey+L

On the left side of the page, there is a new section called “WANTED” which houses a list of missing shows/episodes, meaning I can’t find them online anywhere. So I’m asking if anyone has any episodes of any show on that page, that they make them public, or contact me about them.

Also, I’ve decided that it would also be a good idea to put up some free documentaries that would also be of interest, relating to the content that is already up here.

Lastly, there is a semi-secret project going on that a handful of people are privy to. This should take off pretty soon, but the beginning is proving to be bumpy and I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.

~Famicoman

Left to right: Windows Mobile 6, Android 2.1, Blackberry OS 4.5
Running on a Windows Mobile powered HTC Kaiser. Booyah.

That is all.

Via Moonlit from The Moonlit Code

Ahh, this old place, neglected and crumbling… could use a lick of paint and a post or two, I reckon, so thanks to Famicoman’s article on video hording, I’d like to propose if I may a little an ambitious idea I had recently…

You may or may not be aware of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. If not, allow me to enlighten you. As the internet ages, sites come, evolve and then, unfortunately, often drop off the face of the internet with no trace or clues to be found. The Wayback Machine exists to preserve the internet as if it were frozen in time at various intervals throughout the web’s history and provides a way of searching and recovering old versions of long forgotten resources which may never have otherwise ever been seen again. A worthy cause, for anyone interested in the evolution of this big wide world we call the internet. Myself, I’m such a person, but I also have a lot of memories tied up in the depths of television history, so I considered the possibility of such a service for broadcast media.

Long defunct shows, be they fondly remembered or barely remembered at all, are often hard to find. Sure, the internet has ways of preserving some of them, via torrents or flash video archives, but some are seemingly lost forever. Not entirely so, perhaps, but they do not exist to the internet, they exist merely in fading VHS tapes in a loft, or on a decaying Betamax in a basement. Many shows saw their end before the internet could provide a method of preserving and sharing them, disk space was at a premium and bandwidth equally so, while some were lucky enough to find their way onto filesharing services or video hosting websites, sadly huge amounts have not.

My idea is this: imagine those tapes were captured in digital form, much as they occasionally are by some kind souls, and archived in some meaningful way. Imagine there were a location on the internet where you could simply visit, look up any TV schedule on and day of any year, and watch whatever was broadcast that day. Like the Wayback Machine, but for TV stations. A place where you could punch in any day, be it the day you were born, the date of a major world event, the time of something special to you and only you… the possibilities are endless.

A mammoth task by any measure, I have to admit, but as Famicoman mentions in his article, when enough people with enough resources come together, sharing what others do not have, a very broad collection can be obtained and preserved. So what if all of those Betamax and VHS tapes, those archived DVR recordings and grainy video files, those DVDRWs were collected up, sorted and archived? Would it be possible to create such a service? To some extent I believe so, I would expect significant gaps, but any start is a good one. One person might contribute a series of one show, another might add a similarly aged series of another and so on, eventually providing a solid catalogue of shows you only ever see in your imagination today. Ideally station idents would be there too, much harder due to those who see fit to trim video to include only the shows in question, but still very interesting. I’m sure a few people would even appreciate era-appropriate adverts, too.

The most saddening part of all of this is not that the shows themselves currently appear lost, or that it would be extremely difficult to collect pristine archives of every TV channel, but that there is no possible way this could ever be done legally. Rights owners across the globe would descend like a pack of rabid vultures to tear any such service to shreds, leaving only a bloodied carcass and a string of takedown notices and lawsuits. Even if some rights could be cleared and by some miracle it would be possible to get some companies on board, international distribution rights, music rights, content used in clips, appearances by certain people, they would all slaughter an arrangement like this in a heartbeat.

Lucky then that the internet doesn’t always abide by archaic, draconian and crippling laws, rules and regulations, isn’t it?

Via Moonlit from The Moonlit Code

These days, I share my collection of shows over the internet: the same way I received them. I continue to seek out lost shows and fill out holes in my archive in an attempt for completion. Many people may wonder why I even bother. The answer to that question may be more complicated than one would think.

It all must have started in the mid 90’s. I was maybe eight years old. I used to love watching cartoons, but my favorites always played when I was off at school. This is when I discovered the magic of VCRs. I never knew that you could use a VCR to record shows before, but it made things a lot easier after I found out. I learned how to tape shows while I was watching them, and advanced to master timed recording. I filled hour after hour of tape after tape, and re-watched episodes until I had to go to sleep. In affect, this marks my first archiving practice. I wanted to watch whatever I wanted when I wanted it, and found a way to do so.

Years later, I got into torrenting, which I still enjoy today. I’ve never been to keen on mainstream content. Those Hollywood blockbusters don’t do too much for me. The wonderful think about Bittorrent communities is that they are very diverse. I can find so many things that I would otherwise have missed. Have a favorite television show from the 80’s that was never released to DVD, or a movie that only could have been seen when you owned a Betamax player? Odds are I can find what you are looking for. I like to think of torrent communities as groups of friends you lend DVDs out to and talk about weird films with. When you put this group of friends online, it expands to include hundreds more like-minded individuals.

So why go through it all?

Part of it revolves around me having a certain mentality. If I don’t archive it, who will? The stuff that was out there years ago is becoming harder to find. This seems to be true for everything, but especially IPTV. As far as I can tell, I am one of two or three people that have been saving this stuff and trying to share it all back to the world. I think of websites like Jason Scott’s textfiles.com and think of how different things might be if he never decided to share a world of text files. What would have happened to our history of Bulletin Board Systems? Maybe a few Angelfire fan pages and a news group? Certainly not enough to make a statement.

Another part of it is simply the community aspect. Sharing the content makes for meeting people makes for conversation and more sharing. For example, with the IPTV Archive, I chat with a number of people who have an IPTV craze. We get to talking and searching for lost videos and have fun in the process. It opens whole new doors. Somebody may have ideas that throw you in new directions and change things for the better. Video packratism works far better in groups. Pooling resources, time, and effort helps maintain efficiency.

Through it all, video packratism has worked well for me. I locate, I leech, I share, all along with others. It might have taken a long time. I’ve been accumulating content for years, and am still nowhere near done. That is the thrill of it. Locating the un-locatable and watching the unwatched. It is a long process with a short reward. A month searching for thirty minutes of content? Good thing there are hundreds of files out there that are just waiting to be found, otherwise I might get bored.

Via Famicoman from Famicoman.com

Debian Security Advisory DSA-1975-1

Security Support for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 to be discontinued on February 15th

http://www.debian.org/security/ – Stefan Fritsch – January 20, 2010

The Debian project has released Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias ‘lenny’ on the 14th of February 2009. Users and Distributors have been given a one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current stable release. Hence, the security support for the old release of 4.0 is going to end in February 2010 as previously announced. Previously announced security updates for the old release will continue to be available on security.debian.org.

Security Updates for Lenny

The Debian Security Team provides security updates for the current distribution via . Security updates for the old distribution are also provided for one year after the new distribution has been released or until the current distribution is superseded, whatever happens first.

For apt-get: deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main
For dpkg-ftp: ftp://security.debian.org/debian-security dists/stable/updates/main
Mailing list: debi...@lists.debian.org
Package info: apt-cache show
and http://packages.debian.org/

See Also:

• January 10, 2010 — Solution: chown: invalid user: www-data:www-data
• August 31, 2009 — Howto: Insert Bash Command Output Into MySQL
• August 14, 2009 — Howto: Tail Lighttpd Logs with Style using Sed
• July 31, 2009 — Howto: Lock Your Screen in dwm with WindowsKey+L

Via Silivrenion from The Silver Onion

Using IP to CIDR

The tool is very easy to use. The first text input field is the first IP address or start of the range. The second text input field is the second IP address or end of the range. For instance, supplying 172.0.0.0 in the first field and 192.168.255.255 in the second field will produce:

192.0.0.0/9
192.128.0.0/11
192.160.0.0/13
192.168.0.0/16
172.0.0.0/6
176.0.0.0/4

172.16.0.0 and 172.17.255.255 will produce:

172.16.0.0/15

I’ll eventually implement on-the-fly htaccess, null route, and iptables policy generation.

IPtables Drop Policies

In addition to the new IP Range to CIDR tool, I’ve also added drop lists for ThePlanet, Softlayer, APNIC, and Amazon, courtesy of robtex.com. While looking over firewall and httpd access logs, malicious attacks and comment spam seem to originate from these sources the most. If there’s a network or company you’d like me to add, just submit a comment to this post.

See Also:

• November 22, 2009 — Count the Total Number of IPs From CIDR
• December 28, 2009 — Invalid Packets From the DoD
• December 13, 2009 — Nullamatix.com – DDoS Attack 12-2009
• August 31, 2009 — Howto: Insert Bash Command Output Into MySQL

Simply open a Command Prompt window as Administrator, and enter the following command:

powercfg -energy

Windows 7 will take about a minute and a half to analyze power usage and provide an HTML report of possible issues that could be drawing more power than necessary. By default, the report is placed in C:\Windows\System32\energy-report.html, however you can change the output location with the flag -output on the command above, no carats.

Via Silivrenion from The Silver Onion