Posts Tagged howto
Snowed in? 15 Thinks you should be using online CCOD – 9.6.2011
Posted by Jon Zobrist in AWS, Communications, internet, Linux, Technology, Wordpress on September 6, 2011
There are a ton of cool things to do on the Internet. New doors are open to everyone. I’m surprised how often we take it for granted that everyone is in on the latest trend in tech. Here is my humble addition to a list of things that I think people should be using online.
1. Twitter – News *stream*, or should I say FLOOD. Follow smart people, get smart (filtered) news and info. Want to blow your news mind? Get tweetdeck and put in a search for any hot topic. (Don’t follow #earthquake unless you want to feel constant fear).
2. Facebook – Connect with your family and friends. Be benign on Facebook! The Internet is public, immortal, and Facebook does hate your privacy.
3. Amazon AWS/EC2 - What you don’t need a virtual server? You sure about that? Not for your blog? Not even if it scales infinitely? Not even if it’s free?
4. WordPress – Joomla and Drupal are cool, but WordPress is the king of the web page CMS.
5. Gmail – Seriously, stop deleting your email, get a gmail account. Use your own domains (Google Apps is still free for < 10 users).
6. Google Docs – If you haven’t had 10 people all editing the same spreadsheet at the same time you have not Cloud’d it up.
7. Cloud Music (Google Music, Amazon Music Locker, iCloud, Soundcloud, Spotify) – This is new, try them all out, find new music, sync your own.
8. Google – Search done right. Everyone has been playing catchup for a while now, and I’m sure that one day they will, but until then, google.com
9. Snopes – The Internet means rapid access to information sharing, but many people share false information. Sites like snopes.com
10. Shopping - Deal sites like slickdeals.net, fatwallet.com, woot and more track deals as they happen, often with good comments on how to maximize them. The people on some of these sites are mad geniuses when it comes to getting the most for your buck.
11. Skype – Everyone has it, get on and video chat your friends in other countries for free. Ride this one until Microsoft torpedos it, and we all move to Google Chat, which you should be on already via your gmail account.
12. Linux – If you are even slightly technically inclined, Linux opens the door to you (for free) to everything from high end movie effects to computer forensics. Get started with a Live CD from Ubuntu (Your computer is probably 64-bit, and you probably want the desktop version – You can boot the CD and use Linux without doing anything to your computer), and NO it does not run Office or any Windows program, but it does run thousands of cool programs.
13. Photo sites (Picasa, Flickr, Smugmug) There is no reason you should be burning a photo CD to send to your friends and family. Get an upload utility, and start putting your photos on the ‘net. You don’t have to share them, and I would highly recommend NOT sharing them publicly unless they are very public information. I do not post pictures with faces in them without permission from the person owning the face, and, in general, don’t do this.
14. Education (Khanadademy, Alison.com, MIT Open Courseware, Instructables, k12) – There are too many to name, and pretty much access to infinite information is it’s own education. Don’t think that just because a skill isn’t directly computer related that you can’t learn howto do it online, and for maybe for free.
15. Wikipedia - What is a wikipedia? Well, a wiki is a website that anyone can edit the pages of, so, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Not always right, but rarely uninformative.
Well, I hope this helps. Please send me your lists or additions (comment below, or email to jon@jonzobrist.com).
Free QR Code Generator, via Gina Tripani @ smarterware.org
Posted by Jon Zobrist in internet, QR Codes, Technology on June 7, 2011
Thanks to Gina Tripani at SmarterWare I found a cool, free, 2D barcode generator!
Her article about 2D barcodes is here
And the QR code generator is here
And, here is my URL QR Code, it generated!
HowTo Quick Setup a Minecraft Server
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Games, Linux, Macintosh, Minecraft on June 5, 2011
My kids have dove into the game Minecraft and one of the first things they wanted was their own servers that they could customize and create lots of world.
We’re now running 5 servers on my Linux box. I don’t notice a performance drop in using it for anything, and each one is set to use 1GB of RAM, fortunately I have 8 GB…
This should be a quick howto that will work on Linux and Macintosh as long as you have screen and java.
I run the Minecraft servers under screen, so I can disconnect and reconnect to them, and they’ll keep running if my connection stops.
Quick setup :
(I use -R instead of -S to start and name the screen, since it will resume the same screen if it’s already running)
mkdir minecraft
cd minecraft
Edit a server.properties file, here’s a sample one :
Go to http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp and copy the link that says “minecraft_server.jar” (it will update based on version, so copy it each time)
wget -O minecraft_server.jar http://www.minecraft.net/download/minecraft_server.jar?v=1307312614783
(that link will change with each version)
Now start your server
screen -R minecraft
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
Now type CTRL+a d
This will disconnect you from your screen.
To reconnect run
screen -R minecraft
Now connect to your computer from minecraft, you may need to connect by IP address and port.
Running multiple servers on the same host is as easy as changing the port and setting up another directory, and the screen instances.
This is just a simple setup assuming you have a Mac or a Linux box already running.
I hope to cover using a Dynamic DNS service like DynDNS.com , opening the ports in your router so your friends can connect from outside.
It may also help to find out your public IP address, you can go to http://jonzobrist.com/ip.php
I wonder if you could run a minecraft server with only 512MB RAM, would be perfect for the free tier of Amazon AWS..
LCOD 5.29.2011 – 2 quick TCP port check scripts in Python
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Programming, Python on May 29, 2011
Disclaimer : These scripts could be considered malicious and should only be used to test servers with permission from the server administrator. I accept no responsibility for your use of these scripts, and make no warranty about their usefulness either express or implied.
I often find myself troubleshooting someone’s network connectivity, or one of my servers ability to receive connections or mass connections.
For this, nmap is invaluable, but sometimes it’s easier to just send someone a script to run, especially in larger companies where things like nmap, and other port scanners are frowned on.
So, here are 2 scripts that take the same arguments HOST PORT.
They are tcpcheck.py (here is the gzipped version), and tcpcheck-bulk.py (here is the gzipped version).
tcpcheck.py makes 1 connection to a TCP port and reports success or failure.
Example usage and output :
./tcpcheck.py jonzobrist.com 80
Success. Connected to jonzobrist.com on port: 80
./tcpcheck.py jonzobrist.com 81
Failure. Cannot connect to jonzobrist.com on port: 81
tcpcheck-bulk.py is hard wired to attempt 1500 connections to a TCP port and reports success/failures.
Example usage and output is :
./tcpcheck-bulk.py jonzobrist.com 80
Done with jonzobrist.com on port: 80
Done. Failures : 0 Successes : 1500
This script was very useful when we tried to determine server performance over a link that seemed to be killing our connections.
Please feel free to use it, and share if it helped.
ICOD – 6.2.10 – Delete all SMS messages on iPhone
Posted by Jon Zobrist in iPhone on June 2, 2010
Howto jailbreak and delete all SMS messages on your iPhone.
Click to continue reading “ICOD – 6.2.10 – Delete all SMS messages on iPhone”
LCOD – 4.12.10 – Quick Mysqlreport to e-mail setup
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Linux, Linux Command of the Day, MySQL Server Support on April 12, 2010
This will be a quick install to setup your server to e-mail you daily mysql reports using the cool mysqlreport application at hackmysql.com
Click to continue reading “LCOD – 4.12.10 – Quick Mysqlreport to e-mail setup”
LCOD – 5.9.07 – Updating CPAN in Perl
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Linux, Linux Command of the Day, Perl, Programming on May 9, 2007
Perl rocks, it’s easily my favorite programming language. One of the nice things about Perl is the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). Your Linux box has CPAN installed already, and to begin using it you should first update it. To do so run the commands just below. The first time you invoke CPAN it’ll launch the configuration module, just hit enter until it gets into the part about which mirrors you want to use, it’ll have you pick geographic areas first, and then tell you to enter servers by number, separated by spaces. I usually put in about 20 servers, which looks like kinda this
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
#invoke perl’s CPAN shell (and first time configuration with)
bash$ perl -MCPAN -e shell
#once configuration is done, update CPAN, and then reload
CPAN> install Bundle::CPAN
CPAN> reload cpan
Now, head on over to CPAN and search for some cool new Perl modules to play with!
A great place to dive into the world of Perl is Perl.org
Also the Perl Monks is a good Perl site, and Use Perl is as well.
Make sure you have a correct build environment setup, on Ubuntu/Debian you need to install the build-essential package (sudo apt-get install build-essential)
LCOD – 3.12.07 – Speeding up your DNS queries
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Linux, Linux Command of the Day on March 12, 2007
To change to use OpenDNS instead of your own, or worse! your ISP’s crappy, poorly maintained dns server, you can follow the instructions here.
http://opendns.com/start/
The basic info is to put in these 2 IP’s as your dns servers
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
On Linux/*BSD you’d put them in your /etc/resolv.conf file like this
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
If you’d like to double whammy your performance run a local cache, I use DJB’s djbdns dnscache in forwarding only mode, as described here.
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-cache-x-home.html
With the above IP’s in the @ file.
Installing DJB’s stuff is cake, you can pretty much cut & paste his instructions found here
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/install.html
Of course you’ll need Daemontools, and ucspi, install instructions (cut & pasteable) here
http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/install.html
http://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp/install.html
If you get compilation errors cuz DJB hasn’t fixed a bug in his code and some systems (lots of recent Linux systems), run these commands.
(run after you’ve extracted the archive, and cd’d into it’s directory, and run for EACH install.) You may get a no such file for the src one on some, but he mixes software locations, so just run em both.
perl -pi -e ‘s/extern int errno\;/\#include <errno.h>/’ *
perl -pi -e ‘s/extern int errno\;/\#include <errno.h>/’ src/*
Enjoy!
LCOD – 2.18.07 – Simple command line perl substitutions
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Linux, Linux Command of the Day, Perl, Programming on February 18, 2007
first, make a file that lists all the images (we’re using *jpg, but you could do *gif, or *coolimages*, or just * for all files in the dir – note: all files in dir * with a redirect will catch the file you are redirecting to, and it will likely need to be removed)
From the shell / command line, run:
/bin/ls *jpg > ourfiles
Now the fun part! This will take a line like this
picture1.jpg
And make it look like this
<a href=”picture1.jpg”><img src=”picture1.jpg” border=”0″></a>
From the shell run / command line, run:
perl -pi -e ‘s/^(.*)$/<a href=\”$1\”><img src=\”picture1.jpg\” border=\”0\”><\/a>/’ ourfiles
The basic pattern of this command is
‘s/SEARCH PATTERN REGEX/REPLACEMENT PATTERN/’
The search pattern is a Regular Expression, and the Replacement Pattern needs to have any special characters escaped (including / $ # @ “) with a \
The Search Pattern we’re using is a simple one ^ for start of line, (.*) for . anything and * any number of times, with paranthesis around it to put it into the perl variable $1, and $ for end of line.
LCOD – 2.5.07 – Debian package management
Posted by Jon Zobrist in Linux, Linux Command of the Day on February 5, 2007
List all packages installed in a Debian system, piped to more for readability
dpkg -l | more
(dpkg dash lower case L pipe more)
Seach installed packages for ones containing the word foobar
dpkg -P /*foobar/*
This info from this site
http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/debian/
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