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).

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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!

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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..

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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.

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UPDATE: 4/21/2011 – The SMS db on my iPhone moved to /private/var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db on my iPhone 4, IOS 4.2.1

iPhone Command of the Day, 6/2/2010

UPDATE : 10/31/2010 – The app “Delete all SMS” has been fixed, I have been using it for almost a month with no problems, and it is much quicker than this method. I leave this up in case anyone wants to know how to do it the long way, instead of simply installing the app “Delete all SMS” from Cydia, or perhaps wants to hack around with their SMS database.

Howto delete all SMS messages on your jailbroken iPhone.

I frequently get hundreds to thousands of text messages that all say the same thing from my monitoring systems as part of my job. It’s *very* tedious to delete these one at a time, and paying my kids $1 per 100 to delete them is getting too expensive.

Yes, this must be a jailbroken iPhone. If you’re not jailbroken, upgrade to 3.1.3 and jailbreak using these instructions:

1. Sync your iPhone, let iTunes take a backup2. Upgrade your iPhone to 3.1.3 through iTunes
3. Once iPhone is 3.1.3 download and run Spirit Jailbreak (http://www.spiritjb.com/)
4. With iPhone connected, run Spirit and click Jailbreak
5. Wait for phone to reboot and you're done.
6. Go to Cydia, install Rock App

There is an app in Rock and Cydia that will delete all SMS but it SUCKS and routinely jacks up all your future SMS messages at random by inserting text and pictures into them. Fortunately, it seems the actual pictures and messages are not sent to the other party, but it does look on your iPhone like they were sent.

So I highly recommend NOT installing or using “Clear all SMS”.

Instead install “Terminal” from Rock or Cydia.

1. Launch Terminal
2. Case sensitive, type the below line and hit enter
rm ./Library/SMS/sms.db
3. It should just kick you to the next line, now reboot your iPhone

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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

As the user you want to set this up on, run the following commands.

(Note that I touch and then chmod og-rwx the .my.cnf file, since you’re putting your users mysql password in it, creating it and making it unreadable before editing is always a good idea.)

wget http://hackmysql.com/scripts/mysqlreport
chmod uog+x mysqlreport
mkdir bin logs
mv mysqlreport bin/
touch ~/.my.cnf
chmod og-rwx ~/.my.cnf
vi ~/.my.cnf

Now, put in a client section like this in, you can find your sock file with grep sock /etc/my.cnf, or grep sock /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[client]

user="root"

password="password"

socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Now, install perl’s DBD::MySQL

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo su

apt-get install libdbd-mysql-perl

via CPAN/Other Linux/Generic BSD:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

Optional, update CPAN:

install Bundle::CPAN

reload cpan

(If there are errors on following some dependencies exit, and restart your CPAN shell, then start with install Bundle::CPAN)
Install perl DBI

install DBD::mysql
exit

Now, run it to test, you should see a bunch of text output

~/bin/mysqlreport

Now, set it up to run from cron

crontab -e

Add a line like this (this will email to test@example.com a full report nightly at midnight, and put the last nights report in /home/USERNAME/logs/mysqlreport)

0 0 * * * /home/USERNAME/bin/mysqlreport --email test@example.com > /home/USERNAME/logs/mysqlreport.log 2>&1

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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)

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