Recently in General Category

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use HTML::Form;
use HTTP::Request;
use LWP;
use Data::Dumper;

my $username;
my $password;
my $message;
my @recipients = ();

if ($^O eq "darwin") {
	# Log in once to webtext under safari and this will work
	# you need to allow the security program to access the keychain
	open(IN, "security find-internet-password -g -s www.vodafone.ie -r htps 2>&1 |") || die "$!";
	while(<IN>) {
		if (m/"acct"<blob>="(.*)"/) { $username = $1; }
		if (m/password: "(.*)"/) { $password = $1; }
	}
	close(IN);
} else {
	# use something else, or program the passwords here
	$username="0876666666";
	$password="password";
}

my $webtext_url="https://www.vodafone.ie/myv/messaging/webtext/index.jsp";

sub usage {
	print "$0 <addressee1> [...<addressee5>] \"Message\"\n";
	exit 0
}

usage() if ((scalar(@ARGV) < 2) || (scalar(@ARGV) > 6));
while (scalar(@ARGV) > 1) {
	push(@recipients, shift @ARGV);
}

$message = pop(@ARGV);

if (length($message) > 160) {
	die "Message too long.\n Shorten to: \"" . substr($message, 0, 160) . "\"";
}

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
push @{ $ua->requests_redirectable }, 'POST';
$ua->cookie_jar({ });
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/523.10.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.10');
my $response = $ua->get($webtext_url);
#print Dumper($response);
my @forms = HTML::Form->parse($response->content, $response->base);
my $form = undef;
foreach (@forms) {
	if (defined($_->{'attr'}) &&
		lc($_->{'attr'}{'name'}) eq "login") {
		$form=$_;
	}
}
die "Could not get Login Form" unless $form;
$form->value('username', $username);
$form->value('password', $password);
$response = $ua->request($form->click);
die "Login Failed" if (!$response->is_success || $response->base =~ /Login.shtml/);
$response->as_string() =~ /emaining messages this month:.*>(\d+)</s
    or die "Unexpected response: " . $response->as_string() . "  Couldn't determine number of remaining texts";
my $remaining = $1;

@forms = HTML::Form->parse($response->content, $response->base);
$form = undef;
foreach (@forms) {
	if (defined($_->{'attr'}) &&
		lc($_->{'attr'}{'name'}) eq "webtext") {
		$form=$_;
	}
}
die "Could not get Webtext Form" unless $form;

# walk the label for=... -> form id=... matches
my %chk_labels;
my %address_book;
%chk_labels = $response->content =~ m/label for="chk_box_(\d*)">([^<]*)</g;
#print Dumper($form);
foreach (keys(%chk_labels)) {
	my $iv = $form->find_input("chk_box_$_");
	$address_book{$chk_labels{$_}} = $iv->{menu}[1]{'value'};
}

$form->value('message', $message);
my $i = 0;
print "Sending: $message to ";
foreach (@recipients) {
	my $phone = $_;
	if (!($phone =~ /^[0-9]/)) {
		$phone = $address_book{$phone};
	}
	$form->value("recipients[$i]", $phone);
	print $phone . " ";
	$i++;
}
print "\n";
sleep(5);
$response = $ua->request($form->click);
die "Message was not sent correctly" . Dumper($response) if (!($response->as_string() =~ /Your message was sent to:/));
$response = $ua->get($webtext_url);
$response->as_string() =~ /emaining messages this month:.*>(\d+)</s
    or die "Unexpected response: " . $response->as_string() . "  Couldn't determine number of remaining texts";
if ($remaining == $1) {
	die "Even though the message was sent, the number of available messages didn't reduce";
}
print "Remaining Messages: $1\n";
exit 0

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<signature name="default" uid="XXX@XXX" auto="false" format="text/html">
<filename script="true">sig.work</filename>
</signature>

He said: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."

Sir Ken, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, told members of the Criminal Bar Association it should be an article of faith that crimes of terrorism are dealt with by criminal justice and that a "culture of legislative restraint in the area of terrorist crime is central to the existence of an efficient and human rights compatible process".

He said: "We wouldn't get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions. On the contrary, it is obvious that the process of winning convictions ought to be in keeping with a consensual rule of law and not detached from it. Otherwise we sacrifice fundamental values critical to the maintenance of the rule of law - upon which everything else depends."

• 4oz. Margarine
• 4oz. Sugar
• 2 Tablesp. Water
• 6oz. self-raising flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 Teasp. salt
• Flavouring

Method:

cream fat and sugar, beat in the whisked eggs, stir in the flour and salt with added water, Steam or bake.

For Marmalade Pudding:

Add one large tablesp. of marmalade to the foundation mixture. Steam and serve with Marmalade sauce.

To Steam:

1. • use a steamer over a pan of boiling water.
   • Have a well fitting lid.
   • Keep water boiling and steaming all the time
2. • Place the pudding basin in a saucepan with boiling water.
   • Water should come half way up the sides of the basin
   • Keep the water boiling, and as it boils away, fill up with boiling water, but do not wet the top of the pudding
3. Steam in a pressure cooker, according to instructions.

Time for steaming is about 1.5 hours for a pudding made from 6-8oz. flour.

Turning out: A light pudding breaks easily, so loosen it gently from the sides of the basin with a flexible round-ended blade, which should be pressed against the side of the basin, not the pudding.
When loose, cover the basin with a hot dish and invert quickly.
A good pudding may be marred by careless serving and enhanced by dainty dishing.

To Bake:

Use a pie dish, cake tin, soufflé tin, fireproof dish, ring mould, small moulds or deep bun tins.

Grease well.

Time required: 30-40 minutes for large and 15-20 for small moulds.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

In response to an ntp query about how many servers you should have, someone commented that 3 was sufficient.

This is a (unfortunately) very common misconception. NTP requires *four* servers before avoiding a single point of failure. In reality, the times reported by servers rarely if ever match, so three servers are not sufficient since in all likelihood, none of them will actually match.

NTP gets around this problem by using intervals based on the offset and plus or minus a calculated error. A candidate interval is created using two servers, and any two servers can form such an interval. NTP uses the shortest interval which encloses at least half of the servers. With three servers, this can always be formed no matter how wildly the servers disagree by choosing the interval made by the highest and the lowest server offsets, since the third will always lie between them on the interval.

With four servers, however, if three servers are very close and one is far off the others, the shortest interval will consist of the three in agreement, thus cutting out the bad guy. Of course, since NTP servers often use each other as time sources, it is better to have more servers to avoid the problem of one server contaminating another and cascading failures. But to avoid clock jumps you should have at least four.

I was at my sister's 40th this weekend, and boy am I tired. She had her party in the lovely Carraig House, on Caragh Lake. A lovely location for having a nice quiet weekend. There was karaoke, and tunes for the aged. We didn't finish up on the Friday night until after 4am, and on Saturday night I was guiding people to their beds at 5.30 in the morning. The poor nun was woken up at 4.30 by some kids in the room next to her - unfortunately they have no concept of time. I think their parents got a sum total of 2 hours sleep. This morning I had to get up for a 6am flight back to sunny Dublin. I was in the office before 8am - which is way too early for anyone. I'm drinking coffee and trying to keep myself awake (shhhh... don't tell my manager).

Well the housemate arrived back yesterday. Due to a colossal communication breakdown I went out to the Airport twice yesterday. And me with a hangover. I shouldn't have... really.

Hi Jim, it looks like you're having problems with your display. Let's see, the screen itself seems OK, so it's probably a loose connection on the box.
Turns out that the graphics card wasn't seated correctly on the motherboard, wasn't screwed in either. All the jiggling had loosened it, and then it simply refused to work.
ten minutes of sweating and reseating later it was all up and working correctly, but by God I was sweating like a pig with the worry over having fried the card by jiggling it incorrectly.
Let that be a lesson to me... never touch another man's graphics card. It reminds me of that sexist Harry Enfield sketch about cars and women...

Anyone from our group notice that Jonothan from the Guild in London looks really similar to Josh Ritter? I was just looking at the Hello Starling record and he seems quite similar.

I am so tired at the moment. I was at John and Marina's handfasting which was held on Friday evening so I had an 8 hour trip down the country to get to dingle. It would have taken 6 hours if I could drive all the way down the country, but someone in the car was ill with the 'flu and wanted breaks in the journey.
The handfasting itself didn't start until later in the evening (about 9.15), and was quite a bit of fun for everyone. I was shattered and fell asleep around the 1.30 - 2am mark. The journey and the long hours in the office all added up.
The Saturday consisted of a long walk (5 hours) in the intermittent sun. I had put on sunblock before I left the house, but surprise surprise I missed a few spots and got burned. Only noticed it the next day, but jeez I have to take more care with this - I never got burned as a child so something has changed with the sunshine.
Saturday evening was more beer and food and music until about 1.30 in the AM.
Sunday I had to get up and drive to Castleisland to visit the folks. Of course I forgot that they go to 10.30 mass in the morning so I messed up the arrival time until just 10am, so they left about 15 minutes after I got there.
Needing to pick some people up from Dingle again, I turned tail and headed back there. In case you're wondering this adds up to between 2.5 and 3 hours driving for the morning alone.
We started the trek back to Dublin about 1.40 in the afternoon, and had an hour stop off in Castleisland so I could show the parents what a handfasting looked like as well as to put up the family face for that aprt of the month. It being hte third time I got to Kerry in the last month I'm getting really tired of all the trips up and down the country. It's 9 hours up and back again which tends to add up on the shoulders and back.
so I got in the door of the house and pretty much fell asleep within minutes of hitting the pillow. I am still tired today and it's two days later.
Then my portable Hard Drive died... less than 12 hours after it was loaned to one of the housemates.

I'm stunned at the places you tend to find sun hardware ... in major banks, running evil corporations that mutate monkeys into something evil. Sometimes I have to ask myself am I working for a good company or have I been lulled into a false sense of safety by our cool and groovy features for making the typical Evil Genius' program to control genomes run up to 50% faster, with added bling (dtrace), Or to encapsulate their servers into virtual containers so a lone hacker can't take over the entire network (zones), of the ability to make sure that every byte of data that is stored in system is summed, checksummed and cross-checked (DynFS I think) in case an explosion damages some of your storage devices.
Yes, Sun Microsystems... we put the 'Evil Genius' into Far Cry :)

I took this picture a few weeks ago and didn't put it anywhere. I suppose now would be as good as any other to put it up.

Sometimes people tend to say something that seems quite innocuous, but it turns out to be quite insulting. How about this pearl:
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus." --Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in George Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm

How difficult is it for a music playing application to remember where the
hell I was during the last run? I have a pile of long running files (lectures,
audiobooks) and I can't bookmark a piece within them.

Still not used to the 'bring it back the way I had it before' concept then
are we?

It's merely a month after he retred and he's passed away. I am not happy
that this has happened. He was the one true constant in the world.