Linux Tip….
With the stupid amount of Chinese IP’s that are constantly hammering my iptables, I wrote a simple script to download a list of known chinese IP’s and add them to a iptables chain to drop them silently. This allows me to flush out all that noise.
#!/bin/bash
echo “Checking if file Exists”
if [ -f /root/rc.firewall.china ];
then
echo “File /root/rc.firewall.china exists”
ls -la rc.firewall.china
else
wget http://www.okean.com/antispam/iptables/rc.firewall.china
fiecho Processing File
sed ‘s/–dport 25//g’ rc.firewall.china|cat|grep “^[ ]*iptables”|sed ‘s/INPUT/China/g’|sed ‘s/-p tcp//g’> rc.firewall.china_mod
chmod +x rc.firewall.china_mod
echo Flushing Existing Chain
iptables -F China
echo Applying Rules
./rc.firewall.china_mod
echo Clean up.
rm -v -I rc.firewall.china_mod
echo Done.
You need to have a chain in iptables already existing for this to work, you also have to call it from input.
Rain Rain
Ah the rain. Its rained here for three days straight, and heavy rain at that.
Never mind.
In other news I’m now spending more time in my virtual machine install of Linux after refindinding my love of Linux. A few years ago I was running nothing but Linux, even on my desktops as well as servers. I used the Gentoo distribution, which is a “From Source” distribution, and can be a cow to install and configure. But recently real progress has been made at making distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu a lot more mainstream and easier for the user to install and use. The desktop share of these two distributions alone is gaining ground at a superb rate.
However now, on the desktop I’m using Fedora 12, and despite some bugs its working well. And on the laptop is Ubuntu, one I’m not overly keen on as I have never liked Debian. But fedora refused to install on the laptop now. 
I could never truly ditch Microsoft, as there are software packages I have no option but to use in Windows, such as Lightroom and Anquet. Until a similar set of software is developed for Linux, I will keep my copy of Windows 7 around for running those applications. But once again, I’m looking at switching full-time over to Linux.
My Outdoors Bundle
Once again, for those that want it, here is my Outdoors Bundle.
http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F09892604157687496205%2Fbundle%2Foutdoors
iPhone OS 4 on the Horizon?
Next Wednesday, the self-proclaimed god, Steve Jobs will unveil the long-awaited iTablet, iPod or what ever they decide to call it. At the same time, it is rumored that a new OS will be delivered for the iPhone.
This stands to reason, as the iThingWhatever will obviously be running a similar OS, and will either be an offshoot or a new iPhone OS. Which ever, the two are bound to bleed features to each other if not the same.
More info can be found At the Boy Genius Report
iTunes 9
Well, it is here. And I am unimpressed.
None of the rumored social aspects are in, they were just that, rumours. Only one of the features that were introduced interests me, the rest is just uneeded bloat.
The one thing, is the changing of smartplaylists. Now you ca essentially have a playlist inside a plalist to give you fine grained control over it.
Now this will maybe help with the “Source Playlist” issue, where you haveseveral playlists all feeding into one.
The other changes, such as iTunes LP interest me about as much as sticking my nuts in a blender, and I dont really care for the light colour scheme. Much preferred the black.
Having more sync options is good to, being able to sync Playlists, and specific Artists is great, good move there. And the coloum browser makes going through my large libary really a lot easier.
The Applcation sorting is good, but to be honest, I only ever move applications around on the screen once in a bluemoon. I put the icons where Iwant them, and dont move them about. So this feature will be used once only by me for each time I reset my iPhone. calling it a killer feature is a little much.
Apple have also admitted there are a number of issues, most notable are some stack buffer and a dodgy recovery mode. A sense of Deja Vue, like smart play lists having random contents when loaded on the iPod, I can remember that issue from a while ago. Looks like they undid their fix now. Same error, no lesson learnt.
The iPhone’s Webkit browser has a memory corruption issue wherein visiting a maliciously crafted website might lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.
AND ISTILL WANT TO HAVE A CHART TYPE PLAYLIST!
Oh well. Win some. Lose some. I’ll use iTunes a little more when I get some time, and write a proper review of it. At the moment, I need to sleep. 
Death of a Google App
So, Google have announced that they are to cast Notebook out into the cold void. Shame really, since Notebook was one of those apps, that was incredibly useful. Googles blog post detailing this decision is here
Google never really pushed it, and it was bound for the bin, but its loss is noticeable. It was never featured in the Google Menu bar, or even on the “More” page from the menu. It was Googles’ forgotten bastard child. I used it on a regular basis to record information as I trawled round the vast interwebs. Google only really pushed it once, when they closed the bookmarks, they told people to use that instead, now rather ironicly they are telling people to use Bookmarks rather than Notebook.
However, for every grey cloud does have a sliver lining. Thanks to jimmydnet (Who also wrote a good article on converting your google notebook to EverNote) on Twitter, I have discoverd EverNote. This fantastic website, has versions for all Operating Systems and iPhones, Blackberrys and almost every other mobile computing platform there is. It’s much much more than just a on-line notebook. The ability to search for text Within images is great, and incredibly useful, as is being able to capture audio. Head over and see if there is anything EverNote can help you with.
Google Notebook users, it is a highly recommended replacement for Notebook.
Notebook, May you rest in peace!
-
Create
Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote
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Snap
Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We’ll even recognize the text in the image.
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Clip
Clip entire webpages, screenshots, and just about anything else you can copy
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Drag-n-drop
Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows
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Email
Email notes directly into your account using your personalized email address
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Scan
Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote
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Record
Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want
Nerds Look like this
This is Brian Aker – MySQL director of technology for Sun. And he is a geek. All that brain activity when planning the MySQL Fork, Drizzle has melted his hair, along with all the other bits he has been upto including:
- The Drizzle Database server
- MySQL Archive Storage Engine
- MySQL Federated Storage Engine
- Memcached Storage Engine
- CSV Storage Engine
- Blackhole Storage Engine
- WebMethods (HTTP) Storage Engine
You can get the low down on the fork, here, through a interview where Aker talks about Drizzle and the future of Cloud Databases, with the passion and pride only a father can come up with.
This is one guy who is seriously into his 0 and 1′s
The Hunt goes on
The sky has just gone really dark, looks like it might rain ready for my walk into town though. Sods law that.
Oh well, pay daywill see me buying a iPhone, that shoul cheer me up quite a bit. A new toy to play with. With the iPhone 3GS, apple look like they have actually picked the ball up and are running with it. I would not touch the origional iPhone, or the next generation, but this gen has got my interest. I looked at the Nokia N97, and hated it. The keyboard layout is just odd, and I dont like the software. No doubt they will improve that later, but it aint for me. They really skimped on the processor too. Way to slow. Just using it, was slow. Programs loaded slow, like a slug in treacle. And it has the Nokia curse of low application memory.
Anyway, better get ready.
