Archive

Experiments with the eee

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 5 May 2008
in Play
. 3 Comments

It’s been a while since I last handled the eee.

I haven’t gotten around to changing the default Xandros OS to either Ubunty or Fedora. Frankly, the OS works just fine for me. And as long as I can get a command-line and an internet connection, I’m a happy camper.

But it’s been an unusually quiet weekend so I decided to focus a bit more on this cute little monster.

First off, an upgrade. It was a simple matter of doing a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. The bad side is, since the OS uses unionfs, the 4GB storage is now down to only ~260MB free (or around 83% in use). I’ll have to look at the repackaged updates from the XEPC project, if the storage factor becomes critical, but for now, I can live with this.

Next, the OS change. I did attempt to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the eee, but hit a snag while creating a USB bootable flash disk. I had a spare 1GB flash disk at hand, and was able to dump the netboot image from the Ubuntu archives. For some reason, the eee cannot recognize it. Again, I’ll have to dig into this later, but as I’ve said, Xandros works fine for me for now so I’ll stick with it at the moment.

Since I cannot change the OS, I opted to optimize whatever I have for now. One major “annoyance” is the screen real estate (i.e., the lack thereof). Firefox, for example, have large chrome properties that need to be slimmed down. I’m using the basic display mode for Xandros, so there’s desktop screen space is not a primary concern. Since I mostly use the eee for browsing, I need to trim the fat off Firefox.

I had to download the TinyMenu extension. This reduced the menu to a vertical one, which is nifty since I was able to move the navigation bar buttons alongside it. I reduced the space even further by using a minimalist theme called Mini Firefox. I then hid navigation bar buttons that are currently disabled through some tweaks in userChrome.css:

#back-button[disabled="true"], #forward-button[disabled="true"], 
#stop-button[disabled="true"], .search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

The result:

Reduced Firefox chrome

Revisiting my tumblog

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 14 April 2008
in Play
. 2 Comments

I’ve made several improvements to my tumblog.

Previously, I merely plugged in the RSS output from Yahoo! Pipes to Feedburner, and served up the content using Buzzboost. Using techniques from Cristiano Betta’s lifestream and elsewhere, I simplified and modularized the Yahoo! Pipes mashup.

I then used the pipe’s JSON output and styled it with some simple CSS. I didn’t want too much dependence on other JavaScript libraries so I used native code as much as possible, except for dynamically loading the JSON object from Pipes (for which I used the JSONscriptRequest class). I’m still having trouble getting the logic of reloading the content asynchronously: for now, I simply destroy the child element containing the tumblog items and rewrite everything — expensive, I know.

I’ve also been thinking of creating a Google Gadget out of this, but the iGoogle API’s FetchFeedAsJSON method is somewhat limited. I may have to use my current approach of dynamically creating a JSON script request into the gadget.

Well, without too much fanfare, the code is over here, and the tumblog is right here.

Three new old books, two notebooks, a FreeAgent

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 9 March 2008
in Play and Work
. 0 Comments

(… And a partridge in a pear tree. Heh.)

Not much updates from me, except:

  • Got three more great finds from Booksale: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, The Confusion (Vol. 2 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson, and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury — all for under a hundred pesos.
  • I had the pleasure of trying out two sleek notebooks: an Acer Aspire Gemstone and a Gateway T-6311. Both were from balikbayan kamag-anaks who asked me to, er, stress-test their new toys. More on this when I’m done playing with them. Suddenly, I’m craving for a replacement to Mathilda (my Dell Inspiron) — not!
  • My bro gave me a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external hard drive. Yay! It’s 500 GB in a cool black finish, with a footprint of an office stapler. It now rests next to the 19″ LCD monitor. All I need now are a cheap NAS solution and a UPS, and my home computing setup is complete.
  • Due to several NDAs I signed, I couldn’t blog much about what I do at work. Let’s just say it’s been a very interesting engagement. I’ll be in between team deployments (but with the same client) next quarter, so that gives me some breathing space to take on vendor and in-house training. My blogging will more or less be the same — I’m actually thinking of changing my tagline to “Posts of a weekend blogger”. :)

Surprise finds

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 23 February 2008
in Play
. 4 Comments

Surprise finds from a second-hand book shop.

Got these yesterday from a second-hand book shop here in Cabanatuan City: (from top) Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon; Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead; William Gibson’s Virtual Light; and Programming Perl, second edition, from O’Reilly. All for Php99 each.

Not bad at all.

It’s tax season

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 23 February 2008
in Play
. 0 Comments

And what do you know? I recently received a refund from the IRS. Wow!

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $480.23. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 3-6 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here.

Note: For security reasons, we will record your ip-address, the date and time. Deliberate wrong inputs are criminally pursued and indicated.

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service

Copyright 2008, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Err… Thanks, but I’m not even a US citizen. Unless our BIR offers refunds in dollars now?

The link points to an IP address registered in Latin America. It gets better: whois info shows the following:

OrgName:    Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry 
OrgID:      LACNIC
Address:    Rambla Republica de Mexico 6125
City:       Montevideo
StateProv:  
PostalCode: 11400
Country:    UY

Mexico is in Uruguay now?

The headers are also very interesting:

Received: by 10.114.150.9 with SMTP id x9cs106067wad;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:15 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.82.181.7 with SMTP id d7mr20582205buf.4.1203666254308;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:14 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <taxrefund@online.irs.gov>
Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (ug-out-1314.google.com [66.249.92.172])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id z40si1631581ikz.4.2008.02.21.23.44.13;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:14 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 66.249.92.172 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) client-ip=66.249.92.172;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 66.249.92.172 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) smtp.mail=taxrefund@online.irs.gov
Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id e2so1204598ugf.21
        for <myemailaddress@gmail.com>; Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.67.115.10 with SMTP id s10mr1971303ugm.89.1203666253276;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.67.115.10 with SMTP id s10mr1971299ugm.89.1203666253174;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <taxrefund@online.irs.gov>
Received: from mailkbh.delud.dk ([194.182.91.20])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 32si287442ugd.37.2008.02.21.23.44.12;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 194.182.91.20 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) client-ip=194.182.91.20;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 194.182.91.20 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) smtp.mail=taxrefund@online.irs.gov
Received: from mailaarh.delud.dk ([195.192.86.117]) by mailkbh.delud.dk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
	 Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:44:07 +0100
X-Spam-Status: NO, hits=0 required=5
X-Spam-Flag: NO
Received: from User ([71.132.110.97]) by mailaarh.delud.dk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:44:05 +0100
Keywords: disclaimer
Reply-To: <taxrefund@online.irs.gov>

This ran past GMail’s much-daunted spam filters, even when Return-Path was obviously forged. So much for SPF.

Here’s what’s funnier — at the bottom of the message is this boilerplate:

This message has been scanned by F-Secure Anti-Virus for Microsoft Exchange.
For more information, connect to http://www.f-secure.com/

Right. I’m proud that I used to work with a better anti-virus company. ;)