Recently in Memo Category

Snow Leopard came in the mail today (finally). Thank you Apple, for killing a small tree to deliver me one DVD. Using a box large enough to house at least 16 retail packages to ship 1 single disc to an end line consumer is definitely the right choice!! Seriously, if I'm paying you $40 for the rights to kill a tree, I better be the one doing the killing, not you!

I'm creating yet another URL shortener script.  Why?  Because I'm not keen on over paying for simple scripts -- because, well, I'd be over paying -- and I'm not too keen on using open source scripts -- because the more people using the same script, the more likely people will find exploits in it.  So with all that in mind, I set out to create my own script.

I started using RTM a while ago, and it works great.  It helps me keep all my to-dos together in one place, and allows me to set different deadlines so I don't forget them. But the problem is, there is no way to manage my to-do list while I'm on the go... you know, the boring bus commute, and things like that...  Until I ran into an article on how to use Fluid, an OSX application that converts webpages into small Applications for you. Fluid is nice because it offers both userscript (Greasemonky) and Google Gears (offline syncing) support.  But this is where my problem begin...

There is a really nice GM script I want to use, but it seems to cause problems with the Google Gear synchronization.  Whenever I have the script enabled, and Google Gear tries to sync, everything goes wonky and the page refuse to load.  I must disable the script, have Gears sync, and then re-enable the script.

If anyone knows how to make these work in harmony, please do leave a comment to let me know how!  In the mean time, I'll have to keep the script disabled...

As you guys are aware of, I just got my MacBook, and I'm still experiencing the should-not-exist-learning-curve...  Anyways, today, I noticed something funny, and I figured I'd share with all of you.

Earlier today, I was unable to start any applications...  I'd type the application name via QS, and QS would go away, but no app.  I'd use Finder to go to /Applications and attempt to manually launch it, and nothing would happen.  Finally, when I tried to start iTerm, it told me it was unable to fork.  Linux instincts kicked in and told me that the problem came from lack of resources or PIDs.  So I quickly quit a few apps (I had upwards to 30 applications running at that time), and long and behold, I was able to start applications again.  I checked my processes list via terminal, and noticed a bunch of idle perl processes -- It's still a mystery to me as to what they are, as I was unable to kill them individually, nor through killall, nor could I see them via Activity monitor, but that's besides the point.  I rebooted the system, and it seems to be running fine now (and the idle perl processes have yet to return *touch wood*).

I decided I want to pay attention to my resources usage, and make sure my system doesn't lock up on me.  I have the habit of leaving commonly used applications running...  this is even the case when I was still on Windows.  This is when I started to notice a funny trend.  It'd appear that applications on OSX suffers even more evident memory leak/consumption problem than their Windows counter part!  Here's a quick break down of memory usage oddities after around 12 hours of me working:
iTunes - Real Memory: 220.8MB, Virtual Memory: 2.0GB
Firefox - Real Memory: 208.4MB, Virtual Memory: 1.7GB
Mail - Real Memory: 150.2MB, Virtual Memory: 1.4GB
Last.fm - Real Memory: 92.7MB, Virtual Memory: 1023.49MB
uTorrent - Real Memory: 16.28MB, Virtual Memory: 973.33MB

iTunes I understand, I have tons of music (library of 1699 tracks, 14.13 GB total) and most of them are tagged with album art, so it takes resource to load when I play songs.  But on Windows, my iTunes usually floats at around 150MB of memory usage, not 220MB!  So I quickly quit iTunes and restarted it.  Surely, it dropped down to 70MB of real memory, and arond 1GB of virtual memory -- though, as I wrote these, it grew slowly to 85.52MB and 1.07GB already.

Firefox I understand...  The prefetching "feature" and caching of tabs etc. does eat up quite a bit of resources...  On Windows I've seen it gone up to as much as 600MB of memory, too... So I just killed it and restarted.  It's coasting at around 107MB right now...

Mail - I wonder if it downloaded all my mails from gmail, even though I said IMAP, and tries to load them into memory over time... Mail is now consuming only 51MB and 1.0GB after quit and relaunch.

Last.fm - WHY?!  It's a tiny icon that does nothing but scrob my musics! ... and I don't even listen to music from it.  Restarted it and its now only eating 21MB and 986.49MB of memory.

uTorrent - This one is tiny, but still worth mentioning...  Because I didn't do anything with it!  I simply decided to download it to see if it is exactly the same as the Windows counter part.  Forgot about it, and left it idling.  No downloading, no seeding, no hash checking, nothing.   Main window isn't even open (so I don't see it on expose)!   Restarting it seem to have make it go down to 13.17MB, and 966.61MB though.

So, yeah...  tip to make your OSX run faster?  Just quit your apps and restart them every now and then!  It's surprising to see their memory grows so rapidly, even if you're not doing anything with them...

Getting into the Mac world, I encountered two awesome tools from the same author; Nocturne, a tool which allows you to invert screen colors so your eyes doesn't go blind in dark places, and Quicksilver, a rapid application launcher allowing you to perform complex tasks with just a few key strokes. However, they don't integrate well together.... I can't seem to use Quicksilver to toggle Nocturne.... not until I wrote a quick AppleScript for it... And you can do it too!

Here's how I did it.

First, start Nocturne normally, and go to the preferences panel. Disable sensor auto switch... that will bump you right out of invert mode if you are in a bright enough place.

Then, enter night mode, and quit the application... it will auto revert back to day mode upon exit, but when you launch it again, it will start in night mode, which is what we want.

Next, go to script editor (Quicksilver > Script Editor, Enter) and create this script (copy & paste should do the trick):

Save the script you've just created into ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions as Nocturne.scpt and you're almost ready to rock! Trigger your Quicksilver, use Command + R to force refresh of your catalog, and type Nocturne into the first box of Quicksilver. Because Quicksilver weights the application more heavily than your script, you need to hit down a few times to find the script instead of launching the application directly. I gave it three times and then Quicksilver learned that I want to use the script instead of real app... it might take you lesser or more, depending on how many times you've launched Nocturne via Quicksilver. But once it learns that, its all good.

Now, each time you want to toggle mode, just trigger Quicksilver, type Nocturne, and it'll switch day and night mode for you. Pretty neat huh?

Got it to work? Please let me know how things are working out for you via comments section :)

So I had to let a co-worker use my computer yesterday.  He needed to activate his Google account, so he could activate his Google calendar, so we can manage our time better -- more like I can track him down easier :p

Because of personal interest, I waste a lot of time on random silly flash games.  Today, Z-Rox caught my attention because it was linked on some boards I regular. 

Objective of the game is simple, you look at the cross section image provided to you, and you try to figure out what you're actually seeing. It's quite an unique idea which we haven't seen before, you should give it a try sometime. If it gets too difficult, read on for walk through (or a list of answers)...

I tried to install APF (Advanced Policy Firewall) on my Debian 4 server just now, and found out that most tutorials I've seen online doesn't work "out-of-the-box", so I'm writing this one for myself in the future.  Anyone reading this entry and have no idea what APF is, you can read more about it here: http://www.rfxnetworks.com/apf.php

You should be warned; before we continue, if you mess up your configurations, you can and WILL lock yourself out of your server.  Be very careful when you continue with the rest of this memo.  Make sure you have someone who is physically at the server, and can help you regain access to it should you mess up.  Management services are usually expensive, I'm not responsible for any bills incurred as result of this.  You have been warned.

1) Login to your server via SSH, root preferred.

2) Go to a directory where you can download, save, and keep things organized (in my case: ~/installs/ ), and issue these command:

3) Now go into the directory you just extracted, in my case, with this command:

4) We'd need to edit a few files now before we install it:
i) because Debian does not have /etc/rc.d/init.d/..., but just /etc/init.d/ we'd need to remove the rc.d reference from the files.  There are five instances of them in the version I'm working with, may be more in the future:


ii) because there is no /etc/init.d/functions (or /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions for that matter) in Debian, we need to comment that line in apf.init out; simply add a # infront of it would do.

5) Run the install script:

You should eventually see something like these:

6) Configure the firewall by editing /etc/apf/conf.apf
Few things you want to note:

• DEVM = "1" is good for now, but you should change it to DEVM = "0" when you're done all the edits so it doesn't clear the bans every 5 minutes.
• I found that my server did not have iptables configured as a kernel module, so I needed to set SET_MONOKERN="1"
  
• Common TCP Ingress (incoming) ports on cPanel servers are: 21,22,25,53,80,110,143,443,2082,2083, 2086,2087, 2095, 2096,3000_3500
• Common TCP Ingress (incoming) ports on Ensim servers are: 21,22,25,53,80,110,143,443,19638
• Common UDP Ingress (incoming) ports are: 53
• You can choose to filter Egress (outbound) by setting EGF="1", but I prefer to not do it so I don't find myself puzzled when I'm trying to wget / ftp / torrent things.

When you're done the usual Ctrl X, Y will exit and save.

7) Start the firewall:

Other available parameters can be seen here:

8) Check and make sure everything is working...  Test your firewall by banning a friend's IP (or another server you've got access to's IP), and verify that it is actually banned, you can remove the ban with -u afterwards.

9) When you're ready, set the DEVM="1" to DEVM="0"

10) Make it so APF launches automagically when your server starts:

And you should be set!