The developer of NmapFE for OS X hasn’t made a release since late 2004 and consequently is using an outdated version of Nmap. Outdated to the point it doesn’t work:

sendto in send_ip_packet: sendto(5, packet, 28, 0, 127.0.0.1, 16) => Invalid argument Sleeping 60 seconds then retrying

I’ve created an Intel build from CVS using nmap 4.20, which seems to work for me. It is available for download here.

Update: Actually, this doesn’t work very well. I’ll compile something soon that does.

When I attempted to compile IMAPProxy on Linux 2.6.18 with GCC 4.1.1, I received this error:

src/imapcommon.c: In function 'Get_Server_conn': src/imapcommon.c:380: error: 'MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH' undeclared (first use in this function)

The post by Jakob Hirsch on the IMAPProxy mailing list provided the answer:

Problem is that md5.h is not longer included by evp.h (which is included by src/imapcommon.c), so MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH is not defined. “#include ” in src/imapcommon.c fixed it for me.

If you ever use Firefox on OS X to open a document in a helper application (think downloading a PDF to read it directly in Preview using the “Open with…” dialog), I’m sure you get as annoyed as I do when Firefox saves this to your Desktop and not the download directory you specified in preferences.

In fact, Firefox downloads these files to wherever you set Safari to save downloads. You can fix the above behavior by going to the Preferences pane in Safari and changing the download directory there.

Thanks to Adam Kalsey for the tip: http://kalsey.com/2006/02/temporary_files_in_firefox_on_osx/

I’m sad to say it, but I didn’t know about ssh_config until last week. Sometimes you think you’re not that bad at what you do, but then there’s just something that makes you realize you don’t know as much as you think.

A long time ago, I obtained a copy of wireless hacks from a talk that was given on campus. Most of it were things I’d already thought of, the rest uninteresting. A good book for anyone who doesn’t know anything about using wireless networking to their advantage. There was mention of using bash shortcuts to ssh into remote machines easily.

So, instead of typing ssh -X -Y -A ekg2002@canberra.cc.columbia.edu each time I wanted to remotely log into a Columbia machine, I put that exact line into a executable file somewhere in my path. That way, I could just type $ canberra at my prompt and be logged in.

The problem with this scheme is that I can’t easily, say, scp to the same machine. I always found this to be annoying.

Then I found ssh_config. It allows you to define host shortcuts in a single file including any ssh options. man ssh_config gives lots of information on it. So, to replicate the above ssh command, I add this to ~/.ssh/config: Host canberra HostName ekg2002@canberra.cc.columbia.edu User ekg2002 ForwardAgent yes ForwardX11 yes ForwardX11Trusted yes

I can do this for all machines to which I ssh regularly. This is beneficial for two reasons: I can ssh and scp equally easily and I can manage this file centrally (and install it on all of my hosts). The downside is that I have four more characters to type to connect to a given host (which can be reduced to two through aliasing).

I just fixed a random problem with our MythTV box. The backend crashed for some reason, so we had to power cycle the computer. Upon starting mythbackend up, there was an error message about a failed schema update.

The fix was to manually decrement the DBSchemaVer setting:

mysql> update settings set data=data-1 where value='DBSchemaVer';

And reload the backend.

This is an email that I send to a mailing list of my friends in response to an article about Jimmy Wales’s initiative to create a Wikipedia-like search engine.

While this is a fine idea, Jimmy Wales has to figure out how to make it exactly unlike Wikipedia — the wild wild west of information resources. If he does that, he has a chance. Could you imagine what Google would be like if we had every random person tweaking each constant and equation of Google’s Page Rank algorithm?

He also makes no mention of infrastructure. A competitive search engine over the entire web requires vast amount of resources; not infeasible, but certainly impossible for the likes of you and me. Servers, disk space, network, operators — you can’t get by anymore with five employees and a few dozen servers. I’ll be interested to see how he intends to pull this off. Start small, obviously, but growth is a problem in today’s exploding web.

He has more of a chance if he specifically pitches it to academic database researchers who need substance for their PhD research. There are some really smart people out there who need to prove themselves before they get snatched up by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

The article makes a point that I believe is fairly true: people will not switch search engines until the current one fails them. How often do you randomly go to Yahoo! or live.com to see if those search engines are better than Google? I’d bet not often.

If Tim Berners-Lee’s “semantic web” idea comes through, in several years, this project will be much easier. People have asked me, “What will topple Google?” And the answer is a level playing field. Despite the myth, a giant won’t be toppled by a David, like Jimmy Wales proposes, but will be toppled by a changing landscape. The promise of the semantic web is easy access to information. Google will then need to compete on the other factors that Jimmy Wales mentions in that article.

At the very least, Jimmy Wales is spearheading a discussion on how we use the web — and all of information — of the future. Whether his project succeeds or fails, I hope he at least motivates a few people to look at how the web can be, different from how the web is today.

Disagreement welcome, of course, Eric

Some developers really want their users to have the cutting edge:

Society is in strange point in time. Why should this be news?

Hot. (Addison Montgomery on Grey’s Anatomy):

One more. This should be a reason why Dreamhost is the mostest awesomest hoster ever: