A number of people have requested that we use Postgresql instead of mysql.  At first I thought it was going to be a walk in the park after all the are both SQL… well I had never setup a dbms other then mysql and well postgresql has a LOT of options and is really diffrent from mysql.  The confusing file is pg_hba.conf mostly because there’s 9 different ways to  authenticate to the db server and you can set that differently for different hosts.  Then there’s the little differences.  If you want to quit you type \q if you want to list the tables you type \d if you want to see the structure of a table you type \d table_name.  Now I get to try and get php to work nicely with postgresql

I fairly quickly came across “Stopping Spambots: A Spambot Trap”. On that page Neil talks about how he made a simple spambot trap that should trap any abusive robot that does not pay attion to robots.txt. so I thought of 2 things to do first keep track of who simple ignores the robots.txt but does download it (kindof hard w/o looking at logs or editing htaccess/httpd.conf) or make a folder that’s in robots.txt as deny for all then frist have a page that warns users that if they click the link on this page they will be banned from this server. log who hits that second link and log their ip agent etc in a db.

For now I think i’m going to simply make the later of the 2. then make a small php script that I can include on all php pages with a simple sql query and if it finds the ip die();. once I get that I also want to add a second part to the php script that get’s included on all pages. I want to look in using dns blacklists for blocking open proxys as they are nothing but truble. The only down side is that it can take some time and I don’t know of any way to mutithread php. So my idea is use a ouside program mostlikely java as it’s my language of choice to do this step and use a simple system call in php.

Dating an Apple Developer

7. Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.

I once overheard Justin having a conversation with a friend of ours. He made mention of a ruby and a pearl. Seeing as how it was almost my birthday I immediately thought I was in for a great gift. Little did I know they were talking about Ruby on Rails and Perl. Later that week we went out for a Sunday afternoon drive. There is a jewelry store just across the street from the local Barnes and Noble. I, of course, thought we were pulling in to buy some bling. 30 minutes and two O’Reilly books later I figured out that my “birthday gift” was actually how-to manuals for programming languages.

The only thing is my 2 favorate distro’s are not really supported. gentoo is not even listed on their site as something they are working one. debian 3.0 is beta but 3.1 came out a while ago and 3.0 is SOOO out of date. my choices are all rpm based something I left behind in the 90’s because they are nothing compaired to dpkg and portage. However I really want to use cpanel soo I deside to bite the bullet and start to install suse 10 when the install failed (because of something don’t know why) kevin told me that suse 10 is not supported. I got a little pissed but went fine and desided that getting mad would not help me get any where fast so I take one from the team and bendover while I start to download the 4 cd’s for fredora core 4 :-/ when the install failed I started to louse my cool but went fine test the cd for errors it said the md5 didn’t match so I checked the sha-1 of the iso it was fine burned another copy same thing bad md5 at this point my rage was getting high and my stack of cd-r’s was shrinking. At this point I tested the last thing centos. It’s red hat enterprise but free it also has the same installer as fedora. but you know what I get the same error :-(. at that poing all I wanted to do was go home and so I did but that’s when I rembered that it’s a blizzard out there :-(.

After doing this 2 questions have come to mind. The frist one being what’s stoping google from telling the world about who they use for gmail? I don’t get why Sophos would have them keep quiet about this as it would be great advertiseing. the second thing is does antivirus give users a false sence of security? a number of the files that I tested later on were not deteded by quite a number of venders. It seems to me that noobs think that if their antivirus is up to date and says it’s working just fine that they are invincible, but this is never the case. As long as we rely on virus definations we are allways vulnerable.

update: I put some closer to raw resaults at gmail.xls and for the open office users out there gmail.ods