Paul's Time Sink

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SpamAssassin DoS vulnerability fixed

Paul Westbrook | 18 June, 2005 20:25

I just saw this announcement. It looks like there was a DoS vulnerability in SpamAssassin 3.0.1-3.0.3. This has been fixed in SpamAssassin 3.0.4

Yet another great dialog

Paul Westbrook | 17 June, 2005 13:45

This one is from Apple's Backup

IP addressable devices

Paul Westbrook | 17 June, 2005 13:41

I don't know what is it about them, but I like the concept of ip addressable devices. The June 2005 issue of Sound & Vision, has an interesting article on these devices. It actually mentions some great sounding devices.

NetStreams has IP-Based audio streaming technology. This allows you to have an audio system that has unlimited amount of zones. In fact, Polk has a speaker line that uses NetStreams' technology. Their LCi-p line will play the streams that are broadcast in the NetStreams format. The speakers also include a DSP to make music sound better for their location. These speakers will not be inexpensive. The will run for $2000 - $3500 per pair.

I really like the concept of ip addressable devices for mainly two reasons:

Allow data to be shared among the different devices.
Get more use out of my broadband connection.

(More)

MyBlogLog

Paul Westbrook | 16 June, 2005 11:48

MyBlogLog is an interesting take on a web stats tracker. Instead of tracking how many people look at pages in your web site, it tracks the links that people go to when they leave your web site.

It is a free service, and it looks interesting to me.

hijacking smtp traffic

Paul Westbrook | 16 June, 2005 11:38

This week, I have been using the free WiFi service offered by the hotel I have been staying at. I noticed that they do something that T-Mobile does. Any time that you attempt to send mail, they redirect that connection to their server. Since I have my mail client configured to use authentication, I get a message stating that the server does not allow authentication.

If I was not setup to authenticate my outgoing mail, it would silently go to their servers. I have a few problems with this:

They didn't inform me that they were going to do this.
They could potentially store my message on their server
They could also get my username, password and mail server that I use for sending mail. So now someone could send spam using my authentication information.

I understand their desire to not allow spam to be sent through their access point, but I think that a better solution would be to block all access to this port. If they were to do this, people would be required to use a webmail service, smtps (smtp over ssl), or tunneling though ssh or vpn.

Witch

Paul Westbrook | 15 June, 2005 16:53

I saw Witch mentioned in the June 2005 issue of MacWorld. This is a cool little program, that lets you switch to any window that is open, even if it is minimized in the Dock. It is very similar to Exposé, but it lets you use your keyboard to select the window that you want.

Definition of "Data Port"

Paul Westbrook | 14 June, 2005 20:03

I am out of town on business this week, and when I looked at the description of the Millennium Harvest House Boulder hotel. In the description of the room it said that they have data ports. What they don't clarify is that their data ports are phone jacks. It has been such a long time since I had to use dial-up.

To be fair, the hotel does have an 802.11b network in the lobby, that is available for free.

New version of Shrook

Paul Westbrook | 14 June, 2005 19:32

A new version of Shrook was just released. This version adds the ability to have the Genre and/or the Album of the tracks as they are added to iTunes. This means that it will not be necessary to use any of the AppleScripts that I was attempting to write.

Google not crawling urls

Paul Westbrook | 12 June, 2005 23:49

In the beginning of May, I wrote about how I bought a new smoke alarm, and the problems that I had with it. Shortly after that, Google change the ads in my AdSense section to be related to smoke alarms, which I think is appropriate. But then after I posted a number of other articles, that post was no longer visible on the home page, but the ads for the smoke alarms still are visible.

It appears that Google is not crawling all of the possible urls for determining which ads should be shown. For example, http://www.paulstimesink.com still shows the smoke alarm ads, while http://www.paulstimesink.com/index.php?blogId=2 (which is a link to the same page) does not.

Periodically, after I see an access to one of these pages, I see an access from a Google server with the http client string "Mediapartners-Google/2.1", but only from http://www.paulstimesink.com/index.php?blogId=2 and not http://www.paulstimesink.com/. It seems that they changed something in the past month.

802.11 baby monitor

Paul Westbrook | 12 June, 2005 14:19

Our next door neighbors just had a baby. Since they brought him home, we have been noticing interference on our baby monitor. We either here static or sound from their baby monitor transmitter. It seems that they have either the same model baby monitor, or one that transmits over the same frequencies.

It got me thinking, that we have a relatively robust wireless signals going around our house. Our 802.11g network is very robust, even though there are several other networks nearby. Since 802.11 chips are pretty cheap, it would be great if someone would come out with baby monitors that use 802.11 as the transmission protocol. All that it would have to do is broadcast the audio stream on the subnet.
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Climatouch C3

Paul Westbrook | 11 June, 2005 19:47

One of my friends just bought one of these thermostats, and they look very cool. The Climatouch C3 is a touch-screen thermostat, that is supposed to work with any heating an cooling system. It looks like it has some interesting features that allow you to same money.

One cool thing that this does is allows you to connect a remote sensor, so you can see outside temperature. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you can use can use it to monitor the indoor temperature of a different room. Ideally you would be able to configure it so that the air conditioner would come on if either the upstairs or downstairs gets warmer than a certain temperature.

AppleScript frustrations (cont.)

Paul Westbrook | 09 June, 2005 08:05

Since the code that I wanted to write to determine if a track has been added to iTunes was not working, this is the code that I have found that works the best. It seems that the only way to determine if a track is already added to iTunes is to add it, and then if iTunes throws an exception, then the track was already added.

tell application "iTunes"
with timeout of 300 seconds
-- The easiest way to figure out if this track is already in the library is to
-- add it. If the number of tracks increases, then the track was not in there
--
-- Ideally this would be able to call something like:
-- (exists (get some track of library playlist 1 whose location is theFile))
set this_track to {}
set fAddedFile to false
set gotException to false
try
set initialCount to get count of every file track of library playlist 1
set this_track to (add theFile)
set countAfter to get count of every file track of library playlist 1
if countAfter > initialCount then
set fAddedFile to true
end if
on error
-- This is where we catch the error if the track has already been added to the library:
end try
end timeout
end tell

It is pretty bad that iTune's AppleScript dictionary is not better.

Technorati Tags: AppleScript

Reprogramming X10 light switch

Paul Westbrook | 06 June, 2005 21:34

For some reason, our KeypadLinc X-10 light switch got reset to the default settings, so I decided to reprogram it with some buttons that would be easier to use. Since it has 6 buttons on it, and I only need to control 3 lights, I decided to configure it so that each light would have two buttons to control it, one to dim and one to brighten.

This works fine for the light that is directly connected to the switch, but it doesn't work as I expect for the remote lights. I wanted to program the buttons so that pressing and holding the buttons would continue to send the dim/brighten commands. But it looks like for remote lights, if you use the non-toggle mode to send a bright or dim, the commands do not repeat.
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AppleScript frustrations

Paul Westbrook | 06 June, 2005 21:27

I spent a lot of time this past weekend trying to improve the AppleScript that I mentioned before. I want to uses this script to automatically move all tracks that were added to iTunes, from Shrook, into a single playlist.

Since Shrook downloads all of the podcast tracks to ~/Library/Application Support/Shrook2/Attachments, all that would been needed to is to find all of the tracks in the iTunes library that are in that directory, and then make sure they were in the playlist.

The AppleScript that I wrote before does this job, but it takes a long time if the iTunes Library has a lot of tracks, as it had to iterate over each of them. So I wanted too change the script to iterate over the files that Shrook had downloaded, and then check each one to see if it has been added.

This script sample should work:

tell application "iTunes"

if (exists (get some file track of library playlist 1 whose location is theFile)) then

set this_track to (get some file track of library playlist 1 whose location is (theFile as alias))
set dbid to this_track's database ID
if not (exists (some track of playlist podcastPlaylist whose database ID is dbid)) then

duplicate this_track to playlist podcastPlaylist

end if

end tell

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Applescript to create Shrook podcast playlist

Paul Westbrook | 02 June, 2005 21:51

I have been getting frustrated that the podcasts that were being put into iTunes from Shrook were not being put into a single playlist. So I have been looking for some solutions. I first tried to create a smart playlist, but you can not create rules based upon the location of the files.

I have been working on an AppleScript that would automatically copy the tracks from Shrook into a playlist. Below is what I have come up with so far.

The problem with this implementation is that it iterates over every item in the iTunes Library, so it takes a long time. I am going to change it so it only iterates over the files that have been downloaded by Shrook

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Paul's Time Sink

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SpamAssassin DoS vulnerability fixed

Yet another great dialog

IP addressable devices

MyBlogLog

hijacking smtp traffic

Witch

Definition of "Data Port"

New version of Shrook

Google not crawling urls

802.11 baby monitor

Climatouch C3

AppleScript frustrations (cont.)

Reprogramming X10 light switch

AppleScript frustrations

Applescript to create Shrook podcast playlist

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