Zoë Keating is an cellist, I would say along the lines of Apocalyptica but more classical, softer and easier to listen to when trying to work. I find her music very soothing and it lets me clear my mind to work out problems. I stumbled on her music from someone’s Twitter posting, after listening to a video Wired made of her playing I went looking on Amazon MP3 to see what I could find.

For a project I needed to work out a way to make thumbnails/screenshots of HTML files for some Java code I was working on. From my research, I found a nice project called the The Flying Saucer Project which has an XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 renderer which works for what I needed for my project. Taking the HTML files and using JTidy to make them in to XHTML the renderer could output an image file for me.

A bit ago at work I was asked to help a customer with a solution for using the Lyris ListManager’s SOAP API with just HTTP Post calls. They just needed to see some sample code that they could use to re-write. SOAP is XML based, you send and get back XML. Just using HTTP Post you need to format the XML you are sending and then parse out the information you get back from the SOAP server.

I haven’t posted in sometime due to being so busy with a mix of work and getting things ready for my wedding. Truthfully, by the time I sit down in front of my own computer, I just want to veg out and watch some TV shows before heading to bed. As soon as I have some free time I’ll start writing some more tech based postings. You may see some photos pop up from New Zealand and Australia if I take any that I find good!

From my other posting “Stopping SSH Brute Force attacks with PF on FreeBSD” I’ve been getting a good number of hits from people searching on how to stop SSH Brute Force attacks but on Linux and not FreeBSD, so I kind of feel the need to make a posting on this for the linux people. I also just setup a Fedora 13 server on Rackspace’s Cloud and I wanted to ensure I could stop SSH Brute Force attacks.

From my last posting about ZFS “Fun with ZFS send and receive” we see that the ZFS commands are really easy to use but very powerful, because of this I find it easy to write scripts to do the things I need. Here is some code that I use for snapshots, it’s written in python but can be ported to anything as it’s taking command line output and parsing info for what it needs.

Not sure if ’entitize’ is the right term but it’s what people at my old job would call the process of taking high level characters and replacing them with the unicode. For example, € would be replaced with €. This was needed with some inhouse applications or dealing with output to HTML/XML to ensure it would show the right character to the users. Well, I needed to do this awhile ago and I looked up some old Python code that I had done before and re-wrote it in Groovy.

For the people who haven’t had the opportunity to play around with ZFS, it’s a powerful filesystem which lets you easily manage storage with very simple commands. Right now you can use ZFS within FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and Solaris and there are also ports for Linux, MacOS and NetBSD but they still in the works and something I wouldn’t use in production. For this posting we will be looking at some ways you can use zfs send and zfs receive command and how they can help you manage your storage along with combining them with other Unix tools.

I would never call myself an expert of music. I know very little of what it takes to make a song let alone what it takes to make an album. But I do know what I like and I do enjoy sharing my thoughts on new bands that I have discovered. When at work coding along, I like to listen to things that have little to no vocals or something where the beats are out doing the vocals.

Spam sucks and administrating a forum that is phpbb3 based you find there are a lot of bots that sign up and try to post spam. It’s a pain to go through by hand and remove them all due to some of them being really clever and looking like real people. This is where a great site like stopforumspam.com comes in to play. You are able to search users based on email, username and IP to check to see if they have been reported as a spammer before.