I recently discovered CAcert.org, a group that will give free certifactes not only for email (like Thawte) but also for servers! It’s even possible to get a code signing certificate and have them sign your PGP key. The downside is that there really aren’t any major browsers that have their root certificate listed as trusted by default. There are a few linux distributions and a couple of smaller browsers, but nothing mainstream. Even still, it does provide some value over doing everything self signed because anybody who’s ever added the cacert root certificate to their browser’s store will automatically be able to see that my certificate is valid. This would not be the case if my certificate was simply self-signed. So, because it’s free (well, other than the notery fees and postage) I went ahead and used the Trusted Third Party method of getting assured. I’m now the second listed assurer in the state of Michigan! At some point I need to set up a page with my public keys on it in addition to information about meetings for getting other people assured (and doing PGP key signing).
Fedora Core 4 is here at last
I finally figured out how to get Fedora Core 4 to install on my machine. When I last posted on this topic, I thought the problem was that Anaconda didn’t like my software mirroring. As it turns out, the problem was the fact that I had two swap partitions. Once I removed one of the swap partitions (both physically and via /etc/fstab), Fedora Core sucessfully installed on my machine. I updated my bug at RedHat with this new information. The only hitch I’ve noticed so far is that Cyrus didn’t want to start because of database incompatibilities. The solution I ended up using, which was one of the ones I found on FedoraForum, was simply deleting the database files. Other than that, it seems to be working fine.
Made the Switch
The SPAM finally got to me. I don’t know if WordPress will be any better at handling SPAM or not, but I can dream :). The design is still very much off the shelf, so I’ll have to play with that in the months to come and, of course, I still have to learn about how to use this software. But I’m hoping that it will be much better than MoveableType was. In my brief playing while evaluating and setting it up, I think I like it better. MoveableType 3.0 may have been much better, but I didn’t wanna have to pay for it.
So, if you’re curious, read on to find out how I set it up. It really was quite simple. I first downloaded and installed WordPress using their 5 minute install guide. After that, I followed the instructions for importing from MoveableType. The most difficult part was making sure my permalinks from MovableType (like the archives) still worked. To do that, I created an .htaccess file to leaverage mod_rewrite. It looks like this:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^archives/0*(\d+).html /~jake/blog/index.php?p=$1 RewriteRule index.rdf /~jake/blog/index.php?feed=rdf RewriteRule index.xml /~jake/blog/index.php?feed=rss2
So, we’ll have to see how well this really works for me, but at this point I’d have to say that I’ve already committed to it.
Fedora Core 4… Not yet :(
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I have been unable to try out Fedora Core 4. I have downloaded it and successfully made the install disks and I can boot off disk one with no problem. The problem arises when I select which installation to upgrade. My setup isn’t entirely normal. I have two 120GB disks running off an ATA100 controller (so they are NOT hda and hdb) that are mirrored using software mirroring. So my root device is /dev/md0. That shows up as an option and has Fedora Core 3 detected on it, but when I click next, I get a dialog that looks similar to:
+-----------------------------------------------------+ | Duplicate Labels | +-----------------------------------------------------+ | | | (*) Multiple devices on your system are labelled | | | | [ Reboot ] | +-----------------------------------------------------+
In the above ASCII art, (*) represents a symbol that looks like a critical fail icon.
What really confuses me about this dialog is that it doesn’t tell me what label is duplicated. I’m guessing this is some kind of bug because I have two physical disks that are identical in every way, but I’m not sure. I open bug 160622 on Redhat’s Bugzilla, but it got closed telling me that my RAID disks can not be labelled and suggesting that I remove the label. As far as I can tell, I have no labels of any sort, so I think I’m gonna have to reopen this bug. I’ve been poking around on the ‘net trying to find a solution, but having no luck. So for the time being, I’m unable to use Fedora Core 4… unless, of course, I install it on another machine.
UPDATE: 29-Sep-2005 – It’s installed and working!
MichiganGasPrices.com
A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon GasBuddy.com, a site with a bunch of links to other sites that use the same software to track gas prices nationwide. When I clicked on the link for Michigan, I saw listings for Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Detroit but pretty much overlooked the link to MichiganGasPrices.com at the top. I was disappointed that there was no Muskegon listing and actually emailed GasBuddy.com to ask about it. They, very kindly, sent me back a link to the Muskegon section of MichiganGasPrices.com. So now I can track area gas prices, assuming that people in the area help keep it updated… which at least some people do, seeing how there are prices listed. FWIW, my user ID on that site is StarDestroyer.
I’m a clonetrooper?
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You scored as Clone Trooper.
Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you? |
More on Sprint Ringtones
After making my previous post about Sprint ringtones, I made a ringtone for my fiancée from a song that she really liked. She had previously said that she was really looking forward to it becoming available and would use it as her ring as soon as it was. She was really appreaciative, but after a couple weeks pointed out that it didn’t sound as good as the other ringtones on her phone. I thought that was weird, because I had listened to that ringtone and some of the ones I had downloaded from Sprint’s site on my phone and they all sounded about the same to me. My fiancée, being a Sprint employee, has a fancier phone than I do, so I listened to a couple of the other ringtones on her phone, and she was right… the one I made for her just didn’t sound as good. So I went back and did a little more research and discovered that the Sanyo MM 7400 supports MP4 ringtones, provided they have the M4A extention. So, I had to find a way to convert my WAV file into an MP4 file. For that purpose, I used dBpowerAMP. So to make a long story short, she was really happy that I was able to produce a ringtone that sounds just as good as the ones she gets from the Sprint site and was just what she wanted.
Update 8-Feb-2006: Thanks to Tony, we now know how to make ringtones for free! (Hint: Use walmart.com as step 1).
She Said Yes!!
Typically, I try not to post too much in my blog that would just be considered “personal news,” but in this case I just can’t resist. Yesterday I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she said yes. So now instead of a girlfriend, I have a fiancee!
Create Your Own Sprint Ringtones
For the past couple of weeks now I’ve been looking off and on about how to make my own ringtones for my Sprint PCS phone. I’ve managed to find some resources that said my Sanyo PM-8200 phone will support polyphonic ringtones. These are essentially just MIDI files and thus can’t do anything more than notation. Nice, but they can hardly compare with the ringtones that are available for $2.50 apiece from Sprint’s site that expire in 90 days. I wanted something of that quality, but without the price or the expiration. So I kept looking. What I discovered was that those fancy rigntones were in a QCP file format. I also discovered a simple command line application, PureVoice that can convert a WAV file into QCP format. Now the only thing I had left to discover was how to get that QCP file to my phone. In looking for that, I discovered a Free Mobile Phone Uploader site that will either send a text message with a link to download your file or give you a Jump Code to allow you to download it.
So now I can have any sound I want in the entire world as a ringtone. Using a little creativity, that can include clips from songs that I downloaded from iTunes for $.99. The basic steps to do that are:
- Purchase the song from iTunes.
- Convert that file to MP3 format. You can either burn it to a CD then rip it, or use JHymn.
- Convert the file to WAV, shorten it to 30 seconds or less. I used Audacity for that task.
- Reduce the sound quality to be PCM, mono, 8 kHz, 16-bit. I was unable to figure out how to do that in Audacity, so I simply used the sound recorder app that comes with Windows.
- Use PureVoice Converter to convert the WAV file to a QCP file (drag the WAV file onto pvconv.exe).
- Upload the QCP file to the Mobile Phone Uploader.
- Download it from that site to your phone and assign it like you would any other ringtone.
Update 25-May-2005: Newer phones (like the Sanyo’s that start with “MM”) can use a different, and better sounding, format.
Update 8-Feb-2006: Thanks to Tony, we now know how to make ringtones for free! (Hint: Use walmart.com as step 1).
Are Spammers Retarded?
It seems that the average spammer must have the IQ of a 1st grader. Nevermind the fact that they constantly are trying to get around people’s spam filters in email, an action that only serves to upset those from whom they want money, I’m not even gonna go there right now. What’s got me upset is the constant fact that they keep hitting me with trackback spam. I never used to get that. I used to get my share of comment spam, but every since I installed the SCode plugin, I’ve been hit with a constant deluge of trackback spams. My guess is that their script noticed the error message when they tried to post a comment spam and switched over to trackback instead. What’s really kinda strange, however, is that when I just had comments off, that didn’t happen. It was only after I took the step of installing SCode and turning old comments back on that this happened. Now, the idiocy comes in because I also have the Bayesian filtering plugin installed and it marks all these trackback pings as spam as soon as they’re posted (In fact, it has a tendency to mark things as spam even when their not… probably because my spam corpus is so much larger than my non-spam). Not one single time has one of these trackback spams actually appeared visible on my site. Not once. You’d think they’d kinda want that to happen in order for it to even be worth their time in constantly spamming me. But what do I know, I’m just a lowly consumer.