Turns out, it is pretty easy and straight-forward. From wherever you are in a Terminal window, simply enter

open .

to create a Finder window for your current location, as you see in the following screenshot:

The Mac OS X open command also works using files as a parameter:

open mymovie.avi

will open your favorite OS X movie-playing application (in my case: VLC) to play mymovie.avi.

The article 'How to open a Finder window from the Mac OS X Terminal' was posted on 2011/06/05 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2011 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

Jan 24 13:13:26 sshd[14029]: Invalid user r00t from 85.25.130.167
Jan 24 14:19:35 sshd[14029]: Invalid user r00t from 85.25.130.167
Jan 24 15:27:09 sshd[14029]: Invalid user r00t from 85.25.130.167
[…]

Wenn er es schnell genug hintereinander probiert, dann erwischt ihn fail2ban. Ansonsten darf er sich zu seinem Kollegen von serverloft.eu gesellen, den ich vor ein paar Tagen ebenfalls schon geerdet habe:

# iptables -A INPUT -s 85.25.130.167/32 -j DROP

Bye, bye.

The article 'Skript-Kiddies mal wieder…' was posted on 2011/02/01 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2011 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade && aptitude clean

So, you’re performing the same procedure on each host: logging in, executing aptitude, logging out… But WAIT! There’s Cluster SSH for you.

The idea is simple: type in a command into one console and multiplex that input to several remote, i.e., SSH sessions.

For Mac OS X, csshX (also available as homebrew formula) comes in handy as it provides that multiplexing support for Terminal.app.

Open a console in Terminal.app and type in

csshX user1@host1 user2@host2 user3@host3 …

(providing appropriate user@host combinations for your needs, of course).

Then, you enter your commands, e.g., aptitude update into the red control console. As you can see in the screenshot, the keystrokes are the sent to all open shells. Updating a bunch of servers became… a piece of cake. Hooray for the lazy admin!

The article 'Cluster SSH' was posted on 2011/01/16 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2011 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

12.30 Uhr
Begrüßung und Einführung ins Thema
Prof. Walter Kriha, Studiengang Medieninformatik der HdM

12.45 Uhr
Wikimedia – Ausmessen des LAMP Stacks mit Werkzeugen,
Studierende des Master-Studiengangs Computer Science and Media der HdM

13.30 Uhr
Externes Monitoring
Heiko Specht, Account Manager Gomez Deutschland

14.45 Uhr
Wer langsam ist wird verlassen – Performance großer Websites, ein Blick hinter die Kulissen von XING
Dr. Johannes Mainusch, Vice President Operations XING

16.00 Uhr
Client-side Optimizations
Jakob Schröter, Master-Studiengangs Computer Science and Media der HdM

16.30 Uhr
Skalierbarkeit, Datenschutz und Geschichte von StudiVZ – Technik und Diskussion
Dennis Bemmann, StudiVZ Gründer

Die Videos der Vorträge wird es später auch auf der HDM-Webseite (Medieninformatik) zum Downloaden geben.

Update: Der Cruiser hat ein paar Details mitgeschrieben.

Update 2: Die Aufzeichnungen sind online und auf der Seite Thementage des Studiengangs Medieninformatik zu finden.

The article 'HDM Stuttgart: Die Langsamen werden verlassen' was posted on 2010/01/22 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2010 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

• WP Super Cache — Serves a cached HTML version of WordPress pages instead of serving each page as PHP output for every single request. This speeds up loading time and reduces the web server load. A lot!
• WPtouch — When a user is using a mobile device, e.g., an iPhone, iPod touch, Android phone etc., they will see a slightly different layout of this blog, particularly optimized for small screen sizes.

lighttpd does not understand Apache’s RewriteRules that are used for permalinks in WordPress. Therefore, you’ll have to come up with your own set of rewrite rules. Based on the rewrite.lua script initially written by Giovanni Intini, I have come up with a slightly modified version that takes the presence of the WPtouch plugin into account.

To install this script, perform the following steps:

1. Download the latest version of the rewrite.lua script from my github project site.
2. Place rewrite.lua in the root directory of your WordPress installation, i.e., the same directory where you find the WordPress PHP files such as wp-config.php.
3. Update your lighttpd config file for the host running WordPress and include this command:
   magnet.attract-physical-path-to = ( server.document-root + "/rewrite.lua" )
4. Make sure the Mobile device support option of the WP Super Cache plugin is enabled and the Rejected User Agents list is up-to-date. You’ll find those options in the Settings -> WP Super Cache menu of WordPress once WP Super Cache has been activated.

The lighttpd host configuration should now look somewhat similar to this:

$HTTP["host"] == "myblog.com" {
server.document-root = “/srv/www/myblog/wordpress”
accesslog.filename = “/var/log/lighttpd/myblog/access.log"
magnet.attract-physical-path-to = ( server.document-root + “/rewrite.lua” )
}

Restart lighttpd to put the changes in place. Check your error log for any strange entries. Check the WP Super Cache settings of your blog and try to view it from a mobile device or an iPhone simulator, e.g., iPhoney.

Let me know if you’d like to further improve the rewrite.lua code. Just go ahead, clone it from the github repository and start working on it! If you’re interested in writing your own LUA code check out the Programming in Lua book or the Programming in LUA website.

The article 'WordPress on lighttpd: Rewrite rules with WP Super Cache and WPtouch' was posted on 2009/11/29 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2009 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

Moment… “Jean Pierre Wenzel aus Grub”? WTF?

Ein bisschen Surfen im Google Cache brachte dann das hier zum Vorschein:

Da möchte Partnerschaft.de wohl die eigene Link-Farm mit mehr Content füllen… Schade nur, dass das thematisch mal überhaupt gar nicht passt — es sei denn, wir ziehen alle schnell um oder gehen Partnerschaften mit unserem Boot-Loader ein…

P.S. Da die Frage gleich aufkam: Die hinreichende Schöpfungshöhe ist bei Tweets wohl nicht erreicht, daher sieht die urheberrechtliche Handhabe eher mau aus, sollte jemand sich durch die Verwendung seiner Tweets auf den Schlips getreten fühlen.

The article 'Partnerschaft.de grast sinnfrei Twitter-Feeds ab' was posted on 2009/11/20 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2009 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

The only Linux machine I could access at that time was a virtual machine running CentOS 5.4, but it served its purpose very well.

Before you can build your own freetz image in CentOS, you’ll need to install the following RPM packages (if they are not already present on your machine) using yum (as root user):

yum install subversion gcc gcc-c++ binutils autoconf automake libtool make bzip2 ncurses-devel zlib-devel flex bison patch texinfo dos2unix unix2dos gettext expat pkgconfig perl ruby gawk python libusb-devel unzip

Now you can get the current freetz sources (see their download website for more details) and start building your own Fritz!Box image.

The article 'Build freetz on CentOS' was posted on 2009/11/19 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2009 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/scd0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
Manchmal liefert das Syslog wertvolle Informationen – versuchen
Sie dmesg | tail oder so

(Quelle: mount, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS)

Geholfen hat’s leider nichts, scheinbar wird das Dateisystem auf der verwendeten DVD-RAM nicht korrekt erzeugt. mkudffs läuft zwar ohne Fehler durch, aber das Dateisystem kann ich dann trotzdem nicht einhängen. Vermutlich ist dann doch einfach die Scheibe defekt. Da es sich um ein off-site System handelt, kann ich aber leider nicht mal eben nachschauen. Das muss dann wohl bis morgen warten.

The article 'Fehlermeldungen mit Humor' was posted on 2009/04/26 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2009 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

Today, we got two new records in our internal spammer high score:

Banned services with Fail2Ban:                          Bans:Unbans
Exim4:                                                  [243:241]
202.109.98.37 (chipolbrok.com.cn)                       9:10
122.55.96.50 (122.55.96.50.pldt.net)                    7:8

Those two hosts in China and the Phillipines have been behaving most rowdily so far.

And, in addition, I cannot verify that the spam situation improved after one of the major botnet control hosters was taken down. Quite the contrary. We saw a small decrease for a few days but the average number of spam/malware per day that someone is trying to load off at our server has more than doubled compared to the situation two, three weeks ago.

The article 'New spam record' was posted on 2008/11/18 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2008 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.

This might be great if you want to run their latest software, but if for some reason you need a specific older version, you’re gonna be quite upset, e.g., you want Flash on a legacy operating system such as Windows 98/ME, Mac OS X < 10.4, or older Linux/UNIX OSes.

In my case, there is a web site that has been programmed in such a bad way that it is simply broken and unusuable with the latest version of Flash Player 10. I don’t use the service of that website on a daily basis, but I wanted to install Flash Player 9 on top of a Windows installation in a VM.

You can find the installation files for the legacy Flash Player 9 download on Adobe’s TechNote site. Please keep in mind that Adobe may (and surely will) stop releasing any [security] updates for those old versions of Flash.

Of course–after I eventually found the download link and installed the old Flash version–I remembered having a moldy Ubuntu Live DVD somewhere in my drawer… And I bet it has Flash Player 8 or 9 installed…

The article 'Still looking for Adobe Flash Player 9? It’s hard to find.' was posted on 2008/11/08 to the $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog weblog.
© 2008 by Jean Pierre Wenzel. All rights reserved.