I always seem to forget how to fade the edge of an image in the gimp… so here’s a note-to-self:

select the area to preserve; IF YOU WANT THE EDGE TO FADEOUT, SELECT A BOX JUST INSIDE THE ENTIRE IMAGE; YOU CAN ALSO USE THE MAGIC WAND TO SELECT AN AREA, AND SHRINK AND GROW AS NEEDED
SELECT->FEATHER, GIVE IT ABOUT 5 PIXELS; THIS APPEARS TO DO NOTHING BUT PUT A BIT OF ROUNDED CORNERS ON YOUR SELECTION, WEIRD EH?
NOW, INVERT THE SELECTION, AND HIT DELETE – vioala, GIMP FADES OUTWARD. YEs, IT’s weird!

soRRY ABOUT THE caps, IT’S HONESTLY EXACTLY how the letters are spewing out on my macbOok prO, Now That i”ve Mananged to get it humming and then spill a full glass of water on it. AWESOmENEsS. AND that”s With another Keyboard attacheD. aPPARENTLY THE MAIN KEyboard is flicking THe shift KEy on aND OFF LIKE A CHRISTmAS TrEE. AND IT’S not EVen ThaNKSGIving Yet.

I’ve put off upgrading my XBMC media center forever, as it has Just Worked for years, and I was using an old hw raid box that newer kernels didn’t like.

Then a drive in my raid went bad, and I realized I’d better upgrade or die. I started by copying the system to a second drive and trying to reboot off of that. But the root was ext3 and the second drive was ext4 and it wasn’t going to work without some tweaking, which is hard on an oooold system. So it was “put up or shut up” time…

Here are the adventures of me brutalizing my old gentoo box into upgrading (let’s see you do THAT with any other three-year-old distro)… (continued…)

A new release of Hang The DJ (v 0.8.2) is available on Sourceforge.

Features:

• mobile client can stream your collection to you on all mobile platforms
• desktop client UI makes it easy to add and remove new DJs and get your songs rated fast
• multiple user and multiple server support makes sharing easy

Send me an email if you want help trying it out.

I get spammers slamming my little web sites all the time. A couple of my pages seem to have gotten added to some bot list, and there is no end of attempts to add comments to my WordPress blogs and tickets to my trac issue tracker. There are lots of ways to fight this, and both WordPress and trac have pretty decent built-in tools. One apache-based tool I recently added is mod_evasive, and it is so simple and elegant there’s really no reason not to use it. It’s small and appears to use an in-memory hash table for live state tracking so it shouldn’t slow things down much. All it does is look for rapid access from the same IP address, and put a temporary block on that address for a short time period. So as not to interfere with access by real people, it only takes action against obvious abuse. Here’s my configuration, with notes:

# MDM i thought about changing these to block 5 ticket requests in 60 seconds
# BUT THAT'S TOO MUCH for any other part of my websites
# This really isn't going to solve the trac problem... but i'll leave it for DOS attacks
# I did make it a little tighter:
# lowered page count from 5 to 3 (3 page requests within 1 second)
# upped site count from 100 to 50, interval from 2 to 10 (50 site requests in 10 seconds)
# MDM The only thing getting blocked is me, prolly due to HangTheDJ pings, doh
# Forget this, set it back high again.  It's ONLY going to stop true DDOS attacks.
# We'll set up mod_qos or something else for trac ticket spammers.
# MDM Actually looks like spammers are dropping off...?  didnt see any logging tho... huh
# I'll tighten up a LITTLE; site count from 100 to 30; page interval from 1 to 2; blocking period from 10 to 20
# MDM OK it seems to be working great now!
# But why limit the block to 20 seconds?  I'm upping it to 5 minutes.
DOSHashTableSize 3097
DOSPageCount 5
DOSSiteCount 30
DOSPageInterval 2
DOSSiteInterval 2
DOSBlockingPeriod 300

Good lord things are getting out of hand in Python land.

I recently bumped up my entire server with the typical emerge –world and –depclean and revdep-rebuild. To get trac working again, I had to jump through some hoops…

• bump my entire machine, watch trac fail with “ImportError: No module named trac.web.main”
• run python-updater (which didn’t seem to do enough?)
• upgrade to unstable trac 1.0.1
• re-emerge world to upgrade all six versions of python (either new versions were posted overnight or apparently installations were damaged by –depclean?)
• set active version of python back from 3.2 to 2.7 with eselect
• re-emerge mod_wsgi
• restart apache

Of course I did a LOT MORE than that to figure out that that’s what I had to do! 🙂

Ahh the price of fame.