Joel Franusic

information vaults

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:42:37 GMT

I'm very excited about the Wells Fargo vSafe rumor. I desperately want an online backup service with a guarantee on the order of decades.

"API wrapper" service

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:18:15 GMT

I want to make a website that will periodically scrape sites like caltrain.org and then provide an API for programatically accessing that data.

Things you can waste

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:30:14 GMT

A shortened list of things you can waste, thanks to snowclone.pl:

You can waste your...

life
money
computer
home
feet
energy
breath
strength
emotions
strength
vote
water
battery
RAM
gum
employees
weed
stamina
ammo
space
efforts
profits
bandwidth
punches
quarters
webspace
brainpower
quota
internet

Things for which I wish there was a 3rd party API: Part 1

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:40:13 GMT

As I'm working more on web applications I'm finding that there is a particular set of problems which are fixed in scope but that need constant tweaking in order to stay useful.

A possible solution for these sorts of problems might be a 3rd party online API. Here is the start of my list:

1: Email validation
2: Email verification
3: User Agent parsing

(I realize that an online API would have latency issues, but these are the sorts of things which should probably be performed asynchronously anyway)

fetch_urls_from_tinyurl.sh

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 07:05:36 GMT

#!/bin/bash # Fetch URLs from tinyurl.com # Make sure you have curl and bc installed before you run this. # # Joel Franusic 2008 - Public Domain Sofware MIN=1 MAX=10000 SLEEP_MAX=3 l=(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z) for((n=$MIN; n<$MAX; n++)); do r=`echo "obase=36;$n" | bc` num='' echo -n "$n " for c in $r; do c=${c#0} # remove zero padding, yay variable mangling! num=$num${l[$c]}; done echo -n "$num " result=`curl -s -I "http://tinyurl.com/$num" | grep -o -e 'http.*'` echo -n "$result" echo '' sleep $((RANDOM%$SLEEP_MAX)) done

Homeschooling

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:12:56 GMT

The people that know I was homeschooled have have been asking me what I think of the recent ruling concerning homeschooling in California. My opinion comes down to this: In the long term, this ruling is meaningless.

The ruling might have made a meaningful negative impact on homeschooling a few decades ago, when it was still an unproven educational system. But that time is now long gone.

The elephant in the room here is that California's public education system is fabulously broken beyond repair.

It's actually pretty sad. In theory a public school should be able to provide a superior education. They should have experienced trained teachers on staff and presumably have the money to purchase expensive equipment for sports, science, arts and music programs, etc.

Yet, for the last couple of decades, "uncredentialed" parents have been providing their children with an educational experience that is far superior to what our public school system has to offer.

I'm looking forward to watching how this all pans out.

Today in PBwiki news

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:44:10 GMT

I've got some neat OpenID stuff in the pipe.
Nathan has a really really neat 2.0 feature working.

Today

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:19:31 GMT

The power went out before I left for work today.
There were lots of tree parts on the sidewalk as I walked to the street car.
I stood in a doorway and watched people use umbrellas as shields against the wind.
Southbound BART service was interrupted because a tree fell on the tracks.
I took CalTrain to work instead.
I saw raindrops floating in midair outside the 8th floor window of our new office building.
I helped set up DSL at our new office.
Our entire office was put into boxes.

Fake Name OpenID Provider

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 21:33:28 GMT

Testing OpenID would be a lot more simple if there was an OpenID provider that was pre-filled with a lot of generated fake identities.

Idea for an Amazon rainbow table super computer

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 21:30:37 GMT

Run a program that will generate a wordlist, put the output in an queue.
Have a bunch of EC2 instances that take input from the queue and generate MD5, SHA1, etc hashes from the queue. Store hash to password mappings in SimpleDB
Depending on how fast inserts into SimpleDB are, it might make sense to store the hash/password mappings on disk or in S3 and stream them into SimpleDB
???
Profit!

Since the Amazon AWS services have set prices, it should be pretty easy to calculate the dollar cost per n passwords. I'm guessing that number would be pretty low.

See also: http://twitter.com/jf/statuses/536491112

San Francisco

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 06:40:40 GMT

I still have trouble believing that I'm living in San Francisco.

It has been about 3 months since a tornado ripped me out of my peaceful life in San Luis Obispo and dumped me in the Bay Area. Only now have I had the time to be introspective about the whole thing. Hopefully I've left enough digital life fragments around that I'll be able to reconstruct what I've been doing these past few months.

Corrie and I have been living in the Haight-Ashbury district for just under three weeks now. I love being able to get around without a car. I "commute" to work by walking 4 blocks to the N Judah which takes me to Civic Center, then to BART. Today I walked with Corrie to Trader Joes on Masonic, we purchased 3 bags of groceries and took the 43 Masonic back. Bookstores, Restaurants, Groceries, Cafe's and more are a few minutes from my front door. That said, the city still weighs down on me. Its density, people, buildings, and noise are all things which I am still trying to become acclimated to. I expect that over time I will become more at ease with everything, as I learn to discern threats from the benign.

Last night, I took Corrie to participate in phil kline's unsilent night. It was magical, like something out of a vision or a dream. It was the first time that I felt welcome and at ease in San Francisco.

I think I'm going to love living here.

"Good news...

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:09:20 GMT

I figured out what the thing you just incenerated, did."

In Rainbows

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:27:57 GMT

I'm very happy with Radiohead's latest album, musically and socially.

Musically, I like the album, I've listened to the album about six times through.

Socially, I think that In Rainbows is huge.

I'm disappointed that some people have chosen to complain about the bitrate of the songs rather than consider the implications that this experiment has for the music industry. If you want to complain about the bitrate, then I have some products you may be interested in.

Radiohead didn't do anything new or unexpected. Just unprecidented .

Come, you cannot resist.

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:11:52 GMT

Many of you already know that I've been planning on moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, several people have been constantly demanding that I move back to the Bay Area over the past year or so.

Well, I'm moving back.

My last day of work at Cuesta College will be November 9th. I'm going to come up to San Francisco for SHDH21, and not go back.

It was not an easy decision to make, I really like working at Cuesta. I have great coworkers and my supervisor is the best "boss" I've had so far - I'd hope to have him on my board of directors some day.

However, earlier this week, I got a call from my friend David Weekly. He made me an offer to work for PBwiki that I could not refuse.

I just signed my papers and met all of my future coworkers - all of whom are awesome. I'm going to be sad to leave my friends at Cuesta College, but I'm really excited about PBwiki, they are an amazing team with a great product (make yourself a wiki right now)!

July 2nd - August 17th

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:11:04 GMT

The past 6 weeks have been a blur. I'm actually having to make use of my flickr, twitter, and Google Calendar accounts to triangulate my memories.

Week of July 8th-14th:

Corrie made me a really neat dinner.
I finally got my skydiving photographs developed!
A buddy who works for the County of SLO gave me a tour of their data center. They have a robotic tape loader arm!
Went on a camping trip. Among other things, this particular trip made me very aware of the importance of proper planning.

Week of July 15th-21st:

Tom and Dan came out to visit! I really enjoyed spending time with them. We went sailing!
We found out the Corrie's cat Kira has kidney failure. :-(
I got my PayPal Security Key in the mail! I really like it.

Week of July 22nd-28th:

Went to see Gone With The Wind on the big screen with Corrie!
Got a demo of Sun Ray from a guy at Sun. I loved what I saw, I now have two units I'm using for testing:
Visited with Tom, Adam, Matt, Jeff, Mike, and Ernesto in the Bay Area.
Got the Sun Rays working on a LAN!

Week of July 29th - August 4th:

Went on a hike with Adam, Matt, Mike and Ernesto. Found some replicating pods.
Attended DEF CON 15. DEF CON deserves a separate post.
Rode on the Las Vegas monorail. Zach came along wearing his awesome hat.

Week of August 5th-11th:

Got back from DEF CON.
Went to SHDH19. Greeted lots of people. Had some very good conversations, showed off my Sun Ray setup. Had a blast.

DEF CON

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:38:23 GMT

I leave for DEF CON tomorrow. I'll try doing some voice posts from Las Vegas if I can remember to do so.

MetaCalculate

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:50:47 GMT

I'm sick of Excel. Every time I try and do something a little bit fancy, I have to learn how to do things the special Microsoft way.

I want a spreadsheet program I can program in Perl, or Python, or C, or whatever.

Right now I'm envisioning an open source program, let's call it MetaCalculate for now.

MetaCalculate would provide a basic spreadsheet framework to any programming language over some API. It would handle whatever specialized logic is specific to spreadsheets and let you do all the rest in your programming language of choice.

I want to be able to use an RSS library to fetch prices off of New Egg and put them into a spreadsheet for me. I want to be able to use printf(3) to format my cells. I want to be able to write my own bankers rounding function. I want to be able to use DBI to access databases.

Maybe this will turn into a DevHouse project.

Random Memory

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:37:05 GMT

I must have been about 6. I remember walking away from a library in San Jose, arms full of books that the library was discarding.

I think this was the same event where we got our encyclopedias. The library labels eventually peeled off of the encyclopedias and left this neat looking red residue where the Dewey Decimal number used to be.

Weekend of June 29th - July 1st

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:24:27 GMT

Last weekend I:

Attended Inspirathon.
Went to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, had a BBQ at Tom's house.
Visited the Sutro Bath ruins.
Attended the Charter Members night of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings

How to send S/MIME email using openssl

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:48:58 GMT

Use your email client to generate a signed email (but not encrypted). The message you generate should be Content-Type: multipart/signed; and have an attached p7s (not p7m). Save this raw message as 'message_from_to_user'.

$ openssl smime -pk7out -in message_from_to_user | openssl pkcs7 -print_certs > to_user_public_key.pem

This will extract the public key from the smime.p7s email attachment and save the public key in PEM format.

$ echo 'THIS IS A TEST' | openssl smime -encrypt -des3 -from 'From User <from@domain.dom>' -to 'To User <to@domain.dom>' -subject 'Encrypted Test' -text to_user_public_key.pem | sendmail to@domain.dom

This will send an email to the user "to@domain.dom". The email will be encrypted using the public key we extracted above. The -text flag is important! Without it a standards compliant email reader (Such as Mail.app) won't be able to decrypt the email.

Conversation

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:26:03 GMT

Adrian: What I need is a program that makes me always do the right thing.
Me: emacs

The Gmail Spam Game

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:46:23 GMT

The goal of this game is to craft a query in Gmail that will find the largest percentage of Spam in your inbox.

Post the size of your Spam folder, your query and the number of messages that your query selected.

Good Riddance

Wed, 30 May 2007 06:51:53 GMT

Hi Joel,

We have received your request to cancel your MySpace account.

In order to complete the cancellation process, please click on the link below:

http://www1.myspace.com/misc/cancel.cfm?iid=E4A39987-F748-4F26-9005-8F8ABFA45AFA

If you have problems canceling your account, please click the link below:

http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contact

We will cancel your account within 48 hours, after which you will no longer be able to log in.

Please note that cancelled accounts may not be reactivated and all of your account information, including your friend network, will be removed from MySpace.

IF YOU NO LONGER WISH TO CANCEL YOUR ACCOUNT

simply ignore this message. We will not cancel your account unless you follow the above instructions.

knockd

Mon, 07 May 2007 21:54:20 GMT

What I needed to set up a knockd server which closes up the firewall behind me:

# cat /etc/knockd.conf 
[options]
        logfile = /var/log/knockd.log

[pokeSSH]
        sequence       = 1000,2000,3000
        seq_timeout    = 5
        start_command  = /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s %IP% -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
        cmd_timeout    = 30
        stop_command   = /sbin/iptables -D INPUT -s %IP% -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
        tcpflags       = syn

# cat iptables_save 
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [1838:350285]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [3037:1027623]
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT 
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j DROP 
COMMIT

Username Changed

Fri, 04 May 2007 19:07:55 GMT

I really like Livejournal as a blog host and wanted to stay with them instead of running off to somebody else. The only thing I didn't like was my old username.

Anyway, did some searching about a month ago and found that the user "joel" was deleted. All I had to do was wait for it to be purged and it would be mine!

Well through the magic of *nix, I got a message 9 minutes ago that the username was available.

Cron + Growl = Win.

0 8,12,17 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/curl -s joel.livejournal.com | /usr/bin/grep -v '<!' | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -s