Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

dyject – Python Dependency Injection

Sunday, April 28th, 2013

The first release of dyject is now out. Dyject is a simple dependency injection module for both Python 2 and Python 3. It had no dependencies outside of the standard Python library and uses a configuration parser to construct and wire objects. You can download packages from pypi, get the source code from githib or view the full instructions and documentation on dyject.com

Rear View Mirror v1.0 Released

Monday, March 11th, 2013

Rear View Mirror v1.0 is now out. It has an improved option dialog, cleaner update system and MSI installers for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It also has a new website: RearViewMirror.cc.

Invalid partition table in VMWare ESX

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Anyone who has expanded a drive in Linux knows it’s a two step process. First, the partition table must be altered to include the new space. Second, the file system must be expanded to make use of the new space within its partition. It’s a fairly straightforward process I’ve done many times, but I ran into an interesting issue when attempting this within VMWare.

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Copy Reddit Subscriptions from One Account to Another

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

For those of you who use Reddit, if you’ve ever wanted to abandon one account for another, or just copy your subscriptions between your primary and your throw-away account, I’ve written a Python script called copy_reddit. I uses the praw API to copy both subscriptions and friends lists.

Reassigning DNS Entries in Windows/Active Directory using Powershell

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

Typically, internal DNS entries for websites must be different than the external addresses due to NAT issues. If your organization has a lot of web sites that exist on either a single server or a set of identical servers behind a load balancer, it’s best practice to have all DNS entries be CNAME records to either that particular server’s DNS entry or the entry for a server farm’s load balancer. Recently I was involved in a mass server migration where actual IPs were used throughout a Windows DNS server. The following is a Power Shell script designed to rename DNS records in mass on an Active Directory Domain Controller.

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Signature Verification Between Java and Python

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

Using public/private key pairs to digitally sign text is a common way to validate the authenticity of a piece of data. However dealing with RSA keys, certificates and signatures can often be a bit overwhelming, especially between two different languages or platforms. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use RSA keys to generate and validation signatures in both Java and Python 2.

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RearViewMirror 0.8.9.3 Released

Friday, August 10th, 2012

It’s been a little over a year since I lasted updated RearViewMirror. The new version contains the following features:

  • Options, both global options and individual camera options
  • Ability to play an audio file (wav) when motion is detected
  • Ability to record motion that is detected

RearViewMirror is an application developed to be a fancy cubical mirror. It can support multiple camera and MJPEG sources and pop up a window when motion is detected.

Making the Thunderbird mail icon more useful on MacOS

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Up until Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0, the MacOS version would show you the number of new messages in Thunderbird since you last clicked on the window, in the dock icon. Now by default it shows you the total number of unread messages, which is pretty useless if there are just a ton of messages in your bulk mail accounts you have no intention of reading. A bug report was filed for this issue, in order to restore the old functionality (or at least make it optional). Although the bug was closed and the option was added to Thunderbird, it’s not in the main user interface. It must be set using the advanced configuration editor.

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RearViewMirror 0.8.8.6 Released

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

It’s been nearly two and a half years since the last release of RearViewMirror. There aren’t any new features on this release, just several updates to help improve speed and to check for future releases.

For those who have never used it before, RearViewMirror is an over-glorified version of those mirrors office workers attach to their monitors so people don’t sneak up on them. Instead of using a mirror though, it uses a webcam and allows users to share their webcams with others around the office.

Storing Shibboleth IDP Logs in a Database with IP Addresses

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Shibboleth’s IDP can store audit logs that indicate when people authenticate against the IDP web application. These files are written to disk by default using the settings in the logging.xml configuration file. This tutorial will show how audit logs can be placed in a MS SQL database and also include the IP addresses of the connecting clients.
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