The Site of Mike

Google's instant search is kinda dangerous, now you don't have to even finish typing a search before getting distracted and forgetting the original task at hand. Today's distraction (so far) is seeing what sites come up for just a single letter:

A: Amazon.com
B: Bank of America
C: Craigslist
D: Dictionary.com
E: ESPN or eBay
F: Facebook
G: Google
H: Hulu
I: iTunes
J: JetBlue
K: Kayak
L: Lowe's
M: MapQuest
N: Netflix
O: Orbitz
P: Pandora
Q: BrainyQuote
R: Red Sox
S: Southwest Airlines
T: Target
U: UPS
V: Verizon Wireless
W: The Weather Channel
X: Xbox 360
Y: Youtube
Z: Zillow

This list isn't global by any means, Google's location detection has a big influence on what results it shows. I tried the same after setting my location to Google Central (Mountain View, CA). That area seems to be more interested in the IRS, Kohl's, and Redbox.

I am pleased to announce the first public release of Nagcat! This is a project I have been working on at ITA Software over the past several months for monitoring the complex applications we run. It is intended to be used with Nagios 3.x and is written in Python.

I just finished cutting the release and setting up its new project site and now I think it is time for a beer so this announcement is rather short. I'll be posting some HOWTOs and other information here in the future.

I recently reconfigured my server to run Squid in front of Apache in hopes that it will hold up under load a little better now (Polvi's site is just too damn popular with web crawlers). To keep people who like reading their Apache logs happy I wanted to make Apache log the original client instead of 127.0.0.1. Here's the best I've come up with so far:

# Set using the normal REMOTE_ADDR value first
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "(.*)" TRUE_REMOTE_ADDR=$1
# Pick the last ip address off the proxy list if we can
SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-For "([0-9\.]+)$" TRUE_REMOTE_ADDR=$1

LogFormat "%{TRUE_REMOTE_ADDR}e %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

Seems to be working so far :-)

Vim's built in encryption feature is pretty handy but it's algorithm is only strong enough to protect against a casual observer. For good encryption something else is required but I still want something that is fairly transparent. I've come up with a little solution using GnuPG, just add the following to your .vimrc to automatically encrypt and decrypt *.gpg files. (Replace my key id with yours of course)

au BufNewFile,BufReadPre *.gpg :set secure viminfo= noswapfile nobackup nowritebackup history=0 binary
au BufReadPost *.gpg :%!gpg -d 2>/dev/null
au BufWritePre *.gpg :%!gpg -e -r CB06CE30 2>/dev/null
au BufWritePost *.gpg u

I took this photo earlier this evening from the roof of my apartment building along with a few others. This place has a pretty good view of the city which should be nice for fireworks tomorrow. :-)