While the headline sounds like it might be the beginning of a bad joke, the Trappist Monks from Moncks Corner, SC were mentioned in a sermon this morning, and so I thought I would look up the article referenced, as it sounded pretty good: The Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks.

The article might be long for some of you, so I'll quote the highlights (though you should at least go read the seven bullet point "secrets").

I can think of no business mission more lofty, soft and abstract than serving God, and monasteries manage to successfully infuse this lofty mission into a panoply of niche products and mundane tasks with the kind of preternatural focus that leads to almost supernatural results.

The third element of service and selflessness is a commitment to excellence: At Mepkin Abbey every single egg is packed with a “prayerful attitude.”

This next one has happened to me.  I do wonder if people can feel good about themselves when they know they are gouging their customers.

One day I was making deliveries with Father Stan when I heard one of his buyers offer to sell Mepkin’s eggs at a premium price. Stan thanked him for his kindness but said that an “egg is an egg,” and the brothers couldn’t in good conscience sell their eggs for more than the prevailing price.

I love this next one, and I really like being able to bill hourly, rather than per-project, which is more standard in my business.  It takes so much time to quote the project, and then I have to estimate high for unexpected things, and so hourly is cheaper for the customer, and results in less boring work for me (quoting a project has to be the worst kind of work there is, though the sewer management guy at Star Island probably wins that contest).

Trust is the most powerful form of capital there is, and nothing makes a business run more smoothly than trust.

And lastly, in case this is getting too philosophical for you:

Every time I think I’m making progress I catch myself shoving some old monk out of the way so I can get that last dish of ice cream.

I have a customer who installed a machine with the administrator/root password very weak, and left it open to the internet.  Someone guessed the password, logged in, and then helpfully ran 'screen', so I could watch what he did (presumably - he might have been smart enough to do other things, and we will format the drive, but it was neat to see all of his commands, including typos, and guessing at some commands, because he must not have been familiar with CentOS).

He had a script that he ran to check out other machines around the world, simply doing a port scan, and then using ssh to try out accounts and passwords off of a statically generated list, so if you were bad enough to have the password "root" or "toor", etc. on your root account, then you get recorded.

His script generates a text file of hacked machines, so I emailed the administrators of those machines (living in Hungary, United Arab Emirates and Germany), and let them know that they have insecured machines on their network.  But, the cool part is still to come...

For those of you who know me, you know I find it useful to ask the question, "What's the worst that can happen?" when thinking about whether to do something or not - particularly when it comes to a matter of walking by faith in a particular situation.  I find that the answer to that question is usually, "I could get embarrassed", or "I might lose some money", or other such things that don't matter all that much.  Every once in a while the worst thing that could happen is a bigger deal, but I find it seldom is.

I was amused to see the question asked in the Dilbert comic strip the other day.

A customer wanted a "site index" page for their Wordpress site, which in blog terms means an "archive" page.  You can use the wp_get_archives() function, but that doesn't give you much in the way of customization.  I thought about using the "format=custom" parameter, and try to parse the information afterwards, but that seemed like a pain, so I threw away that function call, in favor of calling get_posts, and then doing all of the setup myself.

Here is what I ended up with (note, I'm skipping the template specific stuff, you'll want to include a header, and an appropriate div, and your sidebar(s), etc. There are many sites on the internet that will show you how to create a generic archives.php template)

Note: This is extremely hacky, and you had better make sure you have a backup, as it is quite easy to wreck the repository.

Scenario:

I was moving a subversion repository from one server to another, and in the process, I also wanted to update the paths, since the first repository had been a general purpose repository, and the second was only for one particular customer, and so didn't need the extra path info at the beginning.

I started with these instructions: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.reposadmin.maint.html#svn.reposadmin.maint.filtering and they got me almost all of the way there.  However, I had problems with one revision that contained some merge information in it.

The error I got was: pathname not terminated by :

The problem was that I had replaced:

Node-path: SAMS/framework/mine
Node-kind: dir
Node-action: change
Prop-content-length: 90
Content-length: 90

K 13
svn:mergeinfo
V 55
/SAMS/framework/current:4-9
/SAMS/framework/tags/3.6:10
PROPS-END

with:

Node-path: framework/mine
Node-kind: dir
Node-action: change
Prop-content-length: 90
Content-length: 90

K 13
svn:mergeinfo
V 55
/framework/current:4-9
/framework/tags/3.6:10
PROPS-END

And that isn't quite right.  The key is realizing what the "V 55" part means and that is counting the number of characters that is in the next section, and since I removed 10 characters (I removed "/SAMS" twice in the same block).  Replacing "V 55" with "V 45" and tada, it works.

I suppose that the Content-length field should be updated as well, but subversion seems to be able to tolerate text changes without updating that field.

A little humor for your day, courtesy of Jack Gannsle.

1. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi
2. 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton
3. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope
4. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond
5. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram
6. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = Knotfurlong
7. 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Serling
8. Half of a large intestine = 1 semicolon
9. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz
10. Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower
11. Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line
12. 453.6 graham crackers = 1 pound cake
13. 1 million-million microphones = 1 megaphone
14. 2 million bicycles = 2 megacycles
15. 365.25 days = 1 unicycle
16. 2000 mockingbirds = 2 kilomockingbirds
17. 52 cards = 1 decacards
18. 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 FigNewton
19. 1000 milliliters of wet socks = 1 literhosen
20. 1 millionth of a fish = 1 microfiche
21. 1 trillion pins = 1 terrapin
22. 1 rations = 1 decoration
23. 100 rations = 1 C-ration
24. 2 monograms = 1 diagram
25. 4 nickels = 2 paradigms
26. 2.4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University Hospital = 1 IV League
27. 100 Senators = Not 1 decision

I've noticed a common spam method lately, which I'm not quite sure what the idea is since it is so obviously spam, and trivially filterable that it doesn't seem like it will last very long, but a couple have ended up in my inbox, and since I really don't like emails in my inbox I decided I would write a filter to keep this type out.

:0:
* ^From:[^@]+@[^@]+@
spam/mail

Pretty simple - just look for multiple @ signs in the From address - I can't think of a reason why someone would do that on purpose.  Though maybe some people have "joe@example.com" <joe@example.com> as their from address - I'll have to see if it results in any false positives.

There are a handful of solutions out there to integrate TinyMCE and Moodle, but some of them are obsolete, and some contain all sorts of things other than the TinyMCE files.

So, I started by reading this entire page, and then figuring out which versions no longer worked, and finally settled on John Stabinger's version (link to stabinger.us was removed, since it appears the site was bought by SEO spammers), which was pretty good, though it contained a lot of extra stuff.

I've tried to keep my version pretty simple, and hopefully you'll save some time by using it.  I downloaded John's version that was built using 1.9.8 from 05/12/2010.  It merged cleanly into my 1.9.9 2010-06-09.

We don't think it will affect anyone's current websites, but we've turned off DirectoryIndex'ing by default for security* reasons.  If you desire this behavior in a certain directory, you can turn it back on by adding (or editing an existing) .htaccess file and adding the line:

Options +Indexes

And the old functionality will be restored.

* Where "security" is defined as security through obscurity, and not any real definition of security at all, but it keeps the script kiddies away.

It about to be deprecated, so this information won't be worth much in a month or two, but for some reason, the documentation on how to post stuff to a page's wall is really sparse, and took me a while to figure out, so here goes, and I'll try to add in the keywords that I searched for while trying to find the answer.