Google Celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the Buckyball with a new Doodle
One of my favorite things about Google is that they like to pay respects to all sorts of things … holidays, historical events and even scientific discoveries like the Buckyball. A Buckyball, or a Buckminster fullerene is an atom that is completely made from carbon. The first fullerene was discovered in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O’Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University. The name comes from famed architect Richard Buckminster Fuller who was known for his geodesic domes, which look similar to the Buckminster fullerene!
Google’s second O looks like a Buckyball today, and you can even spin it by moving your mouse over the fullerene posing as a letter o. So check out another unique Google homepage and hope that Buckyballs will soon help make other scientific discoveries possible.
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Angry Birds for Android released
The Angry Birds game has been released on Android. I’ve played it a bit today and it’s an extremely addicting game in a Frozen Bubble kind of way. Android Central has a nice writeup on it along with links to the game:
Highly recommended.
Bind Logs – Top DNS Queries
This week at work we fancied figuring out what the top sites are on are network. So decided an easy way to work this out would be to enable logging on are bind server and then write a script to work out what the top DNS queries are.
To enable logging in bind add the following to your `/etc/bind/named.conf`
logging {
channel simple_log {
file "/var/log/named/bind.log" versions 10 size 50m;
print-time yes;
print-severity yes;
print-category yes;
};
category default {
simple_log;
};
category queries {
simple_log;
};
};
this will output log entries every time a query is done. We can then parse the log files with the following script to get out just the url and a count.
#!/bin/bash echo "Top 20 Domains" echo "" cat /var/log/named/bind.log* | grep 'queries' | cut -d '/' -f 3 | sed 's/www.//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 20
this script will output the top 20 in descending order with a count of the number of queries next to the url.
I then like to run the script every 2 minutes using watch.
watch -n 120 './bindLogCheck.sh'
running this should give you output like this
Top 20 Domains
6782 example.net
950 api.del.icio.us
600 test.com
600 something.com
536 mail.google.com
527 site.de
526 alpha.com
526 delta.com
526 gamma.co.uk
526 digitalforensicsmagazine.com
386 pablumfication.co.uk
200 google.com
192 safebrowsing-cache.google.com
189 safebrowsing.clients.google.com
97 google-analytics.com
83 facebook.com
74 googleads.g.doubleclick.net
74 bbc.co.uk
70 uk.mg40.mail.yahoo.com
70 capa.org
Any questions or comments as usual I would love to hear them.
Research:
Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!
Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's Content Chair.
Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.
How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.
We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!
Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.
We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.
Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.
The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.
Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.
Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.
For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.
OpenArena – The OpenSource Quake III Arena
Guess where did I play Quake III Arena for the first time. Not place, I am talking about the platform/Operating System. Nope! its not windows, its Linux 
. Surprised, right? I was too when I found this brilliant opensource version of Quake III Arena aka OpenArena.
While looking for a good one man shooting game in the software center, I bumped into this one which says, "a fast-paced 3D first-person shooting game." I decided to give it a try. After downloading around 300 MB of the packages the game was finally installed and while runnning and shooting weird creatures(some almost nude lady warriors too 
) I couldn't believe that even such a game could be totally free.
I was indeed dazzled by the brilliance of this game but since I had never played Quake III Arena before, I never realized that it was almost exactly like it. One day co-author Chia saw me playing it and asked where the hell did I get Quake from? Thats when I came to know I had accidently found something really cool.
After gathering a little info about, I found out that it is actually Quake III Arena. Its built upon ioquake3, based on id tech3, the Quake3 game engine which was opensourced by the company, id software, in Aug 2005.
Thats when OpenArena project was established to built an opensource FPS game derieved from Quake III Arena. ioquake3 is a project aimed to improve the opensource engine further.
If you have been a Quake III Arena fan and miss it on Linux then you should give openarena a try. The one thing that sucks is its incompatibility with the propreitary game. I haven't tried coupling the original with openarena but I guess that won't work. However, its being cross-platorm removes most of the hurdles for network gaming. You can find the listing for online openarena servers here.
Install OpenArena
It is available in repos of almost all common distros. You can easily install it using the package manager. Otherwise, try running these commands.
[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install openarena #for Ubuntu or Debian based systems
[root]# yum install openarena #for Fedora or RedHat based systems
Kensington Pocket Battery for Smartphones Review
Smartphones are all the rage these days. Everyone uses them as more then just a plain old phone. We browse the web, stream media, play our music, check our e-mail, take pictures, check social networks and oh, yeah, use it as a phone. Battery technology in these phones have not really progressed to the point where you can make it the whole day. Especially if you are using it as something other then just a plain phone. If you are away from an outlet at anytime, well, you will likely run out of juice at any time unless you have something like Kensington’s Pocket Battery for Smartphones.
This battery is much smaller than my Droid 2. It fits nicely into a pocket in my jeans and hardly weighs anything. I don’t even feel it when it’s in one of my pockets on my cargo shorts.
On the back is a USB cable that you just flip put and plugin to a USB charger or a free USB port on any computer. Once it is charged, the light on the front turns green.
To charge your phone, you select one of the cables that are on either side of the battery depending on what kind of phone you have. It supports both Mini B USB and MicroUSB. Pull it away from the side of the battery, connect it to your phone and press the button. Your phone should go into charge mode and start charging.
Last night, in an experiment, I had the battery fully charged and y Droid 2 down to about 20 percent. I plugged it in while driving my family on some errands and even stopping for a bite to eat. Once the battery was drained, I looked at my phone and it was about 70 percent charged. While it was not a 100 percent charge, it is still extending the amount of time I can be away from a outlet. In extreme cases, this could help you make a phone call or two when your phone would normally go dead.
One reason this battery will not charge my phone up all the way because it only has a 1200 mAh capacity. The battery on my Droid 2 has a 1400 mAh battery. So even if you are completely flat, the best you can hope for is a 85 percent charge and you likely won’t get that to various losses that occur when charging. However, it’s still capable of giving your phone some extra life and that is something I appreciate!
The only issue I have had with this battery is I would occasionally plug it in and press the button and it would not charge. I would unplug it and replug it and hit the button again and it would start charging. Not exactly sure why this happened and when it did, I wiggled the cable a bit to see if it was a bad cable but the cable was fine. So I chalk this one up to a fluke.
The Kensington Pocket Battery for Smartphones is available for pre-order direct from Kensington for $39.99.
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Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party
Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!
I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:
There is a screen on: 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.
The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.
It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.
EDIT: After a question in comments about how you keep them from opening another non-screen'd connection, my friend Peter suggested adding screen -xR to the user's ~/.bash_profile, so it forcibly connects to the screen session. Thanks, Peter!
Codename of Frugalware 1.4 is Nexon
Finally, Vmiklos has published the codename and the roadmap of the next stable version of Frugalware Linux.
So, the codename of Frugalware 1.4 is Nexon and is planned to be released on 7/02/2011.
Nexon is a fictional planet in Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series. At 2 parsecs (6.5 lightyears), it formed with Solaria the closest pair of Spacer worlds.
0.A.D. now available on Frugalware
0.A.D is a real strategy game like Ages of Empire but opensource. This game is still in development but usable. I’ve tested it and I’ve found it very impressive. It’s so rare to see an opensource game with this quality.
I am pleased to announce that 0.A.D is now available on Frugalware current as nobuild package. To install it:
# repoman upd && repoman merge 0ad
Rock-It Turns any Flat Surface into a Speaker.
I am convinced that one of these days they are going to have a way to implant the music directly into our brains so that we have no wires to have to contend with. For now, the next best thing could be the Rock-It portable vibration speaker. It looks slightly like a speaker you might put under your pillow, except it has a pod that you stick on any flat surface. It could be a box, a window or the side of your file cabinet just so long as it’s flat and it will stick. Plug in your iPod, iPhone or anything that has a 3.5mm headphone jack and then that surface becomes your speaker. It is available now for only $29.99 direct from Pyramid Distribution.
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