Two companies that are getting it right (finally).

Over the last week or two, for reasons not important here, I’ve upgraded two PCs to Windows 7.  Let me start by saying that normally, I dont’ do OS upgrades.  I usually just wait until my PC explodes or melts or catches fire, then I just get whatever OS the new one comes with.  I am not, as they say, an “early adopter”,

That being said, the first PC to get the upgrade was my work PC (thanks Mr. Virus man!).  Amazingly, the install went incredibly smooth, and all of my old files remained intact.  Many programs had to be reinstalled, sure, but that’s par for the course.  Very nicely done though, as I didn’t even have to consider where to get my drivers as the install took care of that all for me.  Good job, MS, good job.

Net was my new home PC, the Acer Aspire Revo 3610.  I could go on for days about how cool this little box is, but I won’t right now… that’s for another post.  Sure, this box came with Win7 already on it, but it was bloated as all hell, so I wiped the disk clean and installed a fresh copy.  Glorious.

To top it all off, the Windows 7 interface is nice.  I like it.  It makes sense, and most importantly it works.  I never had the problems with Vista others had, and I’m not having any problems now.  Must be my awesome personality.  I don’t get bugs. (HA!)

Shifting over to anti-virus programs now: TrendMicro is ace with me.  It’s not like I kept the install disk around all these years from when I first got Internet Security 2006, but who cares… you don’t need it.

I got a 3-license kit back in the day, and TM knows this.  I can log into their site, download the software (personalized with a slipstreamed serial key! w00t!), and install it in a matter of minutes.  “OH NOES!” I hear you say… “WHAT IF YOUR 3 LICENSES ARE ALREADY ACTIVATED?!?”  Well, first off stop showting, and second: that also doesn’t matter.  Once the install completes, you can transfer the license to your new PC from your old without ever bothering to turn on the old pc.  This is a great idea, and it works very well.

Mini Review: 7da Zombie Hunter

Let’s face it. Most iPhone games suck, especially the free ones. Long story short, 7da (no, that’s not a typo) Zombie Hunter is 100% ronseal. It’s full of action, zombies, and hunting. And it has seven levels (days). Yes it’s short, but that’s the idea here. If you have time to play for hours on your iPhone, then you’re probably missing something important (aren’t we all?).

The game is simple. Left thumb moves, right thumb shoots in traditional 2d “Smash TV” fashon. Arenas are small, and zombies are plentiful, as is the blood. Rock. It’s free for a while, so why not give it a shot?

PDF to EPUB (or any other eBook format)

So i’ve come across a large collection of ebooks in PDF format (I won’t say from where) which is awsome, except for one thing. There is not an ebook reader in the world (besides Adobe Digital Editions, but meh…) that reads PDFs. So I sat about on a journey to find a decent way to convert PDF to the popular EPUB format. Why epub and not something else like amazon kindle’s mobi format? Because, I have an iPhone, and iphone has Stanza (teh best ebook reader on the platform) and Stanza uses epub.

Long story short, there’s a lot of software out there that claims to do this all for you, but a lot of them jsut don’t cut it when it comes to images. The books I’m interested in are of a technical nature mostly, so there will be diagrams.

After testing out all of the free alternatives, I cam across Calibre. Calibre is an open source ebook management program that reads just about every format you can imagine, and can convert from one ebook format to another.  It’s also free and open source, so woot!

Calibre CAN do PDF to epub, but you lose a lot of formatting and all of your bookmarks.  In other words, no table of contents.  That sucks.

To make a long story short, I tried a few combinations of softwares to get this working, and here is the most reliable way I have found to convert PDF to epub while retaining the table of contents, images, and MOST of your original formatting (some will still be lost, but if you’re a freak about stuff like that you can always fix it before the last step).

First, the requirements:

  • Adobe Acrobat – $300.00 - No, not Acrobat READER, that’s something else.  You need to have Adobe Acrobat, or some other program that can export PDF’s as compliant HTML 3.2.  I’m sure there’s something free out there, but this is what I used as I had it at work :)
  • Calibre – FREE
  • Notepad++ (optional) – FREE – this is used for some code cleanup if needed (for you formatting freaks)

Process couldn’t be simpler really:

  1. Load the PDF in acrobat
  2. FILE > EXPORT > HTML > HTML 3.2
  3. Click on “SETTINGS”
  4. uncheck “Generate Bookmarks”
  5. check “Generate tags for untagged files”
  6. check “generate images”
  7. uncheck “use sub-folder”
  8. click OK
  9. Save
  10. OPTIONAL – Edit the exported HTML file in Notepad++.  get rid of any style tags in the body element, and any font colors, as they will mess with some readers (like stanza)
  11. Open Calibre
  12. Click “Add Book”
  13. select the exported html file
  14. Right click on the imported book and select CONVERT E-BOOKS > CONVERT INDIVIDUALLY
  15. Input format will be ZIP, output will be epub
  16. edit meta info as needed
  17. On the “Structure Detection” tab, set “detect chapters…” to //h:h1
  18. On the table of contents page, set level 1 to //h:h1, level 2 to //h:h2, and level 3 to //h:h3
  19. Click OK

That’s it.  the PDF will be converted to an epub that you can view in Calibre, or save to another location and read in another reader, or send to a device.

Note that all PDFs are not created equal, so some of these settings will need to be tweaked for different books, but this is what worked for me with a quality I was happy with.

Firewalls for dummies

Word to the wise folks. When you’re installing a firewall on your server due to mysterious login attempts, make sure that you know what IPs you’re blocking.

I ended up driving out to where my server is colocated at 8pm last night because my server wasn’t reaponding. I had recently installed APF (advanced policy firewall) and BFD (brute force detection) and wad confident in it’s functionality. Note: I installed and tested it while away from home.

Geeky stuff: APF is a CLI Frontend for iptables. You can deny/allow IP addresses with simple commands. Pair it with BFD and what you have is a nice little security system that scans server logs every few minutes looking for repeated failed logins and other suspicious activity and automatically blocks access to the offending IP (and tells you what it’s done in a nicely formatted email. End of geeky stuff.

Once I had it up and running I walked away confident in the security of my server. I knew of a few IPs that had been hacking away at me for months, so it was only a matter of time before the emails came telling me they were blocked. I added a few manually just to get the feeling for it. Happy with myself I went out with my lovely wife for dinner and a movie.

Then I tried to access my website from home…

No http access, no ssh, no FTP, and no reply on pings. Shit. I call the office and have them reboot my server. Nothing.

I only live about 10 miles away so I drove out to take a look. Looks like it’s running… Better reboot again to make sure it was done right. A few minutes later and we’re back in action! I head home.

Wake up at 6am. No response on my site or email. No FTP. No ssh. DAMMIT!

After a few cups of coffee it dawns on me to try something. I Vpn into my desktop pc at work and pull up my website. Works fine. Try it again from my local browser, fail.

A feeling starts to nag at me.

I use my remote desktop to SSH into the server. Success.

The feeling gets stronger.

I disable the firewall…

Everything magically works again.

The feeling begins to redden my cheeks.

I check the firewall rules.

Out of the eight IP adresses I manually denied, my home ip was first on the list.

The day before I installed the firewall I had forgotten that I had changed my password. There were several failed login attempts due to this.

That feeling? Stupidity. I has it.

Ferber Baby

Having a son means losing sleep now to sleep all night later. Let Isaac cry it out last night. It was like he knew it was my idea because he started crying for me in particular. Ouch.

When that didn’t work he started crying for mama but HA! I had given her earplugs! After a grand total of 45 minutes we all got back to sleep. Up at 6:15 to start our day. We’ll let mama sleep in today.

Daddy 1, Isaac 100.

I’ll catch up some day, right?

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