August 2006 Archives

So last weekend was a UXPL tournament. the UXPL is a speedball style tournament play that is quite popular for various reasons. Some of those reasons are exactly why I don't play very much of it.

Speedball is an extremely fast paced style of play. Fields are designed for a set number of players (3,5,7, and 10 man), usually filled with air bunkers in patterns. These condensed sized fields are home to the fastest paintball you can see, where the name of the game is time. Matches range form 3-5 minutes max, and are often shorter.

This style of play is often ideal for TV, and really benefits field managers and manufacturers, because it demands you shoot a lot of paint. This is part of why I usually dont' play speedball, I'm too cheap.

However, our team, which is largely Woodsball and Scenario oriented wanted to have some fun. A few members had a main 5 man speedball team, but we knew there was room for another. So 5 of us showed up Saturday morning, ready to play.

None of us had played speedball together, and for some it was the first tournament attended. But we were ready to have fun. It was great seeing the funny looks we got from semi-pro and pro level teams as we walked on with our Camo jersey's (Speedball teams all have bright Motocross style jersey's). We received more than one sneer from the uppity schmucks, but hey, we were ready to play.

Within a short amount of time we had people's attention, especially when we blew out a higher division Team Imperial 97 - 4. Nothing is as nice as blowing out the big guys.

We were well on our track to taking first, when one member broke a rule and swore on the field after messing something up (he was mad at himself), and our team was forced to play the finals series with only 4 people.

Now when teams are only 5 man, that makes a serious disadvantage. Even more fun when we still managed to take 2nd place overall in the division. And this against teams who constantly practice in this play style. :)
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Yes, Plug is turning ten years old this month, and we have a very special meeting planned. There will be some big announcements, and two presentations. Joe has a special show and tell item he is bringing in, and I will be providing the technical presentation.

Come learn about mod_security . I've posted a few times about this package, and how it has helped me deal with spammers, attackers, and other scum. Now come and see how it works, how easily you can set it up, and how you can configure it to your needs. Learn how this small package can protect your web services, custom code, blog, and just plain filter out crap from wasting cpu cycles and log lines.

Vist Plug for time/location/details
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My family has had a long history of "Readers" in it. Growing up, there were always books around the home, of every variety. Family fun usually involved everybody sitting around and reading. Extended family often pokes fun at us because we usually don't buy books for fun, because they only last us a day or two, whereas everybody else gets years of enjoyment from a single book :) And yes, all except my brother are speed readers.

With that said, my Mom is one of the worst in my family (although my sister is trying hard to take the title). Even we poke fun at my mom, claiming she has the platinum library card.

How little did I realize how close we were.

See, my mom has serious health problems, and we often have to run errands for her. Today, my mom needed me to stop by the library and drop off a stack of books, and pick up her reserved ones. I ran in, handed her card over and mentioned that my mom needed some books on hold. The librarian looked at the card, and no joke said, "Oh, you're her son. How's she been, we haven't seen her all week and were worried."

No kidding, she then asked a bit more, commented on the amazing amounts my mom reads, and delivered a stack of books that were on hold. All this from somebody I'd never met, and only saw the name on the library card.

I am proud, yet scared, and was ready to laugh. Now, if she could get frequent flier miles or something out of that, I'd be set :)
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For those watching, you'll remember me discussing a small outing my paintball team did with the National Guard. If you missed it, please read my notes of our Green River Paintball Trip first.

Along with my team, we took three people from one of our sponsors, and they did a write-up for the June Edition of Recon Magazine

They were gracious enough to give us a copy of the article in PDF form for our site, so if anybody wants to read: Team Desert Edge featured in Recon Magazine
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For the last two years I've have very limited use of MySQL , primarily using PostgreSQL , SQLite and a bit of Oracle .

I do enjoy using other engines, but my mysql-fu has been falling behind as some impressive features have been rolling out. So it felt kind of good when a friend asked me to help fix a problem with some SQL that MySQL didn't seem to like... (Read More)
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Just another followup on my Mod_security patches. I've had to disable a couple rules I had setup, example, I decided I did want file uploads, so I re-enabled them. What's been fun though is watching the number of times I've been bouncing fake attempts from various virus, spambot, and other hacks. Just in the last week, I've had over 19,500 hits filtered by mod_security. Now aint that purty?!
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Via Perl.com I found this post that has a tip for editing your .vimrc (as we discussed at plug on Wednesday).

The basic hint is these two keybindings, which allow you to edit and reload your .vimrc, instead of trying to muck around with in the ex interface.

",v brings up my .vimrc
",V reloads it -- making all changes active (have to save first)

map ,v :sp $VIMRC_
map ,V :source $VIMRC:filetype detect:exe ":echo 'vimrc reloaded'"

For those who own one of several Microsoft keyboards, with the 'F Lock' key, you are sure to know the pain of which I speak here. These keyboards have a modal switch that alternates the commands from the function keys. What's bad about this, is in great form, the default state for this switch is to turn your functions keys into some strange command keys, since nobody would ever use those function keys for their original purpose.

Getting 'functionality' out the keys is easy, you just have to press the 'F Lock' key, and things work. But this will then go away any time your reboot, returning you to the brokenness you come to expect :(

Well, today I found a fix to F_Lock problems for Linux . Windows folks have a description and fix here
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Thought I'd pass along a great deal on a 512 mb SD card:
Kingston 512 MB Secure Digital Card $6.99
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Ok folks, mark your calendar, while there are other fun scenario games happening in the next month, this is one of the big ones. If you are interesting in trying out paintball, if you like it and want to learn more, if you are new and want to get taught, anything, just check it out.

Aliens in the Rockies as presented by Millenium Paintball

My Team has been contacted to help provide the "disturbance" forces for this year, and we'll help make sure everybody can enjoy this game. This is a great 24 hour scenario event with lots of objectives, fun prizes (some really good ones too).

If you have any desire to try out paintball, if any of this sounds interesting, please contact me, I'll see if I can assist you in getting out and making sure you're set up right.
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After seeing my sister's results, I had to try taking this aspie quiz: Aspie-Quiz

My results:

• Your Aspie score: 125 of 200
• Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 75 of 200
• You are very likely an Aspie

Telling, isn't it.

When I installed mod_security yesterday, I was hoping for some good results. Those results I figured could be tracked by watching my visitor and hits statistics return to somewhat normal values, as well as seeing OS and Browser versions return to something more that I would expect from my geeky audience

Well, in only one day, I am proud to say that modsecurity has more than beat my expectations. Visitor counts have returned down to the humble amount this little blog can expect, hits are way down, and already, safari , mozilla, and Linux have moving back up in marketshare , instead of the hyperinflated number for the windows/IE bots that were hitting this box.
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Just was referred to this site which hosts a couple of interesting Lectures/Notes/Presentations including

• Perl For Newbies
• Haskell for Perl Programmers
• PostgreSQL

There are actually quite a few other sets of slides of varying topics, worth looking into.
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In the last month I have been getting nailed with various forms of referral spam , and various annoying exploit attempts. Besides the sheer annoyance of it all, the way it screws up your logs and stats, I just didn't want them to think their stuff was working. So I finally implemented some mod_security rules into my apache.

I extended the default debian ruleset with a few that I found online, and things seem to be working well. I hope not too much of a performance hit on this little box (if so, please tell me). I've only had two issues with it so far:

1. Default rules blocked my cookies. The default rules had a very basic regex for cookie data, didn't' work with my system
2. Debug Log. The debugging by default is at 9, and that very quickly filled up a 2gb file, which then killed apache