For the first time in about 15 years, I had the chance to check the Encyclopedia Britannica for an entry about a historical figure.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/580776/Hippolyte-Taine

Compare this to the Wikipedia entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Taine

I can appreciate that Wikipedia may or may not distort the figure in question; however, at least I have something to go on. Britannica is just a disaster. Imagining a world without Wikipedia is, for the lack of a more descriptive term, depressing!

I have been using Django off-and-on for about 2 years now. I am really liking the direction, but what bugged me (for the longest time) is the re-usability of the view section.

For those unfamiliar with Django views, they are not strictly “MVC” views. If anything, they act more like controllers, and I treat them as such. It should be a piece of cake to reuse code between these, but usually what happened was that I would define a bunch of private view functions and have them referenced by various view functions. It wasn’t exactly the shining pinnacle of my development career.

While reading the code for django-jqchat while working on a project for my client, I rediscovered the python __call__ magic method. This basically permits you to call an instance of an object like a function. With a little effort, I managed to re-organize the code to make it a little more easy to parse. This is not complete and not debugged, but maybe you will find it useful.

Github Gist Link

http://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/nf5zl/how_do_islamic_banks_make_money/c38przk

I previously considered Islamic banking a fraud, more or less at the same level as “halal pork”.  This comment has forced me to reconsider.

Should I get the 13.3 or the 13.6?

https://github.com/jacobian/django-deployment-workshop

Found this while watching a class on Safaribooksonline.

https://gist.github.com/1414828

I am not sure if I should actually publish this because it seems like hitting a fly with a nuke.

http://mix-mplus-ipa.sourceforge.jp/download.html#migu1m

Found Migu1m recommended as a Japanese Sublime Text 2 font while surfing the web.  Certainly is better than the other options I have on Ubuntu.

Days of effort have finally paid off; I have managed to establish an chroot jail for a project I was working on.

A chroot jail is basically a less-secure virtual machine.  User “A” logs into a machine and thinks he is in root (when he really is in /usr/foo/bar/).  If he has a sufficiently locked-down environment (such as the one that rssh provides), he will not be able to break out of his little cage and modify important system files.  However, as a result of his confinement, he will also not be able to access other system resources – including shell files.

Herein lies the crux of the problem.  It isn’t clear to me what files are needed and what files are not needed to establish a basic SCP or SSH connection.  The following worked in my case.

1. Install rssh (sudo apt-get install rssh)
2. Install scponly (sudo apt-get install scponly)
3. Copy the scponly files to /foo/bar (or wherever you are making your jail)
4. Copy the /lib/ directory files to /foo/bar/lib (as it appears that not all files needed are copied)
5. Modify the /foo/bar/etc/passwd file (sudo chmod a+r /foo/bar/etc/passwd) and eliminate all users you don’t need in it.
6. Create a new user (sudo useradd -m -d /chroot/restricted_user -s /usr/bin/rssh restricted_user) and copy over his information from /etc/passwd to /foo/bar/etc/passwd
7. Your Chroot is working!  (Be sure toedit /etc/rssh.conf to enable the options you want working, and set your chroot directory to whatever you want)

This approach needs to be cleaned up, since I still don’t know what library files I need and which files I don’t.  I am sure that, as is, there are a few security bugs.  Probably will whip up a script to test it out tomorrow.

http://neojaponisme.com/

A statistical fluke among Tokyo gaijin blogs as it is well-researched and a pleasure to read.

Actually, I will take back the “pleasure to read” part, as it can be disturbing to truly understand how a machine works.  It reminds me of how I felt while studying Genetics; like I was on the verge of understanding many great truths, and simultaneously fighting the urge to run away screaming because of how it unraveled one’s pride in being human.

http://oapeon.blogspot.com/2010/05/ubuntu-1004-vnc-based-login-server.html

Who could have known that it was so hard to switch resolutions on an Ubuntu machine?

Downgraded back to 10.04 last week for my home server; life is too short to get caught up in learning a tablet OS for a server.