Cruel and Unusual Geography

Vodafone’s current promotion in New Zealand is a young male (the “3GGuy”)  trotting around the country giving away netbooks. They created a Twitter account for the chap, but rather than use that have chosen to spam the Vodafone corporate Twitter account for the duration of the promotion.

Sadly this young chap (and/or his marketing-droid masters) doesn’t seem to understand social media. His first competition was to see who could spam the most.

This has not pleased some folk. Nope. Not at all.

In the Open Source spirit of “if you don’t like it, fix it” I’ve created my first Twitter bot. It parses the @vodafoneNZ Twitter stream and posts all tweets that don’t contain references to 3GGuy to @vfNZno3gguy. The updates aren’t instant, but should come through within half an hour or so.

The filtering is pretty basic at the  moment (it’s keyword-based; feel free to suggest modifications in the comments), but will be updated as I’m able.

Again, the 3Gguy-free Twitter feed is at @vfNZno3gguy. I hope this is of use to some folks.

Update:  the @vfNZno3gguy account was mentionned by @lancewiggs in his “how NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation” post.

I recently wrote about using apticron to keep track of package updates required on your Ubuntu or Debian server. It turns out that the instructions linked to from that post are out of date.

When apticron is installed (on the one Debian and two Ubuntu versions I’ve tested this with) there is no configuration requested. Instead, the default is to mail the update notice to root on the local box. To change this, edit the EMAIL field of /etc/apticron/apticron.conf. I’ve found that no other configuration changes were required.

I’ll post more on setting up a simple mail handler Real Soon Now.™

I know people who manage several, and in a couple of cases hundreds, of servers. While I’m nowhere near that level — I’m a coder, not a system administrator —I do have a few machines that I’m responsible for. The work subversion repository, for example, and the issue tracker, and one or two others, mostly running various flavours of Ubuntu Server on virtual machines.

Manually checking whether patches are required for the kernel or applications

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

becomes more of an effort when there’s more than one or two machines to manage. Enter apticron, a utility which will automatically email you when there are packages needing upgrading.

Configuration is simple; there’s a nice overview here.

Update: there are brief (but accurate) configuration instructions posted now.

Computers are always giving us grief, and the term “computer bug” is bandied around to describe all sorts of things going wrong. While technically a “bug” is (uaually) a fault a the program running on the computer, there are exceptions.

Depending on whether you believe the US Navy or wikipedia the first actual computer bug was found in either 1945 or 1947.

First actual case of bug being found

It’s a moth, trapped between points in one of the large electromechanical computers of the day. The image is the page from the log book where it was taped after being extracted from the computer. If only present-day bugs were so easy to find and remove…

A while ago I wrote about the “blackout” campaign protesting about Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act. I’m pleased to announce that the government has decided (or is that “noticed”) that the section in its current form is unworkable, and will be amended before it comes into force.

A rare win for common sense in Parliament. Full marks to the team at Creative Freedom Foundation who led the protest, and thanks to Stephen Fry and everyone else who joined in.

Google’s recent announcement that it will be targeting advertisements based on your browsing history has generated discussion around privacy and control of your browsing history. Many services provide the ability to “opt out” of this sort of advertising, but the opt-out mechanism is cookie based, and if you’re the stype who regularly deletes your cookies you’ll find yourself back in the program.

Enter the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out, or TACO. Written by Christopher Soghoian it preserves a number of opt-out cookies for firefox users when cookies are cleared. There’s more information, including details on which cookies are preserved, which are not, and why, on the TACO page. It can be installed from that page, or (preferably) from the Firefox addons site. While it’s tagged “experimental” by Mozilla that’s a log-in-required add-on, but BugMeNot has credentials for the site.