Disabling The hald-addon-storage Service On CentOS/RedHat

The hald – Hardware Access Layer Daemon – runs several processes in order to keep track of what hardware is installed on your system. This includes polling USB Drives and ‘hot-swap’ devices to check for changes along with a host of other tasks. You might see it running on your system as follows: 12342474 ?        S      0:00  \_ hald-runner 2481 ?        S      0:00      \_ hald-addon-acpi: listening on acpid socket /var/run/acpid.socket 2487 ?        S      0:00      \_ hald-addon-keyboard: listening on /dev/input/event0 2495 ?        S     41:47      \_ hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/hdc If your system is static and the devices do not change, you can actually disable this service using a policy entry. Create a file in your policy directory, for example /etc/hal/fdi/policy/99-custom.fdi. Add the text: 123456789<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>….

Why I’m Dropping Boxee for XBMC

The Boxee platform had so much promise. Since releasing the Boxee Box in November 2010, Boxee has absolutely abandoned the PC users who brought the platform to prominence. Having waited since November for Boxee 1.0, PC Boxee users (including me) are now in open revolt.  I've been a huge proponent of the platform since the Alpha in October of 2008. The developers have done a great job building a product on top of XBMC, adding streaming capabilities from popular sources such as Netflix and Hulu. The product, overall, is a great idea. Since the Boxee Box release, the PC version of Boxee has been left derelict and is just an afterthought at this point. Hulu content is inaccessible (from what I understand largely due to Hulu) and the other web-content is near-unwatchable due to the idiosyncrasies of each web player and how Boxee displays them. It is only with frequent updates to correct these glaring problems that….

Experimenting with Pascal on Ubuntu

I’ve been busy lately on a number of projects, one of which is a programming class I am currently taking. The class itself is interesting, we are learning about the different types of programming languages. For our latest project, we were tasked with writing a simple program in Pascal. Pascal isn’t used too much any more since it lacks some of the features that most modern languages have, but it is good to know at least a little bit about it in case you ever run across some old Pascal programs in the wild. The syntax for pascal is a bit verbose, that is the main complaint about it. There are a number of others, but that is beyond the scope of this howto. Installing The Pascal Compiler on Ubuntu Installing Pascal in modern Ubuntu is a cinch. The Free Pascal Compiler, or fpc, is all that you need to….

Twitter Blocked in Egypt: A View From Inside Their Network

I keep various VPSes across the globe for research purposes. One of those locations is in Egypt. So what happens when I do a normal traceroute? [root@vps01-eg ~]# tracert google.com traceroute to google.com (74.125.230.81), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1  host-x.com.eg (196.x.x.x)  0.033 ms  0.024 ms  0.017 ms  2  host-x.com.eg (196.x.x.x)  0.780 ms  0.883 ms  1.091 ms  3  10.x.x.x (10.x.x.x)  0.691 ms  0.700 ms  0.693 ms 4  172.x.x.x (172.x.x.x)  1.623 ms  1.613 ms  1.603 ms 5  172.x.x.x (172.x.x.x)  1.751 ms  2.060 ms  2.055 ms 6  172.20.2.1 (172.20.2.1)  7.860 ms  7.855 ms  7.846 ms  7  172.20.3.37 (172.20.3.37)  6.387 ms  7.281 ms  6.525 ms 8  * * * 9  * * *10  64.214.151.81 (64.214.151.81)  140.963 ms  140.328 ms  140.305 ms11  po2-40G.ar4.NYC1.gblx.net (67.16.132.174)  140.821 ms  143.027 ms  141.632 ms 12  72.14.198.93 (72.14.198.93)  129.329 ms  129.689 ms  129.658 ms13  216.239.43.114 (216.239.43.114)  187.277 ms  132.211 ms  131.428 ms14  216.239.46.219 (216.239.46.219)  136.966 ms  136.579 ms  136.060 ms 15  64.233.175.115 (64.233.175.115)  136.051….

My Thoughts on the iPhone 4 on Verizon

The Verizon iPhone is a win for consumers all around. The competition between VZ and ATT will only heat up with better values coming out of all cell phone plans (the current pricing trend is out of control.) Which will be better for you? Depends on whose network covers the places you frequent the most. On the VZ positive end there will be the ability to turn the iPhone into a network hot spot without jailbreaking (for an additional fee, likely $30/month); on the minus it can not make voice calls and transfer data at the same time. For AT&T’s part, they have grown up around the massive amounts of data the iPhone uses and it is as of yet unseen if Verizon’s network can handle it.  I would recommend waiting until May or June to get the next generation iPhone from Verizon to see how things pan out. If….

Adding Random Quotes to the Bash Login Screen

According to “official” system administrator rules and guidelines you shouldn’t be adding so-called vain scripts to the login prompt – only utilities that will add something useful to the system (for example, current system load, memory and disk usage, etc). However I have some systems that I frequently connect to and thought it would be neat to add a random quote script to my bash login. That being said, this should only be done on ‘non-production’ systems and adds a security vector so please be careful where you use this. The goal of this is to add a little quote, at random, every time you log into your system. My thoughts were to do it not only as a little source of inspiration but also to add perspective to what I’m doing sitting in front of the computer all of the time. Originally I was going to try to write….

Find Out If A Twitter Username Exists Using PHP/JSON

I’ve been trying to grab a Twitter screenname that people continually register and do not use. Twitter eventually deletes it, but I suppose it is in high enough demand that someone else registers it right away (and then continues to never use it). Wrote up a quick and dirty php script to check the Twitter API to see if a screenname exists and if it doesn’t, shoot a short an email. I’ve been using changedetection to roughly do the same thing but it has fallen short on two counts: the first is that it reports follower count changes, and second it only runs once a day and this hasn’t been fast enough for me to grab my desired screen name. You can set this script to run via cron at any desired interval, I’ve set it to run every 30 minutes for me. Test with sample information to make sure….