vStone Blog

Since my BashDL project is kinda on hold till I finish kickstart bash, I’m posting the script I’m currently using to download from rapidshare. I fixed a small bug since rapidshare changed some of the site’s inner workings. The script can currently be found until improved here:
RapidShare Basic Download Script

It’s possible there are still bugs present, in which case you just respond here with what the problem is. If you are going to attach output, check /tmp/ for files looking like LINKS???????.rs, PAGE???????.rs and WGET??????.rs.

IMPORTANT!
Make sure you remove your rapidshare password and user from ALL files you send me. I don’t need to know.
You can do this by using ’sed’ (replace 000000 by your user name / password).
See the manual for information on how to use sed. A example can be found here:

sed -i s/000000/=LOGIN=/ [filename]
sed -i s/000000/=PASSWORD=/ [filename]

If you run into any trouble loading a file with links in it, make sure it has unix line endings. You can use the tool dos2unix to convert a file before using it.

Not many people know about it, but the file hosting service rapidshare.com provides a perl script to upload files to their servers. They distribute it here: http://images.rapidshare.com/software/rsapi.pl.

If you have ever used it, or are trying it out right now, you’ll notice it is but-ugly. The script isn’t meant to be actually used (AFAIK) but is more of a prove of concept where other programmers can base themselves up to write their own applications to upload to rapidshare. I adjusted the script a little to use myself. Nothing changed in the internals, but I added a progress meter and upload speed.

A small example of the output now is:

[  1%]    896000 of  71061919 bytes sent at [Current/Global:  73.80 /  63.05 (KB/s)]
[  1%]   1024000 of  71061919 bytes sent at [Current/Global:  58.13 /  62.30 (KB/s)]
[  1%]   1152000 of  71061919 bytes sent at [Current/Global:  63.66 /  62.46 (KB/s)]
[  1%]   1280000 of  71061919 bytes sent at [Current/Global:  58.37 /  61.98 (KB/s)]

Upload Speed statistics may be a bit of. it’s more of an indication anyway…

The source of my ‘hardly’-improved version can be found here:
Rapidshare Perl API (Improved) (Zip File).

A couple of days ago, I finally made up my mind about choosing sourceforge.net or google code. It became google code. It seems to me the site is a lot more responsive than the sourceforge one, and that is really all that matters for now. I don’t need complicated tools (although the webhosting sf.net provides would come in handy…).

After making a initial mistake of adding a wiki page right from the start, I could no longer reset the attached svn repository (this is only possible when you are still at r1), so I had to make a little detour by the Google-code-group. You can find the finished product here: http://code.google.com/p/kickstart-bash/. Happy issue filing!

Like I posted some time ago, I had some problems resolving the rewrite engine when trying to access my kickstart page (http://vstone.eu/kickstart) and separating it from http://kickstart.vstone.org. I proposed a solution but that only worked half the time. It was a work around at the time, but it gave me some problems in the end. Since the check for the referer was in there, I couldn’t access my wordpress/wp-admin page anymore when using the link on the main page. This gave me a nice 404.

So, I decided to be smart about it, reset the .htaccess file in my root folder to the default one for wordpress and adjust a separate .htaccess file in the kickstart subfolder. It looks like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteBase /kickstart/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^kickstart.vstone.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
</IfModule>

By setting the RewriteBase to /kickstart/, I’m already sure this rewrite condition will never match ‘http://kickstart.vstone.org/’. This could only give me problems when I have sth like http://kickstart.vstone.org/kickstart/. So, I also make sure that the HTTP_HOST never is kickstart.vstone.org.

After that, I can be pretty sure I can rewrite it to the index file used for wordpress.

Since the beginning of this week, I’ve been altering my code base for the Kickstart BASH script a lot. After a while, I decided it looked horrible, lacked documentation and was unmaintainable (and certainly not expandable). I also have the bad habit of forgetting what a certain function does, so proper documentation is a must.

So I started with getting back too my good old classes and objects. Starting off with the Output to HTML / Text or a File, I’m converting everything to fit nicely in classes and mainly use objects. And started documenting them all. You never know my code might prove useful to somebody else. You can expect to have a link show up to the phpdocs pretty soon.

Next up is converting my kinda ugly template system to Classes. Probably Options will prove useful here too. And I’ll be able to re-use them from my Output.

Yesterday, I finished putting up the Kickstart BASH page. More information can be found here.

At the same time, I fixed some SSL issues I was having on my home-webserver. Apparently, ssl doesn’t play nice with Namebased Virtual Hosts – which gave me some issues getting the right certificate in place. It’s a self signed one so you might get a little warning about that. It’s not going to change any time soon (as long as I’m hosting the svn repo myself that is).

Planned for later this evening: Setting up http://kickstart.vstone.org/, which will host the actual script in action. I ran into some problems again here: since my webhosting puts subdomains in a subfolder in my htdocs root, I had to do some magic rewriting to forward only ‘kickstart.vstone.org’ to the proper location.
For those of you who care: the solution was to add a rule to my wordpress rewrite rules in the .htaccess file. I’ve added the condition to check whether or not the server was accessed by ‘www.vstone.org‘ or ‘kickstart.vstone.org‘.

.htaccess file

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(http://|https://)(www.)?(vstone.org).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^kickstart.vstone.org.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

Don’t you just hate it when you have an idea, you scribble it on a piece of paper and after a while you have too much pieces of paper dealing with the same thing. Or even better, the paper have served as barbecue fuel already… I have this problem all the time. So I went looking for a online brainstorm package. Originally, I wanted to find some php project dealing with this that I could set up at my home server.

But then, I ran into Bubbl.us. What is Bubbl.us? From their website: "Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online."

So if you feel the need to brainstorm and you want to stop wasting paper, just register and have a blast.

Update: I noticed they have a wordpress plugin too. You can find all the information here.

Yesterday I started with some inline svg in a xhtml webpage. And it proved to be a great challenge to make the damn thing valid. I tried multiple solutions and finally I found the following blogpost. There are 2 solutions according to :ism:

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When I found myself re-adding libraries in Netbeans again, I felt that I needed a quicker way to so. I have plenty of java libraries installed on my machine and it’s turning into a real hassle to set them up each time I clean out my Netbeans configuration folder.

So, that is why I created this script.

It is somewhat meant to be used on Gentoo. But it can be used on other distros too.

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I’m writing this to make sure that the plugins I’m setting up are actually working. Let’s see how this goes:

/*
* A small test class to see how Geshi works this.
* Hope I won't have to tweak it too much...
*/
public class TestMarkup() {
 
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World");
  }
}