Tripwire Script

Here's a fun little tripwire script I whipped out this afternoon:

#!/bin/sh
cd /tmp
find / | grep -v ^/proc > tripwire0 2> /dev/null
diff tripwire1 tripwire0 | grep "[<>]" > tripwire3
cat tripwire3 | sed 's/</del/' | sed 's/>/add/'
chattr -i tripwire1; mv -f tripwire0 tripwire1
chattr +1 tripwire1;
exit 0

Run this in a cron job and get a list of all the files that have been added or deleted from a system. This is specially calibrated ignore the dynamic nature of /proc. Beware of transient mounts!

Room 101: The Evolution of Desktops

A nice set of screen shots covering The Evolution of Desktops. Don't read the comments, as people started blasting the guy for not having an all inclusive history of desktop computing. He didn't state that as his goal, so his achievement is definitely worth.

Sunrise Run

Went for a sunrise run along the beach in Jacksonville, Florida. I was just getting back in the car for the trip back to the hotel to get ready for work, when I noticed the sun peeking over the clouds.

BTW: TextAmerica.com must be reading my blog, because the day after I mentioned that they could not post picture descriptions, but Blogger could, they fixed their system.

Huge Trunk

When they handed of the keys to the rental car, I thought it was strange that they called the trunk the HOLD. I figured it must be a huge trunk he they are calling it a cargo hold. Then I realized they
meant that I had to hold the button to open the trunk.

More Moblog Integration Fun

A few observations:
One picture at a time. The bridge post included three pictures, but only one of them made it to Blogger. All three made it to the TextAmerica moblog.
Doesn't handle punctuation. The truck picture should have some apostrophes, but they didn't get translated correctly.

Bridges In Jacksonville, FL

Boy, these people really like bridges.

Car Covers

Transport truck carrying covered Audis. Cool idea. I&#39;m suprised an American car company didn&#39;t think of this. Not.

Blogger - Moblog Integration

You'll notice a picture of the Denver airport in the blog. I wanted to test this new function of Blogger. Setting up the integration was not as straight forward as they implied, but seems to work a little better than TextAmerica. Honestly, the problem is Sprint.

Blogger says to send them a picture and they will send you a claim code. Unfortunately, the claim code was sent as an image which my Sprint phone could not view. I had to forward the message Blogger sent to the phone to regular mail account. Sprint, however, does not actually e-mail pictures. What they do is send people an e-mail that tells them to go to Sprintpcs.com so they can see the picture that was uploaded. It's Sprint's way of saying "All you Picture belong to us." Once I logged into webmail, redirected to Sprint to get the message from Blogger, I could then log in to Blogger to associate my phone with the blog.

The only reson I mentioned that it works better than TextAmerica, is that TA is not able to capture the picture mail text from Sprint. As a result, anytime I send a picture to TA, I have to log in and edit the description. Blogger seems to have licked that problem.

Denver Airport Trains

This is a view of the train that connects the terminals.

Google Maps Mobile

As you know, I love Google Maps! And now, I've got Google Maps on my phone!

I already have Rand McNally StreetFinder on the phone which is integreted with the phone's GPS system. (We understand, of course, that phones don't really use GPS, the use LBS.) This is a wonderful program as it is actually a client application, which makes it much more flexible than a standalone GPS device. It uses the location based services to locate the phone within a few hundred feet, and downloads the street and neighborhood info for that area. As a result of this download, I can start keying in a destination address, and the system will search memory first, and on the server if needed. Generally, it can find any address within half a dozen characters.

Now that it has both the current location and destination, it hands the data up to the server, which calculates the route, and downloads maps to the phone. Since it is constantly communicating with the server, the information is reasonably up to date, and I don't need to worry about updating the program. The downside is that it is a subscription based service, but at $4.95 a month, I can afford to run it for a long time before buying a real GPS.

I use a similar process to drive my Bunger Tracker system, though I let Google provide the maps, and skip the downloads.

Now to Google Maps Mobile: I stumbled upon http://www.google.com/gmm, which explained that if visited the site on my phone, I could download the application. There was a hardware compatibility list of supported phones, it did not show the cost of this service. I figured the only way to find out was to try it... and you know what?

Its free!

The bad news: no GPS integration. The good news: satellite images.