The iwl3945 would not go into monitor mode as easily as some of the
documentation says.

To get this to work, I had to go through a peculiar set of steps.
Notice the changing argument, wlan0 or wifi0.

1. airmon-ng stop wlan0
( will say “monitor mode disabled)

2. airmon-ng stop wifi0
(will say nothing much)

3. airmon-ng start wlan0
(now it agrees to go into monitor mode:
(Monitor mode enabled on mon0)

Here is a useful function to detect, in your controller, when a bot or web spider is clicking your links and pushing your buttons.Place this in helpers/my_helper.rb (use your own controller name obviously).

def MyHelper.is_bot?(request)
request.user_agent.downcase =~ /bot|slurp|spider|crawl/
end

Simple enough, but useful.

In my case, on a site i’ve been building, www.movie-cat.tv, the googlebot was coming through and marking all movies as “unavailable” through a simple crawl. If the bot is detected, the controller should not mark the movie unavailable, instead return before performing some action. This solved it.

GoogleBot, MSNBot, Yahoo Slurp, BaiduSpider. Modify the regex by adding any other bots you want to exclude, and separating them with a pipe “|”.

Using ScrubyT, a Ruby on Rails plugin, on a Linux system such as my CentOS 5 VPS, you can get an error message and stack trace like this:

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/scrubyt-0.4.06/lib/scrubyt/utils/shared_utils.rb:43:in `traverse_for_match’: undefined method `each’ for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

If you see this, go to shared_utils.rb in the path above, and change this block:

node.children.each { |child| traverse_for_m….

into this:

if node.children
node.children.each { |child| traverse_for_m….
end

Thanks to Deginzabi who wrote about it in Japanese. This article is a translation of what he said. Hope this makes the next ScrubyT release! It is a great project.

Did you know that you can use “Invisible Mode” in the Google Talk app? This is not the web application, but the genuine standalone Google Talk app. You don’t have to use the GTalk applet that is embedded in Gmail any longer, and can avoid cyberstalkers with class and sophistication!

Here is the link to the version of GTalk you’re interested in – Google Talk Labs Edition:

http://www.google.com/talk/labsedition/index.html

I would recommend uninstalling the ordinary version of Gtalk first, otherwise the two will be installed side by side and become an annoyance.

Check out this video! I made it on a site called Animoto.com . Awesome!!!

BF and DSZ’s wedding on 6.27.09. Turn up your speakers!

Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), and at least 10 other companies have shed nearly 50% of their value in after hours trading. Nothing in the recent news feeds gives any indication why:

The worst 10 after-hours performers, from nasdaq.com.

Intel lost 49.5% of its value after hours.

Oracle lost 49.77% of its value after hours.

This must be a prank. In theory, just one prankster could have pulled this off. Right at the closing bell, just before 8pm, he could have sold one share of each of these stocks. He put a limit order so low that anyone with a standing buy order (at a much higher price, obviously) would have gotten a great deal – one share of INTC for half price. Computers handle all the trading and would instantly execute such a sale order. Since after hours trades don’t report volume in the same way as normal trades, this prank could severely worry investors!!

Unless the US high tech economy has totally collapsed since 4pm wednesday!

( I sure hope this is a prank. Buying 1 plane ticket to Kolkata just in case…)