Tony Baltazar » admin

Filled with disgust

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:57:09 +0000

Like if over a million people jailed each year in the U.S. alone for drug possession is not enough, yet another example by Hollywood’s pop culture demonstrates our failed drug policy. On the same day another mayor of a Mexican border city gets executed by Mexican organized crime, it’s absolutely disgusting see the grin on Paris Hilton’s mug shot from her arrest for cocaine possession.

If only Miss Hilton went South of the border were she can stand at the doorway of a home (with no electricity and little food) watching the agony and pain of a mother of a young man who was just executed by a rival cartel. This young man, due to economic circumstances; only responsibility in his life was to take care of his mother and family, by smuggling drugs. Which at the end of the day he’ll only be able to carry water and bring some food to his mother and family. He should NOT have to do that but THAT is the real life. I wonder how much that would change the life of precious Paris? I am certain it would, somehow. These Hollywood superstars who “carry the torch for the poor and weary”….right!!! they want their drugs and they want them “now!” They are all co conspirators of murder, at least in my mind.

This incident reminds of the day when the US Senate Judiciary Committee decided not to prosecute Michael Phelps for drug charges, which happened at the same time the Police Chief of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico was executed along with five of his body guards.

It is absolutetly disgusting to see these famous people be gloried and go about with total impunity.

Ian Holloway before the 6 – 0 defeat

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:58:38 +0000

Ian Holloway bravely announcing his premeditation of losing badly to Arsenal, which consequently they ended up losing 6 nil at the Emirates.

Video that nearly brought tears to my eyes

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:39:03 +0000

Re-enabling mod_ruby on perlninja.pl

admin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 05:16:27 +0000

I finally managed to re-enable mod_ruby on my server once again. This time around, I had a hard time enabling eRuby to work in Apache.

New Apache configuration file:


AddType text/html .rhtml
LoadModule ruby_module modules/mod_ruby.so
#
RubyRequire apache/ruby-run
RubyRequire apache/eruby-run

Options +ExecCGI
SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::RubyRun.instance


SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::ERubyRun.instance

#

The Apache eRuby SetHandler (rhtml) was not able to render any html/ruby pages, while regular ruby scripts (.*rb) were able to run just fine.

Apache log error:
[Sun Aug 08 20:56:15 2010] [error] mod_ruby: (eval):45: (eval):45: uninitialized constant Apache::ERubyRun (NameError)

FIX:

Specify the absolute path to the eRuby Apache module in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/apache/eruby-run.rb.

Change line 45

require ‘eruby’

require “/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-linux/eruby.so”

Restart Apache and eRuby should render html/ruby pages as expected.

I hope people find this useful (and save a headache) as I spent about 5 hours researching this problem and I wasn’t able to find this fix anywhere.

Narco culture

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:45:58 +0000

As I’m simultaneously listening to my neighbors music and the music that’s being played in my own house; the thing they both have in common is that both are playing narcocorridos.

As far as I know, there is no other culture in the world that listens to, glorifies, and embraces the one single thing that is destroying their very own civil society.

Lawlessness in Mexico

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 05:56:01 +0000

On the same day where the leader of “La Linea”, organization responsible for the car bomb that killed two Federal Policemen and a paramedic. The Mexican government finds out that 17 killings committed in nothern Mexico last week, were perpetrated by hitman already in prisoned. Apparently the jailed hitman were allowed to leave their cells with weapons borrowed from guards of the actual prison.

References:
http://www.informador.com.mx/mexico/2010/221004/6/el-20-operador-de-la-linea-tras-las-rejas.htm
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/25/world/la-fg-mexico-killings-20100726

Charles Bowden interview

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:52:13 +0000

Charles Bowden is a very smart person, but comparing the Mexican Drug War to the Vietnam War is absolutely ridiculous. In Bowden eyes, “It’s turned into a War by the Mexican government against the Mexican people”.

According to United Nations organized crime adviser Edgardo Buscaglia, Mexican cartels need to be stop being categorized as drug organizations as the DEA wants them to be, for their very own self-interest as their simple existence to fight drugs. Throughout Mexico, these criminal organizations also commit 25 other types as crimes, such as kidnapping, extortion, etc… In it’s true sense, the “War on Drugs” is a failed US policy thats been going on for over 40 years while the Mexico is dealt with its very own war against organized crime which morph from the failed US policy.

What’s in my bookshelf?

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:55:53 +0000

I finally finished reading my second book on Perl. Unlike Apress’ Beginning Perl, Learning Perl 5th Edition by Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy is not a book for someone new to programming.
With a solid understanding of dynamic languages like PHP and Ruby, I found most of the material covered on this book very comprehensive, thus said, at times I found myself re-reading portions of the chapters just to understand concept the authors were trying to cover.

For the most part, I read this book jointly with Apress’ Beginning Perl and I found this book to have more practical real word code examples (at least if you’re a sysadmin). The most notably difference on how this book was written for someone who is new to programming with Perl, but to not new to programming are the three chapters the authors dedicate to regular expressions.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Scalar Data
Chapter 3: Lists and Arrays
Chapter 4: Subroutines
Chapter 5: Input and Output
Chapter 6: Hashes
Chapter 7: In the World of Regular Expressions
Chapter 8: Matching with Regular Expressions
Chapter 9: Processing Text with Regular Expressions
Chapter 10: More Control Structures
Chapter 11: Perl Modules
Chapter 12: File Tests
Chapter 13: Directory Operations
Chapter 14: Strings and Sorting
Chapter 15: Smart Matching and given-when
Chapter 16: Process Management
Chapter 17: Some Advanced Perl Techniques
Chapter 14 Introduction to CGI
Chapter 15: Perl and DBI

I would only suggest this book to someone with a solid knowledge of another scripting language.
Learning Perl, 5th Edition
3/5

Speed up shell scripting

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 04:28:08 +0000

Once again the book Practical Ruby for System Administration by Ben Hamou taught me some pretty clever Ruby sysadmin scripting tricks.
One of the scripts that the author used was to automatically populate the path to the Ruby interpreter, update the permissions to 755, and open the script in vi, all during the same process.

I took that same concept and enhanced the script to also auto populate the settings if the scripts is written in Bash, Perl, PHP, or Python.

Download rnew.rb

-Copy rnew.rb to somewhere within your system PATH.
cp rnew.rb /usr/local/bin

-This should give the ability to use rnew.rb from anywhere you’re working on.
rnew.rb koolscript.php

-Happy Hacking

watch command line utility for alternative for Mac OS X

admin — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:34:41 +0000

I recently purchased the book Practical Ruby for System Administration by Ben Hamou and one of the cool Ruby one-liner command line expressions is one that mimics the watch command.
ruby -e 'system "clear; df -h" while sleep 1'

Just like the author, for quite a while I’ve been kind of annoyed by the fact that Apple doesn’t include this really useful command line utility. So inspired by the one-liner script, I hacked a small watch command line alternative for OS X.

Download watch.rb
sudo cp watch.rb /usr/local/bin
wacht.rb ‘UNIX command‘