AndrewEnsley.com

Problem:

You’ve chosen the most simple, solid Linux server – Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and you want to run the most simple, solid XMPP server – ejabberd. BUT, the version of ejabberd in Hardy’s repositories is the really old (Sep 03, 2007!) 1.1.4 release.

Solution:

You could of course build ejabberd from source, but that’s not why you chose the “It Just Works^TM” Ubuntu server, is it? Have no fear. A simple and (mostly) painless solution awaits!

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Thanks to my friend who sent me this.

Uber-geeks will recognize “RFC” (yet another TLA) as short for “Request For Comments.” But those with lives normal folks might need an explanation.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has created RFC as a standard for documentation of Internet-related subjects. There is an RFC for just about everything, including:

• Internet Protocol (791)
• Email (5322)
• TCP (793)
• Instant Messaging (3290)

A lot of RFC’s are standards, but the vast majority of them are not. Almost all of them, though, are painfully dry reads. That said, there are some glaring exceptions.

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Recap

In case you missed Part 1, I briefly summarized 4 different strategies for programmatically determining the current Operating System in C#.  The code I posted there utilizes the System.Environment class.  It works great and is sufficient for most uses, but sometimes you want need to know everything about the OS, including the edition (i.e. “XP Pro” vs. “XP Home”).

Summary

For that, Microsoft gives us the lovely Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Interface.  You can do a lot of really powerful and interesting things with WMI and WQL, but for this purpose, all we care about is getting some information from it.

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Whenever I have limited experience with something or just need to do some research, I go straight to StackOverflow.com – a computer programming question and answer site.  Out of the 24 questions I’ve asked on the site, only one has gone unanswered to date, and I’ve gleaned countless other answers from questions others have already asked.  In case you haven’t already guessed, I really like the site.

Not long ago, I needed to convert uploaded video files for a project in PHP.  FFMPEG was a clear and obvious choice for the job, but I had never used it before, so I turned to my favorite resource.  Sure enough, I got enough information in the answers to build a fully working solution.  I posted that solution as an answer to my own question in case anyone else could use it.

Unfortunately, StackOverflow seems to be having trouble displaying my answer, so I’ve reposted it here for anyone who needs it.

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I hate spam. I hate it. That’s why I’ve been a participant in Project Honey Pot for the past several years.  For those who don’t know what Project Honey Pot is, here’s their About page

To summarize, the project catches spammers by putting fake e-mail addresses on special pages that only harvesters crawling websites should ever find.  When one of those addresses get spam, they’ve caught a harvester and know exactly when and from what IP the e-mail address was harvested.

It only just recently occurred to me that there really is no good Wordpress plugin that allows you to hide honey pot links in your website. So I wrote one.

I was surprised at how easy it was actually. I hope it’s helpful to someone, somewhere.

Go to the plugin page now