Category: nerdy

Arizona Crash Data

There is a search tool available, consider it in ‘beta’, for any Arizona reported crash involving a motor vehicle for any years between 2009 and 2022. And most, but not final 2023 is loaded (note it takes as much as many months to get into the database):

You can search by specific date, name of road, city, county, year, injury type, latitude/longitude. In addition to Arizona, the complete United States FARS (fatality only) is searchable but only by date. Continue reading “Arizona Crash Data”

Godaddy go slow again?

This picks up where godaddy-troubles-slow-wordpress-grid-hosting-solution left off. Azbikelaw has been on so-called grid hosting from godaddy ever since the migration of Nov 2010. And it’s been pretty good ever since; it’s not blazing fast, e.g.  webpagetest.org on one particular afternoon saw a full  wordpress homepage load in under 3 seconds; 1st byte at under a second. So, acceptable.  As we learned in Dec of 2014 when problems arose trying to use wordpress on cazbike.org, grid hosting is no longer available for new accounts (i.e. azbikelaw is “grandfathered”). So, at that time cazbike.org to transitioned (albeit manually, I had to reload everything from scratch) to “cPanel” hosting. The pricing is the same. Continue reading “Godaddy go slow again?”

godaddy and ssh and cron

In the beginning, say from 2000-2013 or 14: my username is azbikelaw (probably not a surprise or a revealing security hole, seeing as how it is in the domain name); and I use that to log into ssh and everything is spiffy. When logged in to ssh, e.g. I see my files are “owned” by azbikelaw. So far so good. Continue reading “godaddy and ssh and cron”

Fun with tables.

table from mysql -H html output:

InjurySeverity IncidentID IncidentDateTime Onroad CrossingFeature
5 2371350 2010-04-17 01:18:00 99th Ave Camelback Rd
5 2401688 2010-08-13 00:00:00 99th Ave Union Hills Dr
5 2416950 2010-10-31 11:03:00 99th Ave Lindgren Ave

table from myphpadmin:

IncidentID IncidentDateTime Onroad CrossingFeature
2446148 2010-09-23 06:41:00 Via Linda 117th St
2453234 2010-09-23 07:45:00 Missouri Ave 63rd Ave
2445966 2010-09-23 08:22:00 University Dr Hardy Dr
2451975 2010-09-23 11:10:00 Ina Rd La Cholla Blvd
2451005 2010-09-23 13:49:00 Colombo Ave Charleston Rd
2454504 2010-09-23 15:10:00 Glenn St Orlando Ave
2454482 2010-09-23 15:31:00 8th St Tyndall Ave
2453231 2010-09-23 15:44:00 Camelback Rd 79th Ave
2454471 2010-09-23 15:45:00 Oklahoma St 12th Ave
2448706 2010-09-23 16:13:00 3rd Ave Encanto Blvd
2448069 2010-09-23 17:00:00 Delaware Dr Apache Trl

LED bike lights

Advances in LED lighting, and Li-Ion batteries  have made BRIGHT lighting for cyclists reasonable and cost-effective.

The picture doesn’t do it justice; these lights are very very bright; I have been running them in daylight on their lower-power setting and they are quite visible.

The lights I stumbled on are sold on eBay “direct from China”; from seller “lifebike2011” for ~ $30 (the price has been going down) for a kit that includes a light head; handlebar mount; head strap (that i’ve never used or tried) and a 4-cell Li-Ion battery pack (which is wired in parallel, by the way; i.e. nominal voltage is 4VDC). Continue reading “LED bike lights”

Ug another godaddy problem

[ok, so it’s not exactly correct to blame Godaddy. this is something they (godaddy) is doing for security purposes to try and prevent various types of attacks on their servers; which we godaddy customers should appreciate, even if troublesome.
Update: I called in the morning early of 9/26/2013. They are totally aware of the problem. I had turned on my error logs last night but strangely they were and still were empty; supposedly the tech said they will look into that. Other than that they pretty much said it *should* be fixed within 48 hours. As of 1130am it does look good; so i’m not sure if something was actually generally fixed , or if they just whitelised my ip — the tech did want my ip address so that’s a possibility]

Manifests itself in chrome browser as “No data received” (or as “This page can’t be displayed” in IE) when trying to publish or update a post in wordpress, and is (annoyingly) intermittent. Continue reading “Ug another godaddy problem”

Googlebot / caching / spam insertion issue | Later the WSO web shell by oRb backdoor

(get rid of 503 error in original http://azbikelaw.org/googlebot-caching-issue/ article ?? –that article is now stuck in “draft” status so google won’t/shouldn’t try to crawl it anymore; in March 2018 i started getting complaints from google that that link can be crawled ) Continue reading “Googlebot / caching / spam insertion issue | Later the WSO web shell by oRb backdoor”

XBMC / ECS H61H2-M2 Budget system.

The Hardware

Low-budget system. ECS H61H2-M2 mobo w/hdmi output newegg.com  was blowing them out for like $30 bucks after a rebate. Got a cheapie intel cpu (G530?) from MacMall of all places, via Ebay for $45.

I tried it on both windows and ubuntu and it was fine.

HDMI worked as expected on my television (but was weird on Dave’s?). One thing to note is when the audio line out is plugged in, the sound doesn’t come out the hdmi.

The system uses about 38W sitting on the windows 7 desktop idling according to my Kill-a-watt. This is with an inefficient-looking 400W power supply (it uses 3W even when off, or on standby). That’s inlcuding one 3.5″ 7200 rpm hard disk drive spinning.

Win 7

Fresh Win 7 Pro SP1 installed from bootable USB key. Installed fine but not even the lan worked right out of the chute. Installed mobo drivers, but just the following:  chipset D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Chipset\INF ; lan  D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Lan\Atheros\AR813x  ; video D:\ECSh61h2-m2\VGA\H6x\W7Vista64.

Got xbmc Version 11.0 ‘Eden’. Installed and ran okay. very snazzy. The remote control for andoid works fine EXCEPT that by default, it’s not turned on — to enable it you have to go to system settings and enable the http web server in xbmc.

XBMCbuntu / Linux

Also got 11.0 ‘Eden’ which is distributed as a live CD; based on Ubuntu 11.10 (I think). The live cd booted up and seems to just work. Then I installed it onto the hard drive. It booted up and ran just great. If you exit (click on the virtual “power button”); you will go to a login screen where you can log into a normal ubuntu (select XBMCubuntu) desktop. There is a third choice from the login screen called “openbox” i tried it but it just went to a blank graphics screen.

openssh-server is installed and running by default, so you can/should just let it do its XBMCunbutu full-screen thing and log in via ssh.

Tried some content on a usb hard drive, as well as a windows smb share and both worked fine. didn’t mess with any sort of wireless network traffic. Xbmc has plug in apps for things like Youtube, PBS, Fox News, Al Jezerra, etc; they all work pretty well but the content is somewhat disorganized.

I almost always have trouble with grub/grub2. The basic jist is that you’re supposed to be editing the file /etc/default/grub (e.g. to change the default boot setting) and then you run a job called update-grub. This generates/updates a file called /boot/grub/grub.cnf which you’re not supposed to edit, but you can as long as you’re aware it might get overwritten by various scripts. I never have much luck doing the grub-install, which actually diddles with your hard disk’s MBR. here is the full doc: help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 There is a gui app (apt-get install startupmanager) but I sometimes have trouble with it; like this time i used synaptic to install it just fine but it actually put in the wrong default (it put in a 6 instead of a 5 into grub.cfg!).

If it get really stuck, i just use some windows admistration command, /fixmbr or somesuch; and that just gets rid of grub all together.

Boxee on Win 7

Note that as of March 2012, boxee desktop (as opposed to the commercial boxee box) is at it’s end of life; so this is more of a historical curiosity

Fresh Win 7 Pro installed. Installed mobo drivers, but just the following:  chipset D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Chipset\INF ; lan  D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Lan\Atheros\AR813x  ; video D:\ECSh61h2-m2\VGA\H6x\W7Vista64.

installed fine out of the box, except won’t run. To fix that install direct X from microsoft

boxee-1.5.0.23596-2bcda77.exe

note that i initially installed a slightly older (late 2011?) version and it had an aspect ratio problem (black vertical bars on both sides of the screen when playing video; regardless of screen settings).

Boxee on Ubuntu / Linux

Note that as of March 2012, boxee desktop (as opposed to the commercial boxee box) is at it’s end of life; so this is more of a historical curiosity

installed 11.10 default from cd. Did not install anything extra or special. i.e. unlike win7, the lan and graphics seem to “just work”.

boxee-1.5.0.23596-2bcda77.i486.deb and installed by clicking on it and using gui (could have done: sudo apt-get install boxee… )

There were some instructions here… so i installed these dependecies. Thread on boxee forum about installing 1.5 on Ubuntu 11.10.

sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8

my only confusion is I can’t figure out how to launch the program?? in the unity desktop, you can click on the ubuntu button and search for boxee and a shortcut then pops up and runs.

So it started up and ran pretty uneventfully 🙂

 

Embedding Youtube videos iframes and [dciframe] shortcode

[Update: revisting this on 2/27/2013 the problem mentioned just below seems to be fixed or otherwise is a non-issue — you can just use iframes directly within wp’s built-in editor with no problems, see e.g. driver-convicted-in-horn-honking-incident, which also by the way wraps the iframe in a div tag — div style=”clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;” — and that looks nice ]
There is a bug/feature/problem with wordpress’s built in visual editor (tinyMCE) in that it just goes ahead and removes iframe tags. An iframe tag is used for, among many other things, to embed youtube videos. Another popular usage example is to embed a google map, or calendar.

here is what some youtube embed code might look like:

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oUkiyBVytRQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>  </iframe>

Here are a couple of  good rundowns of what to do here or here. Continue reading “Embedding Youtube videos iframes and [dciframe] shortcode”

WordPress Minutia

tips and trick.

Blockquote

Below is a blockquote…

this text is in a block quote. Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar

Here is some text after the blockquote has ended.

Text boxes

So the code looks something like this

<div style="float: right; width: 250px; height: 300px;  padding: 2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; background-color: #eeeeee; border: #dddddd 2px solid;">text goes here</div>

… And you can also add in fancier CSS3 styles like box-shadow, text-shadow, and box-radius — they work, but the visual editor stripped the radius and box-shadow: -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px rgba(0,0,0,0.5); text-shadow: 3px 3px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); Continue reading “WordPress Minutia”