Gigi and kittens

Now you should know that cat have different temperaments and attitudes. Some are vocal and very talkative (like our Garo). Others are shy and reserved. Others are aloof, etc..
Gigi is like nothing I have seen before. She is clearly the strongest of the bunch as all the other cats in the neighborhood (males and females alike) move out of her way and step back when she hisses at them. And her hiss is barely noticeable. She’s very calm and steady. On the other hand she’s very warm with people. She will rub on anyone’s feet. Will not balk away if you try to pet her. And will gladly climb into any welcoming lap. She doesn’t vocalize much and before she gave birth we rarely heard her voice except for the casual “beep” (half a “beep-beep”) if someone steps on her tail because she’s always laying behind our feet when we’re in the kitchen!
Now Gigi is not litter trained. Mainly because she takes care of business (and sleeps) outside. But since the kittens came, we decided to keep them inside (closed porch). Gigi is happy with the arrangement since she doesn’t have to fend for her litter. Garo comes in for feeding on that same porch a couple of times every day, but he’s a pushover and she doesn’t worry about him much. We even closed the small opening he used to enter, so he now stands outside and yells for someone to open for him. So, when Gigi wants to eliminate, she has to go outside. She could simply leave, but we noticed that before leaving she comes looking for us. Every single time, before going outside, she comes looking for either one of us and starts taking loudly. We know we have to do something because she never speaks otherwise, and she’s never loud! When we follow her to the porch and stand next to the kittens, she rubs her head on our feet once and then steps out. She makes sure that the kittens are asleep before she leaves. And she only stays out for a few minutes each time. She trusts us to handle the kittens: no hissing or any sort of complaint when we do that, but she licks them thouroughly after we put them back. So I’m guessing that she wants us to kittensit for her while she’s away! Have you ever seen such a behaviour?

Update: after exactly 7 days, gigi was very vocal again. She was going out more and after a few trips, she came back and started taking her kittens one by one to hide them in the bush across the street. Pia was not too happy with that.

Another update: Xena came back after 2 days of absence. She delivered her litter somewhere in the neighbourhood. She is coming to feed more often now and is back to her playful and hyperactive self.

Yet another update: it’s been about a week since we noticed Xena’s delivery. She was very noisy today, even more than usual. And she was exploring the house. At about 6pm, I was taking a nap when I heard a scream. Pia was screaming (joyfully as I learned later) because Xena was carrying one of her kittens in her mouth and she took it straight into our living room. She went though the whole ritual 5 times (telling us she was going, drinking some water our milk, then going to get a kitten). I’m writing this update now sitting on the floor next to them. She is tired, but purring loudly. And the 5 are taking turns at feeding. bliss…

Basically what you need to do is add an SPF record to your domain’s DNS zone. But since most DNS control panels do not have this record, you can simply add it as a TXT record.
The OpenSPF site provides the syntax used to identify the resources on your network or otherwise that are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. But I always find it easier to use a simple form to generate that record. Below are a few helpful sites that offer such a form/wizard:

• EasyDNS – EasySPF
• Mail Radar SPF Wizard
• Cloudfloor DNS
• let me know if you find others you like…

I know GMail checks the SPF records. Yahoo Mail prefer DKIM. For more info about DKIM and setting that up check this old post by Brandon Checketts.

The MD5 hash should match.
You could use a bash script to search a directory for a specific MD5 hash. For example:

I guess the above could use some work

for the CLI-phobics check out this certificate key matcher

We had recently lost our cat “The Boss”, and had plenty of cat food left over. So my wife started feeding one of the cats that was bold enough to stop and “chat” with us while passing by.
He came back again for more and we took his picture. Comparing that to an older picture we had of “the boss” conversing with another cat from behind closed windows we knew that was not the first time this particular cat was at our door (and windows). We had thought it was a female previously. And “the boss” was bold enough to chase away other cats that ventured near his balcony, so we never saw that cat again while he was with us.
Soon after, my wife was leaving food for “Garfield the red” on the balcony every night, and we always found the bowl empty in the morning. Garo (for short), was also visiting during the day, and screaming for attention (and food) whenever he saw us. But we suspected he wasn’t the only one eating our food.
One day, we saw the one I always called “hag” passing by. But instead of taking the trail down the wall facing the office and to the street, she went straight to the balcony and to the bowl of food! Yeap, Garo had competition.
And it was real competition for our affections, as Giselle was so cuddly and human-friendly you wouldn’t believe it was a feral cat. She spent her time rubbing against my wife’s feet. When Pia sat down she would come and sleep in her lap. And she was never too hungry or preoccupied to let us pet her and check her for flees.
It was mating season, so we heard plenty of screams night and day. That was normal. Then one day, Garo came with a huge cut on his forehead, next to his right ear. He allowed me to put some betadine on the wound. We were worried, but he’s doing fine now except for a bald spot where the wound used to be. We also treated both cats with tick repellant.
Giselle was now spending most of her time on our balcony, leaving only for a few hours every day. On one night, we heard her calling out in her small voice (as opposed to Garo’s howling cries) to someone we couldn’t see outside. We came out to see another female of the same size, coming in from the outside. This one we called Xena after a few days because she always annouces her entrance with the same war cry that Xena the warrior pricess used when attacking enemies!
Xena and Giselle were now inseparable. They even defended “their” place against all other intruding cats. Even Garo was sent crying when he tried to come in for a bite.
The story continues, with lots of interaction and new cats coming in from the wild daily. Giselle went out one day and did not come back, we’re not sure where she is. Garo is sleeping on the balcony now. Him and Xena tolerate each other. The stealthy Gerard and his black and white side-kick are venturing nearer now, but Xena still slaps them silly when they try to trespass!
I’m posting just a few pics, let me know if you like them.

The problem is that my home-ip is not fixed. A Dynamic DNS setup is the fix that comes to mind first. But, I thought I would try something else: Reverse SSH Tunnel
I used the recipe and explanations in this article. Mostly, all I needed to do was the following:

Where the 18000 is the port on the server, and 8000 is the port on the home machine. No harm in using the same port numbers, btw.

I then changed the VirtualHost configuration in apache on the server to read:

Restart apache on the server and all falls in place perfectly.

From the man page:

pm-suspend-hybrid
Hybrid-suspend is the process where the system does everything it needs to hibernate, but suspends instead of shutting down. This means that your computer can
wake up quicker than for normal hibernation if you do not run out of power, and you can resume even if you run out of power. s2both(8) is an hybrid-suspend
implementation.

Background story: Electricity problems in Lebanon, and old UPS, causing me plenty of headaches. So I needed a quick way to suspend/hibernate the desktop without loosing all my volatile settings and open files. I added a shortcut for a ConnectBot host configuration on my android phone that runs this command on the desktop (remotely): sudo pm-suspend-hybrid
This way if the backup generator starts in time or not, everything is back up and running in under 45s12s (just clocked it!).

1- Add the remote server’s information (Session)

2- Add the tunnel information (Connection – SSH – Tunnels)

You need to edit the Source port and Destination then click the “Add” button.

This should be enough. Either go back to the “Session” screen and save the configuration for later. Or simply click “Open” to get started.

Creating an SSH tunnel or forwarding ports is pretty easy when you’re on a Linux machine. Simply type the following in the shell:

Where the first 8080 is the local port and the second 8080 is the port on the server.

Practically, let’s say you have a glassfish installation on your server at 10.0.10.15. You cannot access the admin port 8484 on that server as it’s by default bound to localhost only. So, you can create a tunnel using the following command and access the glassfish admin site as if it’s on the local machine at http://127.0.0.1:8484/:

I was asked to create a small organizer/calendar type app for a client to be used mainly from a smart phone. The app seemed very straight forward, so I thought I’d rely on the generic views for most of the work.

Check out some of the code after the break
Here’s a bit of code:

and some code from the Views:

I should mention that most of the code in the views.py could simply be removed and the equivalent added in the urls.py file. For example:

could be replaced by editing the line in urls.py:

Note also that you can simply use the default template_name instead of adding your own (less code!).

Since the app would mostly be used from smart phones, I used jQueryMobile for most of the template work (and its DateBox plugin. Here’s a bit of code from that:

and the listing:

It’s good to be back. And the project was fun and apparently very useful. In the spirit of agile development, the first iteration took about 3 hours to complete. I am still waiting for feedback to get started on the next one (should be related to hooking Google Calendar to the app).

The documentation for the API can be found here

So to reboot, I use the following script:

That seems to be much safer than running: sudo reboot

Here’s the code snippet I’m using to read the ePub book. The library I’m using is ePubLib, and I’m displaying the page in a standard WebView: