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HasciiCAM supposed to stream ASCII video over the network on GNU / Linux

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

To continue with my lately ASCII centered articles I found hasciicam
hasciicam is a program to stream ASCII video over the network on Linux and probably can be easily made working on FreeBSDtoo.

The project concept is interesting in a matter of fun (play) point of view, however not too usable as we all know ASCII character looking faces doesn't look too pretty.

Below is the Debian (Squeeze) package description:

noah:~# apt-cache show hasciicam|grep -i description -A 7 Description: (h)ascii for the masses: live video as text Hasciicam makes it possible to have live ASCII video on the web. It captures video from a tv card and renders it into ascii, formatting the output into an html page with a refresh tag or in a live ASCII window or in a simple text file as well, giving the possibility to anybody that has a bttv card, a Linux box and a cheap modem line to show a live ASCII video feed that can be browsable without any need for plugin, java etc. Homepage: http://ascii.dyne.org/

On hasciicam Project webpage is it is stated as a hardware you need to have:

"As hardware you need to have a webcam or a videocard supported by "video 4 linux", most of the gear you can buy around should work well."

To install and test it I run:

noah:~# apt-get --yes install hasciicam

Though it is stated on the project website supposed to work display video fine with most 'linux ready' webcams, it didn't with this very standard one.

Here is the exact WebCamera model as identified to the kernel:

noah:~# dmesg|grep -i camera [ 1.433661] usb 2-2: Product: USB2.0 Camera [ 10.107840] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (1e4e:0102) [ 10.110660] input: USB2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input11

By the way, I use the very same CAM daily on for Skype video calls as well as the Camera is working with no problems to save video or pictures inside Cheese

Here is the exact WebCamera model as identified to the kernel:

The just installed deb has one binary file only /usr/bin/hasciicam. To test it with the camera I issued:

Device detected is /dev/video0 USB2.0 Camera 1 channels detected max size w[640] h[480] - min size w[48] h[32] Video capabilities: VID_TYPE_CAPTURE can capture to memory !! error in ioctl VIDIOCGMBUF: : Invalid argument

Unfortunately as you see from the output, it failed to detect the web camera model.
The exact camera besides its kernel detection naminf is a cheap external USB 2.0 (fake brand / nonanem) "universal" Web PC Camera (SUPER .3mega pixel)

For those who have a further interest in building and installing hasciicam on other Linux platforms than Debian and Ubuntu or whoever wants to look in the code check check Project webpage is. For those who are less of programmers (like me) the project is written in C programming language and uses aa-lib in order to render the video to ASCII.

On the site you will notice two totally schizophrenic looking pictures of presumably the project head developer …

As I read in man hasciicam manual page it's said to be able to generate ascii plain text and html files as well as directly to write the output to console, which later probably can be streamed via the network.
Pitily as it didn't detect my camera I couldn't make some testing of its network capabilities.

A Streaming of ASCII couuld be done through pushing the .html output to a webserver and setting a php or javascript to loop through and refresh the browser over the uploaded files every sec or so.

Also I assume the ASCII video output saved in plain console could be streamed via netcat or some tiny scripted perl or bash script and directly observed via a telnet or ssh connection.
One playful way I can think of checking a stored video without the use of FTP is to login via ssh and do:

$ ssh someuser@somehost $ watch -n 1 "cat video-ascii.html"

🙂

Well something disturbing about hasciicam from a (purely Christian point of view) is it was developed by some kind of non profit organization called RastaSoft on the project website, some of its authors has written JAH BLESS.

As I didn't succeeded seeing it working, I'll be interested to hear if someone who red this article and give it a try can report the web camera model used.

Tags: ascii character, Auto, card, description, dmesg, doesn, Draft, dyne, file, formatting, fun, fun play, gnu linux, HasciiCAM, html page, kernel, linux box, modem line, noah, package, package description, page, pci, plugin java, possibility, Product, project webpage, quot, refresh, show, squeeze, ssh, tag, text, tv card, video, video feed, video on the web, videocard
Posted in Entertainment, System Administration, Various | No Comments »

AEWAN – a nice advanced GNU / Linux console ASCII art text editor

Saturday, May 19th, 2012

I'm a guy fascinated by ASCII art, since the very early days I saw a piece of this awesome digital art.

As time passed and computers went to be used mostly graphics resolution, ASCII art loose its huge popularity from the early DOS and BBS (internet primordial days).

However, this kind of art is still higly valued by true computer geeks.
In that manner of thoughts, lately I'm researching widely on ASCII art tools and ASCII art open source tools available for Linux.
Last time I check what is available for 'ASCII job' was before 5 years time. Recently I decided to review once again and see if there are new software for doing ascii manipulations on Linux and this is how this article got born.

My attention was caught by aewan (ASCII-art Editor Without A Name), while searching for ASCII keyword description packages with:

apt-cache search ascii

Aewan project official website is on sourceforge check it out here

Here is the complete description of the Debian package:

hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show aewan|grep -i description -A 5 Description: ASCII-art Editor Without A Name aewan is an ASCII art editor with support for multiple layers that can be edited individually, colors, rectangular copy and paste, and intelligent horizontal and vertical flipping (converts '\' to '/', etc). It produces both stand-alone art files and an easy-to-parse format for integration into your terminal applications.
I installed it to give it a try:

noah:~# apt-get --yes install aewan Selecting previously deselected package aewan. (Reading database ... 388522 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking aewan (from .../aewan_1.0.01-3_amd64.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Setting up aewan (1.0.01-3) ...

aewan package provides three executable binaries:

noah:~# dpkg -L aewan|grep -i /bin/ /usr/bin/aecat /usr/bin/aewan /usr/bin/aemakeflic

1. aewan binary is the ascii-art editor itself

2. aecat is utility to display an aewan documents (aewan format saved files)3. aemakeflic – tool to produce an animation from an aewan document

Next I ran it in plain console tty to check how it is like:

hipo@noah:~$ aewan

Below are screenshots to give you an idea how powerful aewan ASCII art editor is:

Aewan immediate entry screen after start up

Aewan ASCII art editor – all of the supported tool functions

As you can see from the shot the editor is very feature rich. I was stunned to find out it even supports layers (in ASCII!!) (w0w!).
It even has a Layers Manager (like GIMP) 🙂

To create my first ASCII art I used the:

New
menu.

This however didn't immediately show the prompt, where I can type the ascii characters to draw my picture. In order to be able to draw inside the editor, its necessary to open at least one layer, through using the menu:

Add Layer (defaults)
then the interactive ASCII art editor appeared.

While an ASCII art is created with the editor you can select the color of the input characters by using Drawing Color menu seen in the above screenshot.

I've played few minutes and created a sample ascii art, just to test the color and editor "look & feel", my conclusions are the editor chars drawing is awesome.

All the commands available via menus are also accessible via a shortcut key combinations:

aewan controls are just great and definitely over-shadows every other text editor I used to draw an ASCII art so far.
Once saved the ASCII art, are by default saved in a plain gzipped ascii text. You can therefore simply zcat the the saves;
Don't expect zcat to show you the ascii as they're displayed in aewan, zcat-ing it will instead display just the stored meta data; the meta data is interpreted and displayed properly only with aecat command.

I've checked online for rpm builds too and such are available, so installing on Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc. is up to downloading the right distro / hardware architecture rpm package and running:

# rpm -ivh aewan*.rpm
On the official website, there are also instructions to compile from source, Slackware users and users of other distros which doesn't have a package build should compile manually with the usual:

$ tar -zxf aewan-1.0.01.tar.gz $ cd aewan-1.0.01 $ ./configure $ make $ su -c "make install"

For those inrested to make animations with aemakeflic you need to first save a multiple layers of pictures. The idea of creating ASCII art video is pretty much like the old school way to make animation "draw every scene" and movie it. Once all different scene layers of the ASCII art animation are prepared one could use aemakeflic to export all the ASCII layers as common video.

aemakeflic has the ability to export the ASCII animation in a runnable shell script to display the animation. The other way aemakeflic can be used is to produce a picture in kind of text format showing the video whether seen with less cmd.
Making ASCII animation takes a lot of time and effort. Since i'm too lazy and I lack the time I haven't tested this functionality. Anyways I've seen some ascii videos on telnet to remote hosts (some past time); therefore I guess they were made using aewan and later animated with aemakeflic.

I will close this post with a nice colorful ASCII art, made with aewan (picture is taken from the project page):

Tags: aecat, animation, ars, art, art editor, art files, art tools, ascii art, ascii keyword, Auto, BBS, bbs internet, computer geeks, converts, copy, copy and paste, deb, debian linux, debian package, description, documenti, dos days, dpkg, Draft, executable binaries, hipo, keyword description, manipulations, menu, nbsp, new software, noah, open source tools, package, piece, quot, reading database, related tools, revolution, rpm, Search, show, software, support, terminal, terminal applications, text, time, tool, true computer, zcat
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

Viewing JPEG,GIF and PNG in ASCII with cacaview on GNU / Linux – Review on caca-utils text mode graphics utilities

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Stitch 80x45 libcaca mascot cacaview viewing JPG, PNG, GIF images as ASCII on Linux libcaca

Probably, many don't know that it is possible to view normal graphical pictures (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP) etc. in plain console tty.

Being able to view pictures in ASCII is something really nice especially for console geeks like me.
The images produced sometimes are a bit unreadable, if compared to the original graphics, but anyways most of the pictures looks pretty decent 🙂

Viewing in console / terminal images on GNU / Linux is possible thanks to a library called libcaca, caca labs libcaca project official website here.
Below is a shot description of libcaca:
hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show libcaca0|grep 'Description' -A 4 Description: colour ASCII art library libcaca is the Colour AsCii Art library. It provides high level functions for colour text drawing, simple primitives for line, polygon and ellipse drawing, as well as powerful image to text conversion routines.

In Debian, Ubuntu and other deb Linux distros viewing GUI images with no need for Xserver or any kind of window manager in plain ASCII is possible with cacaview.

cacaview is part of a package called caca-utils. caca-utils is providing few other great utilities for ASCII freaks 🙂 along with cacaview console ascii viewer prog.
The package> is available for Debian distributins since many years, so even on a very old Debians like Debian – (Potato, Woody, Sarge) the package is available in default free package repositories ready to install via apt

To install apt-get it as usual:

noah:~# apt-get --yes install caca-utils

Here is a list of the binaries the package provides:

hipo@noah:~$ dpkg -L caca-utils|grep -i /usr/bin/ /usr/bin/cacaserver /usr/bin/cacaplay /usr/bin/cacafire /usr/bin/cacademo /usr/bin/cacaview /usr/bin/img2txt

1. cacaserver a tiny program allowing network streaming of applications written in caca

Belkow is a chop, from man cacaserver

cacaserver reads libcaca animation files in its standard input and
serves them as ANSI art on network port 51914. These animations can be
created by any libcaca program by setting the CACA_DRIVER environment
variable to raw and piping the program's standard output to cacaserver.

Clients can then connect to port 51914 using telnet or netcat to see
the output.

The example section of the manual points 1 example use of cacaserver to stream the console output from cacademo.
cacademo binary is a short presentation ASCII DEMO in the spirit of the old school assembly demos (demoscene) .
To run it to bind on port 51914 one has to type in bash shell:
hipo@noah:~$ CACA_DRIVER=raw cacademo | cacaserver initialised network, listening on port 51914

Then to check out how the demo looks, open telnet connection to the cacaserver host; In my case the cacaserver is binded and streamed over IP 192.168.0.2:

hipo@debian:~$ telnet 192.168.0.2 51914

Immediately you got the demo shining; Below are two screenshots of the demo played after succesful telnet connection:

Cacaserver - caca for the network screenshot Matrix cacademo

cacademo running over telnet network connection – Matrix

cacaserver running on Debian GNU / Linux drug addict like spots streamed via telnet

Blur spots cacademo shot of cacademo streamed via network

You see the demo looks quite awesome 🙂

2. Running cacafire to stream over network

Another possible example use of cacaserver is in conjunction with cacafire libcaca test application:

noah:~# CACA_DRIVER=raw cacafire | cacaserver initialised network, listening on port 51914 cacafire is a short application written to render ASCII via libcaca and is just displaying a screen with ASCII (moving) burning fire.
It is quite spectacular if you, ask an unexpecting friend to connect to your host to 51914 🙂

Cacafire Screenshot Debian GNU / Linux cacaserver streaming ASCII demo via network port 51914

Besides that bored sys admins, could run cacafire in console to hypnotize themselves watching dumb the burning fire screen for few hoursor just use it as a screensaver 😉

3. cacaview a program to display a graphic images in console using ASCII art

cacaview takes just one argument – the picture to be displayed.

Below is a screenshot of cacaview ran from my gnome-terminal displaying a ASCII text version of the MySQL server logo

hipo@noah:~$ cd /disk/pictures hipo@noah:/disk/pictures$ cacaview mysql_logo.png

Whether cacaview is invoked in GUI, the libcaca X support is used, so the text image is visualized in new window with graphics, if however it is invoked in plain let's say tty1 libcaca displays the graphics pictures drawing it with only text characters.

Here is also a screenshot, I've made while viewing a GIF website logo in ASCII in plain tty console:

hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/logo.gif

The logo is in cyrillic, so for latin speaking people some of the characters in the two words seen will be unreadable 🙂

cacaview even supports viewing, the next and previous picture in line, like in any modern graphics image viewer program.
To view a bunch of graphic pictures in ASCII with cacaview pass it *.*:

hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*.*

For simplicity the common unix * is also supported, so I find it quicker to do:

hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*

Showing pictures forward and backward (Previous / Next) picture is done with n and p kbd keys, whether;
n - next; p - previous

cacaview doesn't crash or stop but skip unknown file formats – if for instance encounters filenames which are not images; lets say you have *.rar archive files along with other pictures.

The complete list of keys cacaview supports are:
br />

KEYS
? show the help screen

n, p switch to next image, previous image

Left, Right, Up, Down or h, l, k, j
scroll the image around

+, – zoom in and out

z reset the zoom level to normal

f switch fullscreen mode (hide/show menu and status bars)

d toggle the dithering mode (no dithering, 4×4 ordered dithering, 8×8 ordered dithering and random dithering)

q exit the program

4. Converting graphics images to ASCII art like (plain text pictures)

The tool that does "the trick" is img2txt. img2txt has a bit more options while compared to the rest of the aforementioned tools.The following list of arguments are recognized:

the size (font, height)
brightness
contrast
gamma and dither
format type of out the output pic

Anyways I found that the basic just in / out arguments passed are enough to produce pretty good results:

hipo@noah:~$ img2txt hipo_avatar.gif >hipo_avatar_pic.txt

The original hipo_avatar.gif file looks like so:

hipo avatar gif picture before img2txt convertion to text

After above img2txt command is run and hipo_avatar_pic.txt to see the colorful output ASCII art img2txt produces, cat it:

hipo@noah:~$ cat hipo_avatar_pic.txt

The image result if screenshot looks quite beautiful and even, can be considered or used as an ART effect image (filter) 🙂

The picture colors are plain ANSI color, so in order to display properly the picture with colors on another computers or Operating System you will need at least basic support for ANSI colors.

Plenty of output file formats are supported by img2txt

Here is the complete list of supported output formats:

ansi : coloured ANSI
caca : internal libcaca format
utf8 : UTF8 with CR
utf8 : UTF8 with CRLF (MS Windows)
html : HTML with CSS and DIV support
html3 : Pure HTML3 with tables
irc : IRC with ctrl-k codes
bbfr : BBCode (French)
ps : Postscript
svg : Scalable Vector Graphics
tga : Targa Image

libcaca is available for FreeBSD too, but the caca-utils is not available as a port yet, though probably the deb or rpm packages can easily be ported to BSD.

Well that's all, Enjoy.

Tags: animation files, art, ascii art library, Auto, caca, colour, colour text, connection, conversion routines, demo, description, Disk, dpkg, Draft, ellipse, gnu linux, graphics utilities, gui images, hipo, host, JPG, level, level functions, libcaca, linux distros, nbsp, noah, original graphics, package, plain ascii, png, polygon, primitives, screen, screenshot, shot, shot description, show, something, support, terminal, text, text conversion, text mode, tiny program, xserver
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, System Administration, Various | 1 Comment »

How to add visitor/visitors counter in Joomla based website using the VINAORA joomla plugin

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

One of the websites based on Joomla, that I’m managing, had to have the option to show a Visitors Counter on the page bottom.

I did some research online to check for some Joomla plugins that are capable of aiming my Joomla installation with the Visitor Counter feature.

There are a couple of plugins available out there that are able to provide a Joomla installation with a Web Counter, however I’ll just mention the few which I have tested myself.
The ones I’ve tested myself are;

1. VCNT
2. Count your Visitors
3. Cool Hits Counter
and finally the one that I really liked the most:

4. VINAORA

All the prior 3 aforementioned VCNT, Count your Visitors and Cool Hits Counter, are actually working right after installation. I haven’t had the time to test them thoroughfully but from a first look they appear to be counting the visitors.

The Count your visitors – joomla plugin’s download main page was in German with no option to revert to English, so that wasn’t nice.

Though the plugin seems to work fine after just downloaded and installed and configured from

Extensions -> Module Manager

The configuration options for Count your visitors are quite obscure but if you’re a looking for a really simple way to count your Joomla based website visitors it might be a good choice. The plugin is based on the initial Joomla module called Statistics.

By the way I’ve read some reports online that actually Joomla 1.5 also includes some kind of minimal integrated web counter embedded in itself throughout the Joomla Statistics module .
However I personally couldn’t really follow the methods describe to take advantage of the Joomla install integrated Statistics module, however if somebody has already succeeded in using the Statistics default joomla module I’ll be glad, if he shares with me.

I’ve found the VCNT visitor statistics plugin a handy one, but this module had this major problem that the VCNT 1.5 text which was appearing as a heading before the statistics was hard to wipe out of my web page, so eventually I got pissed of and thought and tested the Cool Hits Counter.

The Cool Hits Counter is actually a simplistic module which presents a counter about visitors on the web site in numeric digit numbers.
These module uses the integrated Joomla 1.5 module mod_stats the only difference is the support for numeric digit numbers.

As I’ve said none of the above modules wasn’t flexible enough and therefore wasn’t what I was looking for, thus I decided to use my installed VINAORA Joomla web(users) counter plugin.

The VINAORA is actually quite straight foward to configure, right after installation to start with the configuration I had to navigate to:

Extension -> Module Manager -> Vinaora Visitors Counter -> Module Parameters

Since I wanted just a simple counter without any external statistics I personally prefered using Vinaora’s counter with the optionsDisplay Mode: Simple as well as the Zero-Statistics turned on to (Yes)

Some of the other options I found to be best matching my desires for the Visitors Counter was:

Show Title: No and Position: Left

Now I had this shiny visitors statistics in my Joomla installation but there was the annoying Link in my Visitors Counter appearing on the page, thus in order to remove the default link Visitors Counter which was pointing to the VINAORA’s web page, I had to edit the file:
modules/mod_vvisit_counter/tmpl/default.php located in my Joomla Document Root directory.

First I’ve edited the code on line 21 where I’ve removed out the Vinaora string since I didn’t wanted any reference to Vinaora to occur in my Joomla HTML code.

In line 162 in the code:

$html .= ….

By removing it I’ve completed scraped out the annoying references to VINAORA and their link to http://vinaora.com website and thus made the Visitors counter a look a bit more professional.

Now the counter is working with a graphical numeric digits and everything is just fine with my Web counter Joomla counter thanks to VINAORA 🙂

Tags: configuration options, configure, count your visitors, download, Extension, feature, file, How to add visitor/visitors counter in Joomla based website using the VINAORA joomla plugin, installation, mod, Module, none, option, optionsDisplay, page, page bottom, Parameters, plugin, right, show, statistics, support, text, time, vcnt, visitor counter, website visitors, Zero
Posted in Joomla, Linux, System Administration, Various | 3 Comments »

How to change Debian GNU / Linux console (tty) language to Bulgarian or Russian Language

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Debian has a package language-env. I haven't used my Linux console for a long time. So I couldn't exactly remember how I used to be making the Linux console to support cyrillic language (CP1251, bg_BG.UTF-8) etc.

I've figured out for the language-env existence in Debian Book on hosted on OpenFMI – Bulgarian Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics website.
The package info with apt-cache show displays like that:

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ apt-cache show language-env|grep -i -A 3 description Description: simple configuration tool for native language environment This tool adds basic settings for natural language environment such as LANG variable, font specifications, input methods, and so on into user's several dot-files such as .bashrc and .emacs.

What is really strange, is the package maintainer is not Bulgarian, Russian or Ukrainian but Japanese.
As you see the developer is weirdly not Bulgarian but Japanese Kenshi Muto. What is even more interesting is that it is another japanese that has actually written the script set-language-env contained within the package. Checking the script in the header one can see him, Tomohiro KUBOTA

Before I've found about the language-env existence, I knew I needed to have the respective locales installed on the system with:

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

So I run dpkg-reconfigure to check I have existing the locales for adding the Bulgarian language support.
Checking if the bulgarian locale is installed is also possible with /bin/ls:

# ls -al /usr/share/i18n/locales/*|grep -i bg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8614 Feb 12 21:10 /usr/share/i18n/locales/bg_BG

The language-env contains a perl script called set-language-env which is doing the actual Debian Bulgarization / cyrillization. The set-language-env author is another Japanese and again not Slavonic person.

Actually set-language-env script is not doing the Bulgariazation but is a wrapper script that uses a number of "hacks" to make the console support cyrillic.

Further on to make the console support cyrillic, execute:

hipo@noah:~$ set-language-env
Setting up users' native language environment
by modifying their dot-files.
Type "set-language-env -h" for help.
1 : be (Bielaruskaja,Belarusian)
2 : bg (Bulgarian)
3 : ca (Catala,Catalan)
4 : da (Dansk,Danish)
5 : de (Deutsch,German)
6 : es (Espanol,Spanish)
7 : fr (Francais,French)
8 : ja (Nihongo,Japanese)
9 : ko (Hangul,Korean)
10 : lt (Lietuviu,Lithuanian)
11 : mk (Makedonski,Macedonian)
12 : pl (Polski,Polish)
13 : ru (Russkii,Russian)
14 : sr (Srpski,Serbian)
15 : th (Thai)
16 : tr (Turkce,Turkish)
17 : uk (Ukrajins'ka,Ukrainian)
Input number > 2

There are many questions in cyrillic list necessery to be answered to exactly define if you need cyrillic language support for GNOME, pine, mutt, console etcetera.
The script will create or append commands to a number of files on the system like ~/.bash_profile
The script uses the cyr command part of the Debian console-cyrillic package for the actual Bulgarian Linux localization.

As said it was supposed to also do a localization in the past of many Graphical environment programs, as well as include Bulgarian support for GNOME desktop environment. Since GNOME nowdays is already almost completely translated through its native language files, its preferrable that localization to be done on Linux install time by selecting a country language instead of later doing it with set-language-env. If you failed to set the GNOME language during Linux install, then using set-language-env will still work. I've tested it and even though a lot of time passed since set-language-env was heavily used for bulgarization still the GUI env bulgarization works.

If set-language-env is run in gnome-terminal the result, the whole set of question dialogs will pop-up in new xterm and due to a bug, questions imposed will be unreadable as you can see in below screenshot:

set-language-env command screenshot in Debian GNU / Linux gnome-terminal

If you want to remove the bulgarization, later at certain point, lets you don't want to have the cyrillic console or programs support use:

# set-language-env -r Setting up users native language environment'

For anyone who wish to know more in depth, how set-language-env works check the README files in /usr/share/doc/language-env/ one readme written by the author of the Bulgarian localization part of the package Anton Zinoviev is /usr/share/doc/language-env/README.be-bg-mk-sr-uk

Tags: Auto, bashrc, bulgarian language, configuration tool, consol, debian gnu, description, description description, Desktop, dot files, Draft, existence, Faculty, font, font specifications, Gnome, hipo, info, Informatics, input methods, language support, localization, muto, native language, natural language environment, noah, OpenFMI, package, package maintainer, perl script, quot, root, root root, Russian, russian language, set language, show, show displays, support, time, Tomohiro, tool, UTF, utf 8, wrapper script
Posted in System Administration | 4 Comments »

Tiny PHP script to dump your browser set HTTP headers (useful in debugging)

Friday, March 30th, 2012

While browsing I stumbled upon a nice blog article

Dumping HTTP headers

The arcitle, points at few ways to DUMP the HTTP headers obtained from user browser.
As I'm not proficient with Ruby, Java and AOL Server what catched my attention is a tiny php for loop, which loops through all the HTTP_* browser set variables and prints them out. Here is the PHP script code:

<?php 
foreach($_SERVER as $h=>$v) 
if(ereg('HTTP_(.+)',$h,$hp)) 
echo "<li>$h = $v</li>\n"; 
header('Content-type: text/html'); 
?>

The script is pretty easy to use, just place it in a directory on a WebServer capable of executing php and save it under a name like:
show_HTTP_headers.php

If you don't want to bother copy pasting above code, you can also download the dump_HTTP_headers.php script here , rename the dump_HTTP_headers.php.txt to dump_HTTP_headers.php and you're ready to go.

Follow to the respective url to exec the script. I've installed the script on my webserver, so if you are curious of the output the script will be returning check your own browser HTTP set values by clicking here.
PHP will produce output like the one in the screenshot you see below, the shot is taken from my Opera browser:

Screenshot show HTTP headers.php script Opera Debian Linux

Another sample of the text output the script produce whilst invoked in my Epiphany GNOME browser is:

HTTP_HOST = www.pc-freak.net
HTTP_USER_AGENT = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
HTTP_ACCEPT = application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING = gzip
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = en-us, en;q=0.90
HTTP_COOKIE = __qca=P0-2141911651-1294433424320;
__utma_a2a=8614995036.1305562814.1274005888.1319809825.1320152237.2021;wooMeta=MzMxJjMyOCY1NTcmODU1MDMmMTMwODQyNDA1MDUyNCYxMzI4MjcwNjk0ODc0JiYxMDAmJjImJiYm; 3ec0a0ded7adebfeauth=22770a75911b9fb92360ec8b9cf586c9;
__unam=56cea60-12ed86f16c4-3ee02a99-3019;
__utma=238407297.1677217909.1260789806.1333014220.1333023753.1606;
__utmb=238407297.1.10.1333023754; __utmc=238407297;
__utmz=238407297.1332444980.1586.413.utmcsr=www.pc-freak.net|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/blog/

You see the script returns, plenty of useful information for debugging purposes:
HTTP_HOST – Virtual Host Webserver name
HTTP_USER_AGENT – The browser exact type useragent returnedHTTP_ACCEPT – the type of MIME applications accepted by the WebServerHTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE – The language types the browser has support for
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING – This PHP variable is usually set to gzip or deflate by the browser if the browser has support for webserver returned content gzipping.
If HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING is there, then this means remote webserver is configured to return its HTML and static files in gzipped form.
HTTP_COOKIE – Information about browser cookies, this info can be used for XSS attacks etc. 🙂
HTTP_COOKIE also contains the referrar which in the above case is:
__utmz=238407297.1332444980.1586.413.utmcsr=www.pc-freak.net|utmccn=(referral)
The Cookie information HTTP var also contains information of the exact link referrar:
|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/blog/

For the sake of comparison show_HTTP_headers.php script output from elinks text browser is like so:

* HTTP_HOST = www.pc-freak.net * HTTP_USER_AGENT = Links (2.3pre1; Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 x86_64; 143x42) * HTTP_ACCEPT = */* * HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING = gzip,deflate * HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET = us-ascii, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16, windows-1250, windows-1251, windows-1252, windows-1256, windows-1257, cp437, cp737, cp850, cp852, cp866, x-cp866-u, x-mac, x-mac-ce, x-kam-cs, koi8-r, koi8-u, koi8-ru, TCVN-5712, VISCII,utf-8 * HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = en,*;q=0.1 * HTTP_CONNECTION = keep-alive One good reason, why it is good to give this script a run is cause it can help you reveal problems with HTTP headers impoperly set cookies, language encoding problems, security holes etc. Also the script is a good example, for starters in learning PHP programming.

Tags: AOL, arcitle, article, attention, Auto, blog, browser, code, code lt, content type, copy, debugging, download, Draft, dump, Dumping, ENCODING, ereg, freak, gecko, Gnome, gzip, host, host www, HTTP, image png, information, Java, khtml, linux x86, loop, nbsp, opera browser, php, php script, php txt, place, prints, quot, ruby, Safari, screenshot, script, script code, server, set variables, shot, show, squeeze, support, text, Tiny, type, unam, User, utmb, utmcsr, xml
Posted in Programming, System Administration | No Comments »

Check and Restart Apache if it is malfunctioning (not returning HTML content) shell script

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Check and Restart Apache Webserver on Malfunction, Apache feather logo

One of the company Debian Lenny 5.0 Webservers, where I'm working as sys admin sometimes stops to properly server HTTP requests.
Whenever this oddity happens, the Apache server seems to be running okay but it is not failing to return requested content

I can see the webserver listens on port 80 and establishing connections to remote hosts – the apache processes show normally as I can see in netstat …:

apache:~# netstat -enp 80 Active Internet connections (w/o servers) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State User Inode PID/Program name tcp 0 0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:80 46.253.9.36:5665 SYN_RECV 0 0 - tcp 0 0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:80 78.157.26.24:5933 SYN_RECV 0 0 - ...

Also the apache forked child processes show normally in process list:

apache:~# ps axuwwf|grep -i apache root 46748 0.0 0.0 112300 872 pts/1 S+ 18:07 0:00 \_ grep -i apache root 42530 0.0 0.1 217392 6636 ? Ss Mar14 0:39 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 42535 0.0 0.0 147876 1488 ? S Mar14 0:01 \_ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start root 28747 0.0 0.1 218180 4792 ? Sl Mar14 0:00 \_ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 31787 0.0 0.1 219156 5832 ? S Mar14 0:00 | \_ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

In spite of that, in any client browser to any of the Apache (Virtual hosts) websites, there is no HTML content returned…
This weird problem continues until the Apache webserver is retarted.
Once webserver is restarted everything is back to normal.
I use Apache Check Apache shell script set on few remote hosts to regularly check with nmap if port 80 (www) of my server is open and responding, anyways this script just checks if the open and reachable and thus using it was unable to detect Apache wasn't able to return back HTML content.
To work around the malfunctions I wrote tiny script – retart_apache_if_empty_content_is_returned.sh

The scripts idea is very simple;
A request is made a remote defined host with lynx text browser, then the output of lines is counted, if the output returned by lynx -dump http://someurl.com is less than the number returned whether normally invoked, then the script triggers an apache init script restart.

I've set the script to periodically run in a cron job, every 5 minutes each hour.
# check if apache returns empty content with lynx and if yes restart and log it */5 * * * * /usr/sbin/restart_apache_if_empty_content.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

This is not perfect as sometimes still, there will be few minutes downtime, but at least the downside will not be few hours until I am informed ssh to the server and restart Apache manually …

A quick way to download and set from cron execution my script every 5 minutes use:

apache:~# cd /usr/sbin apache:/usr/sbin# wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/bscscr/restart_apache_if_empty_content.sh apache:/usr/sbin# chmod +x restart_apache_if_empty_content.sh apache:/usr/sbin# crontab -l > /tmp/file; echo '*/5 * * * *' /usr/sbin/restart_apache_if_empty_content.sh 2>&1 >/dev/null

Tags: address state, apache processes, apache server, apache webserver, apache2, apacheroot, Auto, checks, child processes, client, client browser, content, cron, Draft, enp, everything, grep, HTML, HTTP, internet connections, lenny, Lynx, nmap, oddity, program, proto, Restart, restart apache, root, script, scripts, Shell, shell script, show, spite, ss, SYN, User, Virtual, virtual hosts, webservers, weird problem
Posted in System Administration, Web and CMS | 7 Comments »

A preaching words Paschal greeting for Great Saturday and the Resurrection day by Byzantium Emperor Theodore II Ducas Laskaris

Friday, April 29th, 2011

Theodore Ducas Lascaris coin Christian Seal

Below’s text is a Paschal greeting of the Byzantium Emperor Thedodore Ducas Lascaris, the text is really beautiful, I’ve translated it from Bulgarian translation which was translated from Greek, the general idea of the text is clearly observable. I’m really sorry if the text has translation mistakes. Have an enjoyable reading!

“Christ is risen from the death”, that are the words of the Angel; this saw the women; this testifies Pilatus stamps, this is what the empty grave of the Saviour proclaims; this is what testifies for the moved tomb (about 2 tons) stone; the guardians lay bare by their own speech; the grave guards acknowledges and takes the money; the High Priests [Anna and Caiphas] show off they’re guilty; Pilatus is feeling guilt; the centurion on the curtain tear down does believe; the sun has prooved the Godly essence of Christ darkening itself during the crucifix; the resurrected bodies of the many dead saints does testified about the truth; the whole nature confirmed the Resurrection, which has happened in the end of the Saturday, in the beginning of the [first day of the week].

Rejoice oh Man: Christ has Risen from the dead; the testimonial is truthful; Rejoice for you have been freed; hell is bound up, Rejoice!; It’s the day of the Resurrection, rise up your voice; The master of our salvation has risen up from the dead; rejoice oh heaven and earth, see through the resurrection a harmony between holy Angels and humans has been established; rejoice oh you plants; the execution of Christ has been on a Cross, but through the Cross the Resurrection has accomplished; Adam has been risen up again; Eva has been released from the chains; Christ has preceeded over the prophets; The Kings Solomon and David are salute with victorious songs!

Rejoice oh man the darkness has lessen [in the world] the light has come; the shadow has fade away quickly; grace come in; the spring of life has rised. Does somebody needs to hear about God? Doesn’t everybody know, that he rose up from the dead? Why Pilatus is riotous; Chaiphas thinks where to have the assembly of the Jewish elders. Rejoice oh also you robber, and enter in paradise, when everyone is gathered there; here is the firy sword has turned it’s back; the grandparent has been released; rejoice oh you children of him. From Eva has the has the falling come, from the immaculate Theotokos – the rising up; through disobey death has come, through humility of the Son of God has the resurrection was given as a gift. Through a woman the fall up come, and through a woman is the resurrection preached.

Christ is Risen from the death!, let the clouds flow the rain of joice, let the plants draw a fresh leaves and the earth does bring forth fruits.

The creator of all has Risen from death and you rejoice; virtuous branches bring forth your fruits.
Who is not joious today; who is not feeling sweet joy, who is not rejoicing?

Risen up from the death, Christ destroyed kingdom of hell, He is Risen and destroyed the devil; he has risen and erased sin; he has Risen and decreased the idol-mania; He has risen and chased away dilusions; he has risen and rescued Adam; he has Risen and made the engles motionless for evil; He has risen and rescued Man; He has risen and joined the heaven ones with the earth ones, ruling himself as a King of the whole world and most-supreme ruler of all; angels and man, elements, elemental force something unseen so far by the demons.

Therefore rejoice with unspeakable joy; rejoice oh you who hear that Christ is Risen from the death; who does not obey to the first and the last in accordance with the God driven voice (Revel. 22:13), who is not glorifying him? The darkness has been crucified, we’re free from the chains; we’re risen to the upper (heavenly) kingdom.

It’s the day of the Resurrection; who is not picking up a spiritual guitar, to sing up many times a repeating song, with songs, psalms and great joy and with a piercing melody to cry out?: “He is risen from the death” Christ has risen from the death

Let all demons phalanx run far away; and the ruler of darkness with his army let enter the Tartara (hell), because the master of life has Risen and the evil one’s kingdom is robbed.

Let noone all you who are truthful be on the feast with poor garments; let we the Orthodox, does dress our corporeal and spiritual eyes with the shiny garments of goodness; let we the orthodox christians, be dressed up shiny; the enemy [the devil] is dead; the Bishop of Bishops has Risen; yesterday’s sorrow has turned to joy, what is keeping us to sing together with the pupils, to sing up victorious songs together with the Maryies? The Godly home-building is achieved: the descendance of [the Holy Spirit], the conceal, the birth of a Virgin, the baptizmal, the Godly signs, the suffering and Resurrection; Christ has risen from the death, rejoice ohh all you nations.

Likely we on Great Sunday with a divine hymn do glorify the risen from the death Master Christ – truly Risen, truly without doubt.
And for us oh God where from will there be mercy sent for our petitions.

Theodore II Laskaris head painting
Paschal Greeting Text by Byzantium’s Emperor Theodore II Ducas-Lascaris (1254-1258 AD)
Translated from Bulgarian (Original text translated from Greek by Alexey Stambolov)

Tags: angels and humans, bulgarian translation, byzantium, caiphas, centurion, Cross, crucifix, curtain, dead saints, death, ducas, empty grave, essence, first day of the week, general idea, grave, greeting, guilt, heaven and earth, high priests, holy angels, Man, nature, paschal, pilatus, quot, reading, resurrection, resurrection day, resurrection rise, Risen, show, spiritual, stone, testimonial, text, Thedodore, translation mistakes, woman, words of the angel
Posted in Christianity | No Comments »

Still Here

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

Aloha. Still here. Two days ago I ran Heroes 3 under my FreeBSD box successfully, there was a terrible bug in fullscreen mode which needed fix I’ve used the loki’s site patch to patch the heroes 3 start binary with xdelta. The loki installer was a terrible pain in the ass I used my l337test sk!llZ :} to be able to patch the binary by hand. About the last post yes I was desperate still not good still living. Today I was on exam again a failure probably, nothing new.

As I often used to say in the fast if something starts bad then it overs bad too. See my life show this very well. I’m suffering terrible and still waiting for something to set me free to happen. What would be the turning point? Will there be turning point at all? No idea. If God is such good and powerful as he said in the bible and his promises are true then he will deliver me and set me free on a good ground. Still hoping … Prodigy — Speedway, else the earth is probably his favourite experiment.

Tags: bible, earth, experiment, failure, favourite, freebsd, fullscreen, god, ground, hand, heroes, idea, life, llZ, loki, Mode, pain, pain in the ass, post, Prodigy, promises, show, site, something, speedway, test, turning, turning point, xdelta
Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »

Opera!

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Yesterday I and Alex went to an Opera. We watched Opera by Giuseppe Verdi called “La Traviata”.It’s the second time I see this opera, the first time was when I was still a puppil.Pretty awesome opera the actors were really good. And this classic music! Awesome!After the Opera performance I phoned to Ivo a.k.a. (Order)we went to a sort of pub which wasextremely cheap considering the fact it was near the center and the food and drinks were really good.After all this we had a walk around in Varna and hitted the road back to Dobrich.Kimmo My finish colleague is leaving for Finland and was organizing farewell party.Unfortunately because of the Opera I was unable to go to the party. Yesterday was a really niceday considering that nice opera show. The bad news for me yesterday was that I didn’t passedthe written exam in German and I have to go to the re-sit at Tuesday. With the Lord’s helpI hope I would pass it 🙂 Also I’m going to start for the Accounting exam because It’s at Monday.END—–

Tags: Accounting, actors, alex, bad news, center, classic music, colleague, dobrich, drinks, end, Farewell, farewell party, finland, giuseppe verdi, helpI, la traviata, Monday, music, niceday, opera, opera by giuseppe verdi, opera performance, order, party, passedthe, performance, puppil, quot, road, second time, show, sort, time, varna, yesterday
Posted in Entertainment | No Comments »

☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

Posts Tagged ‘show’

HasciiCAM supposed to stream ASCII video over the network on GNU / Linux

How to change Debian GNU / Linux console (tty) language to Bulgarian or Russian Language

Tiny PHP script to dump your browser set HTTP headers (useful in debugging)

Check and Restart Apache if it is malfunctioning (not returning HTML content) shell script

A preaching words Paschal greeting for Great Saturday and the Resurrection day by Byzantium Emperor Theodore II Ducas Laskaris

Still Here

Opera!

Daily Bible quote

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