Unfocused Brain

On my new server one of the things I really wanted was iptables. In the past when we have had problems with a machine choking the T1, all we know is which machine is doing it. Not what on the machine is doing it.

I want to solve this problem by letting iptables keep track of the traffic on each of the virutal hosts. I want to know if the traffic is on say port 80 or 25.

I spent many hours looking for decent info about this but didn’t find any. Sure everybody tells you how to build iptable filters but nobody gives you any good examples of how to do accounting based on them.

Then I found a site from 8/10/2004 that was just plain and simple.

It made it all make sense.

I will now take the into I’ve learned and see if I can coax MRTG into giving me some useful data about what is going on with traffic on the machine.

So I’ve been using TiddlyWiki since I first found out about it. Its turned out to be really handy.

One thing I’ve been thinking about would be a spreadsheet version of Tiddly. Tonight I’m gonna search and see if someone has alredy made one. I know that a javascript spreadsheet exists out there somewhere.

Off I go to look. If I find anything I will post it in comments.

My first prototype of the XML Flashcards is online at XMLFlash

Right now it just has a text area for pasting code into. No error checking and it only generates one type of cards.

The idea began as RSS flashcards. Not memory cards but the pieces of paper that have a question on one side and the answer on the other.

I see lots of virtual and physical word flash card programs available on the Internet. One thing most of em have in common is that the flashcards are in a closed format. You generally cannot import a dataset from one program to the next.

What if you like the way the program works but you want to have the data printed onto physical cards. Too bad.

Wouldn’t it be better if the data was stored in a common format that all programs could use. There could be a database of information that people want to learn. They can then just pick the program that presents that data in the way they want. (Now you have to find a program that has the data you want, that comes close to working the way you want)

So the simplest version of this in XML would be:
<?xml ?>
<cards>
<card>
<front>Question?</front>
<back>Answer</back>
</card>
</cards>

Any programmer could use this. You can get fancy and have the <front/> contain an image. Like: <front><img src=”http://www.host.com/image.gif”></front> and the back could be what the image is.

Another possibility would be RSS. Everything has got RSS in it. Think how easy it would be to convert the above example to the typical RSS…
…
<item>
<title>Question?</title>
<link>http:///</link>
<description>Answer.</description>
</item>

With RSS you could send lessons on vocabulary to everyone in a class. They could check it in the morning. Look at the title and expand the description, see then answer and learn the new words.

So my goal right now is simple. Make some test XML data files. Create a few interfaces to it.

1. XML -> PDF so you can print out physical cards.
2. XML -> CSV so you can import the data into a word processing program for printing.
3. XML -> HTML interactive quiz based on the data.
4. XML -> RSS so you can subscribe and learn something new every day.

So I was reading issue 5 of Make Zine. Then I ‘discovered’ TiddlyWiki more specifically the GTD TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki is a neat concept, it takes the idea of a wiki and does that in a single HTML file chocked full of Javascript. Everytime you update the wiki it saves it’s self into it’s self. Neat idea. (Javascript is the equivalent of a Cthulhu god. It sat in your web browser dormant for years, occassionally causing problems, but now it has emerged as AJAX)

I wasted almost the entire day playing with Tiddly stuff. Of course when I showed it to my friend he said, “I’ve known about it for months…where have you been?”