Yeah

Come on, let’s go

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where
the dollar is sacred and proud

Let’s do this shit for real, come on now

Smoke and mirrors, stripes and stars
Stolen for the cross in the name of God
Bloodshed, genocide, rape and fraud
Written to the pages of the law, good lord

The cold continent latch key child
Ran away one day and started acting foul
King of where the wild things are, daddy’s proud
Cause the roman empire done passed it down

Imported and tortured the work force
They never healed the wounds or shook the curse off
Now the grown up Goliath nation
Holdin open auditions for the part of David, can you feel?

Nothing can save you, you question the rain
You get rushed in and chained up
fists raised but I must be insane
Cause I can’t figure a single goddamn way to change it

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is God

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is God

All must bow to the fat and lazy
The fuck you obey me and
why do they hate me, who me?
Only two generations away from
the World’s most despicable slavery trade

Pioneered so many ways to degrade a human being
That it can’t be changed to this day
Legacy so ingrained in the way that we think
We no longer need chains to be slaves

Lord it’s a shameful display
The overseers even got raped along the way
Cause the children can’t escape from the pain
And they’re born with the pores
and there’s hatred in their veins

Try and separate a man from his soul
You’ll only strengthen him and lose your own
Well shoot that fucker if he walk near the throne
Remind him that this is my home (now i’m gone)

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is god

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred

Hold up, gimme one right here, hold up

You don’t give money to the bums
On the corner with a sign, bleeding from their gums
Talkin bout, you don’t support a crackhead
Whatchu think happens to the money from yo’ taxes

Shit the government’s an addict
With a billion dollar a week kill brown people habit
And even if you ain’t on the front line
When master yell crunch time you right back at it

You ain’t look at how you hustling backwards
And the end of the year add up what they subtracted
Three outta twelve months your salary
Paid for that madness, man that’s sadness

What’s left get a big ass plasma
To see where they made Dan Rather point the damn camera
Only approved questions get answered
Now stand your ass up for that national anthem

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is God

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief, home of the slave
Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is God

[instrumental break]

Custom made, the consumer news

Keep saying we’re free
But we’re all just blue (x3)

Custom made, the consumer news
Keep saying we’re free
But we’re all just blue

Basically, Django’s built-in ORM is awesome, but lacking. There are many reasons to move to SQLAlchemy, but not if you’re more interested in speed of development. One feature that Django’s ORM is missing is stored procedure support, including the ability to make them quickly.

A stored procedure is basically a function definition on the database side that runs a few to hundreds of lines of SQL and returns the result, decreasing the amount of SQL sent over the network. This is very useful for complicated statements that are called often, say once for every single page, but require only a few variables if any. A use-case in my PHP project was where 99% of the pages ran the same lookup query which consisted of about 10 lines of SQL; instead of sending that SQL over (around half a KB) each time, I replaced the SQL with “CALL generic_lookup($pageid)” or in Python “CALL generic_lookup(%s)” % pageid.

Now, to port this to Django we need a two-phrase process. The first one creates the procedures in the database, the second replaces normal ORM calls with stored procedures.

I have not made this, but here are the specifications for the code that would take only a few hours to create and a few more to debug (if only I had the time):

A decorator for models.Manager functions. Called @stored, it will function in both phases differently. For the creation phase, it will simply tag the function it is wrapping with func.is_stored = True, allowing introspecting code to identify it as a stored procedure. It will also make the wrapped function available like so:

@stored
def all(self):
    return self.get_query_set()

all.is_stored == True
str(all.func.__class__) == <type 'function'>

The first phase also involves a management command that goes through every model’s managers and looks for stored procedures using the .is_stored property created above. The .is_stored and .func properties could be combined.

This management command, having found all the stored procedures, will then proceed to get the SQL for each QuerySets and wrap it with the DB-specific code for stored-procedures (MySQL’s is provided earlier). Once the SQL has been wrapped, it is sent to the DB for creation and the procedure is now available. The SQL will need some filter to allow for arguments to the stored procedures, but that’s a whole other can of worms for a possible continuation of this post.

Once the procedures have been created on the DB, the @stored decorator now just ignores the function it’s wrapping save for its name and arguments and returns the dataset returned by the database after a call to the stored procedure. Since most databases don’t allow further filtering on procedure output, returning the dataset is the only way to easily keep loose-coupling with the DB.

I hope this post was useful to someone else who can code in Python/Django. If you create a decorator using these specifications, please post a link in the comments so that others can benefit from it too. If I write it, I’ll definitely provide the app somehow, though I don’t see it in my near future.

Skipping all the Windows 7 stuff, I’ll just skip to what I did.

The Jump List is what shows up when a user right-clicks on a taskbar item in Windows 7, so I modified PuTTY’s source to enable JumpList functionality. On my main site, I have a binary and the necessary patch.

Added Functionality:

* Each session can add itself to the JumpList for PuTTY

* Upon startup, JumpList is created

* If user pins PuTTY to the Start Menu, JumpList remains

My main site has some further information, as well as the actual files.

So I’m listing restaurants that are open at the listed time and earlier:

12am midnight:

Fred’s Deli

Blondie’s Pizza

11pm:

House of Curries

10pm:

Tandor Kitchen

Note: This post is currently limited to the restaurants/stores that I frequent, but I’ll gladly add more restaurants if you comment with their names/hours. Also, if it closes before 10pm I’m not interested.

Yeah, we had that exact same problem. Except I’m not working for the FBI.

Google didn’t help one bit, “flatten pdf” means something entirely different to most people, so I couldn’t find it. Anyway, I chose to use the awesome tool ImageMagick.

I tried converting from PDF to PDF, but what happens is the filesize blows up if I want any sort of quality. Instead, I convert to PNG and then back to PDF.

So below is the shell script, with the only dependency being ImageMagick:

LINES=$(cat files.txt)
COUNT=0

for LINE in $LINES
do

COUNT=$(echo "$COUNT + 1"|bc)
echo -n "Working on $LINE.."

if [ -f fixed/$LINE ]; then
echo ". already done"
continue
fi

mkdir fixed/imgs-$LINE
convert -density 400 broken/$LINE fixed/imgs-$LINE/out.png
echo -n ".."
convert -density 400 fixed/imgs-$LINE/out*.png fixed/$LINE
rm -r fixed/imgs-$LINE
echo ". done"

done

It takes files in the file “files.txt” from the broken/ folder and outputs fixed ones to fixed/.

I did this to make sure the files were good and then let me upload them later. The broken/ folder is an sshfs mount to the original server mounted read-only.

Once they’re all fixed, I tested a bunch out and they were no longer copy-paste vulnerable and the info was completely boxed out with a similarly sized PDF

There are many improvements of openconnect over the official Cisco AnyConnect client, one of them being that it actually works. Because of these, I’m an advocate of this script versus the official client.

I’ve made my script available here. Please comment here regarding any issues or dependencies regarding this script. I’m happy to incorporate any patches you have for making more things work, and I’ll try to fix any problems you may have. If you have to modify the script to make it work for your system, let me know so I can make the script more generic (assuming you’re using a generic distribution, I have no intention in supporting custom Linux OSes).

Happy VPN’ing!

(ENGLISH ONLY)
uh huh uh huh uh huh
oh this takes me home,
it makes me think about sitting outside of my old home when i was younger and singing something like

(Chorus I)

gabar yaroo subhaano (Young beautiful girl)
maro shabeelo hirato (wearing tiger-patterned)
maro qafiifa huwato (light, thin clothing.)
maga’aaga ii sheeg (Tell me your name.)
magaeygu waa sharaf (she says: My name is Sharaf)
sharaf haaji weeyan (Sharaf Haaji, it is.)
aqalada hariirta (Those beautiful houses)
dhina baan ka jooga (I live beside.)
alla ya u sheega (Somebody please tell them)
tinta u shanleeya (give them a clue)
nahoy zamzamey (of you, Zamzam,)
sabaah nuurey (who shines like the morning light)
adoo kin kin iyo (like the scales)
kaluun badaneey (of a colorful fish,)
adoo hajka jira (while you were gone on Hajj)
xasuus badaneey (had many memories.)
sahiibtaa asho ashaq baa dilay (Your friend, Aisha died of love.)
ugu dambeyntiina (at long last [I realized])
aniyo geeluba (both I and the camels)
wa u banaanbahnay (need love.)

(Chorus II)
wanagii orodnee (Remember us fleeing,)
nabad barinee (searching for peace?)
mareykan waa laga soo waayay(3x) (In America, none was found.)

There are certain things fresh,
and certain things mesh,
I got my own sound i dont sound like the rest,
and even my attire and my choice of dress,
and not long ago i don’t spoke English
my point is police pull me over a lot
they wonder what kind of rap sheet i got.
and sometimes i take a young girl out to eat,
and hold the door open oh your so sweet,
of course my affection’s super illustrated
and i like to give don’t reciprocate it
unless you could give me someone innovated
well lets cook it up we dont refrigerate it
but back to the country of the educated
where people get robbed and they celebrate it,

(Repeat Chorus II)

(MOS DEF)
Maraken,
my country tis of thee
sweet land for robberies
dos smokin SUV’s
grab me an army green
fat and frills
thrills and spills
eat and sleep
hump and kill
shop til you drop
work til you dead
get all you can
then get in the wear
outta my face
on your knees
sleep in the mansion
shut out the streets
make that cake
woop that trick
lick my swagger
suck my sick
get high get low get stcky get rich
get yo own show get down get quick
you slow you blow you broke your fix
terror dome, home swag home
terror dome, home swag home
home swag home
home swag home

(Chorus II) (America repeated)

(CHALI 2NA)

There are some things pure while certain things blur
dilute it with the lie and you believe when it occur
falsified information got my people in the stir
we have to be in search of something equal to the cure
straight out the door, i come to give you more
lay the law keep it raw, when i speak it from the core
get underneath your skin like especially with the claw
conflicted with the rich cuz i kick it with the poor
i laugh in the face of adversity
sound clashed with the bass cuz its natural to me
but if you pay attention to the past you will see
not long ago you black they’d hang your ass from a tree
certain things things change, while some stay the same
some are recluse others are lovers of the game
I’m trying to walk the lane, the serahtal mustakeen (Arabic for straight path)
instead of doing things that keep you covered in the flame.

(Repeat Chorus II) (America repeated)

Nanananana that shit was cool in English, but let me get that Somali verse.

(Chorus I)

Sources:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/america-lyrics-knaan.html

http://www.url.com/lyrics/show/2275/k-naan/america

My Somali friend, Moha Egal.

Well, there’s good news. I created a plugin to enable Invisible for Google Talk accounts.

Now, before you go rushing off to download and install that plugin, here’s the big caveat: I only made it work for one account. If you have more than one Jabber/XMPP/GTalk account, then it won’t work for all of them. Proceed with caution, because having multiple accounts may break it. I have tested it with one account, so no worries there Fixed, now supports multiple accounts (but no guarantees, this is open source software).

Instructions are available on my main site for both Windows and Linux.

Update 3/19/2010: There have been a lot of requests for fixes/updates/rewrites to this code. I’m sorry to say, but I’ve moved on to newer projects. This was originally only a weekend project for me, little did I realize that there was this much demand for it. I’ve provided all the code I have for this, if anyone wishes I can provide the whole working directory as well as instructions to compile on both Linux and Windows, but beyond that I will not be making any more changes.

Now, I have a patch waiting in my email, and I will attempt to incorporate that sometime in the future, but as above, no guarantees.

Sorry to everyone who has posted with problems with this code, but it’s over a year old, meant for a much older version of Pidgin, and works with at least historically badly documented APIs (sorry Pidgin, but that documentation wasn’t easy to understand at all, I worked mostly off examples). Good luck with getting a real invisible implementation into Pidgin trunk!

Update 6/27/2010: Again, there have been many further comments as to whether it works or not. Seeing this much demand for only a few lines of code is very interesting. Until now, many of your problems have been either unfixable due to the way the plugin works (a hack) or too much work to reproduce. However, I’ve been notified of a better way to go about going invisible and I will try to update the plugin soon (no guarantees however) with that new system: http://chinmaykamat.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/google-talk-invisible-mode-in-pidgin/

Sorry to everyone who’s Pidgin crashes when using this plugin, there’s little I can do when I have the plugin enabled all the time and get no crashes. In fact, I’ve had Pidgin crash repeatedly on me before, but never since I enabled this plugin.

Music Video

Lyrics

Ringtone

Looks like something the world should listen to. Well, at least the most polluting country in the world (the USA). If anyone knows the candidate of hope’s number, please let him know about wind energy’s superiority over everything he’s proposing.

If you don’t know his number, I recommend commenting this link to him here:

Link: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2009/january7/power-010709.html
Candidate of Hope: http://change.gov/page/content/discussservice

You can find a place to post the comment at the VERY bottom of the page.