it’s unix, not eunuchs

So, imagine my surprise when I logged into twitter to find that every single update came from my newest follower, Zetrax?

Check out the screenshot:

I sure hope this is just poor coding, but should I really be surprised that a semi-silly idea for a website may be coded by someone who doesn’t know how to code very well?

—————————-

UPDATED at 6:00 pm

Nope, it’s verified, these guys are not legit.  I sent them a direct message on twitter to knock it off with a URL to this post.  The response?  A pingback that combined the last three posts of mine together.  It’s a technique used to drive up Search Engine results.

I had Zetrax begin following me a few minutes ago in Twitter. I’m very new at Twitter, so I am a bit suspicious whenever I begin being followed by people I don’t know. Although it appears to happen fairly frequently.

Anyhow, I checked out their profile and there’s not much but a link back to their webpage which allows you to stream music to your computer. The selection seemed pretty good but there’s very little documentation. Basically you just search for music, hit the green PL button to the right side of the stuff you want to listen to. That song is then added to your playlist at the top of the screen. In my case, the playlist didn’t start playing immediately, but I hit the ubiquitous play button at the top left and music did start playing.

I hadn’t heard about this website on Lifehacker yet, as they usually are the first to tell me about new ways to listen to streaming music. So I went off to do some research and it is apparently a REALLY new website. Here’s a guy who did a bit more research than I did at Google Blogoscoped. He looked at the headers and figured out that it’s a mash-up actually pulling audio from youtube.com.

One of Blogoscoped’s commenters complained about the audio. I don’t think it’s superior, but how good does free have to be?

I am not a huge personal fan of streaming music. I used Pandora.com for a while, due to the way it would profile your likes and dislikes, feed them into a recommendation engine, and then try to play you more of the same, but from different artists. I liked some of the recommendations, but it seemed like they ended up playing a lot of b-list music after a while and when they added advertisements I just stopped listening at all.

Now I just ensure that I always have an ipod physically on me somewhere. Plus I can always pull down some music from Rollins Archive and play it locally.

One of the problems I can already foresee with Zetrax is that they’re going to pull some things that are predominantly video streams. I searched for a band called the Minutemen and one of the results was two minutes of some guy’s kid moshing to the Minutemen. I’m sure it might be compelling in video format, but an audio ecstasy it was not.

And as another of Blogoscoped’s commenters pointed out, youtube’s probably not going to be very happy about this when they find out.

—————————————–

UPDATED at 7:02pm

So I worked on a script to clean up a postfix problem we were having at work.  Imagine my surprise when I logged back into twitter to find that I was being spammed by the Zetrax user?  Check out my post about it here: Zetrax Twitter Spam

—————————————–

I do receive ad revenue from Google, just to keep things up front and honest. But I’m not going to out these guys, maybe they have something going on with google for all I know.

G4tv mentioned that homestarrunner will be putting out a wii game. I haven’t picked one of these lovelies up yet, but this may be just the thing that pushes me over the edge. Plus I got rid of satellite TV, so I don’t watch near as much TV anymore.

A few weeks ago I ran into some problems working on a Solaris system. I knew there were zones on it, but the error that Solaris kicked to me, really wasn’t particularly helpful. I certainly knew that the filesystem was writable. Anyhow, for our current setup, sudoers modifications must be made from the global zone. I’m fairly sure I could institute a local sudoers, but since I’m new in my position, I didn’t really want to go causing waves.

ERROR:

# /usr/local/sbin/visudo
visudo: /usr/local/etc/sudoers: Read-only file system
# hostname
appserver.sierraleone.appserver-devapp1

SITUATION:

I’m in a Solaris zone. Modifications must be made in the Global Zone
# /usr/sbin/zoneadm list
global
apache
macau
ireland
rhodesia
uruguay
sierraleone
kenya
testing
westernsahara
algeria
canada
newguinea
oman
haiti
vietnam
antarctica
liberia
# /bin/grep benicio /etc/passwd
# /bin/hostname

appserver-devapp1

visudo works just fine in the global zone. I just had to log out of the individual container.
There are security ramifications to how I did this. I happened to be adding a developer to a box where he already had access to many of the systems.

I think there could be two ways to handle this. I could setup individualized local sudoers in each container, but that does get a bit cumbersome. The only other thing I can think of is to come up with some sort of username/usergroup security hierarchy so that the end users would use different users in different zone. That is equally cumbersome and worse it puts pressure on the end users to modify their behaviour due to a design problem.

I’ll do some research and try to see if Sun has an idea on how best to manage this or if a smarter admin has already posted a tutorial about this.