Amazon Frustration-Free-Free Packaging

Most of the sending is waste – ok, at least its only paper and no plastic. But the overall packaging to send these two cables is big enough to carry one big or two small notebooks.

When YouTube lately changed their api again I found out about Youtubian. Goto the website, drag’n'drop the Youtubian link to your bookmarks. Then when watching a YouTube video that you want to cache locally just click the Youtubian bookmark and enjoy the new view to YouTube. Youtubian offers a very comfortable way to download the video in various formats, sizes and levels of quality.

Lets see when we have to change again …

Download YouTube Video

Just right-click on this link and select “Save as Bookmark”.

Here is the new updated code snippet. Please update your bookmark or just right-click on the following link and choose “Bookmark this Link”:

Get YouTube Video

End of November 2008 I needed to download in entire Picasa Webalbum, so I looked for a nice solution for this. Today a colleague posted me a trick in IRC to easily download YouTube Videos. And right about this evening I needed this trick – need to have 2 short clips offline available.

Now I just want to share this feature. Its quite easy and should work with every browser that supports bookmaks.

The only thing you need to do is to bookmark this link:

javascript:if(document.location.href.match(/http:\/\/[a-zA-Z\.]*youtube\.com\/watch/)){document.location.href=’http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt=’+(isHDAvailable?’22′:’18′)+’&video_id=’+swfArgs['video_id']+’&t=’+swfArgs['t']}

Just add this link to your bookmark list (right-click > bookmark this link) and give it a nice name. When you are surfing on youtube and want to download the current video, just click this bookmark link and the video will be downloaded in the best quality – yes, it’s that easy.

I got this trick from a colleague but I also found an online source here.

Well actually I do not use these online photo albums (yet). The nice thing about them is, you can show a huge pile of photos to someone without having to send him tens of eMails with 4 or 5 photos attached to each – depending on resolution, file format and the allowed size of attachments of the receivers mail server.

On Saturday, 2008-11-15, I had a concert with my gospel choir Profil and a professional photographer took photos of us. Liberally he offered to send me the images to put them into the gallery of our website. As I am a geek of course I asked for the images in their original resolution (maybe we want to use them in some print material).

Today I finally got an eMail from him, and guess what: He uploaded all the 240 images to his Picasa Webalbum. Its nice to see the slideshow online in the browser or to get a an overview in the thumbnail view. But I wanted to download the real data on my disk to work with it. On the website I did not find any link to download that stuff. I could click around to get the image in original resolution, but only one at a time and it took about 5 clicks to get the real download link.

Google itself told me to install Picasa on my system. Another blog described a way how to download the images with the Firefox plugin Downthemall. I also found a Java applet and a Mono application that could have done the job. But I didn’t want to install some big blob just to download some images from the net – this is insane.

Then, thankfully, I found this page. It provides a simple Bash script that can download Picasa Webalbums just by passing it the URL. It even knows about nested albums and you can specify exactly what you want to download. The script is licensed under GPL3 or later so I’ll host it here as well (to never lose it). Just put it in your ~/bin folder or even in /usr/local/bin

Now assume you got a link to the Picasa album GNULinux of the user abhishek.amberkar. The link you got looks like this: http://picasaweb.google.com/abhishek.amberkar/GNULinux

All you have to do to download this album is this:

mkdir newPictures
cd newPictures
picasaweb-download http://picasaweb.google.com/abhishek.amberkar/GNULinux

See the linked site and the scripts help for the usage. It supports listings of albums and images and once you downloaded something you do not need to specify the full URL any more but can download the next album just by name. Veeeery cool. Thanks “Loïc Cerf” for this great script. Now its a matter of a few seconds to download enire albums.

Hardly any spam during InternetX-DDoS

I don’t think I have to comment on the graph. It’s quite easy to see what happened. But unfortunately the spam starts to rise again since the DDoS stopped the weekend.

Just one question remains: Why exactly was there so few spam during this DDoS?

• Were the remaining bot nets busy with flooding InternetX and had no bandwith to send advertising?
• Does InternetX provide service in any way for the spammers, and therefore the DDoS blocked them as well?
• Do big parts of the spam delivery rely on DNS servers of InternetX and was therefore blocked as well?

The two main ISPs of the American hoster McColo pulled the plug of his internet connection. Based in California McColo supposably gave refuge for master servers of several spam bot nets. The Washington Post covered this story as well. According to IronPort, spam levels fell by 66% in this night.

It’s a pity for all reputable customers of McColo’s – sorry, but I welcome this action. I hope you’ll quickly find a new hoster.

Some months ago I set up mailgraph on my server. Mailgraph is nice mail log analyser and visualiser. It watches Postfix or Sendmail log files and creates daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. I regularly check these graphs. So I discovered the unusual low mail reject rates Tuesday night already. And even days later the spam levels stay at that level. Here is my weekly graph two days after McColo went offline:

Mailgraph two days later

But I wanted to have my own numbers. So I quickly did some calculations and compared the first McColo-offline-day (Wednesday) numbers with the former average:

• overall connections to my mailserver dropped to 48%
• overall rejects as well are at 48%
• rejects because of invalid helo hostname even are at 44%
• mail rejects from known spam sources are down to 38%
• rejects because of invalid recipient fell to 50%

Now it even got more interesting monitoring the statistics to find out when the spam rates start to rise again. Somehow I doubt that the bot net creators will fail to even get parts of their system back under control.