May
12
2008
0

Food without Fear

I have emailed Siôn Simon MP for Birmingham, Erdington asking for his support of the Early Day Motion 891 - "Food without Fear" being put before parliament.

The motion is asking
That this House recognises the importance of the proper handling of allergens in loose foods in hospitals, schools and eating establishments by chefs and caterers; notes the recent publication of guidance by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to increase understanding with chefs and caterers and to protect consumers with a food intolerance; further notes that 700 people in a constituency of 70,000 people have coeliac disease, equating to one in 100 people across the UK; further notes that people with coeliac disease have an autoimmune disease and the only medication possible is a life-long adherence to a gluten-free diet; further notes that for people with coeliac disease eating in hospital is restrictive and at times unsafe; urges the Department of Health to improve gluten-free choices in hospitals, and urges chefs and caterers in all eating establishments to improve gluten-free choices through specific training; calls for the monitoring of the impact of the new FSA guidance on the handling of allergens in loose foods to achieve greater understanding, awareness and gluten-free choices on menus; and supports Coeliac UK in its Food Without Fear campaign to raise awareness and understanding of coeliac disease with chefs and caterers to ensure that eating out through pleasure or need is freed from restrictions.


I hope that he will add his support to this, so that eating out can be a more normal experience for us as a family.
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May
9
2008
0

New look blog

Regular visitors will immediately notice the difference.

I have changed my blogging software to use Serendipity Weblog System

Serendipity has many themes, and comes with an extensible plug-in architecture which allows you to add features and functionality via drag and drop with no coding experience.

Spam protection is excellent and allows you to use recaptha ,and to take advantage of RBL and SBL lists.
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May
3
2008
0

PHP mail notifications

It has taken me a while to get this working, so I thought I should document this for posterity.

I installed nail as my mail client.

I modified my php.ini file as follows

sendmail_path = "/opt/bin/nail -t -i"

Emails were being sent, but not received....so I added the following to /opt/etc/nail.rc

setsmtp=my.isp.smtp.com
setfrom="my.email@myisp.com (My Name)"
set smtp-auth=login
set smtp-auth-user=myuser
set smtp-auth-password=mypassword


Once the SMTP was authenticated, all was hunky dory.
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Apr
7
2008
0

First comment spammer thwarted

I was intrigued when looking at my logs, that I had 3 visits from someone in Bangladesh. Upon further examination I saw

123.49.44.10 - - [07/Apr/2008:12:07:27 +0000] "GET /blog/comments.php HTTP/1.0" 200 36029 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
123.49.44.10 - - [07/Apr/2008:12:07:48 +0000] "GET /blog/comments.php HTTP/1.0" 200 42163 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
123.49.44.10 - - [07/Apr/2008:12:08:10 +0000] "GET /blog/comments.php HTTP/1.0" 200 37852 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"

What struck me as strange was that they went straight for my comment page on the blog, and had not fetched any other pages.

I check my blog blocking lists, and yes, it had added 123.49.44.10 automatically.

All I can say is a big thank you to the Project Honey Pot team for providing me with an API to do the DNS lookup for all posters. Further details are in my previous blog entry

Further checking on their IP Address Checker confirmed this was a comment spammer
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Apr
6
2008
0

awstats reporting with Firefly

I have been using awstats to report on my Cherokee Web Server usage for a little while now.

I wondered if I could get it to parse my firefly media server logs to produce the same usage reports. After reading the documentation, it seems that it supports streaming files, so the adventure begin.

My firefly log has the following :

2008-04-05 01:07:13 (00004803): Session 0: Streaming file 'fricomedy_20080404-1900.mp3' to 192.168.100.142 (offset 0)
2008-04-05 01:35:09 (00004803): Finished streaming file to remote: 13674540 bytes

The awstat log format is configurable, so I set this to
LogFormat="%time2 %code %method %url %host %bytesd %other"

I had to fake the http code 200 and the method GET.
The number of bytes streamed is on the following log line so that had to be trimmed and appended to the previous line.

The reformatted firefly logfile looks like
2008-04-05 01:07:13 200 GET "fricomedy_20080404-1900.mp3" 192.168.100.142 13674540 bytes

The awstats input log file can take a feed from a pipe, so I wrote a shell script to modify the log file. The entry required for awstats was
LogFile="/etc/awstats/aw-firefly.sh |"

Here is a preview of some of the report (quality reduced for display porpoises ;-))
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