Maeyanie.com

One of my friends has opened a site, Voice be Herd, in support of her equine charity work.
She has some nice pictures and articles and a forum and stuff there.
If you’re interested in horses, go ahead and take a look.

A handy companion to my last utility, this very simple program converts PeerGuardian blocklists to ipfilter.dat blocklists. This lets you use BLM to update eMule and such too.
It’s available as pg2ipfilter.c, but should be as easy to build as “make pg2ipfilter” on any real computer.

A little while back, I wrote a post about using iptables PeerGuardian blocklists efficiently. However, that program only uses a single list; it expects it to be pre-processed by another program.

Originally I used Bluetack’s Blocklist Manager. It’s quite good, but it’s Windows-only, slow, and eats gobs of memory. (Seriously, 100+ MB, and 24/7 if you want it to auto-update.)

Today, I got bored, and wrote my own as a tiny command-line program dubbed BLM.

It only merges the blocklists, though I included a couple of scripts to show downloading them with wget automagically too. Also, it’s designed to output the merged list in PeerGuardian format to stdout, which works very nicely with my pg2ipset utility from that post I linked above.

My suggestion is to make a file with a bunch of URLs of blocklists in .gz format (the .tar.bz2 includes a list of the Bluetack ones) then add a script something like this to your crontab or /etc/cron.daily:

#!/bin/bash
cd /opt/blocklist
wget --timestamping `grep -v ^# urls.txt`
zcat *.gz | ./blm | ./pg2ipset | ipset -R


Modifying this to your personal paths and needs, as always.

As many of you probably already know, Microsoft is doing a “Browser for the Better” campaign to promote IE8.
(more…)

In the latest development release of OneSwarm (version 0.6.2) they added another way to find peers: community feeds. Basically, a central server takes public key registries and hands out the few “nearest” peers to you (based on binary search of public keys).

The sample community server is in Java only. My VDS is a bit short on memory to be running random Java programs, so I took a little time and hacked together a simple PHP one. It doesn’t (yet) support some of the important features of the mainline one, like registration DoS protection or IP limits, but you can get the source under GPL if anyone wants it.