mike.mainguy

I've been using Rackspace cloud for testing some server builds and ESB solutions and recently ran into a "gotcha". First off, it looks like maybe the machine was compromised... I HOPE it was an inside job by one of my developer "friends" who happened to know the userid/password. If not, that means the default install of ubuntu 10.04, apache tomcat6, apache2.2, and servicemix is able to be compromised in less that 3 days when left out on the internet. In any event, that particular problem notwithstanding, I now have a different problem... That is, rackspace has suspended my account and I cannot access my server, nor create another one until Monday. Thank god I was only using this machine to test things, I can't image what I would have done if I was actually depending on it to be running. Another problem I'm finding is that I cannot find any reference on Rackspace's web site about acceptable use. They suspended the account for outbound ssh act...

Early Results Here are some early results: Port Huron, MI Rockford, IL These maps show the first page of garage sales on craigslist with about a 50% accuracy rate (meaning, only about 1/2 of time can I find an address). That having been said, it's still pretty impressive as manually entering these things into google maps is.... tedious. This process takes about 60 seconds per city using the script I've written. Back to Geocoding Note, geocoding is the process of attaching geographic coordinates to data. In my case I can find a "reasonable" address in about 1/2 of the entries. This means there is a string somewhere that looks like an address, notably, it has a few numbers, and then a couple of words. To get this data and geocode it, I wrote an awk script $1 ~ /\([0-9]+ .+\)/ {match($1,/([0-9]+ [^\)\(]+)\)/,out); printdata( "\""out[1]"\"")} $1 !~ /\([0-9]+ .+\)/ && $2 ~ /[0-9]+ [a-zA-Z]+ [a-zA-Z]+ /{match($2,/([0-9]...

The Backstory My wife is an avid garage sailer. She finds garage sales she thinks have promise, then cruises by them to see if there is anything of interest. She is so accomplished at this that she routinely turns a profit by snagging things that folks didn't realize had resale value, and flipping them at local consignment shops. While this doesn't pay the bills, it DOES provide enough extra cash to actually have her garage sailing at least pay for itself with a little left over. This is, however, not without it's share of problems: First, the postings online (or paper) for garage sales are scattered to the four winds. At this point, craigslist.org is the hands down winner for quality and quantity of posts. Local newspapers/classified also have a good quantity, but the few sites I found on google geared toward this are suffering terribly from a strategic chicken and egg problem. Second, while craigslist has a fairly high quality set of sales established, it h...