Category Archives: Tech

Reading something into your bash history…

An interesting idea from jimmac via jdub. At home: (marty@merboo)-(03:42:46 Fri Apr 11)-(~) $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head 106 screen 96 ssh 48 sudo 43 vim 25 ifconfig 25 cd 17 make 12 ls 12 cat 10 iwconfig …and at work: marty@boober:~ $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in [...]

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If fibre goes down in a forest, does the twisted pair hear it scream?

So at $work[0] we’re trying to bring up a new service for a customer. It’s a 2meg service from T, which terminates on our side like so: fibre -> managed media converter -> twisted pair -> router We think we’re ready to turn it up and a T technician is booked. For 01:30am due to [...]

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Google doesn’t seem to care about your privacy…

SMH is reporting about Google’s imminent launch of “Street View” in Australia. Richard Chirgwin points out the spineless journalism that let quotes like the following through to the keeper: Still reeling from the backlash by privacy activists after Street View began in the US last year, Ms Mayer said Google was developing technology to blur [...]

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Ubuntu Hardy unlikely to have working Ralink drivers…

So I’ve been persisting with using the rt2x00 drivers with 2.6.24 on Ubuntu Hardy but it wasn’t only slow (interface was quite often at 1Mb/s rather than 54Mb/s) but unreliable, dropping out every 15-20 minutes. A quick bounce of the interface brought it back but it’s just un-acceptable to do that indefinately. I’d been booting [...]

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Obscure compliment…

…in a ticket at $work[0]: MB’s mutt-fu is strong.

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Bankwest feedback falls on deaf ears…

$better_half was trying to login to Bankwest the other day and it didn’t work from the desktop. Tried a few different things and eventually tested it from the laptop which worked. The only difference between the two is that one is amd64 and the other is x86. I had a look at the source but [...]

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Wireless interface renaming fun on Hardy…

As I mentioned in in my last post I was having problems with wireless. As the drivers for the rt2500 chipset have been a problem in the past, I assumed it was the same issue rearing it’s ugly head again. I was wrong. My system had a wlan0_rename interface as well as the expected ra0 [...]

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Trackerd makes Mutt a sad MUA…

I recently upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Hardy. Lots of teething issues including the rt2500 based wireless card not working with 2.6.24 kernels. However the one thing that caught me by surprise was Mutt stopped seeing new mail in folders other than $MBOX. After checking that I was receiving email fine, my attention turned [...]

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As sexy as they are, Macbook Airs are nothin’ but trouble!

Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight – “I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.” Gone, Without a Trace – “As humiliating as [...]

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It must be a bad day to be in the hosting business…

Dreamhost – “Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline.” Out of band access anyone? Nearly Free Speech – It will probably have changed shortly but right now it reads “Our master MySQL server has blown more drives, and this is [...]

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