Sun, 19 Oct 2008
Links of the Day: October 19, 2008
Simon Caulkin: High earners need to be brought down to Earth
"The credit crunch has written it out in huge red letters: incentive pay may work for Chinese peasants, but in situations of any complexity, and especially where the quality of the decisions made is only apparent in the long term, pay that truly reflects performance is not only unachievable: the attempt to make it so is catastrophically counterproductive."
[2008/10/19 / daily links permanent link]
Sun, 12 Oct 2008
Links of the Day: October 12, 2008
Sad Guys on Trading Floors - And if you look over here, you'll see we have some...
...little do they know it's the Australian Treasurer!
[2008/10/12 / daily links permanent link]
Tue, 30 Sep 2008
Links of the Day: September 30, 2008
Real Dan Lyons Web Site - What the hell is happening to me?
"For the first time ever, I agree with something Richard Stallman says."
[2008/09/30 / daily links permanent link]
Mon, 18 Aug 2008
Links of the Day: August 18, 2008
Road to Qingdao: Even the people who watched the race on TV where totally confused.....
49er Medal Race "It was an exciting race, with lot of drama, but we have to wonder if it was really a test of skill, or a test of who's boat would or would not break."
[2008/08/18 / daily links permanent link]
Sun, 10 Aug 2008
Links of the Day: August 10, 2008
impossible circuit - Jon Lewis - edu.merit.nanog - MarkMail
"Before you read further, I need everyone to put on their thinking WAY outside the box hats. I've heard from enough people already that I'm nuts and what I'm seeing can't happen, so it must not be happening...even though we see the results of it happening."
[2008/08/10 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 06 Aug 2008
Links of the Day: August 06, 2008
Internet Memes
A reminder of everything that is wrong with the Internet.
End of the road for the Mean Machine TP52 programme
Frankly, it seems a bit of a cop out. They're running 4th in a fleet of 20 boats with two regattas to go. Make it a contest all the way to the fat lady singing...
[2008/08/06 / daily links permanent link]
Sun, 03 Aug 2008
Links of the Day: August 03, 2008
Schneier on Security: The DNS Vulnerability
"The whole mess is a good illustration of the problems with researching and disclosing flaws like this."
[2008/08/03 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 31 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 31, 2008
[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc. - (37signals)
"What do they say in Texas? 'The only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.'"
Git for the lazy - Spheriki
"git is a distributed version control system. No, you don't need to know what that means to use this guide. Think of it as a time machine: Subversion or CVS without the suck."
Man spent $1,000 a week on beer? | Reuters
''(That is) poor judgment on two counts there -- drinking that much and drinking Melbourne Bitter,'' magistrate Vince Luppino was quoted as saying.
[2008/07/31 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 23 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 23, 2008
Watch out for everyone or no one - (37signals)
"Don't say everyone or no one. It doesn't mean anything."
[2008/07/23 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 17 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 17, 2008
Ed Boyden's blog: How to Think
"....teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving..."
[2008/07/17 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 16 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 16, 2008
Virtual Geek: VM HA - service console networking, isolation behavior - and other under the covers stuff
"Boy, this is a topic that just never stops giving :-)"
Coding Horror: Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal
"Traditional database design principles tell you that well-designed databases are always normalized, but I'm not so sure."
[2008/07/16 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 12 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 12, 2008
VMware to raise prices in Europe, Australia and New Zealand by 10% starting Sep. 2 | virtualization.info
"virtualization.info has just learned that the 10% price increase is confirmed also in Australia and New Zealand. We can't confirm when the new prices will be applied. It seems that the high currency volatility is not just a European problem."
[2008/07/12 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 10 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 10, 2008
EXCLUSIVE: VMware employee reveals internal details on CEO removal, exposes Tucci and Moritz confidential emails | virtualization.info
"This confirms a couple of points which virtualization.info speculated on: Diane Green was working to sell VMware and finally unchain it from EMC; Her departure will eventually lead to a mass-exodus...."
[2008/07/10 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 03 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 03, 2008
Oren Hurvitz's Blog - LinkedIn Architecture
"At JavaOne 2008, LinkedIn employees presented two sessions about the LinkedIn architecture."
Esoteric Curio - Scalability and concessions
Follow up... "I would like to comment on something I see repeated again and again and is likely misinterpreted by young scalability architects. The statement of what you should expect to lose when you scale up/out."
[2008/07/03 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 02 Jul 2008
Links of the Day: July 02, 2008
The OSPF Default Mysteries
"In this article, you'll see how the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol uses default routes and how various OSPF-generated default routes interact in typical network scenarios."
Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
"Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003-04 which is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term..."
[2008/07/02 / daily links permanent link]
Sun, 29 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 29, 2008
iamcal.com - Parsing Email Adresses in PHP
That is one crazy regex.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
"Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours."
[2008/06/29 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 28 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 28, 2008
Renesys Blog: Cogent Becomes Transit-Free
"Cogent (AS174) has established a direct connection to the America Online Transit Data Network (ATDN) (AS1668). This long-awaited connection completes Cogent's effort to directly connect with every transit-free network in the world."
WWoIT - Wayne's World of IT: Find VM snapshots in ESX/VC
"Find snapshots of VMs in ESX and VC other than manually looking through each VM in the GUI. Query the db using SQL management studio, use sqlcmd from the command-line, list the files in the service console, or use the new VI Toolkit powershell snap-in."
xtravirt.com - SnapHunter
"SnapHunter is an ESX3 Service Console utility which can report back on the Snaphot status of VM's from multiple ESX Servers."
[2008/06/28 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 26 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 26, 2008
Oil Price Fallout: Jobs Coming Home?
Sometimes cheap labour isn't enough... "As the cost of shipping continues to soar along with fuel prices, homegrown manufacturing jobs are making a comeback after decades of decline."
Virtual Geek: Answers to a bunch of questions
"I got a lot of questions on the 10GbE post, which is great. Some of the answers involve graphics, so rather than comments, I'm just going to do a post...."
Coding Horror: Revisiting the XML Angle Bracket Tax
"I wasn't trying to present it as "Oh, XML is bad...". What I was trying to say is why don't we think about what we're doing? ... Can we just stop programming for a minute to think about what we're doing and not make a blind choice...?"
Coding Horror: The Ultimate Code Kata
"Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice. ... You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something."
Stevey's Home Page - It's Not Software
I do a lot of monitoring at work at this rang true: "... until you're actually measuring all your use cases, any one of them can potentially be unavailable without your knowledge. Hence availability monitoring always evolves into real-time QA."
[2008/06/26 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 25 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 25, 2008
Marcus Ranum - The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security
Read this some time back but a mailing list post reminded me of it.
"Let me introduce you to the six dumbest ideas in computer security. What are they? They're the anti-good ideas. They're the braindamage..."
Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle, by R.P. Feynman
Estimates range from 1:100 to 1:100,000. Higher from engineers and lower from management. 1:100,000 would imply a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one. "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"
Simulating the Cisco 7200 Router with PC Hardware
"Well, rejoice in the power of open source, as there is a project that will let you simulate the 7200 series on a normal server. Dynamips is a GPL-licensed emulator that uses standard IOS releases to simulate 7200, 3600, 3700 and 2600 series routers. "
VMWare ESX - How to clear a hung VM guest OS.
"I'm guessing that most ESX administrators have experienced at least one time where a VM decides to hang leaving them unable to shut down or restart it."
[2008/06/25 / daily links permanent link]
Tue, 24 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 24, 2008
CT3 - Disable optional IOS features on high CPU load
"The applet monitors the average one minute CPU load on the router (using the cpmCPUTotal1min SNMP variable) and disables optional features when the CPU load exceeds predefined value."
[2008/06/24 / daily links permanent link]
Mon, 23 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 23, 2008
Transcoding MTS/M2TS AVCHD Video Into AVI Files with Free Software | fsckin w/ linux
"When I opened it, the first question in my head was not atypical of a Linux users' train of thought: 'Is it compatible with Linux?'" I have a Panasonic HDC-SD9 and trying to convert the MTS files. It would be faster if my laptop wasn't a Core Solo.
[2008/06/23 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 21 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 21, 2008
Economist.com - The future of the European Union
"...a case can be made that EU treaties are too complex to be readily susceptible to a simple yes/no vote. 11 EU governments promised such referendums on the constitution, and ten of them have been dishonest in pretending that Lisbon is wholly different"
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Two aphorisms and a few notes
"Twitter is referred to as a "micro-blogging platform," but twittering seems more like antiblogging, or at least an escape - retreat? - from blogging. Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique."
EmailKarma.net: Yahoo! Announces Global Availability of Two New E-mail Domains
"Yahoo! announced two new e-mail domains ... ymail.com and rocketmail.com." Hello?!? Rocketmail isn't new, it's so 1997.
Virtual Geek: 10 Gigabit Ethernet and VMware - A Match Made in Heaven
"Consolidation of I/O becomes a core design bottleneck. ... So quick math - 60 old physical NICs are now consolidated on 10 NICs"
Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!
If you have Firefox 3 enter "about:robots" in the address bar.
Five Tools I Use for Listening | chrisbrogan.com
"...companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to .... understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks."
William Vambenepe's blog - SaaS management: it's MUWS and MOWS all over again
How now brown cow? "So far, we don't have good names for them. And the MUWS/MOWS experience shows that good names matter. IMaaS (IT Management as a Service) and MoSaaS (Management of Software as a Service) won't cut it."
VMware - Scalable Storage Performance
"... the results of studies on storage scalability ... with many ESX hosts, many LUNs, or many of both. It examines the effects of I/O queuing at various layers in a virtual infrastructure as more and more virtual machines share the same storage."
VMware Communities: vMotion Compatibility ...
"Put on your pajamas, 'cuz this could put you to sleep. If you happen to be a fella like me with a software background, the following might be helpful for the below discussion of vMotion and CPU compatibility."
[2008/06/21 / daily links permanent link]
Fri, 20 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 20, 2008
CT3 - BGP default route
"BGP default route origination, advertisements and propagation. This article describes the functionality and caveats of BGP default routing."
VM /ETC - Matrix to Determine VMotion Compatibility by Processor
"Dell's paper titled VMware VMotion and 64-bit VM Compatibility Matrix for VMware Infrastructure 3 and Dell PowerEdge Systems contains a VMotion and 32/64-Bit VM Compatibility Across Processor Models matrix that is easy to decipher."
[2008/06/20 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 19, 2008
Cowboy 2.0 - Salesforce.com No Longer Playing Nice
"I guess it was inevitable, but I did not want to believe it could happen. Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com founder, chairman and CEO) was apparently lying to us all along."
Cisco IOS hints and tricks: Display locally originated BGP routes
"Displaying the BGP routes originated in the local AS is simple: you just filter the BGP table with a regular expression matching an empty AS path. Displaying routes originated by the local router is tougher."
Bruce F. Webster - Anatomy of a runaway IT project
"The following document is the actual text - carefully redacted - of a memo I wrote some time back ... The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered."
VMware Land - Top 10 Lists
That's a lot of lists!
[2008/06/19 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 18 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 18, 2008
Eight Black - Going. Going. Nearly Gone.
"To put this into some sort of basic perspective, if you had purchased $1000 worth of BlueFreeway stock exactly 1 year ago, that would be worth the princely sum of $42 as of close of play today."
Virtual Geek - So, how **EXACTLY** does VM HA's admittance algorithm work?
"What's the symptom - you can't create new VMs without violating the availability constraints - even when you think you have plenty left, or you upgraded from Virtual Center 2.0.x to 2.5 and can't shake the "Insufficient Resources to Satisfy" HA error."
xAnalisys - VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment
"VMware has collaborated with Cisco to produce a guide for deploying VMware Infrastucture 3 with Cisco switches. This guide covers the physical and virtual data network and storage network deployment ... with suggested topologies and designs."
Pawprints of the Mind - Getting Xen up and running: part II
"This post is intended for people who are trying to set up a private network with Xen virtual machines." Virtual networks are unsupported in base Xen but this is a Debian centric how-to which worked first time.
[2008/06/18 / daily links permanent link]
Tue, 17 Jun 2008
Firefox 3 Download Day
"Set a Guinness World Record, Enjoy a Better Web. Sounds like a good deal,
right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the
record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it's that easy."
[2008/06/17 / tech / software permanent link]
Virtualisation Buzzwords
So I was thinking a bit more about virtualisation buzzwords after my discovery the other
day.
"Virtualisation 1.0" appears to be the concept of virtualising physical hosts
onto a defined set of infrastructure. Whether the VM farm is in-house or
outsourced is largely irrelevent. What is important for buzzword compliance is
that there is still a farm with limits, location etc.etc.
"Virtualisation 2.0" appears to be the concept of virtualising physical hosts
onto "clouds". The VM farm is provided by infrastructure-as-a-service and it's
implied that limits, location etc.etc. are non-issues because they are "someone
else's problem".
The problem is that the possibilities in this space are not easily pigeon-holed
into only two catergories. It just does a disservice to whatever you are trying
to describe to fall back on these kinds of buzzwords.
[2008/06/17 / tech permanent link]
Links of the Day: June 17, 2008
smh.com.au - Cut fuel price, say voters
Why do people think the government should intervene in the supply/demand determined pricing of a scarce resource? Did everyone fail economics 101?
Acer Aspire One notebook review
"if Acer wants it to be seen as anything other than a mini-notebook it needs to quickly launch its connected version as this edition is only a success on the price point, lacking the usability and build quality we've come to expect from this market."
TrustedReviews - Asus Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition
"Brimming with features and with a new CPU and better battery, the Eee PC 901 personifies exactly the spirit in which the original was created. ...bit more expensive ... lack a more comfortable keyboard, but ... the 901 has once again set the standard."
TrustedReviews - First Look: MSI Wind
"...though the Wind lacks the classiness of the Mini-Note... it's a good looking machine that shares a visual style with the Eee PC - albeit in a slightly larger chassis. ...it looks as though MSI has put together a very commendable effort..."
VM /ETC - Can you Vmotion between different physical data centers?
"Chad goes on to point out that he feels stretching ESX Clusters is a bad idea in general and lists 4 solid reasons to support why. Check out all the whole post at the link above."
Building a Low Cost (Cheap) VMWare ESX Test Server.
"My job now involves more and more virtualised (or virtualized if you're one of our American cousins from across the pond) server implementations so this is a good excuse to go and build my own VMWare ESX test environment."
Virtual Geek: Building a Home VMware Infrastructure Lab
"This is something I consider mandatory if you're going to take VMware as seriously as I think everyone should :-)"
Connect VMware ESX Server to a free iSCSI SAN using Openfiler
"In this article, we take a look at how you can download a free open-source iSCSI server and use it as your SAN storage for VMware ESX and its advanced features."
Openfiler (The link in the previous article is out of date)
"Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs."
[2008/06/17 / daily links permanent link]
Sun, 15 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 15, 2008
Virtualization 2.0
So I only came across this buzzword for the first time today. A quick Google search and it became clear that it's been thrown about for almost two years. Why not call a spade a spade and bang on about "infrastructure virtualisation" instead?
Rolling Stone - The Battle For Facebook
Short on technical detail, long on melodrama.
[2008/06/15 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 14 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 14, 2008
smh.com.au - ACCC thwarts eBay PayPal plan
A win for common sense! "The [ACCC] has flagged its intention to scuttle a plan by online auctioneer eBay to force its Australian users on to a PayPal-only payments system. Citing concerns about the 'anti-competitive effect' of the proposal..."
Coding Horror: ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
Be sure to read the comments too... "What the heck is an octothorpe? I know this as the pound key, but that turns out to be a US-centric word; most other cultures know it as the hash key."
PostCarbon Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
"... ICT is ... completely dependent on fossil fuels. IF this ... is not changed ... there will be no PostCarbon ICT, period." Original has horrible formatting.
[2008/06/14 / daily links permanent link]
Fri, 13 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 13, 2008
37signals - Git smart: How we're using Git to track our source code
I've been using bzr a lot lately but every man and his dog and their source code seems to be switching to git. Must take a deeper look one of these days.
Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA - Yellow Bricks
"...changed the ip-address of three VMware ESX hosts. ...standard VMware procedure, which usually works... In this case after the ip-address was changed HA did not work..." See also http://www.booches.nl/index.php/2008/06/05/change-esx-host-ip-address/
NAT caveats in IOS release 12.4T - CT3
"The Network Address Translation (NAT) in IOS release 12.4T works significantly differently from the previous implementations (including mainstream IOS release 12.4)."
Cloud Computing vs Grid Computing
"...the term 'Cloud Computing' is relatively new to the Technology buzz. But just how new is it? ...analyzing search trends of different computing keywords to try to put everything in perspective."
Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella - 1 of 3
Crazy!
Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella - 2 of 3
Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella - 3 of 3
[2008/06/13 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 12 Jun 2008
Daily Links Automated
As can be seen from the previous post
I'm back!
The best bit is that post was created automatically. I use del.icio.us to bookmark
interesting things I read day to day. It has support for daily links posted to your blog but
that requires XML-RPC support which Blosxom doesn't have out of the box.
So I wrote a small
perl script which downloads links daily and creates a post if there are any
for that day. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Net::Delicious (which I
turned into a deb package
for Ubuntu Hardy) and to save time a lot of inspiration was drawn from Edward de Leau's WordPress
script.
Final problem. I want it to run at midnight UTC (del.icio.us' "get by date" API
works in UTC) in order to grab all the links for an entire day when they are
fresh, fresh, fresh. But how do you run this out of CRON on a system that is in
timezone "Australia/Sydney" with all it's daylight savings fun, fun, fun?
# Only want this to run just before midnight GMT 59 9 * * * /bin/date +\%z | /bin/grep -q 1000 && /path/to/delicious2blosxom.pl 59 10 * * * /bin/date +\%z | /bin/grep -q 1100 && /path/to/delicious2blosxom.pl
Run it twice a day but check for the current UTC offset first. The first covers
normal Sydney time, the second daylight savings. Sweet!
[2008/06/12 / meta permanent link]
Links of the Day: June 12, 2008
del.icio.us/help/api/posts
Blosxom doesn't have XML-RPC support by default so I'll need to script an API call to download daily bookmarks.
Aaron Straup Cope / Net-Delicious - search.cpan.org
Someone may have already done the heavy lifting for me!
Publishing Links With Perl, by Jeffrey Veen
Just in case I get lazy and need a cheat sheet...
http://edward.de.leau.net/code/wpds.txt
Actually this one turned out more useful.
net::delicious bug #30310: Error messages when used with warnings on
I was getting an error ("Use of uninitialized value in -f at /usr/share/perl5/Net/Delicious.pm line 228.") from my script, seems there is already a bug filed for it.
Royal Pingdom : Javascript framework usage among top websites
Caught my attention because the name MooTools sounds like something JohnF would nave named.
[2008/06/12 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 26 Apr 2008
37signals are Ricardo Semler fans...
On their blog Signal vs Noise, 37signals has a series of articles covering the
work of Ricardo
Semler, a business lecturer at MIT.
I came to the party late with the most recent one on how
to work smarter from an employers and leaders perspective.
The three
previous
articles
(linked in reverse chronological order) cover everything from corporate
structures to so called "lean" companies.
[2008/04/26 / social / business permanent link]
Some helpful addons for Apache and PHP...
Jdub
points out a couple of packages which I'm off to install right now.
I've always redirected to a "one true" FQDN on my websites by using an extra
virtualhost container and a redirect rule. libapache2-redirtoservname to the
rescue!
I don't use as much PHP as a I used to but I'm sure that what little is on
there will find php5-xcache gives it a boost.
[2008/04/26 / tech / software permanent link]
Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Forking for fun(pidgin) and profit!
So we use Jabber a lot at work for internal communication. I've always used
Gaim^WPidgin but with the upgrades flowing through from Ubuntu Hardy I came
across what I thought was a bug
to do with size of (and ability to resize) the text entry window. But no, it's a "feature"!
The Pidgin ticket has comment after comment asking for this feature to be made
optional, or even better for the feature's parameters ("default size" and
"maximum size") to be configurable in the configuration file if not the GUI
interface. I for one would love to set and forget them at "4 lines" and "50%".
The developers of Pidgin don't seem to waver from their original decision, so
welcome to the latest FOSS fork: Funpidgin!
They have a .deb available but I can't be bothered switching just yet. Might
wait and see how this pans out and what path the Ubuntu package maintainer
takes with this issue.
[2008/04/14 / tech / software permanent link]
Fri, 11 Apr 2008
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 customer requirements. Sigh.
Technician reports he can't see either the media converter nor the router. He's
on the "basement switch" (a designation which means nothing to yours truly,
especially at that hour of the morning). Eventually my sleep deprived haze
allows me to parse that he is on a switch in the facility and can't connect to
the service.
Except our understanding is that their end of the service doesn't terminate in
the facility. Their switch is in one meet-me-room but it had cable tray / riser
capacity issues. So this service's fibre went to the meet-me-room at the other
end of the building. Where T doesn't have a switch. But they did have some
spare fibre already pulled from an exchange. So a fibre tie later and our
service terminates elsewhere. And in my blubbering state I can't convince the
technician of this. Cutover canceled. Furrfu.
So what does the subject have to do with this saga I hear you ask?
The technician wanted me to pull the twisted pair from the router to check for
link protocol going down on an interface of the switch he was logged into to.
Even presuming he was on the right switch, my original reaction was that it
wouldn't work because the media converters act like bridges, not repeaters, and
the link protocol wouldn't change at his end.
I wanted to confirm / deny this ungodly hour of the morning theory, but my
Google-fu appears to be suffering 5 month old child process lossage. JohnF did the heavy lifting for me and
turned up this
question and answer
which covered a similar scenario. The pertinent
response that address my question is:
Coming in a bit late here, but... Has the OP looked at how the media converter is set up? Many media converters have a test mode where a down link status is not passed from one side to another. Once you take it out of test mode, it will pass status. Usually it's a small push button, or a switch. Sean
So the answer to my question is: it depends!
[2008/04/11 / tech / hardware permanent link]
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 a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
142 ssh
82 screen
45 sudo
42 dig
24 pstree
18 offlineimap
14 vim
12 telnet
8 ooffice
8 mutt
[2008/04/11 / tech / linux permanent link]
Thu, 10 Apr 2008
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 faces and number plates but she did not know whether it would be ready in time for the Australian launch.
My response to that would be: if the technology is coming you should wait for it and avoid the snafus in the first place.
[2008/04/10 / tech / internet permanent link]
Mon, 31 Mar 2008
Obscure compliment...
...in a ticket at $work[0]:
MB's mutt-fu is strong.
[2008/03/31 / tech permanent link]
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 into an older kernel in order to get working drivers, in the
hope the new ones would be fixed and using them would be a quick reboot away,
but after following the bug
in launchpad it seemed quite clear that I was dreaming.
I bit the bullet last night and installed the old drivers. I had to pull them
from CVS rather than using the packaged ones. But a quick 'make && sudo make
install' and everything is working perfectly again.
I left a
little note in the bug:
I'm not sure why this is "Medium". Most computers these days are doorstops if they don't have reliable networking. You have a LTS release due next month and you are persisting with releasing broken drivers for Ralink chipsets. There was a point about a month ago where someone needed to make a call and either revert to the old drivers or commit to getting the new ones working in time for Hardy. I for one am using the old drivers.
[2008/03/31 / tech / linux permanent link]
Wed, 19 Mar 2008
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 there didn't appear
to be any wacky javascript to mess things up.
So, I thought I'd be helpful and let their web developers know:
...our home computer which used to work fine. It just returns her to the login prompt without any error message. The system is AMD64 Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) and I had her test with both Firefox2 (2.0.0.7) and Firefox3 (beta4). I had her test from my laptop and that worked fine. The laptop is x86 Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) and Firefox3 (beta4).
I wasn't expecting a great response but I got a "talk to the hand"!
Thank you for your message. Please have your wife contact our 24 hour Customer Help Centre on 13 17 18 to enable one of our operators to assist with the enquiry. Due to security restrictions, we are unable to access or discuss information specific to your account via this unsecure message service as it is not possible to complete the identification requirements. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience however the strict guidelines of the Privacy Act commit us to this action.
Ummmm, hello?
Sigh.
[2008/03/19 / tech / internet permanent link]
Tue, 18 Mar 2008
They made this bed, they should sleep in it.
After reading yet
another story on a "credit crisis" casualty, this time Bear Stearns, I was
affronted enough to write the following letter to the editor:
To: letters@smh.com.au Subject: Financial companies shouldn't have their cake and eat it too. Another day, another debt laden company goes to the wall. The US Federal Reserve steps in "to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system". Why couldn't they step in during the good times, billion dollar profits and million dollar bonuses "to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system"? The industry decries regulation that would "prevent innovation" during the good times but then they want bail outs when things turn sour. Natural selection should be allowed to take care of the "innovators". They made this "bed", they should "sleep" in it.
They published it but they made some small changes, mostly fixing my grammar and spelling:
Subject: Lopsided intervention
Another day, another debt-laden company goes to the wall. The US Federal
Reserve steps in "to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system"
("Nervous traders fear worse to come", March 17). Why couldn't they step in
during the good times of billion-dollar profits and million-dollar bonuses to
promote the orderly functioning of the financial system? The industry decries
regulation that would "prevent innovation" during the good times but then they
want bail-outs when things turn sour. Natural selection should be allowed to
take care of the "innovators". They made this bed, they should sleep in it.
And the fallout from this one? Bear has been bought by JP Morgan Chase for around $2/share after trading near $160/share as little as a year ago. Ka-ching!
Source: Yahoo! Finance
[2008/03/18 / social / finance permanent link]
Sat, 15 Mar 2008
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 interface.
$ sudo iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. ra0 no wireless extensions. wlan0_rename IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXXXX"
Hmmmmm... looks like some udev fun! I'd come across the udev replacement for /etc/iftab after we swapped out a network card at $work[0] and the interfaces came up in an odd order. I figured it was something similar here.
$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules :%s/ra0/wlan0/g $ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces :%s/ra0/wlan0/g $ sudo rmmod rt2500pci rt2x00pci rt2x00lib $ sudo modprobe rt2500pci $ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wmaster0_rename no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXX"
Bingo!
[2008/03/15 / tech / linux permanent link]
Fri, 14 Mar 2008
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 to the
method Mutt uses to detect "new mail in mbox format folders". By default it
relys on the atime. Which works fine until something else accesses your ~/Mail/
e.g. backups running.
I'm not sure when Ubuntu introduced Trackerd, but the upgrade to Hardy appears
to have either introduced it or started it by default for the first time. It's
basically a search engine for your hard drive. Unfortunately when it reads
files this resets the atime. This makes Mutt sad.
At first I was tempted to turn it off seeing as I've never used it. However,
realising that it's possible to mount partitions 'noatime' I figured the Mutt
guys would have provided another way to do this.
set check_mbox_size = yes
Woot.
[2008/03/14 / tech / linux permanent link]
Tue, 11 Mar 2008
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 it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so
thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers."
[2008/03/11 / tech / apple permanent link]
Mon, 10 Mar 2008
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 causing most aspects of our service to
stall. We are replacing the entire server as quickly as possible". Ouch.
Edit: Have to say I'm impressed with the information flow provided.
Almost hourly updates until the situation was brought under control.
[2008/03/10 / tech / internet permanent link]
Sun, 09 Mar 2008
Links of the Day: Mar 09, 2008
More reading on the Youtube hijacking, this analysis from
the RIPE project.
Photo
gallery of a high density Internet Exchange in LA.
Commentary
on the credit crunch. I've always been surprised that it's the executives
who get the million dollar bonuses when times are good and the million dollar
kiss offs when times are bad. What do their employees get? Token bonuses when
times are good, perhaps shares or options (which are now in the red) and a
redundancy slip when things get really bad. Somehow executive remuneration
needs to be more closely tied to the long term stability and prosperity of the
company, instead of short termism which leads to the debt laden behemoths that
are all falling out of the sky now that risk spreads are now rational.
Storms in Germany and a Lufthansa flight has
a wing touch before a go around.
An
Elementary Exposition on the Theory of Ponydynamics.
[2008/03/09 / daily links permanent link]
Fri, 29 Feb 2008
Links of the Day: Feb 29, 2008
It was posted a few days ago, but this article on incron was
interesting. Rather than run a script every so often to check for new files to
be processed, this hooks into the kernel and triggers a script when a file
handle event occurs.
Even my Mum mentioned the "Me-Tube" [sic] incident. Renesys
blog is again the best analysis to read on it.
[2008/02/29 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 21 Feb 2008
Links of the Day: Feb 21, 2008
Not sure why but I searched for my name in Google. Fairly common name so it
wasn't till about page 7 that this
showed up. So I poked around a bit on the SFS site and found some more photos of us.
Kuro5hin article
barracking for more modularisation and sharing between software projects.
Apple stops
shipping Xserve RAID hardware just after $work[0] buys one. Sigh.
"Australian Workplace Agreements will be extinct by Easter after the Coalition
dropped its plans to delay their abolition until midyear." - SMH.
I think the thought process was suddenly "I don't think we're in government
anymore Toto!".
I've always wondered about the equation of computer use with computer literacy
/ savvy. It seems that a lot of commenators thought that just because those
children and teenagers growing up now use computers a lot also implies that
they understand them better and use them more powerfully. What total bunk! And
now there is a study on just this topic, covered
by CMS watch, which agrees with my unscientific conclusions.
Skewed priorities.
[2008/02/21 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 20 Feb 2008
Corner cases make me a sad panda
At $work[0] we've had issues with a server that has a Nvidia SATA controller. The errors look a little something like:
ata2.00: cmd 60/08:78:3f:8f:3b/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 15 cdb 0x0 data 4096 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.00: cmd 61/00:80:66:32:77/01:00:00:00:00/40 tag 16 cdb 0x0 data 131072 out
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2: soft resetting port
ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata2: EH complete
ata2: timeout waiting for ADMA LEGACY clear and IDLE, stat=0x400
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 488390625 512-byte hardware sectors (250056 MB)
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
ata2: EH in ADMA mode, notifier 0x0 notifier_error 0x0 gen_ctl 0x1501000 status 0x0 next cpb count 0x10 next cpb idx 0x0
It appears some sata_nv "features" (NCQ) were added to Linux 2.6.22 but some Hitachi
hard drives don't support it. Redhat has errata on this.
Of course we're running that combination. Sigh.
[2008/02/20 / tech / linux permanent link]
Tue, 19 Feb 2008
Links of the Day: Feb 19, 2008
I'm a Sony Ericcsson fanboi. Despite wanting a "smart phone" the P1 was totally
underwhelming, so I upgraded to a k850i.
Just in time for them to release the g900.
Sigh.
"It's a doggone chart buster - a song audible only to dogs has topped New
Zealand record charts, and is looking to go global." - SMH.
Portfolio.com has an interesting article on how P2P
users bit back at MediaDefender, a company who try to make life difficult
for leechers.
[2008/02/19 / daily links permanent link]
Mon, 18 Feb 2008
Links of the Day: Feb 18, 2008
Data Centre Knowledge reports on Speed
Cabling and links to another
story and the official site.
Crimping tools at 20 paces. What will they think of next?!?
Stilgherrian links
to a
story at El Reg on the cable cut rumours.
Speaking of the cable cuts, the Beebs has a nice article
covering all the basics and Steve Bellovin stirred the
rumour pot earlier this month.
[2008/02/18 / daily links permanent link]
Internet "news" and those cable cuts.
I've followed with interest the cable cuts in the Med and Middle East that have
seen rumour layered upon rumour and every armchair commentator lathered in to a
frenzy with conspiracy theories.
There has been excellent coverage at the
Renesys blog (Parts 1,
2,
3,
quash
Iran rumours, 4,
summary)
and Data Centre Knowledge has
been linking to lots of sane
coverage.
It's always struck me as rather odd that just because the Internet enables
everyone to have a say that everyone feels they should exercise that capability
at every opportunity on topics that they know very little.
People do strange things on the Internet. Film at 11.
[2008/02/18 / tech / internet permanent link]
Sun, 03 Feb 2008
CPU lines multiplying like rabbits?!?
So, I admit it's been a while since I really looked into x86 hardware, but I
remember a time when Intel and AMD (and any other CPU manufacturer...) had 2-3
lines at most. There was the one aimed at servers pitched at a speed/feature
set, the one aimed at desktops pitched at a price point and possibly a mobile
chip pitched at a low power/long battery life scenario.
Now you have 47 different types.
I think their thought process must go:
- Is it low power or high performance?
- How many cores does it have?
- Uniprocessor only or made for multiprocessor systems?
- 32bit or 64bit?
- Is it built down to a price or up to feature set?
And then throw in some variations in bus speeds and L2 cache sizes in the different models in the same line. To top it off give the models confusing names not based on any specification of the acutal CPU. Whimper.
Almost makes you want to be a luddite...
[2008/02/03 / tech / hardware permanent link]
Sat, 02 Feb 2008
Contacting Marty
Easiest is probably email: marty@supine.com.
There is also my presence on the various social networking sites: Facebook; LinkedIn.
[2008/02/02 / meta permanent link]
Fri, 01 Feb 2008
Many to one SNAT on Cisco IOS
So, at $work[0] we needed to do a "many to one" SNAT on Cisco IOS. I'd only
ever previously done this by SNAT'ing to an interface, however this required
specifying the IP.
My Google-fu failed me, I could turn up how to do the "SNAT to interface" and
"SNAT one to one from a network to a pool" but not quite what we needed.
So I thought I'd try having a pool with a single IP in it, ala:
ip access-list extended SNAT_SRC_ACL permit ip w.x.y.z 0.0.0.63 any ip nat pool SNAT_POOL a.b.c.d a.b.c.d netmask 255.255.255.0 ip nat inside source list SNAT_SRC_ACL pool SNAT_POOL overload
Which worked!
And then five seconds later a workmate found a site that described exactly this technique. Argh!
[2008/02/01 / tech / cisco permanent link]
Wed, 30 Jan 2008
Back blogging again...
So, it's been a few years. A few things got in the way of having enough spare
time to write anything down. Little things, like no longer being a student and
starting a full time job. Meeting a girl and marrying her. Buying a house.
Having a baby. Little things...
It's taken me a little whilst to even get started again because of the old
manky MovableType install which had been my previous platform. I've tossed that
all aside in favour of Blosxom. When I find the time (!) I'll try to extract
some of the old entries out and put them here.
[2008/01/30 / meta permanent link]
