Info
2008-04-30 phones and stuff
My new toy (Nokia 6500) has been brought to me by the word fail. It no longer dials or receives calls or text. So if you want me, get me by email or carrier pigeon.
2008-04-27 qwerty vs dvorak
There's been a lot of hype recently about the dvorak vs qwerty layouts and how as a keyboard user people should be using the layout which is least likely to cause RSI.
After using the keyboard for nearly 20 years I've decided that I'll give this radical layout a go; however a note for anyone else - beware that not all keyboards have identically shaped keys, as I have found removing these and placing them elsewhere can yield a very oddly shaped keyboard, check that your keyboard is not concave in shape first.
Well one of the first problems is retraining!
2008-04-25 some enchanted evening
Had a good day at work. The day started with some scum bag sending a complaint that one of our hosts was sending ping packets to his box. A little investigation with tcpdump showed that this simply wasn't possible and I set about writing an email stating this. The general thought was that it could be a social engineering attempt.
Little problems like this are great fun to investigate because I'm nearly 100% certain of the outcome and every little avenue of followup check just crystallises it.
Today was just great as I had lot of tickets to followup and most of them kept me occupied for a good length of time where I could learn more about the inhouse systems.
On route home I was listening to Radio 1 "friday floor fillers" which always has a good line up of tracks. Really puts me in the mood for the weekend whatever comes of it!
2008-04-24 looking in the wrong place
Had an urgent ticket to do today. Related to an internal module of Apache that I could see just wasn't working how it should have been. Was doing everything I thought possible to watch it, stracing the process, watching the logs, checking the configurations... etc etc. Still couldn't hit pay dirt.
Eventually some bright spark who had experience of this module had an idea of what could be at fault. Turns out that there was a version incompatibility between 0.2 and 0.3 protocol, the module was incorrectly linked and the TCP sessions it created could not handle the situation if the remote side closed the socket before it.
Long and interesting story short, when dealing with a foreign computer system which is at fault, you can investigate everything possible, but without a debugger, strace/truss just can't give you the full information, unless you can debug the process it might take a very long time before hitting the answer.
2008-04-20 qmail-quickshunt
I've spent some time today working on qmail-quickshunt for my own uses. It's a little program that I wrote so that people in my address book could avoid all the filtering that I have set up for spam and what-not.
This can work in both directions, I can give people addresses to use so they avoid the filtering process too... It was a little distraction for myself.
Details of this are available here: qmail-quickshunt.
2008-04-19 an odd suspicion is true
At the beginning of the week I had one fully charged Apple iPod Nano and one full tank of petrol. By Thursday both were empty. This proves a very important fact. Both the iPod and the car were both empty on Thursday, thus proving that both were deflating with a similar rate of decay.
Something else of interest is that the slow lane of the M4 is very much smoother than any of the other lanes, which is quite odd in my mind as I would have thought the constant thunder of HGVs would have torn it up. It has proved something else, that driving at high revs forces petrol through the engine cylinders with much less efficiency than driving at 62 MPH over a long distance.
Another good way to maximise fuel efficiency si to drive in a calm manner, this enables the driver to putting the accelerator pedal to the floor and allows the engine to build up speed gradually. Although this might add 2mins to your journey time over a 30mile trip, it will allow you to squeeze another day of travel out of your fuel tank in most cases.
Yet another useful tip I've found is to keep a constant 2 second gap between the car in front and yourself, this reduces the amount of breaking you have to do through short stopping space and will allow you to take a much more leisurely pace - again conserving fuel.
During this week, approximately 10 journeys of 55minutes each, I have consumed the entire audio book JPod by Douglas Couperland. Another interesting fact.
2008-04-18 ssh reverse
There are some advantages to having ssh, does terminal services allow remote forwards? I don't think so! But most corp firewalls allow outbound to anything, so you can get yourself a tunnel back to your local network using something like
ssh -R 4444:192.168.0.1:22
This will allow you to create a tunnel from the local (192.168.0.1 on port 22) to be accessible at the remote site via port 4444.
SSH is just so damned inspirational that it was the origin of this domain (S5H.NET), it's gotten me out of tight situations so many times. It would be really great if I can look into more ssh programming interfaces in the future as it should allow doing more in perl than in bash. Anyway, enough waffling. Have a good weekend.
2008-04-13 another reason to not use internet explorer
Quite honestly I was shocked and horrified when I stumbled across an article on wikipedia about index.dat, which is an index of URL information about your browsing history which is left intact when the user user asks IE to clear private data. This is really quite an invasion on privacy.
Why should the browser need to keep this information if not to build a profile about the user? Could this be used by advertising programs, perhaps linked with messenger or even spambots, should you have spyware, it might be useful for it to query this history and target adverts with accuracy.
Well done to anyone who took part in the London 2008 Marathon!
2008-04-09 another reason why unix prevails
Tonight after the office I wanted to work on something from home. Had this been windows I would needed to run rdp over a congested network, but we don't use rdp servers in unix land, we use only ssh (rsa encrypted telnet on steroids). This was perfectly ok over a number of tunnels and allowed me to work happily. Not really possible with rdp, would have meant a lot of window sessions within window sessions - hardly ideal for working on scripts.
I think the above statement isn't really news to anyone in unix but I had to state this again because the network wasn't overly responsive for me, but I can almost imagine the QoS if someone was to try and do something graphical in these conditions - maybe someone has done rdesktop (rdp) over GPRS and lived to tell the tale?
As promised to myself and others, I will soon be ordering a beginners Czech language book to study, if my work shift changes soon and renders me using the train then it can keep me company.
2008-04-05 new things
For once I've tried one of those cover DVDs that come with linux format magazine (which I've been subscribed to for years). This month came with linux mint which is a really impressive distro which claims to have all the media codecs that have to be added to other distros manually.
All in all, this is a very well put together OS which does give the user just about everything they need (like ubuntu but with a little extra eye candy.
I've also found joy with midpssh, so I can log into my server from remote without the need of a laptop. This is seriously handy, although I'd not want to write an essay with the phone, it's certainly suitable for doing things if you have the time to use a mobile phone keypad, credit to the authors.
2008-04-01 redirects and things
Sometimes documentation for Apache can be a little too much. After wanting to alter a redirect and forgetting how to, I found that the docs for Apache just make it difficult to jump to a table of information. The "cheat sheet", on the other hand had just enough information to make it clear for me to do what I needed. There are lots of other programs and languages that have cheat sheets, that contain just enough information to get a job done.
The moral of the story is that it's important to have the right information for the job, sometimes you might have too much information and sometimes the information is too old, but the right information is concise enough that you can get what's required in a timely manner.