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I have to admit to being in geek heaven with my new gadget. I have just got myself a new Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S) which I am absolutely loving. So far I haven’t found anything I don’t like, the screen is superb, plus it is very responsive. I am posting this comment with the wordpress app, not rocket science but very nicely done nevertheless. Users of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 will likely have noticed that the new Taskbar enables users to see previews of all the browser tabs currently open. Whilst this is not a feature that everyone will appreciate some may find it useful because it enable finding a particular tab very quick, of course if you have a lot of tabs this may just be more clutter. Version 3.6 of Mozilla Firefox has just shipped with some great new tab preview features, however most of these are turned off by default. To find and enable the new features you need to get to the advanced configuration page by typing about:config into the address bar. This will produce a warning page notifying you that you should only continue if you are sure of what you are doing, once you have promised to be careful type the word previews into the filter box to find the relevant settings.  Firefox tab preview options There are three options available to be turned on: browser.allTabs.previews To enable any of the options simply double click on it and the value will change to true. Additionally the line will be made bold to indicate that the value has been changed from it’s default setting. On Linux systems the command du can provide you with information about file sizes in directories. Usually I use a command like this
or
to produce a quick total of the file sizes in the current directory or first level subdirectories respectively. This is also really handy for doing quick size comparisons when copying files around, however recently I hit a problem when copying files between an old ext3 formatted disk and a new ext4 formatted one that I couldn’t compare totals and get a reliable figure to compare between the two directories. So this is what I ended up using:
The crucial element to this is that it only totals regular files and ignores directories (and other objects like pipes and symlinks). Without the For anyone involved in IP network architecture, design, maintenance or planning Lawrence G. Roberts has written a great article for IEEE Spectrum about a new router that makes its decisions based on network flows rather that the traditional packet based model that virtually all current routers use. He claims that the new router can process more traffic, improve utilisation, easily manage bandwidth hogging applications like P2P and pull less power. You can read the article here: IEEE Spectrum: A Radical New Router. The latest browser releases from most major players (except Microsoft of course) now support the new HTML 5 video tag, including Firefox 3.5 and Safari 3&4 which means that video just works without requiring a plugin. Of course not everyone is running these browsers (yet) so what is required is a neat way of using these new features where possible and yet gracefully fall back to using Flash, Quicktime or Windows Media in the event the features are not available. Ideally of course you want all this to happen without browser sniffing or other such nastiness that will just store up problems for the future. Well the good news is that all this is possible using HTML without any Javascript. How? Check out Kroc Camen’s Video For Everybody page for all the gory details. On my laptop I have been running XP 64 bit edition for some time, by and large this presents no problem and allows me to successfully use all of the 4G of memory installed. However every now and then I come up against the odd road block because it is something of a second class citizen in terms of the support it receives from Microsoft and other vendors. A good example of this is that when trying to install the latest release of Windows Live Messenger (because it supports multiple sign-ins, at last) I discovered that the installer and web site say it is only supported on XP 32bit. However it turns out that the only bit that is really not supported is the Windows Live Essentials installer that tries to ram all the other Windows Live / MSN features down your throat. In short you can download the various cab files required for each component and install them by hand, instructions and links to the components are here. Hurrah! I have built a copy of the latest vyatta-quagga package from the git repositories which includes the fix for the BGP issue with 32bit ASNs discussed here. You can download my copy of the package here: vyatta-quagga_09910-33islavista2_i386 Note that this hasn’t received exhaustive testing by me but it does apply cleanly to my VC 4.1.4 boxes, appears to be working OK and looks to have resolved the issue. **UPDATE** **Further UPDATE** Also, in case anyone needs to know, just download the patch file onto your vyatta router and then run the following command to install: sudo dpkg -i /path/to/filename.deb What’s so great about Vyatta? In testing and practical use of Vyatta as our primary edge routing platform at Modrus I can say the following: Stability: Scalability: So when we were considering Vyatta I was very keen to ensure that this was not going to be an issue. In testing I was able to easily achieve wire-speed forwarding and with the system running live we have never encountered any throughput capacity issues using it on our gigabit Internet links. Ease of use: Flexible: I should say that no solution is ever perfect, however we have not yet had any occasion to regret choosing Vyatta over the mainstream vendor options, not least because of the potfull of cash we saved ourselves. Finally I should say that if this blog entry reads like a sales pitch, I suppose it is, however I have no affiliation with Vyatta or financial incentive for writing this. In response to a question from my boss, I just wrote this email which summarises my opinion of the new Web Interface that Microsoft have included with Terminal Server on Windows 2008: Err, it won’t work on a Mac, or Linux, or Solaris, or xxBSD, or Windows with Opera, or Chrome, or Firefox, or Safari, or anything except Internet Explorer. I also experienced a problem using it from my home machine which is just running regular Windows XP Pro/SP3 which meant that I couldn’t enable the required ActiveX object without arsing around with the registry. The ActiveX object was there but disabled and hidden. So my summary would be that if you happen to run IE on Vista SP1 then it will probably all be OK, otherwise there is a moderate chance that it will not work. If you get the impression I don’t like the web interface you would be right Well I have pretty much got my blog into decent shape and I am very happy with how it has turned out. For the curious I am using WordPress with the Atahualpa theme, and I can heartily recommend this combination. It is very approachable and yet extremely flexible, so I have been able to get a look and feel that I am happy with really quickly. I should also mention that the picture at the top of the site came from the fantastic stock.xchng site which provides some great quality free stock photographs. Finally I have it all running on bluehost who provide good value hosting. |
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