iantomkins.com » open source

New Android Phone

Ian — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:09:47 +0000

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.

Firefox Tab Previews on Windows 7

Ian — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:55:53 +0000

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
This option adds an extra button to the right hand end of the tab bar which pops up a list of tabs with previews and a search box.
browser.ctrlTab.previews
The ctrlTab option changes + behaviour to use a style new tab preview screen when you have 3 or more tabs open.
browser.taskbar.previews.enable
The taskbar option enables Windows 7 taskbar tab 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.

Vyatta, open source networking that works.

Ian — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:21:55 +0000

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:
We have deployed Vyatta routers as our primary edge BGP routers, and they have proved to be extremely reliable. Typically we use them in pairs with VRRP for failover.

Scalability:
In planning our deployment of BGP we were keen to know what others had found that worked successfully for them. During this we heard of issues with using generic x86 hardware as a network platform, specifically issues with throughput.

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:
Having worked with plenty of mainstream network vendor products (the obvious comparison being Cisco) I can say that I love the command line interface of Vyatta. I find it intuitive, easy to read and obvious where new configuration should go, not something I would ever say about Cisco. And in the event of any difficulty the documentation is available and pretty good.

Flexible:
One of the best features is that because it is ‘just software’ you can run it as a virtual machine, which makes workbench testing trivial and really opens up your deployment options. For example we have a small testing and monitoring datacentre running entirely on VMware ESXi using Vyatta as the main border router in a VM.

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.