Justin's Blog

December 22, 2003

t610 icon

I recently brought a t610 mobile to replace my ageing t68i. I have to say I love the little thing. Hires screen, excellent bluetooth and polyphonic ringtones (I currently have Magnum PI!). I converted the site, and my logo into the background for it. God knows why any of you would want it, but I have included it below. Just save the gif, and if you have a nice mac like me with bluetooth, you can just send it to the mobile over bluetooth in a matter of seconds!

Louis takes on the Nazis

Last night, Lois Theroux took on the Nazis in California, and I don't think I have ever been incensed by a piece of television before. Louis as usual was on top form, and I really felt for the poor guy when he went over to a skinheads house when he was asked if he was Jewish. When will people wake up and realise that the world is not in fact a place where any minority is an enemy! Do the idiots not realise that in fact the "white" race is in fact a minority, and their specific niche of society is in fact hated around the world, not just for their ideals, but because of their blatent lack of respect of humanity? The one thing that really got me was the fact that there was a woman who home taught her children, and brought them up under her ideals, as well as publicising them as neo-nazi pop icons. One quote she gave disturbed me greatly, it was along the lones of "There is no other better way to entice young men into the "faith" than the lure of teenage girls singing Nazi slogans". Great, so not only is she alienating her children against a large part of society, but she is effectively pimping her children! Louis really is great at getting to the heart of issues first hand, and I have to say I salute him! Good on you mate.

Moz on OSX provides NTLM

Geeky as hell, but a life saver for me. The new beta of Mozilla provides working NTLM authentication on OSX. This now means I am not relegated to using the pile of shit that is Explorer on the Mac when I am at work. Now that there is open source code (proper) out there that supports NTLM, hopefully Apple will pick up on it and integrate it into Safari. Hopefully!

December 17, 2003

Postfix SSL Howto

You can find the Postfix SSL howto here. It will give you info on setting up Postfix with TLS support to authenticate clients and encrypt the data stream. PDF version is here and the sgml source is here.

Lovely coders!

I love it when people cleanly write software, it makes my life so much easier. Looking for a version of bchunk (convert CD image formats) for OSX proved fruitless, so I got hold of the source code, and it compiled fist time with no changes to either the Makefile or the sourcecode needed. God bless good coders :o)

SSL Certificate Authority Howto

The SSL CA howto can be found here.
You will find information about how to create a Certificate Authority, to be able to use TLS with Postfix. You can find the pdf version here, and the sgml source is here.

December 16, 2003

Using rsync

Just saw a post on the SuSE List about a problem someone was having with rsync. This is a common problem, and one that inflicts pain on people using cvs too.

By default they both use the quite old rsh protocol to copy data over the network. Most people don't realise this, and get connection refused errors when trying to initiate a connection. To get around this use something like the following:

rsync -avrz --delete -e ssh . 192.168.0.1:/data

This will do the following (in order):

-a: archive mode, keep permissions timestamps etc
-v: increase verbosity
-r: recurively copy
-z compress the data stream
--delete: remove files that no longer exist on the sending side (VERY useful!)
-e ssh: use ssh as the transport protocol
.: copy the current directory
192.169.0.1:/data: the destination and the remote machine

Beavering away

Working onsite at a customers up until christmas eve, and it is going well, doing a SLOX migration from SuSE email server to SLOX 4.1, redoing firewall configs on a firewall on CD that I designed, and also implementing winbindd with PAM/NSS on the fileserver along with SAMBA and Appletalk, all going well so far, but don't like doing out of hours work. I was here till midnight last night :o(

December 12, 2003

SCO

Well, aren't we all happy about the SCO case. The judge has told SCO to declare openly all accusations and their details (source files, line numbers etc) of the infringments that SCO *thinks* IBM is liable for within 30 days from the submission (which will be in a couple of days). I seriously think SCO must be shitting bricks now, as they realise without hard, firm evidence, they are screwed. Good old IBM, they have tried their best to make sure that this will not harm them, and secondary to that, they have acted like a paternal sibling trying to help up poor Linux guys out.

New York

Aimee and I went to New York with CSF after I won a nice little prize for three days. Apart from the terrible snow, we had a great time, and decided to go to NY and LA for our honeymoon. Bah, Americans ain't that bad are they!?

New domain host

I took the plunge and decided to go for a new hosting provider, bytemark. These guys provide UML hosts, so I can pretty much do what I want, which is pretty cool. Apart from a few problems with Postfix, all went well and palmcoder is healthy :o)