Is anyone else having problems subscribing to new feeds in Google Reader today? I’ve tried to subscribe to three different feeds, and each one of them has been giving me problems! Not something I’m used to in the usually flawless Google Reader!
Ever wondered how to build a submarine fibre optic cable? PIPE Networks are a large carrier / IXP here in Oz, and are in the process of building a much needed submarine cable between Sydney and Guam. I’ve met with Bob, their Network Architect and he told me about some pretty crazy and cool stuff that they are doing, and it looks like the project is going to be a huge success for them.
They have decided, rather unusually for such a project, to be very open and transparent about how they are going about it, and you can find lots of details over on their website which includes a blog that you can subscribe to in order to stay up to date with the project!
For a very long time, I have longed for a decent to-do list. Better again, one that was online, allowing me to access it from anywhere. I’ve tried out a few different solutions over the years, but none have really worked for me.
Today, I discovered Remember The Milk, a very cool, Australian developed website, that is rapidly growing in popularity and features. There are currently over 500,000 users of RTM, so I’m guessing with those kind of numbers, there must be something exciting going on!
So far, I’m very impressed, I can hook it into my Google Calendar, allowing me to view as well as create tasks there, as well as create tasks via email and the web etc. Only thing that I would like to see is a Google Desktop plugin, but, I think I’m going to be hooked regardless!
I now work in a predominately MS Windows environment. Yes, I still have UNIX servers to look after, and Cisco kit all around the country to play with, but, most of the users here are Windows users. To that end, I’m currently install Windows Vista on my laptop! The thought of doing that makes me shudder a little, I’ve heard nothing but bad about Vista, and, given I haven’t used Windows hands on as my main OS in about 5 years, I’m not looking forward to figuring out all the bugs and problems that I encounter! Hopefully I can at least use my experiences to make migrating any users here to Vista a lot easier.
If you have been having problems with installing cacti on ubuntu like I just have, this little pointer should help.
There is a bug in the current cacti package that’s sitting in the gutsy mirrors, which will result in you getting the following helpful (not!) errors when you go to log in:
Invalid PHP_SELF Path
This applies to both fresh installs and OS upgrades also.
To work around this, you will need to downgrade to a working package:
sudo aptitude install cacti=0.8.6j-1.1
That should do the trick, until the mirrors are updated with a working version
I’ve just had this pointed out to me! Somewhat strange irony (and if you’re not a geek, you won’t get it!)
daragh@leffe:~$ whois as666
OrgName: US Army Combat Systems Test Activity
OrgID: UACSTA
Address: Commander, USACSTA
City: Aberdeen Proving Ground
StateProv: MD
PostalCode:
Country: USASNumber: 666
ASName: CSTA-CISCO-AS
ASHandle: AS666
And people say they’re working, and not on a junket!! 
Ooh, this is interesting. To me, the killer feature lacking from Google’s great Gmail was the lack of IMAP mail support. In fact, it’s probably the biggest reason why I moved all my mail away from Gmail last year and over onto my own server. But, there are some reports starting to filter through that Google is starting to add IMAP support to Gmail accounts. This is most interesting, and certainly something well worth investigating. Especially so if you’re someone, like me, who likes to use a mail client as opposed to Gmail’s web interface, and also uses multiple machines throughout the day.
UPDATE: It appears that they are only offering this to a limited number of people at the moment (of which I am not one) and I’m not sure what it takes to get yourself enabled. Added to that, when I search for IMAP in the Gmail support site, I get told that they don’t currently support IMAP! 
I’ve just been given a new Nokia E65 courtesy of work, and, as well as setting it up as sip phone, I wanted to be able to access my personal mail from it.
I ran into one rather annoying problem with this however. I am using a ssl cert that is self signed on my imap server, and, unfortunately, the mail app has no way of saving the cert on the phone, resulting it in continuously bugging me to accept the cert every time it tries to access my mailbox. This is a real pain, and entirely counter productive. There is a way around it, but it’s not especially easy. Then again, if you’re running your own imap and smtp server with self signed certs, chances are this will make total sense to you:
Login to your server and convert CA from .pem format to .der format
cd /path/to/cert
openssl x509 -outform der -in ca.pem -out ca.der
cp /path/to/ca.der /path/to/httpd/htdocs/
cd /path/to/httpd/htdocs/
vi /path/to/mime.types
(add the end of the file, add the following line)
application/x-x509-ca-cert der
restart apache
Once you have done this, you then need to browse from your phone to the location of the ca.der file. When there, click on it, and you should be prompted to install the cert. Once this is done, hey presto, no more bugging! 
Barry sent on a clever little hack earlier that speeds up your Firefox browsing experience quite nicely (especially if you have a decent broadband connection!).
Here’s the details:
Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequestsNormally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
Alter the entries as follows: Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30.
This means it will make 30 requests at once.
Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
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