Feb 17 2011

‘blog spam :(

Has someone worked out how to reliably game Akismet? I’ve just had to clear out 45 spam posts all within a few minutes around 6:30pm, then a few every 10 minutes to half an hour or so, until another bunch appeared around 11:15pm.

Quite how desperate for praise and/or attention to these spammers think bloggers are?!

Oh, wait…

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Jan 29 2011

Working around the lack of an RTC battery on ALIX system boards…

The ALIX 2c3 system board the forms my traffic-shaper has one irksome weakness: it lacks an on-board CMOS/RTC battery to maintain the time when the system is shutdown.

This is a more significant problem than it sounds since, for starters, the fsck tools for the ext2 filesystem, by default, treat a timestamp in the future as a failure – and disk checks have to be performed almost immediately on system start, so there is no opportunity to raise networking and start an NTP dæmon.

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Jan 29 2011

ALIX USB support

I have a PC Engines alix2d3 single-board computer – a really nice compact system with an AMD Geode processor, 256MB RAM, compact flash storage and three 10/100MB network ports – acting as my traffic-shaper and network gateway. Since this machine is extremely reliable, always on, and has spare USB ports it seemed like a sensible place to plug in the USB cable from my new UPS. There have been several power-cuts recently (some due to external factors, and some due to a dodgy toaster!) and the time spent recovering filesystems from unexpected restarts was starting to become inconvenient…

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Nov 28 2010

Fixing Terminal.app window titles where directory names contain extended characters…

This one may be a little esoteric, but I’ve always configured my ~/.bashrc to set $PS1 in bash to a simple ‘$ ‘, but show all relevant information in the terminal (or screen) window title.

This is generally fine but, on OS X at least, if a directory name contains an extended character such as ‘Æ‘ then what actually happens is that all characters are sent to the window title except for the extended character, which is pre-pended to the prompt for the following line. Being a double-byte character, this then confused the shell’s line-editing abilities, and characters have a tendency to disappear if the cursor keys are used for editing.

After suffering with this for several months, this interesting problem reached my needs-a-fix threshold and I decided to do something about it 😉

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Nov 21 2010

A Heath Robinson contraption…

This rather Heath Robinson contraption (or Rube Goldberg, to our American readers) is from a picture I took around this time last year, when trying to diagnose a poorly RAID array.

colossus and alexandria

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Sep 18 2010

Fun with Google Instant

This is the second mention of Billy Joel on this blog…

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Sep 9 2010

Directories under /tmp/.private can’t be deleted?

There’s an irksome problem which I’ve encountered on a few Linux boxen recently, whereby directories under /tmp/.private, such as /tmp/.private/root, simply cannot be deleted – even as root, nothing seems to be able to shift them!

This may only be an issue on installations which make use of the PAM ‘mktemp‘ module…

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May 23 2010

Shuttle time-lapse

This is just incredible…

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May 14 2010

Installing Steam on Mac OS with a Case-sensitive boot partition

So Steam has now been released for the Mac. Whilst this is a massive step forwards for the Mac as a platform – finally giving Apple a credible position regarding gaming (after the 2007 deal with Electronic Arts, which didn’t even promise Mac native games but merely wrappers around Windows titles*, apparently went nowhere) – there are still clearly rough edges which makes Steam feel more like a late beta.

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May 13 2010

Look Ma, I’m on TV!

The other weekend I spent Sunday at RAF Upwood, an abandoned RAF base near Peterborough, on a photo-shoot organised by Alex Beckett. Alex has put together a video of the event, featuring some of the most striking photographs taken.

If you keep your eyes peeled, you might even spot me in a couple of the pictures 🙂

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