linux.gen.nz

My bike’s barely moved for probably the best part of a year, but I’ve been out on it a few times in the last couple of weeks.

Tonight’s ride: (and the same on Saturday)

Readymech papercraft deskpirate! (looking a little worse for wear when I found him while moving desks)

The camera in my phone didn’t take the best picture but yes, that is the LP cover for Rick Astley’s album lying abandoned on Willis st.

Did anyone not see this coming?

Offshore bloggers are thumbing their noses at an historic suppression order issued by a District Court judge preventing the online publication of the names of two men charged with murder.

Judge David Harvey yesterday ordered that internet websites were forbidden from publishing the names of two men charged with murdering 14-year-old John Hapeta in South Auckland on August 12.

The names of the two can be published in newspapers, and broadcast on the radio and television.

Writing this up because it was so hard to find information about on Google

I’ve had a problem recently where a Cisco router would refuse to pass fragmented IP packets. The initial packet with ‘more fragments’ set would make it through ok, but the subsequent fragment(s) making up the remainder of the original packet would get eaten. Nothing in the log on the router showed the traffic being dropped, but removing the ACL from the interface would cause the traffic to start flowing as normal. It turns out that the release of IOS we were using had a bug which would cause non-initial fragments to silently be dropped if the ACL parser hit an ‘evaluate’ statement in an access list. Because the router in question had reflexive ACLs configured, the evaluate statement was used in a bunch of places.

The solution appears to be upgrading the router to IOS 12.4(21), but a workaround is to move all the evaluate statements to the very bottom of the ACL, above the final ‘deny ip any any’.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been having between 10 and 50 percent packet loss on my Vodafone mobile data connection, pretty much all the time for the last fortnight or so.  On top of that, the transparent proxy issue I’ve been having hasn’t gotten any better yet.  I get that I’m in a marginal coverage area, but it never used to be this bad.  I’m getting really tempted to switch to Telecom, given the promotion they’re running at the moment.

Debbie Norom was one of the eight tools who paid US$1000 for an iphone app that does nothing more than broadcast the owner’s contempt for money (as if an iphone didn’t do that well enough already).  Now she’s having a whine about being ridiculed by the rest of the world.

http://www.iphonesavior.com/2008/08/i-am-rich-buyer.html

“That doesn’t make me a moron. I happen to like expensive trendy stuff. I’m not an idiot! ‘I Am Rich’ is pretty cool especially now since it’s gone. That makes my app a valuable collectors item worth more than $1,000 dollars if I sold it on Ebay. Can I do that?”

Yeah, good luck with that.

I found tonight that for some reason my wireless card had started associating with a nearby Cafenet access point rather than my home wireless. I remembered that back in the day, Windows XP had a tab in the property sheet for the wireless card showing a list of configured wireless networks, with up and down arrows to choose the precedence. I figured that surely Microsoft would’ve (if anything) made it easier in Vista.

How wrong I was.

For a start, since a couple of updates ago I’m no longer getting the system tray icon showing the list of networks I’m connected to, so I need to browse through the start menu to find the Network and Sharing Center. An annoyance for sure, but not too much of a hassle. Clicking the ‘Manage wireless networks’ link gives me this window. I’ll just let you gaze upon it for a while, to really take it in.

So yeah. All you need to do is drag a network up or down in the list. Oh, but it’s not so much a list as it is an explorer window with icons in it. And when you drag the icon, while it does secretly update some hidden wireless network precedence order that ORDINARY MORTALS MAY NOT SEE, the icons don’t stay dragged; they just pop back to where they were before. You can sort them though! In fact, you can sort them by name, encryption type, network type and mode. Shit, I don’t even know what ‘mode’ is … I’m not allowed to click ‘Details’ in the View menu, so I can’t see what would live in that column. But yes, I can sort the networks by everything EXCEPT the precedence, which is the only thing this list mess of icons SHOULD be sortable by.

Luckily it turns out that when you select one of the network connections, an ‘Up’ and/or ‘Down’ button appears on the toolbar. Clicking the ‘Up’ button until it disappeared seemed to do the trick for me.

One more great stride for usability. Well done, Microsoft.