1. Motorola Q Wasn't Charging via USB

    Posted on in uncategorized

    After a recent trip, I've misplaced the wall charger for my Motorola Q. It's likely that the silly thing is just in a bag somewhere in the house, but my wife thinks it may be at her office. None of that really matters — the silly thing is missing!

    Although I …

  2. Recent Downtime Required fsck

    Posted on in System Administration

    Computer frustration (photo by channah)My pager went off Saturday morning with the following alert: "/dev/hda6 is read-only!"

    I can't remember the last time I received this alert. The filesystem in question is the home of this web site, as well as a few others. Being read-only isn't a major problem since most of …

  3. Fix Firefox 3's Navigation Buttons

    Posted on in Software

    Ugly Firefox ButtonsI'm not a fan of Firefox 3 Beta 4's new navigation buttons. I don't really use these buttons, but that huge Back button keeps distracting me. Thankfully there's a way to fix this, but it's not in the Preferences menu.

    The key to getting a more reasonable set of navigation …

  4. Can Google Apps Replace Lotus Notes?

    Posted on in Software

    Google Apps vs Lotus Notes

    Let me start off by saying that I really don't have a lot of experience with Lotus Notes. I was able to suffer through using the client for about a week before I finally begged the Notes admin to forward my mail to my Gmail account. As an email client …

  5. Mozilla Prism - Almost, But Not Quite

    Posted on in Software

    Mozilla Prism Logo(Let me point out at the very beginning that I am aware that Mozilla Prism is still in beta. This commentary is specifically based on Mozila Prism 0.8 for Mac OS X.)

    I love the idea of Mozilla Prism.

    As an avid user of Gmail and other web-based applications …

  6. Choosing a Language for Custom Nagios Plugins

    Posted on in Programming

    NagiosChoosing a language in which to develop your custom Nagios plugins is pretty easy. You have two roads you can go down: compiled or scripting.

    If you decide to build plugins using a compiled language, just about any will do. Generally speaking, C is the usual choice for something like …

  7. Time Now For Firefox 2.0.0.12

    Posted on in Software

    Firefox Logo (200px)Just in case your browser hasn't popped up and told you, Firefox 2.0.0.12 is now available!

    This version addresses stability and security issues uncovered in Firefox 2.0.0.11. Several of the fixes are critically important. Therefore, it's recommended that all users upgrade as soon as …

  8. Apache, SSL, Rails and a Broken Redirect

    Posted on in Programming

    steam locomotive (photo by benedeki)If you are using Apache and <acronym title="Secure Sockets Layer">SSL</acronym> as a proxy front-end for your Ruby on Rails application, you might have a problem with redirects if the backend server (Mongrel, for example) does not use SSL.

    In a nutshell, you'll discover that redirects are sent …

  9. The Hidden Value of a Backup MX Host

    Posted on in System Administration

    Property value (photo by Sapfizz)A colleague of mine is not fond of backup <acronym title="Mail eXchange">MX</acronym> hosts. He (correctly) points out that all incoming mail should be transmitted through another mail server anyway, so the backup MX hosts only serves as an attack point for spammers.

    For the most part I …

  10. Tired of ISP Traffic Shaping? Beat It!

    Posted on in Networking

    onion class 3 (photo by hedonist)I've written a lot of posts about various methods for blocking <acronym title="Peer-to-Peer">P2P</acronym> traffic, especially with Cisco's Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR). Although these posts are probably of interest to smallish Internet Service Providers and administrators of business networks, they don't have much use for the average …

  11. Let's Install JSON for PHP 5

    Posted on in System Administration

    I recently started messing around with building my own Facebook application. I figured the best way to start learning was to download the demo application and get it working on the Slaptijack web server. I quickly ran into a problem:

    PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function json_encode()
    

    The problem …

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