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New Portslave release after 5 Years

I’ve just uploaded Portslave version 2010.03.30 to Debian, it replaces version 2005.04.03.1. I considered waiting a few days to make the anniversary but I wanted to get the bugs fixed.

I had a bug report suggesting that Portslave should be removed from Debian because of being 5 years without a major release. It has been […]

3G Broadband for Home Use

I have just installed an old Three mobile phone with 3G broadband for my parents home network access for the reasons described in my cheap net access in Australia post [1].

The first problem I had was that the pre-paid Three SIM just wouldn’t work at all. I ended up phoning the Three support line […]

Choosing an Australian Mobile Telco for use with Android

Since playing with the IBM Seer augmented reality software [1] I’ve been lusting after a new mobile phone which can do such things. While the implementation of Seer that I tried was not of great practical use to me (not being a tennis fan I was only there to learn about computers) it was a […]

The Australian Open and Android Phones (Seer)

On Monday the 25th of January 2010 I visited the Australian Open [1] – it’s one of the world’s greatest tennis championships and it’s on in Melbourne right now. IBM sponsored my visit to show me the computer technology that they use to run the event and display the results to the world via their […]

Costs and Benefits of Search Engines

Chris Smart writes about the latest money making schemes for OS distributors, Canonical is getting paid by Yahoo to make them stop using Google as the default Firefox search engine [1]. I think this is OK, the user can easily change it back if desired and it allows them to pay the salaries of more […]

Why Internet Access in Australia Sucks

In a comment on my post about (relatively) Cheap Net Access in Australia [1] sin from Romania said “Somebody needs to whack the aussie ISP in the head with a cluebat. The prices that you pay are insane“.

In Eastern Europe you have optic fibers from Germany and other western European countries that carry vast […]

Cheap Net Access in Australia

The cheapest ADSL or Cable net access in Australia seems to be about $30 per month. I’ve been using 3G net access by the “Three” phone company for 18 months now and it’s been working well [1]. I recently bought a new 3G modem because the old one broke, so it has cost me $250 […]

Nagios and SSL in Debian

I was doing some work on NRPE (the Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) and I noticed bug report #547092 [1] which concerns the fact that the default configuration uses the same SSL certificate for all Debian servers and provides a patch to fix the problem. After building the patched package I followed the advice of the […]

TPG Lies

Shortly before 9AM this morning I discovered that the IP address for my mail server was not being routed, according to my logs the problem started shortly after midnight. It’s on a TPG ADSL connection, there is one IP address for the PPPOE link and 6 addresses in a /29 routed to it – one […]

Gnash and use of Free Software

There is currently a discussion on a private mailing list about whether some money from a community organisation should be used to assist the development of Gnash (the free software Flash player) [1]. The main reason for this is that there are apparently some schools that depend on flash web sites to such a degree […]