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open letter to Toyota

When I visit the toyota.com.au web site it does not display any information on the new Camry, instead it displays a message saying “Unfortunately you do not have flash 8”.

A well designed web site will display information for all users, including those who don’t have flash installed.

The Toyota web site should be aimed […]

started growing a beard

At LCA in January this year there was an auction at the end (an LCA tradition), and most people were feeling very relaxed and happy after plenty of good food and drink and bid with reckless abandon (another LCA tradition).

To help things along a few of us volunteered to do various things if […]

working all night

Last night I worked until 5AM on a magazine article. Upon review the later stages of my work weren’t of my usual quality level, and today I did nothing significant because I was too tired (fortunately it’s a Saturday).

I’m now going to cease all really late-night work except when supporting 24*7 production systems for […]

Virgin – no free water and renewable energy

When returning from Ruxcon I took a Virgin Blue flight.

The Virgin web site has a FAQ with the following advice regarding DVT: Drink plenty of water and other fluids during and after the flight, limiting alcohol, tea and coffee.

However Virgin provide no free water on the flight and charge $2 for 350ml of […]

dunc-tank and motivation

The dunc-tank project was established to raise money to compensate some Debian developers who are essential to producing a timely release of Debian. There has been a lot of acrimoneous debate about whether this is a good or bad thing. The positive side of it is that the release managers will get to spend more […]

Lack of privacy in Amcal

Recently I visited my local Amcal pharmacy. When I was waiting to pay I noticed a large pile of cards on the country, they were customer loyalty cards with the names of customers printed on them. Also on the top of the pile was a Medicare card. The cards were placed face-down presumably to avoid […]

Ruxcon and SLUG

This weekend I was in Sydney for Ruxcon. Ruxcon is a computer security conference with a focus on penetration testing and related skills.

The presentation on Unusual Bugs by Ilya van Sprudel was particularly interesting. He spoke about a number of issues that could do with some improvement in Linux, I will file some bug […]

SAK, ctrl-alt-del, and Linux keyboard mapping

A common problem with Linux systems is when Windows users press CTRL-ALT-DEL at the login prompt and reboot the machine.

To fix this some people change the ^ca line in /etc/inittab to just disable the reboot function. However this is not desirable because sometimes you want to reboot a machine with a simple keypress.

Another […]

tcpdump and ps

Today I was doing some network tracing and figured out how to track the start and end of TCP connections. The following tcpdump command will get all SYN, FIN, and RST packets on port 80 and all ICMP packets:

tcpdump -i bond0 -n “port 80 and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-fin|tcp-rst) != 0 or icmp”

Also recently […]

Ethernet bonding

Bonding is one of the terms used to describe multiple Ethernet cables used to form a single virtual network link. This can be done for performance or reliability.

Bonding for performance used to be common when 100baseT was the fastest network technology that was commonly available. In 1999 servers could usually sustain considerably more than […]