iMac Intel vs iMac G5 booting

YouTube has a video showing a side by side comparison of booting a 17″ iMac Intel (left) vs 17″ iMac-PPC (right).

Intel = 40 seconds, PPC = 98 seconds (There are claims that the video is faked. We will have to confirm the results here, with out of the box machines)

  [1.] iMac G5 vs iMac Intel Boot [YouTube]

Blogging: Australian A+ list?

Frank Arrigo (MSDN Blogs) requests an Australian Bloggier A-List, and creates an *interesting reaction*

• The A+ list of Aussie bloggers [bleeding edge : Charles Wright]
• Aussie tech journalists want to game tech.memeorandum [cameron's brain : Cameron Reilly]
• Australian Bloggers bruised over bloodied Blogosphere banter [shane's place : Shane Williamson]
• Frank’s not on the A+ list [filtered : Mark Jones]

“Well Frank, Charles Wright (who is sitting next to me in the media centre here at Kickstart) and I have decided that we will go one better and compile the “A+ list” of Australian bloggers who are not vendors, and preferrably journalists, or at least content producers. It just seems like the right thing to do because you have upset our oh-so fragile sensibilities.” — Mark Jones

Sounds like a meme circle to me

Meme: an idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs. Although the term encompasses much of the natural flow of communication in the Blogosphere, there are active bloggers and blog sites that are dedicated to the creation of memes on a regular basis [2.]

Del.icio.us Tags: A+_Aussie_bloggers (dcr)

[1.] Australian Bloggier A-List [Frank Arrigo (MSDN Blogs) ]
[2.] Blogjargon [frEdSCAPEs 0.1]

Broadband vs Pay TV connection

Snippets [1]
This is the week where Roy Morgan research announced that for the first time, the number of Australians who have a broadband Internet connection at exceeded the number of Australians with a pay TV connection at home. Telstra Bigpond announced that it had begun offering a video-on-demand service for PC users. And online advertising revenue was reported as growing at 60% for the year, hitting $620 million, and threatening to overtake radio and magazine advertising Download abvs_media_release_oaer_february_21_2005.pdf.

[1.] Snippets [LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth]

PHP TEST

A chat this morning brought us to the topic of “Does PHP run on staff.edfac?” I offered to test a few Hello-World scripts to see if it did;

Hello World (PHP)
Hello World (PHTML)
Hello World (PHP3)

The results were a tad surprising as I hadn’t thought that it would be available, and we can access things beyond Hello-World as the next example shows;

 

phpinfo.php [restricted access]

 

<?php phpinfo(); ?> also works so PHP is well and truely alive from staff.edfac (at least for cf-staff).

Further testing showed success for the following locations (scripts now deleted);
* http://extranet.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/ed-it_ops/phpinfo.php
* https://intranet.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/ops/phpinfo.php
so PHP appears to be alive on all servers.

 

This weeks links

• Crash Course: The ABCs of WPA2 Security
• Computer First Aid Using Knoppix
• iTerm the alternative terminal emulation program for Mac OS X
• Australia Copyright Agency to schools: pay Internet licenses or shut down the net!
• Copyright makes web a turn-off
• BOING BOING’S GUIDE TO DEFEATING CENSORWARE
• new BGAN – The new BGAN satellite units
• Mary Woodbridge’s Everest Expedition – Hello I’m Mary Woodbridge; I’m 85 years old and I’m going to climb Mt. Everest, along with my dog Daisy …
• MacBook Pro – Review

Corporate blogging

• New Millennium PR: 35 1/2 Ideas for Your Blog Posts
• Corporate blogging powerpoint slides
• Your Guide to Corporate Blogging [CorporateBlogging.Info]
• More Corporate Blogging Resources [Contentious]
• Corporate Blogging Rules [Working Smart]
• Corporate Blogging (George Lenard, Steve Rubel and Jeff Seul)::Sound Policy with Denise Howell [ITConversations]

 

we have lift off…

Well it must be Wednesday The new Edfac web site has gone live yesterday

Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 13:56:53 +1100
From: Anna McCredie
Subject: we have lift off…
To: education-staff@unimelb.edu.au

Dear all

Just a brief announcement to say that, despite a couple of last
minute delays, the new Faculty of Education site is now live.

There is still some final testing occurring in the background so
it won’t be fully open for editing until about lunch time tomorrow,
but any urgent changes should go through Tony Zara …

1.) Getting students to the locations to create accounts
Need to update HelpDesk documentation and HelpDesk staff need to be aware. The links

1. HOME http://www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/
2. Current Students http://www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/currentstudents/
3. Resources http://www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/currentstudents/resources/index.html
4. IT services and support http://www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/currentstudents/resources/it.html
5. and then we have access to Create your computer accounts and
   Log into your ed-IT account – Access to your SOCS subject list

2.) Student Account Status [Help Desk Tools]

“Although this page is encrypted, the information you have entered is to be sent over an unencrypted connection and could easily be read by a third party. Are you sure you want to continue sending this information.”

 

You’re posting the form data from a secure page (https) to a non secure formhandler/page (http)?
Solution: make sure the form handler also resides on a secure server (https).
( It can also be caused by a post method that is called via JavaScript:post where it should be post )

3.) Bad links
Working through these 1 by 1

InterMapper – Part II

Earlier this month I was migrating Intermapper to Linux when I ran into a problem. The good folk from support@dartware.com have got back to me with the following;

intermapper.sh is a shell script that first tries the following:

1. Look for “java” in the PATH if INTERMAPPER_JAVA is not set, otherwise use INTERMAPPER_JAVA as the path.
2. Try paths: /usr/local/bin/java, /usr/bin/java or /usr/java/bin/java
3. Try bin/java in the following directories where the second part is a directory prefix:

/usr/java/
jre j2re j2sdk jdk1. SunJava2- linux-sun-jdk
/usr/lib/
jre j2re j2sdk jdk1. SunJava2- linux-sun-jdk
/usr/local/
jre j2re j2sdk jdk1. SunJava2- linux-sun-jdk

That is, we first try /usr/java/jre*/bin/java, /usr/java/j2re*/bin/java, and so on. The jre*, j2re* directories have the version number in the name. We test any located executables and skip them if they are the “gcj” version of java.

In 4.4.2, if you have a file named with the same prefix as the java prefix directory, the script fails to find java. This bug is fixed in 4.4.3b5. This is available for download from:

http://www.intermapper.com/binaries/beta.html

You set the INTERMAPPER_JAVA environment variable in your shell’s .bash_profile file:

export INTERMAPPER_JAVA=[path goes here]

I hope this helps!

We’ll see how it goes later today
As well as being symlinked at /usr/local/java I’ll also symlink to /usr/local/bin/java

agra:~# ln -s /usr/local/j2re-1_4_2_10-linux-i586/j2re1.4.2_10/ /usr/local/bin/java

Not quite …

agra:/usr/local/bin# intermapper /usr/local/bin/intermapper: line 199: /usr/local/bin/java: is a directory agra:/usr/local/bin#

Let’s try pointing directly to the binary, it is a /bin/ alias afterall …

agra:/usr/local/bin# ln -s /usr/local/j2re-1_4_2_10-linux-i586/j2re1.4.2_10/bin/java /usr/local/bin/java

Ok, now we are calling the X11 system so the java side of things must be ok (time to leave the console and visit the machine)
This exception is thrown in Unix environments by the Java AWT toolkit when it can’t make a connection to a X11 server.

agra:/usr/local/bin# intermapper Can’t connect to X11 window server using ‘:0.0′ as the value of the DISPLAY variable.

The quick-and-dirty way to solve the problem is to have an X session open on the server’s console, and to allow access to the X server to any X client running on the server. The “xhost” tool can be used to grant access to a particular machine:

# xhost +localhost

will allow any X client, directly running on the server, to access the X server. Once access to the X server has been granted to Apache Jserv, you will have to restart Apache for the changes to take effect. This command can be used for testing purposes. However, disabling machine-based access control is a security risk, and should be avoided in deployment environments.

This solution only works if you have a graphical console plugged on your server. If this were not the case, you would have to use an X server running on a remote machine (and change the DISPLAY setting in your jserv.properties) … [2]

agra:/usr/local/bin# xhost +localhost
xhost:  unable to open display ""

After a chat with Shaun … and logged in as user account on the console and terminal session.

xhost +localhost
export DISPLAY=:0.0
intermapper

Now onto sorting out the product registration (Intermapper – Part III)

Something else that is probaly worth some investigation is ’sux’;

After ploughing through the site/document somebody else linked above, I found a quick fix to the problem I shared with the OP. Debian has a package called “sux”, as far as I know it’s in Stable & Testing (I installed it in Etch). Just install that and from then on type ’sux’ instead of ’su’ when you want to… ’su’!

It places a wrapper of some description around the ’su’ command to fix the issue. Other than that ’sux’ will work identically to ’su’ but without the errors. [3]

[1.] Error “:java.lang.InternalError: Can’t connect to X11 window server using ‘:0.0′ as the value of the DISPLAY variable”:. [MapInfo]
[2.] Using Xvfb with Oracle9iAS [iDevelopment]
[3.] I’m expecting a terribly obvious answer to this.. [LiveJournal]

RFC 1149

It was a long time ago I was stuffing about with this one; by popular request RFC 1149 – A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

Network Working Group                                        D. Waitzman
Request for Comments: 1149                                       BBN STC

                                                            1 April 1990   A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

Status of this Memo

This memo describes an experimental method for the encapsulation of

   IP datagrams in avian carriers.  This specification is primarily
  useful in Metropolitan Area Networks.  This is an experimental, not
   recommended standard.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
   ... [1]

[1.] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt [IETF]
[2.] RFC 1149 support for LINUX [BLUG]
[2.b] RFC 1149 support for LINUX (the Photos) [BLUG]
[3.] TCP/IP Takes Flight: RFC1149 [The LINUX.COM Article Archive]
[4.] RFC 1149 (RFC1149) [FAQs.org]

Eudora v7.x part II

Back around the 22-Nov-2005 I was investigating the licensing for Eudora v7.x. It would appear that we have now received a licence code to unlock v7.x and it was published to SOFTDIST on 15-Feb-2006 (did anyone see an announcement?)

“\\pv-its-softdist\softdist\Apps\Eudora\Eudora 7 Registration Details.txt”
[15-Feb-2006!!]

In short, I have copied the registration details over to “i:” and we will need to do some testing to see how it performs with VirusScan/Filters etc. before it can be for general release.

Installers for v7.x have been available on “i:” for PC since last year, I still need to drop the installers over for OS X.

I:\SRC\Windows\Applications-INTERNET\Email\Eudora\Eudora 7 Registration Details.txt
I:\SRC\Windows\Applications-INTERNET\Email\Eudora\Eudora7\Eudora 7.0.1\

Of interest, there is also a S/MIME Plugin on the downloads page that is worth a look [2]

So far the testing has been positive, with no unexplained behaviour or mail loss.

[1.] Eudora Downloads [Qualcomm]
[2.] S/MIME README [Qualcomm]

Technorati Tags: eudora
Del.icio.us Tags: eudora
Flickr Tags: eudora
Wikipedia: eudora

Boing Boing – 1337

The FeedBurner feed for BoingBoing was at 1337 k readers … how LEET

[1.] Boing Boing [Boing Boing]
[2.] Boing Boing – syndicated content [Feed Burner]