July 1992. I was on the point of graduating from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth with a 2(i) in Computer Science. Three years earlier, I'd entered university studying Geology, with CompSci as an accessory or possibly a joint degree; I hadn't been too sure. Geology was ostensibly what I'd... »

The problem: The Youtube app doesn't work on the iPhone and iPod Touch when a proxy is configured in the wifi settings. There are various hints on the forums that a particular URL used by the app requires rewriting (as the request says one thing but the Host header... »

Debugging web apps with Curl It's the Swiss Army knife of web app debugging. It avoids wondering how much of what you're seeing is current, and how much has been cached by the browser. It shows you all the gory details of HTTP requests and responses. It's curl, and it's... »

Some time ago, I used a handy Perl script called fp2flickr to import some Fotopic collections into Flickr. It was crude but it did the job usefully. After a moderate amount of hacking and bodging, I've now modified it to import PhotoPost albums into Flickr: pp2flickr.... »

(Blows dust off category in blog.) I am slowly coming to the conclusion that if you built up a billion dollar company over ten years but never did any backups, and then a massive data loss wiped out the organisation, you still wouldn't have lost as much money as... »

And this sort of thing quite clearly runs top to bottom in the shadow cabinet. Very few of them give off that air of quiet technocratic confidence, and they all have plausible-sounding schemes cribbed from American thinktanks. Daniel Davies is my new favourite columnist.... »

This post is mostly for the benefit of any other poor sods trying to run Linux on a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo L7320GW, but it touches on general problems with penguins and laptops.... »

Got a computer system? Got a problem? Take that dumbfounded look off your face and unknot that eyebrow. To accompany major reference works such as The Dummy's Guide To The Internet, The Complete Tosswad's E-Commerce Handbook and The Utterly Cretinous Imbecile's Introduction To Managing IT In The Enterprise, BB... »

(Compare "success" in Fedora terms: "doesn't corrupt hard drive beyond repair".) Upgraded the Glamorous Research Assistant's PC from CentOS 4.5 to 5.0 yesterday and...it actually went pretty swimmingly. Using the recommended Anaconda upgrade method took about an hour, including a moderately long pause after the final package update, after... »

Scenario: you are running some proprietary VPN software under a Windows guest OS in VMware (e.g. Shiva/Intel NetExpress), and you want to share the connection back to the host OS (e.g. Linux) so that you can run native tools that access the VPN. I've used this to run the... »

BB thought our AMD Athlon XP 2000-based system was pretty cutting-edge when we installed it three years ago. Well, by "cutting-edge" we mean "approximately equivalent to the Ars Technica Budget Box" recommendation of the day. Trouble is, we continued to think of it as cutting-edge while the days flew... »

WebSphere Application Server on Sun/UNIX has bugs in the performance viewer and convertScriptCompatibility command.... »

WebSphere Application Server 6.0, the nightmare continues Life too simple? Dull? Lacking adventure? WAS V6 is here to change all that! In no time, those long, rainy afternoons sat comatose in front of the monitor will be a distant happy memory, as you swear, curse and throw your hands up... »

Digital Asset Management in Linux Notes based on quick research into image management under Linux.... »

BB would have no interest in the much-vaunted Mozilla Firefox...if it weren't for the Live Bookmarks feature, and particularly the Sage extension that makes use of this to provide a full RSS feed browser. Otherwise, we'd rather avoid dumbed-down, reduced featureset applications in favour of old-fashioned (but powerful) Mozilla... »

smart-sharpen2 v0.3b is my modified version of John Hall's sharpening script from the GIMP FAQ site. Changes: Dialogue to modify sharpening and edge-detection parameters. Optional despeckling applied to the layer mask prior to edge-detection; this removes a lot of the grain on scanned negatives and thus avoids sharpening it... »

Finally, a Fedora upgrade that Just Works ... it's called CentOS.... »

<Insert standard rant about quality of Fedora releases and inevitable bugs and issues with every upgrade> OK, FC3 to FC5 has been a disaster, an utter abomination. It didn't actually wipe all my data and toast the disk, so in that sense it was a limited success, but in... »

It is now possible to simply install and configure WebSphere® Application Server for multiple systems. Simplify installing GA code, refresh packs, fix packs and interim fixes, as well as creating/configuring artifacts and deploying applications. All of these steps can take precious time that could be spent focusing on your... »

Here's a Cfengine module written in Perl called module:tools, that creates a Cfengine policy file for updating software packages. If you've been wondering how to do this, it may point you in the right direction. Read on for the gory details and the necessary glue.... »

It's actually quite easy to automate the configuration of a BIND DNS server using Cfengine, even one run in a chroot environment. It's also a good illustration of the non-obvious technique for copying multiple files using Cfengine's copy action.... »

My document about WAS on UNIX has been republished by WebSphere Journal (part two next month). They've loosened up the language somewhat to suit their cool, hip image, but the definitive - and updated - version remains my original paper. We found Ade Rixon's "Putting WAS on Unix" in... »

Whenever there's an application problem, project managers and analysts immediately turn to two groups of people to find out what's wrong: sysadmins and developers. So once more, let's play....IT'S NOT MY PROBLEM!!... »

Since I mentioned that I would write further about IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS), I've had several requests. Well, one. But I'm going to write about it anyway.... »

I thought I'd write a nice, concise guide to using WebSphere on UNIX. Something more straightforward than the IBM documentation, which appears designed to bring on a mental collapse. Almost thirty pages later ... Download Using WebSphere Application Server on UNIX in PDF. I hope to say more about... »

Lost and disillusioned at having their thunder stolen by a bunch of smart-alec engineers, the marketing guys at Sun decided to introduce their own innovation in Solaris 10 by designing a new logo: "And with this historic Solaris 10 release comes a new logo -- a logo that captures... »

Hubris and impatience once again overcame caution and bitter experience this weekend, as I upgraded my PC to Fedora Core 3. I had planned to hold back until FC4, but with no news or roadmap announced, and an increasing urge to use the GIMP v2.2.2, I caved in and... »

I've made some further enchancements to SARGE, the SAR graphing package. I tried to run them past Ed Finch, the original author, but email to the address on his web page bounced. I'd still like to see SARGE store the data in RRD files...we'll see how bored I get... »

In case you still use IE (and you've been living in a cave for the last year, which seems a likely combination of circumstances), why not get Firefox before you experience one of those "I'll get me coat" moments in polite company? It's only a 5Mb download. It's faster... »

I'd only tangentially heard of the sinister "Out Of Memory Killer" in the 2.6 Linux kernel series, until a few nights ago when my system experienced its devastating efficiency. It turns out that, as well as a mechanism for killing "random" processes when the system runs out of memory... »

I never learn. Despite the pain that Red Hat/Fedora upgrades typically cause, I still take each one, like a well-aimed kick in the teeth to a rugby player. And Fedora Core 2 is the best yet, with results that rival or even surpass your typical Microsoft update. At the... »

Read James C. Liu's blog entry on the difficulties of tech management. And if you don't understand it, BB has some coloured sticky notes here that might help.... »

"My new rule of thumb is that absolutely no Internet facing service be run in anything but a non-global zone. Anything less is being reckless." - Jarod Jenson, Aeysis OK, right, that's the new paradigm, is it? Let's see if we can make IBM WebSphere Application Server run inside... »

One message that is coming through loud and clear from the various Sun blogs is that their engineers are feeling incredibly bullish about Solaris 10, and rightly so. It's a good sign when a product is trailed not (just) by meaningless marketese about "e-enabling IT and business paradigm integration"... »

Another long time Linux peeve resolved: for the past six months or more, my rxvt terminals have lacked a proper mouse cursor. The standard cursor shape was, and should be, the I-bar. Sometime around one of the many RPM upgrades, it suddenly became a white arrow with, annoyingly, a... »

The Linux cheerleaders are hugging themselves with glee ever since IBM came down so heavily on their side. Personally, the more I use IBM software, the more convinced I become that their support is either a) an underhand Microsoft-funded sabotage attempt (paranoid conspiracy theory par excellence of every Linux... »

There are currently lots of fine things being said about the HP Photosmart 7xxx range, particularly their amazing black & white printing capability, but mainly by those lucky people who have already taken a chance on one. The rest of the world, or at least the part that skulks... »

Nagios is a great network monitoring frontend. NET-SNMP is a good SNMP implementation for the backend. Somehow, nobody appears to have yet connected the two in any useful, simple way. If you feel that you ought to be able to use SNMP to perform remote host monitoring checks in... »

The pace of change in the Unix world has sure picked up since Linux took off. Whereas previously a sysadmin could coast for years on knowledge of a few key packages like sendmail V8.6 and BIND v8, secure that little was likely to change and the skills were transferrable... »

Another new delight in Fedora Core 1 is the libusb library. I wasn't aware of this until I upgraded to VueScan 7.6.78, which can now use libusb instead of the normal USB scanner driver. In fact, the driver no longer worked, but since it's going away with the 2.6... »

Back when I installed Red Hat 9, I mentioned some Unicode-related problems with GTK+ 1.x apps. Following another upgrade to Fedora Core 1 (mostly painless, but once again I had my carefully customised and working CUPS configuration broken), I managed to get to the bottom of this. It's not... »

Sun's Flash archiving in Solaris is a great way to clone systems or take OS backups. It ties nicely into JumpStart too. However, the basic flarcreate(1M) command (prior to Solaris 9 Update 2) is somewhat limited; notably, it won't let you exclude multiple files/dirs from the archive because the... »

Many Java vendors and developers seem slightly mystified as to why Java hasn't taken over the software landscape as completely as was originally promised and expected. They just can't understand why people are still writing and running various dialects of C and other platform-dependent languages - surely it's supposed... »

If you set up Orca according to my original procedure and downloaded the orca_collect script, please fetch the updated script, which contains an important fix to prevent rsync copying all your data files on every run. Mea culpa for your lost CPU cycles.... »

For the first time, BB feels sorry for Windows users (normally, we figure they get what they deserve). They're trying to make headway against a whole battery of M$ bugs, bad patches, IE holes, Outlook holes, RPC holes, viruses, trojans and worms and then they start receiving spam emails... »

If you followed the post about Performance graphing on Solaris, check back for an updated Orca collection script and more fixes (with patches) for SARGE.... »

Every so often, I get bored with the stability of my home PC and, in the absence of Microsoft to break it for me, decide to mix things up a bit by jumping to a newer Red Hat release. The multiple upgrade attempts! The disk corruption! Reconfiguring all the... »

Seen on Solaris Central: JNI Ships 'No-Reboot' Solaris Driver This takes me back. The first and last time I had experience with a Solaris driver from JNI, it too was "no-reboot". As in, the system would no longer boot once the driver was installed.... »

I've installed so many open source software packages in my time, it's frustrating when I occasionally come across one that isn't built and running in five minutes. ./configure; make; make install What's so hard about that? A monkey could do it (OK, an IT journalist would need some training).... »

Problem: you need to get an overall view of the performance of your Solaris servers. Something with pretty graphs. That doesn't require hours of configuration, the installation of complex, insecure client-side agents and a significant overhead in data collection and handling. Solution: nothing. But you can get close...... »

I'm putting this down here because it's taken some non-trivial web searching to find an answer: I needed to convert some audio files (alarms) from my Psion Series 3a to my spiffy new Series 5mx. PsiWin allegedly does this for you, except it didn't in my case - probably... »

"When a nation, terrorist group, or other adversary attacks the United States through cyberspace, the U.S. response need not be limited to criminal prosecution. The United States reserves the right to respond in an appropriate manner." - National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace ...In other words, when the spammers and... »

You want to use client-side redirects? For the home page URL? With Zeus? And NSAPI? Are you mad??! Not yet...... »

Problem: some of the larger SunFreeware packages won't install because they run out of space.... »

(No. 1 in an uncharacteristic and occasional series of potentially useful tech notes. :-) If you're installing the JASS toolkit on Solaris, there are a few extras that the docs don't clearly mention.... »

This is just hilarious, the apotheosis of breathless, clueless and brainless Internet journalism. That it comes from the Grauniad is a little saddening, but we guess they have to employ someone to fill the pages of their little supplement. Apparently: "The last time hackers declared war against government, massive denial... »

The realities of "uptime" for Internet sites is discussed by Steve Levin in an article that was linked on Slashdot, so you've probably already seen it. BB agrees wholeheartedly, while being a little confused by references to NOC teams and the huge cast of support personnel seemingly on hand for... »

Finally, a news story that looks so much better for the good guys and inconveniently awkward for the baddies when boiled down to a tabloid headline. "GOVERNMENT WANTS SNOOPER'S CHARTER" neatly encapsulates the RIP amendments and drowns out the various if's and but's from the Home Office at one stroke,... »

Turnkey solution After it fails to start when you turn the key, you resort to kicking the box, which is your only remaining option as there's no documentation or other method of control. After all, it's a turnkey solution. It's possible the "n" is meant to be silent. Mission-critical... »

I've reverted to kernel 2.2.19 on my Red Hat Linux 7.1 installation. Now at least my CD-RW drive works again. 7.1 has not been a seemless upgrade. Truth be told, I was quite happy with 6.2 - deliriously happy in retrospect, or at least I must have been delirious to... »

When you're sitting on the floor with your PC opened up and the boards in pieces all around you, and then the cat, fur crackling with thousands of volts of static electricity, pads over to say hello while languidly rubbing herself against every object in your vicinity, with the "pop"... »

My Psion suffered another symptom of advancing age last week. This time the left hinge broke. I didn't really fancy repeating the grief I had last time, so I went straight to the FAQ looking for a DIY repair. And yes, once again it's a Known Problem (apparently, the... »

back when I was working for a scientific publisher desperate to jump on the Internet bandwagon before the market was ripped away from under them by the radical free content zealots rife in the academic world, we heard news that Proctor & Gamble had registered over 200 generic domains for... »

I had a rant about PDAs some time ago, but if I were in the market for a new one at the moment, I would definitely be tempted by the Visorphone. Nobody surely wants a mobile phone that tries to be a PDA pressing heavily against their ear. However,... »

Normally, I think any attempt to deliver true "multimedia" (trans.: stuff that doesn't require the ability to read and we know is therefore more attractive to the unwashed masses) on the net sucks donkey parts, but this preview of U2's forthcoming single, "Beautiful Day", is the first Realplayer example to... »

Slashdot smartarses, dontcha hate 'em? Always ready to reply to Ask Slashdot queries with something like: "Don't be so pathetic and useless, Linux is designed to be hacked to do what you want! A High Availability solution is easy: just use ifconfig to move the IP, then install your app... »