Broadband technology (as with most information technology for that matter) has come a long way in the past few years, however expect the odd glitch now and then. There can be many reasons why Internet connectivity or web sites fail, the trick is to try and isolate where the problem is.
This article describes what you should check if you have a problem with your Internet connection, for example, accessing a particular web site. Please note: If you call your service provider support staff, they will most likely go over these exact same things, so using this checklist first may save you some time.
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Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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Ok, so you’ve got data on ISO’s (or CDROM) you need to access all the time, for example the images of your favourite distro. You can extract the file to directories on your hard disk, or you can directly mount them as a file system!
It’s very straight forward, simply run the following command with the appropriate parameters. If you run into any problems, man is your friend. Your local Linux User Group is also always a great place to find helping hands.
mount -o loop -t iso9660 isofilename mountpoint
There are all sorts of information on file systems and CD formats at Linux.com which may be of use if you’d like to know more.
Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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If you’ve got a few boxes around your workspace, you occasionally might like to be logged on as root (you normally shouldn’t be logged on as root unless you really have to, use su or sudo instead!) and watch something on one screen while working on another. No problem, until the screen blanks. Of course you can move a mouse, or hit a key. But wouldn’t it be good if you stop the screen from going blank in the first place? Well you can, simply follow the steps below.
Open the following file in your favourite text editor.
vi /etc/rc.d/rc.local
Edit the following line, I always prefer to include comments.
# Turn off screen blanking, the default is usually 10 minutes
setterm -blank 0
Your screen will now always stay on.
Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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This article is still ongoing. I decided to publish it because I figured it still might help some individuals even in this primitive state.
First things first. What exactly is a user group? A user group is a group of people that get together by interest in a particular technology. It may be a programming language, it may be an Operating System, or even a generic technology just to name a few. User groups are also often referred to as Special Interest Groups (SIG’s).
Running a user group can be a very rewarding experience and a great way to meet like-minded people in your area. It can also be quite a bit of work, but as the old saying goes “many hands make light work”, the more helpers you’ve got the easier it gets. From my experience, if you’re giving something to the community, the community (or at least part of) will be happy to give something back.
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Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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News aggregation built into your browser!
If you’re using the latest version of Firefox (at the time of writing PR1), you might have noticed a small graphic labelled RSS in the bottom right hand corner of your browser.
A Live Bookmark
A Live Bookmark
You probably already know that RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” (or “Really Simple Syndication”) and is one of the most common syndication formats for news and other dynamic information. In fact you may already be subscribed to your favourite news sites using one of the many RSS tools available. If you’re new to RSS, check out Mark Nottingham’s fantastic RSS tutorial at his site.
But what exactly are Live Bookmarks? Live Bookmarks are one of the latest features added to the award winning web browser, Firefox. Live Bookmarks are simply RSS feeds that can be displayed via your bookmarks. This is quite flexible since bookmarks in Firefox (and Mozilla) can be viewed using different methods such as in tabs, sidebar or directly from the main menu. To illustrate this clearer, I have added a few screen captures showing the stages of adding a Live Bookmark.
Adding a Live Bookmark
Adding a Live Bookmark
Live Bookmarks work by “subscribing” to an RSS feed (by clicking on the little RSS button, then selecting “Subscribe to”) which adds an entry to your bookmarks. When you access that particular entry it’s dynamically populates the container with the latest feed items (sometimes you can actually see this happening - you’ll see what I mean). Each bookmark item can then be clicked to take you direct to that article (or article page).
It really adds another dimension to your bookmark system, and we haven’t even touched on remote bookmarks and bookmark sharing! You can find out more about Live Bookmarks at Mozilla’s Firefox information site.
Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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Update - This title is now in it’s second edition.
Google Hacks
Author: Tara Calishain , Rael Dornfest
Publisher: O’Reilly
Online Catalog: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/
ISBN: 0-596-00447-8
Price: $AUS39.00 approx.
Ok. I admit, I’m somewhat of a Google groupie. Having a keen interest in Search Engine trends and technologies, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of O’Reilly’s Google Hacks. Written by serious Google nuts, this book is another must have in my opinion.
The book covers everything from using Google, power searching to programming for Google’s many services and using their API. There’s also some information for webmasters wanting to know about “how” Google works and general behind the scenes info. There’s also a little bit about Google PageRank, the secret formula that dictates how Google ranks their search results. The examples are backed up with lots of code examples in different languages (Perl, PHP, C#, ASP) and some nifty applications that use Google’s services. There’s some downright wacky stuff too, like “Google Whacking” and Google pranks.
5 stars
Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Reviews
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phpinfo is one of the most handy functions a PHP programmer needs to know about, especially when it comes time to debugging! As the name says, phpinfo displays information about PHP.
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Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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Checking if Perl is working for the shell-deprived.
Perl is a very popular language and a common question I here from those that are new to open source web development in general is “Why isn’t my Perl script working?” or “How do I know if I have Perl installed/working?”.
There are lots of ways you can tell if you have Perl (or mod_perl, which is the Apache module enabling Perl on your web server) installed. If you have shell access it’s easy, but what about users who only have access to their host via FTP? Well, you could create a page that contains the phpInfo function, but sometimes it’s useful to actually see a Perl script being executed correctly. Simply copy and paste the code below into a file called test-perl.pl and upload it to your web host, use your CGI-BIN if required. Then set the file’s permissions to 755, which means executable (yes, you can do this using an FTP client). Then all you have to do is visit the file with your browser, eg. http://www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/test-perl.pl.
#! /usr/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
print "Perl is working!\n";
With any luck, you’ll see the text “Perl is working!”
Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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Security Warrior
Author: By Cyrus Peikari, Anton Chuvakin
Publisher: O’Reilly
Online Catalog: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/
ISBN: 0-596-00545-8
Price: $AUS90.00 approx.
Having read most of the security books in the O’Reilly series, I was anxious to see what “Security Warrior” was all about. First things first, if you’re new to the topic of information security, perhaps try a title like “Practical Unix & Internet Security, 3rd Edition” by Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford, Alan Schwartz, which I highly recommend. Security Warriors covers some areas that not many other security books cover, in particular the book starts off talking about software reversing techniques. There is plenty of platform specific information to keep both the Windows and Unix crowds happy, for instance, part 3 “Platform Attacks” discusses common vulnerabilities and counter measures. Most of your regular garden variety infosec topics get a mention in this title, and the topics do indeed cover a very wide area, but at times it delves a little deeper than the average security reference. All in all, a great read. Even if you’re not interested in all of the content, the writing style is such that you can start at pretty much anywhere and follow what’s going on.
4 stars
Posted on May 29th, 2005 to catagory: Reviews
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