Bluetrait

When I installed FreeBSD onto my server it setup an IPv6 address, funky I thought although I'm never going to use it. Anyway my Mac is also built on BSD and it too has an IPv6 address. So I tried a normal ping but it only supports IPv4 so I tried typing ping6 and it worked! Cool!

So anyway I now have two computers talking to each other with IPv6.

electra:~ michaeldale$ ping6 -I en1 fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) fe80::211:24ff:fe2a:f1b3 --> fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=0 hlim=64 time=1.365 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=1 hlim=64 time=1.338 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=2 hlim=64 time=1.382 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=3 hlim=64 time=2.111 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=4 hlim=64 time=1.433 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=5 hlim=64 time=1.379 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=6 hlim=64 time=1.346 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=7 hlim=64 time=1.354 ms

--- fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b ping6 statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 1.338/1.463/2.111 ms

Also that connection is running over my wireless, pretty fast I thought. :)

The wordpress software is growing. Today on photomatt's site, the lead developer of Wordpress, he announced bbPress, a simple web standards focused forum script.
The software is currently running the Wordpress support forum found here: http://www.wordpress.org/support/
It seems very fast and anyone looking to integrate a forum with their wordpress site should look at this.

Matt said this about the software

bbPress is not and will not be right for everyone. There are open source traditional forum packages, like PunBB, that get a lot of things right and push the envelope in interesting ways, so that’s covered. bbPress is not going to have avatars, or put post counts next to your name, or give every user 80 options about how they want their dates formatted, and for some people (maybe most people) that just won’t work. However even if WordPress.org is the only site that ever runs this software, it’ll be totally worth it just to get the forum technology growing again and create a richer support experience for the WP community.

I'll be watching this software. It might be useful for future projects.

Reminder to self. Check out m0n0 wall (http://m0n0.ch/wall/), like SmoothWall but with more features. Might be good. Has had some development lately.

Today after the movies, Matthew and Stuart came back to my place. We decided to go searching for wireless networks in the area with my new ibook. Personally I didn’t think we’d find any, but I was interested to see.

I downloaded a program called Macstumbler, like netstumbler but for mac. I like it because it continuously searches for wireless networks.

Anyway at the bottom of my street up popped a wireless network with the SSID ‘workgroup’ and no encryption turned on. Interesting. So I joined the network. I got an ip address of 192.168.0.3. So I tried typing google into my browser, didn’t work. I went to the address 192.168.0.1 and up popped a netgear password logging page. Anyway I tried the username: admin and the password: password. It worked. Scary. I had access to their wireless router. Anyway I disconnected and we continued walking.

During that time we found about 25 wireless access points. About 10 of which had no encryption, 5 of which the internet worked on (just tested doing a ping to ii.net and going to google.com), and 2 which the access point password was not changed. Most of the access points we found were running on netgear stuff.

I was really surprised to find so many networks and ones where there was no encryption.

We couldn’t pin point the houses where the wireless was coming from although I know the general idea.

I’m going to type up a thing about wireless security and do a letter box drop in the area. It was really scary!!

Anyway it was fun, we didn’t download anything just checked to see if google.com worked. Although now I know where to check my email if iinet goes down :p

Interesting Stuff.

Well I got my mac yesterday, about a week before I was expecting it so it was in time for Christmas, excellent. This is the first mac I have owned so it has been a bit of a learning experience.

As I’ve said many times before I decided to purchase an ibook 12”. I wanted a small laptop that I could move around without any problems. Everyone I talked to said that a 12” laptop would be the best thing to do.

I didn’t get a powerbook for a few reasons. Firstly a new model is thought to be out in the next few months and most people don’t recommend you get the current model as it is getting a bit old. Although it is still great. Secondly the ibook is a lot cheaper, about $600. And finally the battery life is much better in the ibook (5.5hours vs 3.5).

This model ibook has only been out for about a month here in Australia too, so it is nice and new.
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Merry Christmas everyone :) Hope you all have a great day!

Well I got my first pay today, so I’m very happy. I wasn’t really expecting to be paid until by at least the end of this week, very cool. I am also being paid as PAYG meaning that tax has already been taken out and all I need to do is fill in a tax return at the end of the financial year.

I also got my first cheque from my shares today, although I want to reinvest it back into shares.

On another topic, Mr Kightley also rang to congratulate me on my HSC results, thanks. There are a couple of topics on marks etc in the forums: http://forums.dalegroup.net/viewforum.php?f=9

Um my server isn’t looking to healthy. The -12v rail is running at -3v and the -5v rail is running at 0volts! Argh! That is going to need to be fixed. Although the server seems to be running fine at the moment.

Okay look at this sentence:

Wow i’ve just found some gold, aren’t i a smart cookie?

What is wrong with that sentence? The thing that sticks out to me is the fact that the “I” in “I’ve” and “I” is lowercase and should in fact be upper case.

But why?

We don’t start each word in the sentence with a capital letter and we don’t write “a” in uppercase (unless at the beginning of a sentence). Is it just because “i” on its own looks dirty or something; does “I” look more professional?

Any ideas?

I had nine lives but I lost all of them
And I've been searching in the night
And I've been searching in the rain
I tried to find them
But they disappeared
They walked away they dressed in black
They left my side and all i say
Is that I wasted time
When I looked for them
For now i know that things gone past
Are never to be found again
I had nine lives
But lost all of them

I had a plan
But never finished it
And I've been searching for the thought
And I've been searching in a haze
I try all days
To remember it
But now the blueprint in my mind has gone
My mind forgot the colour of direction
And my eyes they see the hands
That could have bulit
That could have constructed

The empire in my mind

The empire
I'll never find
I had a plan
But that was where it ended

The Cat Empire - The Lost Song

Eminem, Enigma, Enya, Era, Eurythmics, Evanescence. Excellent

The New York Times Ad for Firefox has finally been released.

More details here: http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html

WordPress 1.2.2 is now officially available for download. This release fixes a few bugs and security issues and is recommended for all 1.2 users. There have only been minor changes since the last release, so if you’re upgrading from any 1.2 version you can follow the normal upgrade instructions.

Here’s a few of the things we’ve addressed in this release:

* Login problems
* A security fix for a specific IIS/PHP combination
* Last-modified header bug
* An issue with the way site moves were handled
* Email encoding issues

Sorry this took longer to get out than some people thought it should, a couple of issues came up at the same time and we wanted to roll everything into one release so you wouldn’t have to upgrade multiple times. If you have any problems please let us know in the support forums.

The download can be found here: http://wordpress.org/download/

A quick happy birthday to Max who is 18 today.

Today was spent shopping for Max's birthday present (we ended up with a new mini PS2), buying my wireless AP (see below), having lunch, going to the movies and ending up at the GPO bar dinking cocktails, finishing off the day with a visit to the Balmain apple nextbyte store and putting a deposit on my laptop. *breaths* busy day (hard on the wallet too ;)).

Back to work tomorrow in an effort to try and compensate for today’s expenditure. hah.

Was an enjoyable day.

I got my wireless access point today. How cool!? :p

Like all my other devices I've decided to name it, so longreach was appropriate.

It is a netgear WG602 54mb access point. So yeah.

Bandwidth levels can be seen here: http://www.dalegroup.net/server/

Although there isn't any wireless stuff in the house yet so we'll have to wait for my new laptop later this year.

I've decided to go with the ibook as it is cheaper and not all that much slower (plus it has a better battery and wireless).

The specs are as followed:

12” ibook combo
1.2GHz G4
768mb DDR Ram
60gb HDD
Blue Tooth
DVD/CDRW

Should take about 2 weeks to ship. It is taking this long as it isn’t a standard model ibook. The base model has a 30gb HDD, 256mb ram and no Blue Tooth. Should be good.

With the money saved from buying this I’m going to get a wireless access point. Funky.

Well not really. But there is currently a project underway to increase IE’s rendering capabilities.

When I first heard about this project the first thing that came to mind was just a patch for IE that increased CSS support etc. Sure it might be nice but it won’t be used by many people so we’d still have to code in hacks for IE.

But this script is a javascript plugin that increases IE’s CSS2 support. It fixes things relating to the Box-model, Fixed Positioning and Dynamic Pseudo Classes plus a few more.

Pretty much you can get any user to run the script when they visit your site. All that is needed is to upload the files and then add this code to your html.

Unfortunately it is a 30k file (with a 17k lite version) so there will be a speed hit when users are visiting your website. I added this patch to this site but currently I only use a few things that don’t work in IE. Such as the textarea:focus used for the comments section.

The size of the file outweighed the added features to IE so that is a shame.

Although the project is a great idea and I will be following it closely.

Here is the linky: http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/
Here is really what you should be using (or some other standards compliant browser): http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

The server that runs this site, metro (http://metro.dalegroup.net/phpsysinfo-dev/) has always had a small bug that would sometimes cause the system to hard lock.

Yesterday in an attempt to fix the problem I replaced all of the ram in the system. The server also got an upgrade from 640mb to 896mb of ram.read more

Spam sucks. I talked briefly about spam by $_POST here: http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/142

Stuart (http://smkz.is-a-geek.net/) has been receiving vast quantities of spam on his wordpress site. This is because the system is standard across all wordpress installs making it easier for bots to target these sites.
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Today at work I setup my new phone (yes I now have a private phone number at work, how cool). Now this might not sound all that interesting but oh it is!

They use a system called TeleVantage which is a software-based business phone system (PBX). You install a piece of software on your computer which gives you complete control over the way your phone works.

You can record incoming calls (“This call maybe recorded for training purposes”), set your status to away so your pre-recorded message is played. You can do conference calls by simply dragging a contact to the program window.

You can even setup rules so you can make certain phone numbers automatically go to messages or transfer them to another line.

The whole thing is digital and is very cool, although it isn’t VoIP.

All the phone calls are aggregated at the central server and then travel over an ISDN connection, which is currently 10 multilinked connections that can be easily upgraded if needed (this is only used for the phone system, the internet is separate).

So over all it is a very cool system, plus it is easy to use (and if you feel like it the phone works like a normal old phone too).

Features etc can be found here: http://www.artisoft.com/prodtvphonesystemsoverview.html

I'm sitting here at my new job. Tis very cool. The company has just changed names to bluearc as they have merged with a few other companies. I cannot say too much at the moment as I need to sign a NDA or something tomorrow. After that I can see what I'm allowed to say. :p

I've been lazy, I should write about something. Maybe my new job? Maybe later.

A light in my room just exploded and took out all the lights in the house; I should go and fix it. Wow exciting stuff! :p

Anyway, I uploaded some MORE photos, this time of my 18th birthday party. That should be the last of the photos for a while.

http://blog.dalegroup.net/photos/album3/

EDIT: And there was light!

These photos are older so there is a chance you've seen them before, but anyway....

http://blog.dalegroup.net/photos/album2/

These last few weeks have been really good, I've got heaps of new music. Very funky. The last time I got a new CD would have been, well I don't remember when; years.

So anyway I have got these in the last two weeks (birthday presents etc)

Fingerprints - The best of powerfinger 1994 - 2000
American Idiot - Green Day
The best of - Groove Armada
The 2005 Annual, Ministry of Sound
No Doubt - The singles 1992 - 2003
and a couple of CD singles.

It is very cool. The only problem is that I need to rip them so I can put them on my ipod and my cd drives are all pretty dead. I can get 4x out of my burner, but that is it. Dodgy hardware.

But yes. I was going to write something about schoolies but I've been pretty busy these last few days, out finding jobs etc so don't expect it, sorry :p......read more