Bluetrait

It came to my attention that the contact form wasn't working, I use a system I call spamblock which protects web forms from (I wrote quickly about it here) spam, but I had screwed one of the functions. But I've fixed that, so the contact form is now working.

Anyway. 3 provides every user with an email account. You can use your 3 mobile to login to the IMAP (yes my phone does IMAP and POP3) server and download (for free) any emails from your three account (although it costs 20cents to send an email). So I've been giving it a try and it is pretty cool. I'm not sure of the file limit, but I was able to send myself some small files and bluetooth them across to my laptop. So this could come in use if I need something but don't have internet access.

So yeah I've updated my contact form so you can directly send email to it :)

If you'd like the address send me an email to my primary account.

Here is a pretty cool way to allow users to upload multiple files via a web form using AJAX.

Very odd

I just got this in my work email account, thanking someone for fixing their email! Hah.

I would like to announce to all men (please include the feminine gender), tried and true, that forthwith (and first, second and third with) that my trusted vassal Phil (Coelho), having fixed his master's email at home be henceforth (not to be confused with hence first etc) be known as Phil the Phixer - a free man with a really cool lower european beardy thingy

Bow, all ye to Phil the Phixer, Dephender of the Phaith

By order of Sir Skelly

PS best regards to Lord Mulder for his valued assistance

I got my Telstra phone bill this morning....a few hours later I am now on three.

My new phone

One of the interesting "features" I can use it as a mouse on my laptop via bluetooth. Heh.

I decided to go with the $49 cap.

I purchased my ticket for the Green Day concert this morning, it should be good!

Here and here

Just because

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away you entered your email address on http://wordpress.com/ to get a blog.

We're now inviting small groups to use WordPress.com and your email address was selected today!

So yeah I thought I should give it a try, here. I don't plan on moving to it, but I will see how it runs (and hey, it's free bandwidth!).

EDIT: I've also got an invite, if anyone is interested.

Opera is now completely free.

I got my second monitor up and running on FreeBSD this afternoon (running off an old 3dfx Voodoo 3 PCI). There are two ways you can run dual monitors with Xorg. With or with out Xinerama.

With Xinerama turned on, it handles the different monitors similar to Windows. It acts like one large monitor.

In Xorg with Xinerama disabled each monitor acts like is own instance. For example you cannot move windows between them, they feel pretty separate. What you do get is 8 Virtual desktops (4 for each screen). It is pretty cool. So you can change between applications and desktops. It is like running two computers with one mouse and keyboard. It is pretty interesting.

Although I am currently running with Xinerama as I am used to coming from a Dual windows setup.

My only main problem at the moment is that I cannot get 3D (via DRI) working on my Radeon. There is an issue with Nforce2 motherboards or something :(

Middle click for some reason works differently on *nix than is does on Windows. If you have a url in your clipboard, pressing middle click will load that page. In Firefox I normally use middle click to navigate (left and right for a large image or something).

Anyway to disable this do the following:

A Middle-click on a tab closes it on Windows by default. However, in Linux it pastes whatever is currently in the Clipboard and visits that site (or performs a search). This can be changed by setting the middlemouse.contentLoadURL pref to either true (for the Content Load URL feature) or false (for closing the tab).

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/mouse

We'll I've installed FreeBSD 5 on my desktop, I am using Gnome 2.10.0 (2.12.0 is not in the ports yet) and I'm liking it.

During doing an assignment yesterday I spent a good while updating and setting up the the system.

• Getting Xorg to work with my Radeon (still no 3d, DRI isn't happy)
• Upgrading to STABLE
• Upgrading ports

One of the more intersting things was upgrading the ports. I cvsup'ed to the latest ports and did a portupgrade (I left it running overnight, it is a big process). Portupgrade aims to upgrade all your installed ports to the latest versions. I had one or two ports which broke, but I have since fixed these without too much trouble.

I'm pretty happy with Gnome, it feels pretty nice.

I love running Gnome on top of FreeBSD. I've always liked FreeBSD, because it just seems so nice, and now Gnome has given it as interface! I still have the power of freebsd and yet can do all the GUI stuff too.

Unlike my past dealings with Linux, FreeBSD has been so easy. The documentation is great. Although I feel that I should give Linux a try again at some stage, because I am happier with command line stuff now.

Now I need to pull out the hard drive and go back to Windows, I need to finish typing something in Office/Visio :(

So I got myself a copy of Vista Beta 1 through work (msdn thing) and decided I would give it a test. I had a spare 80gb hdd, the RMA return from my server failure, so it was a great chance to test it without killing my current install.

So I plugged in the hard drive and put the CD in. Didn't boot, doh. It ends up that the Vista Beta 1 CD is in fact a DVD :p The only DVD drive I have in this house is on my G4 ibook and I'm not going to try it in Virtual PC. So I should go get myself a cheap DVD-RW drive (I've seen them for less than $70).

Anywho I decided to see if FreeBSD is any good as a desktop operating system.

Sorry Microsoft maybe next time ;)

One of the great things (and also a downfall, because often you need to stay up to date) about freebsd and most other *nix systems is that you can completely upgrade them without the need to reinstall the entire operating system; they also don't get bloated up with junky software (as you can easily remove most of this).

FreeBSD has a great ports system that allows you to install just about any piece of software (and it will go and get the dependencies too).

Most new users to FreeBSD will install a RELEASE version (the first new point release or major release ready for general use). Although changes are always happening to FreeBSD (new software, patches, security releases etc).

Often the ports stop getting upgraded for older versions of FreeBSD (and even quite new releases, i.e 5.4) and so you need to stay up to date with things. Often this comes in the case of a STABLE or CURRENT upgrade.

STABLE is seen as a stable version of FreeBSD with many of the upgrades.
CURRENT is the work in progress version and isn’t guaranteed to be stable.

Today I upgraded my web server to FreeBSD 5 STABLE (I was running 5.4 RELEASE).

I followed the information from
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html

The first link talks about pulling down the latest source files, while the next link shows you how to compile them.

The first step is to setup the supfile. This tells FreeBSD what files to pull down. Mine is below (pretty much download everything):

After than I ran as root:

Once that was done I compiled the source (with custom kernel)

I rebooted into single user mode and ran this (mounts file system and checks some stuff):

And then this:

Mergemaster compares some of the configuration files that are different in the newer version of FreeBSD. Some files you will want to overwrite (general untouched config stuff) but others you will not (master.passwd etc).

We’re now running the latest “stable” version of FreeBSD. Now you should be able to install all the new ports and stuff.

Such a cool game.

My router just reached 100 days uptime.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out. Although I am a firefox user on my PC, I have always used Safari on the mac because the program seemed to run much faster. Firefox on the mac was always much slower than on the PC.

Anyway the good news is this Beta version of firefox is MUCH faster on the mac, and I would say now runs at the same speed as the PC version. Great!

Now all I need is web developer to be upgraded to work on 1.5 and I may switch from Safari. Coolies.

Firefox beta can be downloaded from here

My friend brought over his sound system to Bryn's birthday party last week. It wasn't a bad system for the price.

DSE Stereo Amplifier (A2760) and
DSE Bookself Speakers (A2667)

Both are currently on special from Dick Smith Electronics until the 11th of this month. The amplifier is $149 while the speakers are $39. Fantastic value for money.

I was going to post something about how the Federal Government sucks with it’s on going funding cuts to Universities and how VSU (Voluntary Student Unionism) is going to end up killing just about all services for students. But I really don’t have the energy.

Universities (and education in general, particularly public education) in Australia are not in a good state. They are turning into places where you pay money to be given bachelors in something. You are not actually been given an education. Kind of like those “Online Universities”.

The whole point of education is to ensure that the nation does not become left behind in the global economy, and simply to be a “smart nation”.

More money should be put into education, not less.

Far out, I hate politics. It’s like religion, just another topic for people to disagree about.

The google bot went a bit crazy last month and did over 1.25GB of data transfer. I think it has cached all my source images from my photos page. I have over a 1gb of source images there.

Last month this site did over 2gb of data transfer. A lot of it went towards the Netvista Linux downloads.

This week I've had a bit of a chance to play with some new hardware I was given. I am well enough to be up and doing stuff again, its great :)

So yeah I've picked up a Cisco 2611 and Cisco 827-4v router.
The first one is a modular router that has two 10mbit Ethernet ports, it has been upgraded to 64mb and has a fairly new IOS on it. The 827 is an ADSL1 router with 4 analog telephone adapters (ATA) built in.

I'm trying to setup a RIP routing network between the 2611 and a OpenBSD box. I'm currently looking at two pieces of software to do this, Zebra and Xorp. These both sit on top of another operating system and handle routing.

It has been pretty interesting. I have been impressed with the Cisco gear. Once you'd had a real chance to play with it they work well. I like how the whole configuration is in one file, that makes life nice and easy.

I did do CCNA way back at school, but I'm required to do some Cisco stuff at UNI and I need to refresh my memory.

On another topic. I've run out of Ethernet ports at home, so I thought I'd spend a bit of money and get myself a cheap 24 port 100mbit managed switch. The switch I have purchased also does basic vlans, so that should be very helpful. The switch has cost me about $160 (yes very cheap) and can be found here. I should get that in the next week or so.

It seems as though this year the number of posts on this blog is decreasing every month.

This is not really my intension, I just am finding a lack of time to keep up with everything.

This is a geek/tech blog site and I am more interested in posting things such as HOWTOs, and not general stuff about my life. But yeah. I'll try and do something about that.

Mwhah. First of the month. Let this month be the first month of increased postage! :)