A simple matter of…

Never has a source control system been more aptly named. git is amazingly cool and powerful, however it also possesses a steep learning curve. I’m now happily using it in a basic fashion – one central repository, an edge repository on my laptop and desktop. You really do need to spend a bit of time [...]

These last couple of weeks I’ve been setting the new virtualisation infrastructure at work. Xen is dead, long live KVM. Only KVM tools are horrifically immature. So for example: – virsh can’t shutdown KVM domains – virt-manager can’t do, well pretty much anything – start/stop/show console is about it – libvirt’s XML is badly documented, [...]

Also known as: * our program starts too slowly * advertising our product makes our customers happy * we’ll cover up part of the screen so you can’t work whilst our bloated product loads I’ll admit that last one doesn’t apply so much to Windows users, but definitely _does_ apply (hello there openoffice) on Linux. [...]

For many, many months now my favicons have been corrupted – incorrect favicons stored against various bookmarks. And they keep changing. So first off all I wrote some sed to remove this from bookmarks.html: sed -i ‘s/ ICON=”[^"]*”//’ bookmarks.html I started firefox and … the icons are still there! So now I find that they [...]

You have managed through sheer stupidity and bloody mindedness to overtake even Gnome as my most hated Linux project. I do _not_ like being [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/experimentalAddons mollycoddled]. The [http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/03/25/firefox-3-security-madness/ SSL fiasco] is still ongoing and whilst it’s now slightly easier to bypass, it’s still not good enough. How many of your users do you think are [...]

Well I’ve had enough of Xen – I’ve recently moved a disk from hdd to hdc and since I referred to it in a xen domain, when I tried to start that domain, it hung for several minutes (other domains also seemed to stop responding for a while) and then failed with: abridgett@ripley:/var/log/xen$ Error: Device [...]

Or “Oh bugger”. In short, Debian made a slight change to openssl which means that all keys (SSH user and host keys, X509 keys and certs, OpenVPN passwords) have not been sufficiently random for the last few years. This is a _lot_ of effort to correct: * remove all bad ssh keys and regenerate them [...]

Dear firefox developers. Could you _please_ rethink the current braindead approach to security? Security is important, but the current design is diabolical. I realise that this sometime changes (the windows version seemed better last time I used it). The rant below applies to the latest version on Ubuntu Hardy. For example, I clicked on a [...]

Well fakeraid really is a pile of unpleasantness. I need fakeraid since it’s the only way Vista will be protected against hard disk failure short of buying a hardware raid card (which have their own problems). Linux support for fakeraid is a bit crap. The installers don’t handle it at all – debian and ubuntu [...]

This is aimed fair and square at Nokia, but applies to many other companies too. I’ve been lucky enough to get a new Nokia E60. It has built-in wifi access, but whilst surfing the web is all well and good, it’s tricky from a phone. The _real_ use is for internet telephony and for this [...]