Category Archives: General

This story has probably made the rounds already but looks like a good read. How a worm crashed the Internet in 15 minutes. (via IRC or ILUG, can’t remember which now!)

As I won’t be updating this blog for a few days I thought I’d leave you with a little something special to keep you coming back!
Feast your eyes on “The King Of Hearts”, Cork’s amazing new band, with Owen Kelly on lead guitar! I interrupted a photo shoot this afternoon, and snapped a few quick photos. Apologies for the small size, but if you want the 1600×1200 originals, mail me! 🙂

Jason’s got lots to say, and says it well!

Right, so I have all my accounts in Euro in Gnucash. That’s now a problem since I’ll be spending US Dollars for the next 3 months, but I’ll be servicing loans and bills directly from my account in Euros.
I created a “Cash in wallet – USD” account, with a default currency of USD. That worked a treat when I transfered €200 over to it. Up popped a dialog box asking for the exchange rate or some amount. I entered 230, as that’s the USD value I got back. Nice.
That still doesn’t solve my problem though – do I create a USD version of my most used accounts? Anyone?
Do I simply convert ATM withdrawals over to Euro, and track my spending in Euro still? There’s always a few “misc” entries every few days when I can’t remember what I had for lunch 3 days ago. “Misc” entries could take care of any discrepencies.
Note: I am not doing this for business reasons. This is for my personal records! 🙂

Barry’s off to the Monaco Grand Prix! Well he should be smiling, lucky devil!

Hey Dave! Thanks for the shares!

Looks like Nvidia aren’t the only ones who cheated in benchmarks! Although the Register dubbed it, “optimised code”.
They conclude, “Or toss a coin – just as valid a basis for judgement as benchmarks these days” when buying a new graphics card.

You can tell I’m busy. No posts today so far. Installing Apache, MySQL, PHP on a new machine, and fiddling with firewalls.
Anyone good at iptables stuff? How do I let MSN Messenger through? The following would work fine if not for Messenger!

# /etc/sysconfig/iptables
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT - [0:0]
-A INPUT -j RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT
-A FORWARD -j RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT

# lan
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp -s 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT

# ssh
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 --syn -j ACCEPT

# smtp
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25 --syn -j ACCEPT

# dns
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p udp -m udp -s dns1_server1 --sport 53 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp -s dns_server2 --sport 53 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT

# localhost
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT

# reject everything else
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --syn -j REJECT
-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p udp -m udp -j REJECT
COMMIT

I found reAim which is a compact transparent proxy designed to be run on or behind a Linux IPTables based firewall.
Trying to proxy through Squid didn’t work either, I got the following error:

TCP_DENIED/403 1020 CONNECT messenger.hotmail.com:1863 – NONE/- –

That’s annoying.

Short tutorial on using transactions. Issuing a rollback is fine, but you need to program around it too – your code should be aware the rollback occured. Set some return variable to false and take evasive action!