Windows Vista and 7, if not before, allow symbolic links — mklink is your command-line friend!
Creates a symbolic link. (more...)
Archive for June, 2010
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Symbolic links in Windows
2010
06.28
06.28
Firefox 3.6.6 Crash Protection – crashing?
2010
06.28
06.28
Is it just me or is the new version of Crash Protection which pushed itself via a new release of Firefox up to 3.6.6 marking every instance of Flash as crashed? On the one hand, this may be a little salute to the Flash – Apple situation (though I hardly think it likely).
Am I the only one who’s experiencing this? Hmmm…
Oh, yes – remember to make sure your add-ons are up-to-date…
Create a Tar file from Directory and all Subdirectories
2010
06.28
06.28
It’s a simple one-liner that one tends to forget (that is, one that I forget as I untar more than I manually tar). So creating a tar file from directory and all subdirectories is as simple as
tar -cvf file.tar directory (more…)
Secure SSH Tunneling – at no extra cost
2010
06.19
06.19
Assuming you have a Windows machine and you interact with Linux boxen at any stage, chances are high that you have used and interacted with PuTTY at one stage or another. That beautiful, less than 2 sec, 444K download of a tool (currently at version 0.60 beta) allows you to SSH, COM-direct, RSH, Telnet etc from the desktop. Both examples below relate to MySQL port tunneling.
SSH Tunnels using the Bash command line
Running on a proper machine (or even a Windows with Cygwin or a Mac Terminal) allows you to quickly tunnel a session to a remote server: (more…)
Upgrade and update WordPress without the FTP/FTPS options
2010
06.18
06.18
You may not have FTP or FTPS running on your server (either by choice or decision).
In order to manage that, there is a simple workaround you can implement. (more…)
#Twitter taking #WorldCup strain during matches like #FRA v #MEX
2010
06.17
06.17
http://status.twitter.com/ is reporting the High Error Rate on Twitter.com since yesterday already, and #Trends have been temporarily disabled since the 15th of June.
On Monday the 14th of June, #Twitter blamed the site availability issues on the failed enhancements to their #Timeline Cache. At that stage, it took them a good 5 hours to restore the site to full status, but there were ongoing hassles, dragging on into the next day – at that stage, Twitter #Places needed to be switched off.
June shows 5 hours of #downtime, with 98.64% availability of the site.
Under #WorldCup traffic, matches like #France vs #Mexico, #Uruguay vs #South Africa, and other #CapeTown or #SoccerSCity matches are causing a huge amount of traffic and tweets, specifically due to the #Twitter/Worldcup link… Trying to #pepper this post with #keywords about #uptime, #availability, #highavailability and #twitter overall.
How many hashes does it take? 
WordPress 3.0 is out!
2010
06.17
06.17
Just a quick note – remember to upgrade now! But you knew that already!
218 people helped fixing the 1217 bugs, with a new default theme called Twenty Ten and a whole lot more.
(more…)
[SOLVED] phpSysInfo – failed to open stream on Ubuntu 10.04?
2010
06.15
06.15
phpsysinfo eval : 2 Message : parse_ini_file(/usr/share/phpsysinfo/data/distros.ini): failed to open stream: No such file or directory File
There is a simple fix for this in version 3.0.5:
(more…)
[SOLVED] mysql-server5.1.5.141-3ubuntu12.1 hangs on upgrade
2010
06.15
06.15
There are a lot of words about the MySQL upgrade on Ubuntu 10.04 (64 bit specifically, perhaps the 32bit version too?) — it just hangs:
You get the hopeful message:
Preparing to replace mysql-server-5.1 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.1
but then nothing happens and everything just hangs. (more…)
And now for something completely different
2010
06.10
06.10
The Hippopotamus Song
Words by Michael Flanders
Music by Donald Swann and Michael Flanders
A bold Hippopotamus was standing one day
On the banks of the cool Shalimar.
He gazed at the bottom as it peacefully lay
By the light of the evening star.
Away on the hilltop sat combing her hair
His fair Hippopotamine maid.
The Hippopotamus was no ignoramus
And sang her this sweet serenade.
Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow,
And there let us wallow in glorious mud. (more…)
2 days, 18hrs to go – tickets for Cape Town matches plentiful
2010
06.08
06.08
That place on the web that sells tickets to the foot-operated sport worth billions taking place in a country featuring cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg this year – FIFA.com – has taken the count-down clock off-line – so I had to find other sources to give the 2 day, 18hr count-down.
Meanwhile, there is some uproar regarding the takings some teams have in store for them as winnings paid by their own countries should them come home successfully from the World Cup 2010, even in the light of world-wide “financial pressure”.
So, how much can each player expect to take home as earnings should they lift the trophy?
- Spain: € 600 000 per player
- Italy: € 250 000 per player
- Argentina: € 510 000 per player
- England: € 470 000 per player
- Brazil: € 445 000 per player
- France: € 300 000 per player
- Germany: € 250 000 per player (Quarter-Final progress: a payment of € 50 000 per player, Semi-Final progress: additional € 100 000 per player, making it to the final: additional € 150 000 per player)
- Ghana: € 100 000 per player should they reach the Round of 16 matches
Let’s translate this into South African Rand (€ 1 = R 9.5014 on 8 June 2010 at 16:00), and compare this to the per-capita GDP in South Africa (latest World Bank figure (2008) is $5,678 (approx R 44 912.98 at the same conversion rate date, at $1 = R 7.91), Stats South Africa is offline (technical error):
- Spain: R 5 700 840 per player ( 126.9 x South African GDP per capita)
- Italy: R 2 375 350 per player ( 52.8 x South African GDP per capita)
- Argentina: R 4 845 714 per player ( 107.9 x South African GDP per capita)
- England: R 4 465 535.80 per player ( 99 x South African GDP per capita)
- Brazil: R 4 228 123 per player ( 94 x South African GDP per capita)
- France: R 2 850 420 per player ( 63 x South African GDP per capita)
- Germany: R 2 375 350 per player (Quarter-Final progress: a payment of R 475 070 per player, Semi-Final progress: R 950 140 per player, making it to the final: R 1 425 210 per player) ( 52.9 x South African GDP per capita)
- Ghana: R 950 140 per player should they reach the Round of 16 matches ( 21 x South African GDP per capita)
So if Spain win, their 23-man squad takes home as much as 2918 South Africans earn (gross) in a year. I just worked that out. Compare that with www.capetown.travel‘s info regarding trivia on the new Cape Town Green Point Stadium: “More than 2 500 workers were employed on site during construction, and almost 1 200 artisans received training from the contractors.”
Just a thought… Kinda surprising, but I guess that’s big soccer…
Tickets are still available for Cape Town for the following matches in the following categories: (more…)
Adobe Flash and Adobe PDF zero-day critical vulnerability in the wild.
2010
06.05
06.05
A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix.
Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2, 9.0.262, and earlier 10.0.x and 9.0.x versions on Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris are affected, as well as Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. So it’s kinda big. What to do? (more…)
Ticket sales improving? 15:53 SAST vs 18:24 SAST Cape Town FIFA Ticket availability
2010
06.05
06.05
Seems like tickets are flying… check the usage at 15:53 SAST on 5 June below.
Cape Town FIFA Ticket Sales at 15:53 SAST, 5 June 2010
Now compare this with the availability at 18:24 SAST today same time (ie 2hr 31 min later), below.
Cape Town FIFA Ticket Sales at 18:24 SAST, 5 June 2010
Seems like tickets are near to the “sold-out” definition – but let’s wait for the re-shuffle to proceed…
TimesLive reports that 58 000 tickets will be made available on Monday (remember my previous comment regarding the 90 000 tickets vs the higher number of tickets released?): (more…)
6 days to go… tickets available again for the Soccer World Cup
2010
06.04
06.04
Wheel of Excellence, V&A
So the big ticket shuffle has started again, and tickets that were “currently not available” this morning, at least for the Cape Town matches (France – Uruguay) are available again – if only in Category 1. An overall view shows tickets available across the board (especially in Polokwane and Rustenburg…)
If you’re keen on getting tickets, keep checking back on the Last Minute Sales FIFA World Cup Ticketing site (as long as it’s up… <grin>) [oh, and add as many ™ and ® signs as you feel like - in your head (if you don't get the joke, don't worry)]. (more…)
Maverick Meerkat Alpha 1 (Ubuntu 10.10) is out
2010
06.04
06.04
Quick note – Ubuntu 10.10 – Maverick Meerkat is out. Mark Shuttleworth had already given a vision for it back in April 2010.
Let the “light”ning commence!
“Maverick Meerkat” is the code name for Ubuntu 10.10, scheduled for release on 10 October 2010. See the Maverick release schedule. A quick sketch-up roadmap is over here.
Symlinks (symbolic links) in Samba Ubuntu for Windows
2010
06.04
06.04
To enable symlinks in Samba for filesharing across platforms inWindows, modify
/etc/smb/samba.conf
and add in the [global] section:
follow symlinks = yes
unix extensions = no
There has been some discussion about
wide symlinks = yes
However, due to the attack vector on Samba servers from Windows allowing file traversion, back in February 2010, you may want to force-set wide symlinks to no– it works without that declaration and is set to no by default.
Samba cheat sheet – Ubuntu
2010
06.02
06.02
Samba. Whopping goodness. Here are a few notes that help in the setup – from user creation, to directory settings etc
This blog post contains a few lessons learnt and thus by extension a migration plan from a Windows file server to a Samba-based one running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I look at users, system vs smbpasswd user creation and linking (set that up in Webmin before you start, as well as for groups), share setups, general permissions and some very basic troubleshooting (as there weren’t many troubles, just headaches.) (more…)