Virtuozzo SLM rocks

Just had a new VPS on SLM with a fully loaded cPanel and a few clients and using 140Mb of RAM out of 256Mb. Sooo much better and smoother

Time for another block

As it appears that .cm has setup typo squatting that its time to put in a block to stop at leat the adverts getting served. As such 72.51.27.0/24 is now sitting in my bogon list an no traffic will ever route there again. Whilst technical dicussions might be hard to convince .cm they are doing something wrong, hitting the pocket somehow always seems more effective

Old skool trance

2 Unlimited - No Limits - How crap is this … Why did I ever like it

How to make yourself look classy (sarcasm(

Sit in a coffee shop with your laptop next to a collective of mothers and new born babies (mother and baby club I assume)] Put up with gurgling and crying for a few minutes Wonder why you don’t move.. Look round when one screaches loudly to see said babies mother get her boob out to breast feed it Feel really classy when you realise the situation Start staring at the laptop screen to avoid trying to make eye contact

A resolution a week?

Why do we have just new years resolutions? Surely it would make sence, and a better place if we tried a new resolution each week, or tried to re-do last weeks if we break it. Why wait till a certain date when you can do it on Monday, or today, or right now. Then if you fail just pick yourself up and get back on that horse / insert appropriate analogy here

Detaching Tabs in Firefox?

Why oh why isn’t this feature included? It would be so useful when I want to have a window open on a seperate monitor so I can copy/paste rather than flipping between tabs. I’m not the only one who wants it but I still can’t find any extension that allows it

Astra VXR vs VX220 Turbo

Well recently I had to get rid of my VX220 Turbo due to practical reasons so I thought I would give a bit of a review of whats better/worse/just plain different.

The VXT was a car that let you always know what was going on through the engine noise, the feeling through the steering and the general feedback the car just gave you. Also with it being handbuilt each VXT has its own little squeeks and foibles but they laptop battery make for a car that you just love. So when the day come to trade it in I will admit to being a bit sad but the VXR is starting to become the new love of my life.

First impressions are is that the VXR is all together a bit more civilised in every day use. You can cruise along at 50mph in 6th with very little road noise and get from a to b with the minimum of fuss. Of course there is the sport/insanity button that you can press to release the full fury of the 240BHP FWD car which makes it into a very hot, hot hatch.

Things I miss about the VX220 though is the ability to point and squirt. Being RWD and weighing nothing it just went like a bat out of hell in the direction you pointed it. The Astra has torque steer which I’m still getting use to so with sport mode on but overall I like it. More reaction as I get to actually start to push the car

Living life on the narrow band

Well after a lot of fun moving house this weekend I’ve finally managed to put my local setup back together apart from one little thing. My internet connection. They say you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone and I can now definitly testify to that. At the old place I got 2×2mbit ADSL with failover and life was sweet. Fixed static IP, little to no downtime and it just worked. Something breaks at 3am the PC is there in standby and can be logged in and things fixed in minutes…

…Now however I’m slightly lucky that I’ve got a 384kbit UMTS/GPRS rather that a dial up or connection with a 1GB datatransfer limit per month (I’ve used 150Mb in the last 24 hours) with a 200ms extra latency with my notebook running as a router for the network. Its all good fun. I have learnt however how to use a compressed SSH connection via a remote squid server to tweak a bit more out of it so I’m getting ~1.5mbit for text downloads

Setting up a makeshift Squid proxy

This is a quick howto on how to use a remote debian box to act as a proxy for a single machine over a compress SSH session. I was in a position where all I had was a UMTS connection which maxed out at 384kb/sec which makes running an internet business quite hard. This quick howto gets you speeds of around ~1.5->2mbit on text based downloads. JPG/MP3’s and anything else that is highly compressed isn’t effected. It also only (currently) works for http based services.

Install squid via apt-get install squid

Edit /etc/squid/squid.conf and set http_port 127.0.0.1:3128

Restart Squid. Check the proxy is running by telnet localhost 3128 to make sure that squid is listening. If you get connection refused then check the squid logs

Assuming this is now up on your local linux box run

ssh -N -C -L 3128:127.0.0.1:3128 user@squid

This set the system to not spawn a remote shell (-N), use compression (-C) and foward localport 3128 to localhost:3128 (which is the squid server). You can also setup password less SSH keys as well if you so wish to avoid having to putting you password everytime.

To use the proxy open your web-browser and set your proxy configuration to localhost port 3128. You should now find downloads are faster. To check its working use a site like laptop batteries to see what is shows

Dedicatednow gone boom…

For the second time in 2 months it appears that DN has gone boom with power outages. Some systems went down, others didn’t but the main network did. Also lots of servers are being reported as down (link). So all we can do is put our feet up, sit back and wait for things to become unfucked. The ticketing system appears up but no auto-acks to tickets so will just have to again wait in the dark as customers (rightly) complain and we just say its being worked on…