Software

A collection of 27 posts

Monitoring

SuperShaper-SOHO, a Wondershaper alternative, is now using the HFSC scheduler

A lot of people still use DSL to connect to the Internet, and most of these connections have a lower upstream bandwidth than their downstream. This can often cause latency for interactive low-bandwidth applications, like SSH and VoIP (SIP, Skype and Lync), when uploading large amounts of data because of

Hardware

Solution for MediaScannerService on Android draining your battery

Have you ever experienced that the system service Media climbing to the top of your application list on the Battery tab on your Android device? I had this particular problem, and it took me a very long time to actually figure out what caused the problem. I had read on

Software

iPXE hackathon in Tønsberg, Norway

So, a while ago I decided that I wanted to invite the core developers of the iPXE project to my home for an extended weekend of hacking on the project. The agenda was to try and merge as many outstanding patches and pull requests that we knew about. The work

Software

This is why I participate in an Open Source community

The other day I received this email from a user of one of my CPAN modules. This is what makes participating in an Open Source community really worth it! The tool he's talking about is XML::Rabbit. Thanks a lot, Jack! Just a note to say thank you.

Software

GSoC 2012 roundup for iPXE

During the summer season of 2012 (northern hemisphere) I've had the pleasure of being the coordinator of the iPXE network boot loader's participation in the Google Summer of Code program. This is a summary of what happened during the summer. What is iPXE? iPXE is a

Software

Hiking and hacking at Preikestolen

Recently, I was participating in the Moving to Moose hackathon at Preikestolen near Stavanger, Norway together with a lot of other Perl hackers. I was one of the few people that actually drove to the venue, and it took quite some time to get there. During the trip I stopped

Hardware

How to fix "No access" error when changing Windows file permissions

Yesterday I helped my father to install his new computer with Windows 7. For several reasons I shall not mention, it was in the best interest to take the hard drive of the old (broken) computer and copy all the data from it to the new. What he (and me)

Software

How to automatically block IPs that do a dictionary attack on your SSH server

Have you ever noticed that the sshd on your publicly facing machines gets bombarded with dictionary attacks several times per day? This problem is mostly an annoyance, as it fills up the logs with lots of User authentication failed, wrong password for <username> messages. There are of course

Software

Slow text consoles in Ubuntu 10.04-based VM in VirtualBox?

The default text console on Ubuntu 10.04 uses a graphical mode that uses a planar memory layout. Apparently this graphics mode is extremely hard to virtualize efficiently. Setting another (graphical) text mode that is fast, even on virtualized machines, is actually not that hard. You need to edit the

Software

Talk: Morality and Pragmatism in Free Software and Open Source

I just wanted to inform you about a talk I'll be making on my local college about the differences in philosophy of the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement. Feedback about content, accuracy etc. most wanted. The talk is mostly about summarizing the content of Dave

Software

Deprecated code analyzer for perl

After reading NPEREZ's blog article DarkPAN SchmarkPAN -- STOP THE MEME, it suddenly comes to me: We need a tool that enable users to profile their codebase to verify if they are using any removed, deprecated or changed features of a new version of the perl interpreter. This

Software

Lets make a perl appreciation survey for the masses

This is a response to John Napiorkowski's article: Why All the Hate?Matt S. Trout was talking about the fact that we need to become better with marketing. I second that. One of the tools of marketeers is the survey. My suggestion is this: Why don't

Software

X11 forwarding to Ubuntu server not working with PuTTY and Xming?

I was stumped why I couldn't run X11 software on my Ubuntu server installation and have it forwarded through my SSH connection to my desktop Windows machine running Xming. The solution was to install the xauth package from the Ubuntu repositories: $ sudo aptitude install xauth Apparently installing an

Software

Memory footprint of popular CPAN modules

I was reading Jay Kuri's article about CGI alternatives the other day, and I got thinking. How much memory does these various modules for simple (or advanced) web serving use? After having looked through Mark Stosberg's article on startup penalties I was even more bewildered. It

Software

How to setup an Atheros-based Access Point with WPA-PSK on Ubuntu 8.04 server

Install Ubuntu 8.04 server normally. I haven't tested it, but the desktop edition should also work, but remember to choose the right version of linux-restricted-modules for your setup and to remove the wifi interface from the NetworkManager setup. Login with your normal "admin" user. Get

Software

Catalyst: How to authenticate against OpenID and get roles from local DBIC

First you need to follow the Catalyst tutorial and enable the authentication and session layers. After that you need to install these two CPAN modules: # cpan install Catalyst::Authentication::Credential::OpenID # cpan install Catalyst::Authentication::Store::DBIx::Class, After that you need to add the following to myapp.yml. authentication:

Software

Follow these tips to boost Vista performance

A very good article about ways to make Windows Vista perform better on borderline hardware. I decided to keep only these settings activated in visual effects. It gives a nice balance between speed in good looks. * Show preview and filters in folder * Show thumbnails instead of icons * Show window contents

Software

Nye nøkkeltall for norske internett-brukere

Siste tilgjengeliggjøring om oppløsninger, nettleser og plattform. Kort summert: * 800x600 er ut (<1.6%), 1024x768 er det nye minimum. * Siste versjon av Opera, Safari og Firefox + MSIE6+7 er det vi nå ser ut til å trenge å støtte. * Ulike windows-plattformer har fremdeles 95% av markedet. Mac har 3.

Software

Inclusive Web Design with Progressive Enhancement

This is a very good presentation about the needs to use progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation in web applications. This way you cater to the baseline users first, and create more advanced user interfaces for those that use more advanced browsers. Absolutely worth a read to all web developers.

Software

Ubuntu audio access for Active Directory users

By following the suggestions in this article and making sure that pam_group.so is before pam_winbind.so in /etc/pam.d/common-auth it works as intended. Finally I can have my local machines setup without local user accounts!

Software

Firebird 1.5 on Ubuntu Dapper - How to fix "operating system directive open failed" error

After installing Firebird 1.5 on Ubuntu Dapper I ran into a strang problem. I first installed firebird2-classic-server and everything worked. Then I installed firebird2-dev and suddenly I couldn't connect anymore to my database, not even locally as root. If the fixes in the article above doesn'

Software

Nesten 25% av Europa benytter Firefox

Dette er tall jeg virkelig liker å se. Endelig ser det ut som om Microsoft sitt monopol som nettleser er i ferd med å rakne. Og for dere som enda ikke har begynt å ta i bruk Firefox, gjør det nå!

Software

ImgRed.com - Image Redirection

This is a simple but cool concept. Makes it really easy to hotlink pictures, even for newbies. Simple solution to a boring and tedious problem. I wonder how he does it backend to not eat up too much bandwidth and storage? Probably the url to the picture is stored, and

Software

FTFS Distributed Filesystem (PDF)

This seems like a really good research paper. They adhere to the VFS layer and implement the fact that you should be able to add nodes with any kind of storage at any time, without having to reformat the filesystem. This seems like a much better approach than MogileFS, considering

Software

How to partition Kingston 8GB USB flash drives

Update: It seems like I've been the victim of USB Flash Drive counterfeiting, according to this information. The method below does not work to fix the drives. Use the method suggested in that article instead. My USB drive showed up initially as 1099GB, and using the tool they