Lunar_Lamp

Getting my USB dongle to work in Linux was shockingly easy. I don't know if I was just lucky, but I'd put off buying this for a long time, as I was convinced it would be hard to get to work in Linux. In reality it took less than 2 minutes from start to finish, and no effort at all. Here is the process for Ubuntu 8.10:

1. Open packet.
2. Insert SIM Card into dongle.
3. Turn on laptop.
4. Plug in dongle.
5. Wait for GUI to pop up.
6. Confirm your network, (in my case '3', which was auto-detected).

I found this USB "big red button" recently, and decided that I'd love to have a play with it, using it to run dangerous scripts. At just £5, it was worth the risk of lack of Linux support.

I was rejoicing in the streets about Amazon's DRM-free mp3 service when it was announced that it was available in the UK. My joy was undiminished when I saw that I had to use a download program to obtain my mp3s, because they supported *several* Linux distros. There was one problem however - they do not support 64bit, but this is simple to work around.

Apache logs are great, and with the right settings, are a wealth of information about browser versions, and a myriad of visitor statistics. However, as a lazy person, I didn't want to do the analysis of them myself, nor did I want to sort out more conventional monitoring (for example Google Analytics). I decided to get someone else to look at the logs for me. However, in a nod towards privacy, I did not want to provide them with the list of IP addresses of the users that had hit that web server, but simply removing all the IP addresses would have lost a large chunk of potentially useful data. A simple hashing of the IP address should suffice, but this turned out to be slightly more difficult than I had initially anticipated, possibly largely due to my lack of familiarity with awk. However, I must give much thanks to gnomon on #awk on freenode for his help, and the script provided is all his work.

Today I set up monitoring of my network on my Be-provided ADSL modem/router. The process was fairly rapid, but is probably not the kind of thing that someone would find easy to work out by themselves if they didn't know roughly what to do before starting, so here I shall document it.

I just installed Nokia Mail 4 Exchange to synchronise my Nokia E61 with the Exchange server at work. It appears to work fine, but the install is horrific. Whilst it's just a case of installing the sis file like any other application (or, in my case, selecting it from the 'catalogue' of installable apps), the default configuration settings are awful.

I've recently been playing around with VirtualBox, and have loved it. I've found that all the operating systems that I've installed in it have been very snappy, and it has been simple to use them. I did however, after setting up a Windows XP box, want to copy files from the XP virtual machine to my Ubuntu host. This was, unfortunately, not quite as simple as one would hope, but it isn't hard.

All that is required is to set up a folder on the host, and mount this as a network folder on the virtual system - bilateral file transfer between the host and virtual system is then possible.

I was playing around with various firmware versions for the WRT54GL the other day and, without thinking, I attempted to flash the wrong firmware. The power LED flashed rapidly, and stayed flashing when power was applied; none of the normal (simple) resetting methods worked.

I thought that I was in real trouble when the thing did not even respond to ping. This suggested that I needed to use JTAG to recover, which is annoying and requires soldering.

I have just tested out Fonebank to recycle (or sell) my old mobile phones. It's a simple service where you send them your old phones, and they send you money in return. I was impressed.

Whilst I was aware that "ulimit" was responsible for setting the maximum number of files a user could have open in Linux, I had never needed to alter this value. That was until today when I needed to increase it for a relatively niche purpose, and I was shocked to realise that I didn't have a clue how to do this.