Mick and Jen’s Wedding: Before
Mick, Tim, Tom and myself went out for dinner, played some pool and generally loitered around, before the big game tomorrow (Mick and Jen’s wedding)
The kick-off is at 1pm. Go team!
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Firefox unfriendly sites
I hate that web developers only develop for IE. It shits me on so many levels. My mum has been having issues for ages trying to get to the Westpac Altitude points website. At one stage, it would refuse to even let her try and log in because it would only allow IE, based on the browser’s useragent string. It seems that changing the useragent isn’t neccessary on this site any more, but now when logging in, firefox pops up with the following error:
Firefox and images.pinpoint.net.au cannot communicate securely because they have
no common encryption algorithms
when firefox tries to download the images for the site.
To solve this problem, to go the about:config page in firefox, and set the option:
security.ssl3.rsa_rc2_40_md5 and set to true.
For other websites (e.g. Amazon) that I have seen have problems may require different security options to be set. I worked my way down the list of security options and changed the ones which were false to true, one by one. Maybe this might help somebody else one day.
Xen is cool
Xen is one of the coolest open source projects I’ve seen. Like I said in my previous post, it’s a way of doing a VMWare style of virtualisation on x86 hardware. Like the Xen guys say:
Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.
As I found out after talking to CSam from VPAC, the VMWare license states that you cannot use it for grid computing. I would have thought that VMWare would be great to use for testing simple grid computing configurations, so this restriction seems a little harsh.
The way that Xen works is that you create virtual machines running under a hypervisor, which is a xen-patched linux kernel. You can install any disto you like to become the hypervisor, but the difference is that instead of booting the linux kernel directly, you actually boot a Xen image first, which then loads the xen-patched Linux kernel. To Xen, this machine is known as the domain0.
When you have this up and running, you can begin to create your domainU machines inside of this. The easiest way to do this is by mounting the filesystem for your new VM, and doing a manual gentoo-style install of whatever distro you like. For the RPM based distro’s, there is a tool to accomplish this for you very easily. A Gentoo install isn’t much different, and debian provide a mechanism for bootstrapping also.
By default, Xen uses bridging to bridge together your eth0 from your domain0 to the eth0 of the VM’s, but this is completely configurable. From here, you can then use the virtual console connection to your VM’s to start making your VM’s do stuff.
For a very quick guide to setting up a Xen system, you can take a look at Damon’s guide using CentOS, but it would definately be a good idea to read the Xen docs first.
The Linksys WPG54G Presentation Player
This device is labeled as a presentation player, but it is really a VNC viewer in a box! As most of the Linksys devices around today, it runs a customised version of Linux, just waiting to be hacked…
As the software shipped with the WPG54G is Windows only, some workarounds are needed to get it to play nicely with Linux or Mac. Here’s the details:
Firstly, you’ll need some form of VNC server set up on your PC. For GNOME users, GNOME 2.8+ ships with the Vino remote desktop utility. Windows users can use just plain old RealVNC, and I’m sure there is a solution for OSX users too, but I haven’t ever used a VNC server on a Mac before.
NOTE: for this to work correctly, your VNC server must be set to not require a password. This might not be necessary, but I believe the password sent to the WPG54G is encrypted. Without knowing the encryption, it won’t work.
The Windows utility does some sort of local subnet broadcast to discover the WPG54G, but for us, we will connect directly to the WPG54G’s IP address. For the WPG54G to initiate a connection to your VNC server, the windows software uses a GET URL for the unit to discover the client.
To start it, I used curl in Linux, but you could use any web brower. Fire up the URL
http://IP address/connect.html?DTYPE=plain&ov_name=your name&ov_passwd=whatever you want
and the WPG54G should start a VNC connection to your client’s IP address 
Me and my mate Dave
Had a BBQ and some drinks last night for my birthday. Sat around and watched some Chappell show and Team America: World Police. Some very funny stuff right there. Simone also bought a new digital camera for her trip, so today we went down to St. Kilda and walked along Acland St. and checked out some of the market stalls along the waterfront. The funny thing was, we walked into my mate Dave Hughes
Us with my mate Dave Hughes
Simone and Bek at Luna Park
Simone, Bek, Kelly and Shane at the tram stop at Flinders St.
Andy in the blue sky
Bek would like to note, for the record, Dave put his hand on her ass. She loved it
Testing thumbnails
I needed to test thumbnails by image upload. So, here’s a photo of my dad on a scooter
Dad riding a scooter