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Captcha Woes

Even the most complex captchas can be bypassed, if not tested thoroughly enough. Some time ago, I implemented a captcha on my comments form for news posts, to stop spam bots. My captcha is quite...

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Delphi/FreePascal MySQL.pas

Due to a recent need in a project of mine for mySQL access from delphi/freepascal I have adapted the version of mysql.pas from http://www.fichtner.net/delphi/mysql.delphi.phtml to load both...

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Linux Desktop

With the release of windows vista, comes the start-of-the-end for Windows XP. with its EOL (End-Of-Life) date now set at January 30th 2008 (that’s less than a year away), people (by people I mean...

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DMDirc

I (Along with Chris ‘MD87’ Smith and Greg ‘Greboid’ Holmes have recently started working on DMDirc (again, only this time its in Java to help towards the original aim of the project to be a decent,...

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More DMDirc

DMDirc 0.4 has now been released :)

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Email Woes

On a daily basis, I get around 800 emails to my email accounts, of which most of it is spam. Now as good as thunderbird is at detecting spam, even it fails at a lot of the spam I receive, leaving me...

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OpenID

Recently I finally finished adding support for AuthGate to be an OpenID Provider. This prompted Chris to develop Poidsy, which I have also implemented into AuthGate. This allows people to login to...

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PXE Goodness

So as you may or may not know from time to time I have the joy of fixing computers for various people. A lot of these fixes result in a reinstall of windows and away. This is a rather easy enough job,...

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Virtualbox Bridging

Edit: This is now pretty much unneeded, the new version of VirtualBox seems to handle this all nicely on its own. As I mentioned in my last post, One of the useful advantages of the network boot setup...

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Yakuake on OS X – Almost

For a while now (pretty much since I’ve been using Linux) I’ve been using yakuake, and I’ve been looking for something similar for OS X (at the moment I tend to ssh from my desktop to my OS X machine...

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“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – Act 3” a Dissapointment

Despite all the “This was amazing” “fantastic” reviews I seem to find for this everywhere, I found myself disappointed after watching it. The first 2 acts were funny and very rewatchable, there was...

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MD5

I was recently looking at converting an old application from VB6 to Java that used MD5 in its output files as hashes for validation. The first thing I did was to make a java class that read in the file...

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GMail – apply labels to email from group members

NOTE: The information in this article has been superceeded by this one. As Noted by Chris recently on IRC, Google Mail lacks a feature in its ability to automatically label/filter messages - you can’t...

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JDesktopPane Replacement

As as I mentioned before I’ve been recently converting an old project to Java. This old project was an MDI application, and when creating the UI for the conversion, I found the default JDesktopPane to...

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New Phone – T-Mobile G1.

Recently I acquired a T-Mobile G1 to replace my old T-Mobile MDA Vario 2 (HTC Hermes). All I can say about this phone is that it is quite awesome. I no longer need to run an exchange server to keep my...

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GitWeb Hacking.

Recently I setup gitweb on one of my servers to allow a web-based frontend to any git projects which the users of the server place in their ~/git/ directory. After playing about with it, I noticed that...

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Ident Server

I recently encountered a problem on a server that I manage where by the oidentd server didn’t seem to be working. Manual tests worked, but connecting to IRC Servers didn’t. I tried switching oidentd...

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WordPress

I have recently decided to switch this site to use wordpress rather than the custom code that was here before. This will allow me to edit/post to the site using my phone, which will probably allow me...

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Sending SMS with a Huawei E220

Today I decided to play with an old Huawei E220 I have lying around. After getting it setup and recognised in Linux by following the first 5 steps from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3656717...

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Ubuntu on HP Compaq Mini 311c-1030SA

I recently purchased a HP Compaq Mini 311c-1030SA with Nvidia ION and built in 3G, unfortunately the 3G card is a “UN2400” which isn’t supported right out of the box as it requires proprietary...

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Greasemonkey script for hp.com forums

If you’ve ever visited the hp.com forums you’ll know that any links in the post get enclosed by a call to “javascript:openExternal(“)” in the href rather than doing it properly in onClick. Amongst...

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A tale of two monitors

So, a while back (just under 3 years ago) I obtained 2 of Hyundai’s W240D monitors. These monitors had (I believe) PVA panels and worked fine for most of their life so far. A while back they both...

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Happy New Year

<Obligatory happy new year post goes here>

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IPv6 with Endian Community Firewall (EFW) 2.4.0

First post in over a year! Oops. For a while now, my home ADSL provider (EntaNET) has provided me with an IPv6 allocation, but I’ve never really used it (Its been on my to-do list for some time)...

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Update iptables on Endian Community Firewall (EFW) 2.4.0

Compiling ip6tables on Endian Community Firewall (EFW) 2.4.0 Unfortunately the version of ip6tables available at the time of fedora core 3 doesn’t support the ‘state’ or ‘comment’ modules for use with...

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Microsoft Lync on Linux

Update: This post still gets a lot of search traffic hits, but is now over a year old, and I no longer have a need to use Lync, so haven’t needed to keep this working. I believe that the Ubuntu repos...

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GMail – apply labels to email from group members – Redux

A while ago I posted a python script that allowed automatically adding labels to GMail messages based on contact groups. Unfortunately, a side effect of this script was that Google occasionally would...

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Website Reshuffle

Over the past few weekends I’ve been (slowly) working on moving my websites around a bit so that things are all in once place, and in the case of this blog, no longer hosted on my home ADSL connection....

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Limiting the effectiveness of DNS Amplification

I recently had the misfortune of having a server I am responsible for used as a target for DNS Amplification, and thought I’d share how I countered this. (Whilst this was effective for me, your mileage...

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It’s been a while…

It’s been a while since I updated this. Not through a lack of wanting to, more a combination of things - lack of time, lack of anything worth writing, hating the old blog theme… So I’ve replaced the...

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It did not help.

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Moving to Hugo

For a while now I’ve been thinking of moving this blog to a statically generated site rather than using wordpress. There are a number of reasons for this: I can version-control the content rather than...

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DNS Hosting - Part 1

For as long as I can remember I’ve hosted my own DNS. Originally this was via cpanel on a single server that I owned and then after a while I moved to a new server away from cpanel and moved to doing...

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HUGO PPA

I run ubuntu on my servers, and since moving to Hugo, I wanted to make sure I was using the latest version available. The ubuntu repos currently contain hugo version 0.15 in Xenial, and 0.25.1 in...

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DNS Hosting - Part 2: The rewrite

In my previous post about DNS Hosting I discussed the history leading up to when I decided I needed a better personal DNS hosting solution. I decided to code one myself to replace what I had been using...

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DNS Hosting - Part 3: Putting it all together

In my previous posts I discussed the history leading up to, and the eventual rewrite of my DNS hosting solution. So this post will (finally) talk briefly about how it all runs in production on...

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mdadm RAID with Proxmox

I recently acquired a new server with 2 drives that I intended to use as RAID1 for a virtualisation host for various things. My hypervisor of choice is Proxmox (For a few reasons, Support for KVM and...

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Advent of Code Benchmarking

For a few years now I’ve been enjoying Eric Wastl’s Advent of Code. For those unaware, each year since 2015 Advent of Code provides a 2-part coding challenge every day from December 1st to December...

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Docker Swarm with Ceph for cross-server files

I’ve been wanting to play with Docker Swarm for a while now for hosting containers, and finally sat down this weekend to do it. Something that has always stopped me before now was that I wanted to have...

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Fun with TOTP Codes

This all started with a comment I overheard at work from a colleague talking about a 2FA implementation on a service they were using. “It works fine on everything except Google Authenticator on...

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Upgrading Ceph in Docker Swarm

This post is a followup to an earlier blog bost regarding setting up a docker-swarm cluster with ceph. I’ve been running this cluster for a while now quite happily however since setting it up, a new...

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