xset | Archive

Original Music by …

// May 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

Something occurred to me the other night whilst watching An American Werewolf in London (a superb movie by the way and one of a recent spate of vintage Werewolf movies I’ve been watching) as the opening credits rolled by and informed me that the Original Music was by Elmer Bernstein.

Now this is the kind of statement that impacts on the anal retentive part of my brain due in no small part to the ambiguity of the statement. Does this mean that Elmer composed music that was original (for example making use of off beat tempos and a percussion section composed of ducks on wash boards)? Or does it mean that he composed the original soundtrack but the studio hated it, dumped it and used something different?

Of course I know what it actually means but still, it got me thinking.

The right tools for the job

// May 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

I have a folder on my Bookmarks bar under Firefox called Porn ..

More interestingly to most I also have a folder called Tools! The idea being that the bookmarks bar is home to links I use daily and the Tools! folder specifically contains sites that are genuinely useful in my day to day work. And being the kind, big hearted guy that I am, I figure sharing them with you is the least I can do to repay you for stopping by.

1) CentralOps (aka Hexillion)

Sure I’m a CLI whizz kid but there are occasions when you can’t be arsed (or don’t have access *cough* Vista *cough*) to Telnet and Dig. The Centralops tools offer an amazing range of domain and email query goodies and they’re mostly free*

Try the Domain Dossier for all sorts of goodies about your favourite website or even the Browser Mirror to see just how much the world can see about you as you browse around the web!

2) MX Toolbox

Taking the mail side of things to extremes, this deceptively simple site allows you to pull back a list of all MX records for a domain and then run diagnostics and RBL checks against them.

3) PC Tools Secure Password Generator

Sure we all love thinking up devilishly clever passwords to bamboozle our mates and relatives but you can’t beat a pure random set of characters for security and PC Tools lets you create passwords of between 4 (useless) and 64 (eevil) characters using alphanumeric and punctuation.

(Top tip – set the parameters you want and then bookmark that URL for quick access to random passwordy goodness)

4) Paste2

If you’ve ever spent much time in IRC then the concept of a paste bin is probably known to you. For those who haven’t , a Paste bin gives you a free, temporary space to share large quantities of output or code. Paste2 is suitably Web 2.0 (it’s still in Beta!) but also offers pretty print for 40 different langauages or syntices. A great tool with loads of applications, just remember that it’s temporary. Your Paste Bin will disapear for ever if no one views it for 30 days

5) Down for Everyone

In the wonderfully complex world of DNS, it’s often possible that you may have issues which make things look like the web has disapeared. This site provides a simple means to test website availability and to prove that you aren’t going mad… or more likely that you are and need to switch ISPs. Of course if you can’t access this site then your connection is totally borked and you may as well go outside for a bit.

(Top tip – for uber cool DNS goodness you could do worse than check out OpenDNS. See this post for more info)

6) Search Engine Position Checker

Save a lot of wandering through Google results – simply pass in a URL and a keyword and see where your site lies.

So there you have my toolbox (or the bits of it that you can access – there’s a load of stuff that’s internal or restricted such as my Wiki or ropey Python and PHP scripts)

I hope some of these will turn out to be useful to you. in the mean time – what gems are lurking in your bookmarks / memories? Do share…

* You’re limited to 50 queries a day for free / guest users but can pay for more if you need them.

And we’re back

// May 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal, Tech

After a power surge knocked out the router and the bridge and the internet and the server and generally everything!

I say knocked out – rather the router I currently use (to great effect I might add) has a sensitivity to power outages – namely flip the switch a couple of times and it resets to the factory defaults. I’m addressing this by ordering (finally) a 750VA APC UPS to sit in the corner and hum* which should keep the router, modem and server up during these occasional but regular power outs.

Sorry for all those who’ve been bouncing off an error page for the past few days. At some point I’ll have to look at getting DRBD up and running to replicate the site over to the other server but, to be honest with you, for the 16 hits a day I get round here – it’s so not worth my efforts.

* Because it doesn’t know the words!

Expecting

// May 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

The circle of life! Popularised by Elton John and a certain movie about lions (which inexplicably became a west end stage show which in turn is the only place on earth you’ll find Wildebeest waiting for make-up) the concept is simple.

One door closes, another opens. One creature passes on then another is born to take its place. Of course due to a couple of factors such as population explosion and species extinction, the circle isn’t so much circular as it is a big lop sided wobble mess but you get the point.

I was saddened to hear that two of my good friend’s have recently lost their cat (and a wad of cash in the process) but am also quietly happy that the circle kicked in in due course.

Our little Zumi is expecting! Either that or we really need to cut back on the kibble. Of course some will read this and decry us as uncaring pet owners – Zumi is only 10 months (which I guess in cat terms makes her a teenage, single mother – just another statistic in this cruel world) – but rest assured we are prepared to deal with the little ones and will care for them properly before (hopefully) sending them on to loving homes.

Best guess we have another couple of weeks before the arrival of the litter and have set up a kitten box for her in the warm and quiet utility room – which there is no chance she is actually going to use but we’ve tried.

So our little pseudo family will be growing by 2 – 6 and I can check off another item on my list of things I’ve not done before. In an unrelated note:

COMING SOON! The Xset Comments Kitty Give away!!!

…

JOKE! And if it weren’t nobody has commented here in about a month anyway so the kittys would be pushing three years old before we got shot of them.

The Great Text Tax

// May 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

A scary story in this morning’s Register RSS highlighted the cost of texting / SMS in relation to other data transmission mechanisms.

Their figures where based on an SMS price of 5p per message, a whole 2p less than the Jersey price.

They calculated that to transmit 1MB of data would cost �374.49. In Jersey that cost is more like �524.30 per MB

Of course 1MB is a lot of data in text form but even so – this highlights just how much the Mobile operators are ripping of their customers, especially when you consider that the infrastructure that carries SMS is the same as the kit that routes voice calls and the throughput is stupidly low.

Each message is approximately 140 bytes of data (plus the network overhead) meaning that 7490 messages can be sent per MB of network throughput at a cost to you of more than �500!

Ironic, considering that most teens (and some adults) treat this as a cheap method of communicating.

My advice? Get a phone with a data plan and email instead! Certainly the JT data plan prices that same 1MB of data at the princely sum of �1.00 or 0.2% of the cost of sending the same data via SMS.

Working Weekend

// May 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

A satisfying bank holiday weekend has just finished. I say satisfiying in the sense that the previous bank holiday was wasted (literally) due to an excess of booze on the Sunday which left me clinging to the sofa for the majority of the extra day off.

This weekend involved no excessive drinking, hence no hang over, hence productivity.

It’s an amazingly simple formula once you get it down on paper

Friday, a bank holiday in Jersey, was spent working flat out on a go live for a project that had managed to deviate so badly between what the trunk and the dev branches that it took all day to reconcile . Of course I had company in the form of Buffy season 6 which I watched almost all of in the process.

Saturday saw me up early to head out to a first aid course for 09:00 and then back home at 16:00 only to leave again for a picnic on Portelet beach with the GGF … and no forks. This makes eating salad a little difficult as I’m sure you can appreciate! Finger food aside, it’s a great way to eat dinner – overlooking a plague island in the evening sun

Sunday – a bit of a blur but ending in a BBQ at my parent’s place (the first of the year) with some great food, some good wine and a slighty squiffy GGF!

Rob

Addendum: It’s actually taken me three days to write this post …� how busy am I!