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Oh the horror.

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This is the ultimate breakage: a breakage in the beer chain! In a country where cheap beer is a lifeline out of the inefficiency and brokenness, the danger of an interruption in the beer supply cannot be overestimated. Nevertheless I've been noticing dwindling supplies of bottled San Miguel Beer in Manila over the last few … Read more

Converting Joomla Templates for Right to Left (RTL) Languages.

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There doesn't seem to be much information around the internet on this subject (well at least not in English), so I thought I'd post my notes here. I've been working on a Joomla 1.5 site with a client and they needed an Arabic site put up. I initially tried to do this using Joomfish translation agent, but didn't have much luck, so in the end we decided to put up a separate site. Here's how I did it.

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All Change. Mandriva 2008 to Ubuntu 8.04

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As I noted in a previous post I was recently the victim of a Random Kernel Upgrade Hell (RKUH). Maybe I should trademark that acronym, although its not particularly prounounceable like SNAFU, or PEBCAK. Anyway … the fact was that I was spending several hours trying to fix various problems with wifi drivers, VMware server, truecrypt and the sound in Skype, when it suddenly occured to me that a re-install was probably quicker. The double edged sword of Linux: quick to reinstall, but then again why should you need to do it so often? Well I guess in my case I push the OS pretty hard with some esoteric applications, but even so …

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Ubuntu version of chkconfig

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I always forget this one when I'm setting up a new Ubuntu machine, so this is as much for my benefit as anyone else's … I've used a lot of OSes and have always found the chkconfig command on Redhat / Centos very useful for changing runlevels of services. The equivalent on Ubuntu is the … Read more

Free Wireless VPN

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Depending on your background you'll have different reactions to Free Wireless. Most people shout a quick whoopee, and plug right in there. However if your background is in IT security, you take a much dimmer view.

First of all there's the fact that a lot of the traffic you send down the wire can be intercepted ("sniffed") by people on the same network as you. The guy next to you in Starbucks could be snagging all your email passwords, for example. So at a minimum you need to make sure that you're using Secure email protocols (eg Secure POP on port 995 instead of port 110, and Secure SMTP on port 465 instead of port 25), and using https intead of http wherever you get a chance.

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