General IT

Audio Ping Feedback.

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Step back a few years … I've often thought when I'm under a desk somewhere jiggling wires, is that some kind of audio feedback on ping would be useful: your server isn't responding, but when you re-seat the ethernet connector it comes back online; you have a messy, unlabeled switch to work through, so you unplug wires until the audio feedback stops, and you've located your machine. That kind of thing.

I've occasionally looked around the internet for such a tool and uncovered a couple of scripts and tools which don't quite work. I've even thought of writing my own script, but never quite got around to it.

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Strange SmartBro URL hijacking

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I'm at a loss to explain this unless SmartBro's DNS or proxy servers have been taken over. Here's the deal. I'm surfing normally, and then suddenly I try to go to a normal site (economist.com, yahoo.com, facebook.com, google. com, iptools.com etc) and instead of getting the correct page, I get a weird spammy advertising page, even though the URL in the Address bar looks correct.

The image to the right is an example. Click on the image to get a full sized view. I have more examples saved if anyone is interested.

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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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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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