Mumra dot co dot uk

This is my first post from my new iPod touch. It took around 5 minutes and was surprisingly easy. Apple have really made a useable web browser on a pocket device!

Jailbreaking the 1.1.4 32gb iPod touch is so easy its hardly worth mentioning here. Still, I won't let that stop me.

If, like me you want to be able to ssh to and from your iPod then fear not, you are just a few steps away.

1 - google for the latest version of zitune
2 - restore your iPod to factory settings. Then close itunes.
3 - run zitune and click the jailbreak button
4 - sit back and let it do its thing
-this includes a couple of verbose reboots
5 - once the iPod has booted you will see the installer icon, start it and go to all packages. Here you
search for the vt100 terminal. Install the package. And we are all done.
6 - Go to the home screen and run the terminal.

Ssh to the iPod with username root, password: alpine

Yippee! UNIX with openssh!

Sun aquires mysql! Read more here: Jonathan Schwartz's blog

This is the code for my Samsung LCD, my sky remote does not have the insert to write it down..
This code works for the LE32R41BDX and my LE32R88BDX

Hold the Sky remote away from the TV and press TV
Press Select and Red until your remote light blinks twice
Type in 646
Press Select
Then TV
Then Sky

And now, the xbox 360 universal media remote

Hold TV and OK until remote blinks
Type in 0085
Press TV to store

See http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemsetup/xbox360/accessories/universalmediaremote.htm for more info
Now, how do i get my Samsung remote to work with my sky box?

I've been a big fan of Southpark for a while now and I hit the official website the other day to read about the new series. Found a great little flash app that allows you to create your own Southpark character. So, here's Yulye and I, each drawn by the other.

Yulye

Jonathan

Heard a great quote today when attending a TOI today on brandZ.

The talk covered the new Solaris branded zone functionality that allows you to run userland binaries from different operating systems within solaris. It was an lx zone allowing the execution of linux binaries and as a demo the easy comparison of the /proc filesystem between the lx zone and the solaris native OS was shown.

Quote was as follows

"As you can see, Solaris /proc contains only processes, as God and Roger Faulkner intended".

Excellent!

It is once again September 15th, Battle of Britain memorial day. The day on which it was announced that the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany had subsided thanks to the steely wit and dogged determination of the men and woman of the R.A.F.

Between 10th July and September 15th 1940 a fierce battle raged over the skies of England. It was to be this battle that would decide Adolf Hitlers plans to invade England. If we could hold the skies, his plan would be thwarted, lose and it would be the end of any hopes for stopping the Nazi war machine.

People who have read this blog before will know that a major interest of mine are WWI and WWII. I find it amazing that such a small island managed to hold back the gargantuan forces of Adolf Hitler against all odds.

This afternoon was spent watching footage of the fantastic Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster bomber, it left me, as always with a feeling of awe and (strangely) nostalgia.

It may seem strange but I have always felt an affinity with the allied soldiers of the british army that defended our own and liberated mainland europe. I have no explanation for this other than I have always felt that members of our fighting forces were of a different caliber of men to what we know today.

This blog entry is simply to remind anyone who stumbles across it to take a minute to remember what these people did for us and for the rest of europe, without them we would not be the Great Britain we are today.

To all of those who fought on both sides, both alive and passed, I commend you. May the fallen rest in peace and may we never forget the battle that was fought so that we today can live in peace.

To quote Churchill,

"Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed, by so many, to so few"

[Rant]
I appreciate it is once again approaching the 31st August and this year it will be the 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales but am I the only person who cannot stand the mindless barrage of gratuitous documentaries shown at this time?

Certainly on Sky they are arriving at breakneck speeds, every night it seems that we need to once again have our memories refreshed about "What Diana did", "Who Diana Loved" , "The life of a troubled princess"...and my personal favourite - "Her life in Photos". (see points on kensington palace)

For one, I find it ironic that the media commemorate the death of a lady who died avoiding the media. Secondly, similar shows have been aired every year for the past 10 years, the same stories, the same images. Why does it have to go on! Does anyone actually still watch this?

What other public figure in our colourful history gets the same treatment?

Couple this with my recent visit to Kensington Palace with my soon to be 'in-laws' in which we were subjected to a truly abominable 'Diana Exhibition' whereby large screens show broadcast footage, still photos (This really took the biscuit, a big screen playing a slidshow is at best boring, if not irritating) and play soundbytes in an environment rendered entirely void of all feeling by a thick coat of matt white paint from floor to ceiling and dingy low-watt lighting.

The entrance fee for the palace was around £14 per person which I also find an insult (although cheap when compared against a full ticket for Buck house which will set you back a titanic 25 quid per person! The Royals must be lauging all the way to their bank.).

The state rooms of Kensington palace were in fairly ill repair, looking dusty and dull with poorly lit displays. Having visited Versailles a number of times I really felt let down by the experience of Kensington palace and almost felt embarrassed that I had taken the future in-laws there. In the defence of the palace, the tour around Princess Anne's private rooms was interesting and whilst again was shabby it had some character about it that was rather...'chic'.

In short I wish they would just let both her and myself rest in peace.
[/Rant]

So Jim has finally gotten his music up and on the web for you all to listen to. Varying styles of music available in mp3 format for you to download and other pieces available to download for a donation. Jim is also available for commissions.

Go visit jimmo dot org and check it out for yourself..and remember.. you heard it here (well there) first.

Well done Jim!

At work many of us communicate via instant message mechanisms such as jabber. Imagine the shock when our Sun Ray Server was upgraded and our favourite IM tool gaim was replaced by pidgin. Great!! Except the bundled version comes with no Jabber support!

Well, for those of you currently cursing, here are the simple compile options to build Pidgin with jabber support on Sparc/X86 Solaris.

Simply : ./configure --disable-perl --disable-tcl --prefix=/path/to/where/you/want/it

Unfortunately one has to disable perl and Tcl support as they cause the compile to fail. But the above line will successfully make Pidgin with jabber support and with the purple-remote (aka gaim-remote) so that all of our utaction scripts will work again.

Bonza!

I've always had a bit of a problem with wearing hats in that I have a head the size of 'Mr Potato man'.

When I was in Mexico the past 2 visits I was cursing the fact that I didn't have a brimmed hat to protect me from the sun. On the first visit I purchased a cheap 'bush' style hat that due to the enormity of my cranium was rather uncomfortable to wear.

On the second visit we had the luck to be approached whilst on the beach by a local seller who was making hats from palm leaves. Jessica explained that my head was slightly oversize and he measured it with a palm leaf and sat there making a hat exactly my size. Fantastic!

I've often wanted to be able to wear a hat, you see these guys in their 'cool' hats and think "Wouldn't it be good to have a nice hat"..anyhow, a while ago I was surfing the internet and came across a site sporting replica Indiana Jones hats. I instantly decided that it was the hat for me and sporadically over the next year or so visited the site almost purchasing one.

So, for my birthday yesterday I was incredibly surprised when I opened my present from Jessica to find it was an authentic fur felt Indiana Jones Fedora. She and my housemate Neil had been desperately trying to find out my head measurement and started enquiring about sourcing said fedora. (Jessica had only been in the country for 1 week at this point) They hit the site where I had seen them and were told it would be several weeks before they could deliver.

Neil then set about trying to find a source here in the UK and his search led him to the original hatter who was commissioned for the films, one Herbert Johnson. Neil being Neil quite simply got intouch with Mr Johnson who is, by-the-way also the Hatter to the Royal Family. He explained the situation and that they needed a hat quickly and were told that he was rather busy at the moment and his rates were rather expensive (around £180 p/h). Neil asked if he knew of anywhere else they could get one at short notice and Mr Johnson kindly pointed them to one of his past apprentices.

Once again, Neil got in touch with the apprentice, explained the situation, that they didn't have my exact head measurement but that I wore a size large full face helmet and that my head was "slightly bigger than his" (an understatment...). Anyhow, after some deliberation, they settled on a size and the hat was made, delivered to Neil and kept out of my sight until last night!

All I can say is that it is a beautiful, fantastic quality hat that I actually like wearing. For those of you who are wondering what it looks like:

Keith found a helpful webpage published by Microsoft in regards to stopping their crazy bot spidering your servers webpages billions of times each day.

The following page Here informs interested parties that they may take any of the following actions to prevent the MSN search bot opressing your webserver:

To prevent your website or web pages from appearing in the MSN Search index, use any one of these methods:

- Create a robots.txt file on your site and block MSNBot from indexing your site.
- Add a noindexmeta tag to pages that you do not want indexed.
- Use a secure location on your web server to host the site. For example, require users to sign in or to use HTTPS.
- Remove the pages from your site.

I especially like that last entry...

"To prevent burglars from breaking into your house, demolish it"

I recently had to replace my front wheel setup as I upgraded by bikes front end. The new hub would needed to take a 20mm axle, and seeing as my old rims were on the verge of destruction I decided to go for a whole new wheel build.

This time I chose Sun SingleTrack rims on an Aireal DH1 Front Symetech Hub. All I can say is this is a fantastic hub, it spins beautifully even after dragging it through clay, chalk, sand and other general muck you find around my neck of the woods.



One issue I did have however was that my 20mm maxxle was an incredibly tight fit during the last 15-20% of insertion. Unfortunately, a quick release system that requires a rubber mallet and punch to remove the wheel and the same rubber mallet to re-attach it (not counting the patience of a budhist monk) is not ideal when you are out on the trails.

Unsure what to do about this I had a search around to see If anyone else was experiencing the problem...nothing.. I went to the Magura Forum and posted there asking if anyone had seen the issue with other sets of Magura Wotans again.. nothing.

I eventually contacted Aireal about the issue earlier tonight and received a very prompt reply from them stating that they would look into whether they had seen the problem. Now, this is a small company with a couple of guys that design and machine the parts and so finding an answer was incredibly quick. 20 minutes later I had another mail in my inbox saying that one person had also mentioned the problem with the maxxle and their hub.

The upshot is that they have offered to send me out some oversize end caps so that I can solve my problem! What a great result!

For anyone else out there searching for this issue, contact the guys at Aireal. You may currently experience difficulty finding their site via google as most searches throw up links to an old airealindustries url that doesnt work, but here is their correct address and they are more than happy to help.
Aireal Australia

I was amused today whilst helping my sister with printing some photos.

We were talking about the recent budget announcement and in particular, car tax. So I hit google with the following search:

car tax uk 1.4

This threw up a few relevent sites but they were all reports from 2006 and before. So I added '2007' to my search string:

car tax uk 1.4 2007

Hit google again, and upon looking at the first link I noticed something that made me chuckle. The top hit on google is this blog's entry about 'PAYG road tax'. Ha! Certainly amused me

On top once more

(p.s, since I started writing this a few minutes ago, a whole hour has passed... damn clocks)

I was asked to produce a little gui application in Java for one of my colleagues here in Solaris Sustaining.

However, making something that works in all instances on multiple versions of both the Solaris OS and the JavaVM seemed to prompt an error when serialising and deserialising objects to/from disk.

If you write an object to disk using version X of the Java VM, and then run the application with version Y, you will notice an interesting error message:

Couldnt write to /home/usernameremoved/.escs.data
javax.swing.AbstractListModel; local class incompatible: stream classdesc serial
VersionUID = 6318899794864351705, local class serialVersionUID = -7413386323730897788

This would prevent pre-serialised objects written with version X from being read when using version Y.

Well, its actually something very simple to fix. The serialVersionUID for any given class is VM dependent. Unless you do the following:
serialVersionUID is an overloadable variable (of course) so in the class for the object being written to disk, add the following line

static final long serialVersionUID = -7413386323730897788L

Where -7413386323730897788 is the serialVersionUID from the error message. Remember to declare it as static and final to ensure that only one instance of this exists and cannot be overwritten. Dont forget to use the 'L' at the end of the declaration otherwise javac will throw its toys out of the pram and complain that the number exceeds its boundaries for an int

Now, recompile your classes and serialise your object using JavaVM version X, then quit the application, start it using JavaVM Y and load the object.

If you are using a default Java Class, such as DefaultListModel etc, then you will need to extend the class and create your own version that includes the above final long declaration. Simplest way to do this (using DefaultListModel as an example)

import javax.swing.DefaultListModel;

public class FixedDefaultListModel extends DefaultListModel {

//Fixes serialVersionUID message - not e the 'L'
//which prevents the "integer too long" message
static final long serialVersionUID = -7413386323730897788L;

public FixedDefaultListModel() {
super();
}

}

Hurrah! No error message any more, and the object is now loadable in all versions of the JVM.

"Ladies and Gentlemen" the voice came over the speakers, oscillating in volume and quality. "It is now midnight in the United Kingdom. Happy New Year everyone!".

Happy new year.

It was 7 pm, 31st December 2006 in my ergonomically designed (or so they say) spacially calculated seat aboard the 767 sitting on the tarmac at Atlanta International airport. Due to an 'equipment change' (by equipment they actually mean the aeroplane) seating had been reassigned, separating parents from children and driving the plane into a state of general chaos.

Only one thing to do. I ordered a whiskey.

As I sat there, contemplating 8 hours of estranged children I started to think about the previous three weeks that culminated in the Georgian kindergarten plane.

Icy cold air greeted me as I walked out of Monterreys General Escobido Airport with Jessica in my arms on the 9th of December. Happy to be back with her, I could stand the cold but made a point of commenting that it was actually warmer back in blightly than it was in Mexico.

I had arrived for Jessica's graduation and two weeks travelling in southern/central Mexico.
Graduation day heralded blue skies and 25+ degree temperatures. Jessica, needless to say looked beautiful. Having been to only graduation ceremony (other than mine) I wasn't quite sure how long the whole thing would last. It was a nice feeling and I was very proud of her as she stepped up to take her award. The ceremony was different to how I expected it to be, but it was, best of all, short.

The next day (now the 14th of december) we grabbed our bags and headed back to the aiport to catch our flight to Mexico City. Unfortunately, it seemed that the fog (from the film of the same name) had settled on Mexico City grounding all flights in and out meaning we would not be able to catch the connecting flight to Puerto Escondido. Our flight would have to wait until the next day but that was no problem, another night in Monterrey was not disagreeable.

The next day, bright and early we managed to get a flight to Mexico city, on the way passing over Popocatepetl (try saying that when you've had a few!) a volcano whose activity is rivalled only by its difficulty of pronunciation. We caught our connecting flight to Puerto Escondido and landed in 36 degree heat, the approach leading us parallel to beautiful beaches and tropical flora.

Puerto Escondido is a small town in Oaxaca surrounded by a number of beautiful beaches. We took a taxi to Zicatela - this beach is famous for Surfing and as you approach it becomes clear as to why this is. The beach is a long straight stretch of around 2 miles in a very shallow bay. Large rolling breaks thunder onto the shore after barrelling for the final portion of its journey. We dont normally see waves like this in the UK although I would describe the break as very similar to Newquays' Fistral Beach...

Not being a surfer any more (severely less flexible and far more concious of my own mortality) I was content to watch the locals surf their break whilst I had a little swim or sat and drank a beer.

We booked into a great hostel. There is only really one road along Zicatela and it runs along the beach, adorned with small arty shops, enjoyable restaurants and cafes it also houses many hostels at very reasonable prices. Ours was a very clean room with a Tv, shower and drinkable water, situated right on the beach and sported a balcony that was just the perfect spot to help one wake up in the morning or to simply sit and watch the sun go down.

There was (whilst we were in Oaxaca) and I believe there still is a conflict between the teachers in Oaxaca state and the government. This had caused some civil unrest in the larger Oaxacan cities and I think must have stimied the tourism to the area as we arrived at the start of the peak season and found to our surpise that we very nearly had the beach to ourselves.

We met some lovely locals (Roberto, Margarito (a.k.a SnakeMan!) and a couple whose name I forget) and so were able to see a little glimpse of the local way of life. Nights were spent sitting in the warm air relaxing with them and talking about the differences between our cultures. We were shown great hospitality by all around and it made all the difference to our experience in Puerto.

Margarito (SnakeMan) is the local Steve Irwin. He lives out of town next to a lagoon that is popular with tourists who wish to see the local wildlife. However, whilst most people out there will charge a high price, take many people in one go and use a motor boat to take tourists around the lake, Margarito approached us saying how he lives at the lagoon, knows the wildlife and the area and he would use a traditional paddle canoe to take us around the lake. This, he told us, would mean we could see the maximum amount as the motors would not disturb the local fauna. Never before have I met such a healthy looking man. He is in his mid fourties and yet still looks like he is in his early twenties. So fit and full of life like I have never seen.

The trip to the lagoon was full of mangrove-like trees with fresh water mussels on their tendrils, wild Iguanas and many many different birds

One end of Zicatela beach was full of Pelicans and locals fishing. I guess the locals follow the Pelicans to find the good sites. Having never seen a Pelican before I was surprised by the size of them as they would buzz past us, flying literally milimetres above the surface of the water before settling gracefully and posing for a photo.

We both absolutely loved Puerto Escondido. It was a beautiful pace and way of life surrounded by wonderful sights and all bathed in a tropical heat. Fantastic!

We stayed for a total of 4 days (I think) in Puerto before heading onto the next stop on our journey - Huatulco.

Now even though I dont drive very often I see the governments plans to implement a "pay as you go" road taxing system as an absolute piss take. Excuse the language but I can't think of another way to describe it.

Now all you brits who read my blog, wherever you are in the world (Of both of my readers at least one of you must be a brit ) hit the Prime ministers website Number 10 Downing Street and sign up to the petition against this farcical excuse for an idea.

Some average values for you from a recent BBC study: The lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and the highest was £194 for a delivery driver. A non working mother who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month.

Now not only this, but one will also be expected to buy the tracking device for any cars owned, these are £200 a pop and include (of course) a transponder to allow anyone privy to the information to know your whereabouts and speed. This most likely means that you can expect to receive automatic notice of intended prosecution included with your monthly bill if you are one of those drivers who creeps over the speed limits.

Just what the hell are they thinking?

What about the adverse effect this bill will have on all of the products in our stores. Most freight and produce is moved by road in the UK, I wonder what retailers will do when the costs of their logistics networks sky-rockets through the roof... Well, of course they will have to increase their prices. Ah! I hear you exclaim, but they can use rail!.... With this I would agree, except that around a decade ago our freight-rail system was pretty much disbanded due to the costs of keeping it running when compared with using roads (amoung other reasons).

Britain Britain Britain, how you push me away. High Interest rates, high income tax, high house prices, high council tax, HIGH fuel tax and now this abomination the government is proposing. Its enough to make one consider emigration. How the hell am I supposed to start a life for myself in such an environment. House prices are 7-10 times my yearly salary but the average mortgage broker will only lend 4 times ones income... Hmmm.. I suppose its ok so long as I can save 120K to put down as a deposit.. Yeah Right!

Im going to have to stop this entry now because quite simply, its angering me to think about the labour party and their excuse for a policy.

Thankyou Tony. Thanks a bunch.

Now, this entry may be removed depending on how my mother feels about me sharing this information with both of the people who read this site, so read it while its hot!

A bit of background first. My mother is an "Regulation Inspector". She inspects nursing homes etc and ensures they are kept up to standard.

Today she was inspecting (smartly dressed in a trouser suit she informs me, shoes freshly cleaned, makeup, jewellery et al) and overheard a couple of the temporally-advanced residents talking.

It went (verbatim)

" She's the inspector",
" Oh is that who she is, looks like easy money that job",
" They used to look smart in my day, they used to make them wear ties in my day",
" I think its a woman but you never can tell these days",
" No its not a woman- no titties",
" Well its got a bit in front--man boobs they call them, it said its name was elizabeth",
" Well there is no wonder there are so many nancy boys about today if they give the blokes names like that, and they said it was stuff in the water"

It smacks of the 2 old guys from a comedy show a while ago (help me out someone!) ! Absolutely excellent! Made me laugh reading the email from her!!

Sorry mum!

Browsing Googlutube I came across what I consider to be some of the most extreme freeride footage I've ever seen.

You simply have to check this out! Embedded for your viewing pleasure!






Some of those scenes gave me vertigo just watching them. Loons!

Well...not quite, but this server gets hit from many countries. Below is the list, cool eh

de - Germany (Federal Republic of)
com - commercial, for-profit organizations
net - network infrastructure machines and organizations
br - Brazil (Federative Republic of)
uk - United Kingdom
jp - Japan
ru - Russian Federation
mx - Mexico
ar - Argentine Republic
it - Italy
th - Thailand
fr - France
cn - China (People's Republic of)
pl - Poland (Republic of)
nl - Netherlands (Kingdom of the)
cz - Czech Republic
ca - Canada
be - Belgium
at - Austria
edu - 4-year, degree granting colleges/universities
in - India (Republic of)
au - Australia
ro - Romania
ie - Ireland
co - Colombia (Republic of)
do - Dominican Republic
fi - Finland
tw - Taiwan, Province of China
pt - Portugal
cl - Chile
se - Sweden
us - United States of America
ee - Estonia (Republic of)
org - miscellaneous, usually non-profit, organizations
es - Spain
no - Norway
vn - Viet Nam (Socialist Republic of)
dk - Denmark
il - Israel (State of)
md - Moldova (Republic of)
tr - Turkey
ch - Switzerland (Confederation of)
hu - Hungary (Republic of)
my - Malaysia
sk - Slovak Republic
yu - Yugoslavia (Federal Republic of)
bg - Bulgaria (Republic of)
pe - Peru
sg - Singapore (Republic of)
gt - Guatemala (Republic of)
is - Iceland
cr - Costa Rica
gh - Ghana
lt - Lithuania (Republic of)
nz - New Zealand
ph - Philippines (Republic of the)
pk - Pakistan (Islamic Republic of)
ae - United Arab Emirates
bm - Bermuda
gi - Gibraltar
hk - Hong Kong (China)
id - Indonesia (Republic of)
ke - Kenya (Republic of)
kr - Korea (Republic of)
kz - Kazakstan (Republic of)
ma - Morocco (Kingdom of)
mil - US military
su - Soviet Union
tt - Trinidad and Tobago
ve - Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)

I dont blog nearly enough about Solaris. For the past few months I have been settling in to my new position within Sun Microsystems. For the past year I was working for Sun as a Lab Engineer in Paris. This role included system and network administration, production server maintenance, system configuration and general engineer support and service.

To elaborate slightly; I worked within one of 13 worldwide labs; the purpose of which was to facilitate the use of readily available hardware configurations for use by services engineers. These requests could be as simple and small as a single machine configured with a certain release of Solaris to clustered 'big-iron' solutions such as the F15/25k with an attached SAN.

Anyway, I digress, I'm not here to write about my old position, I'm here to write about my new position and how that brings me around to the title of this entry.

A few months ago I moved departments into 'Solaris Revenue Product Engineering'. This is part of the services organisation within Sun Microsystems. This department is generally referred to as 'Solaris Sustaining' for it is we who fix issues within the operating system (Big change from my previous position!). This fits more inline with my degree in Software Engineering and my Java experience - even though the new position is coding C.

I work within a group inside this department responsible for userland commands, utilities and libraries. In this role I get introduced to a continually changing selection of said cmds utils and libs and some of them are incredibly useful.

In the future I hope to be able to expose many useful commands or features of solaris and hopefully document examples of usage.

This finally brings me to the title; open(2) refers to the Unix system call. However many of you should by now know that it is the tagline for the new Open Source release of the Solaris OS: OpenSolaris.

To quote the homepage :

What is the OpenSolaris Project?

The OpenSolaris project is an open source community and a place for collaboration and conversation around OpenSolaris technology.

The community represents a wide variety of people around the world, including developers adding functionality to the system or customizing the technology for new applications and platforms; system administrators implementing Solaris technology in data centers; educators and students researching operating systems in universities; and new users exploring the technology and discovering that OpenSolaris offers new opportunities.

The OpenSolaris source code is already cutting edge, but innovation happens everywhere so we welcome your involvement.

Whats more is it is absolutely packed with features such as ZFS and the new BrandZ allowing a Linux userland running within a Zone on your Solaris system. I urge you all to check it out. It runs on X86 and Sparc! Check it out!