taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Travel: Toorcon was great fun! Lots of interesting conversations.

Unfortunately they had a cruddy internet connection, so I’m majorly backlogged, and can’t write about any of it just yet ;)

Tags: connection, cruddy, fun, internet, toorcon, travel

Unix: via Ted Leung, Adam Rosi-Kessel’s Linux Tips page has some very useful tips, and this one’s great — to avoid
getting SSH connection resets, add the following to your .ssh/config:

    serveraliveinterval 300
    serveralivecountmax 10 

This will insure (jm: sic) that ssh will occasional send an ACK type request every 300 seconds so that the connection doesn’t die.

As a similar tip that took a while to track down — KDE users who’ve upgraded between KDE releases, will probably by now have seen lots of messages like this:

  nameofapp (KIconLoader): WARNING: Icon directory /usr/share/icons/hicolor/
  group 48x48/stock/text not valid.

It took a bit of googling about to find the cure:

• run in a shell (I cannot find this on any menu): kdebugdialog –fullmode
• select: debug area: 264 kdecore (KIconLoader)
• Change the Warning Output to ‘None’
• select: OK

Tags: connection, kde, kessel, kiconloader, linux, page, rosi, ssh, tips, unix, warning

So I had to edit a Word doc. Left it for a few minutes, the network connection died, so I tried to save it somewhere else.

Foolishly, I did this by hitting File->Exit, knowing (ha!) that I could save it on the way out. All well and good — until something in Word decided it required the old copy of the doc to save the new one — even though that was in memory, since I could scroll around it etc. (it wasn’t a very long doc).

So it refused to let me save until I restored the network connection. I couldn’t be bothered doing that, so I hit Cancel on that ‘please restore the net connection’ dialog, assuming it’d let me just cut and paste the text, which is all I wanted. Guess what it did? That’s right, it just exited, taking the unsaved doc with it. Argh.

I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, I’ll stick with trusty (and sane) Vim. At least it knows how to do an Edit File UI, even if it’s not quite as pretty (or featureful).

Tags: connection, doc, exit, file, foolishly, left, network, something, way, word

Bringing the net to Eden (Guardian). “In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps (…) But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They’re doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They’re doing it wirelessly, and they’re one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.”

Tags: border, bringing, connection, dales, effort, guardian, internet, net, village, yorkshire

A good article about Prague’s CZFree.net, via Cory. Hopefully it’ll provide some good ideas for the Irish-WAN folks:

The most promising way (of getting onto the internet) seems to be connecting to the backbone on a wholesale basis, which is what CZFree.net does through its backbone provider — TransgasNet, the telecoms arm of gas company Transgas. “The connection is already built, and it’s real broadband, guaranteed connection, so the issue of Internet connection is solved,” Janda said.

CZFree.net also has a unique approach to providing Internet connectivity to its members. Janda said that the idea is to give each user at least 32 kbps Internet connectivity (around two-thirds of the dial-up access speed) free, while users who want additional bandwidth will pay a certain fee. The fee is still undecided because the initiative is still in the formative phase, but it should be Kc 200 to Kc 300. The connection to the wireless network is free by default, although every user has to invest in the hardware necessary for exchanging data over the Wi-Fi.

Tags: article, backbone, connection, connectivity, cory, czfree, fee, internet, janda, user