Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’ve been using 1000BT switches here for a year or more now, but just today have I run across the need to make a crossover cable. Many 1000BT (*gigabit ethernet) devices support “auto-mdix” which basically means a direct interconnect no longer needs a crossover cable. However, some devices don’t do this and it looks as though the crossover style is a bit different than that of the older 10/100 cables. (Since all 4 pairs are used, all four pairs have to be reversed…)

Anyway, here is the page I used as a model.

Essentially one end of the cable is white-orange/orange white-green/blue white-blue/green white-brown/brown and the other end is white-green/green white-orange/white-brown brown/orange blue/white-blue (I haven’t tested this yet – will update when that’s done.) Although – that seems to be backed up by this wikipedia page.

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Php list is a great mailing list manage package. But, from time to time you already have a list of users and want to import without requiring everyone to go through phplists web based signup process.

So… this document can give you a walkthrough of how to do it.

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I usually try to avoid talking about politics here really because I don’t want this to be a political blog. I am going to make an exception right now to talk about a concept. I’m going to try to stay out of the party/candidate discussion, but just want to make a question on this idea. I’ve been bothered though the last few weeks about some things I’ve heard said that no one, NO one I’m hearing on EITHER side disputing. It bothers me because I think it runs contrary to just WHAT we should be voting for and what elections are about. Now, I’m trying to make this discussion not about one candidate or the other, but to the concept behind this argument.

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The newest release in the Ubuntu Linux series has escaped into the wild today. If you recall the last Ubuntu release was a long term support release and this one is intended to be a bit more “edgy” or in this case “intrepid”. Download from Ubuntu, or read a review from linux format. It has, of course, the newest releases of the major desktop packages as well as improved networking support. They are trying to focus on making mobile connectivity even better in this release. There is new artwork as well. There is a new mobile USB install option which is a download image that can be written to a USB drive for installing on the netbook class of machines. Judging from Linux Format’s review it’s looking like a solid release.

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This is for Mac or Linux. Their servers are VERY busy right now as you might imagine. But, if you’ve always wondered about crossover wine, see if you can get a copy today at Codeweavers main site. I was redirected to their DOWN page which is a lean page with the download links and a place to sign up for a license key. The license key you can register by the end of the month. Right now their server is crying since they’ve been dugg and slashdot’ted at the same time, but I’m sure it will be possible to slip in sometime today for a free copy of their polished product.

On a side note, I’ve been a paying crossover license owner for some time although on my current main laptop I’ve been using stock wine with VERY good results. If you look “up the food chain” though. Many of the good results we get in the free stock wine is thanks to the work at codeweavers. So…. in spite of todays free offer, they deserve the communities support if you believe that a working Windows compatibility layer is important to the future of operating systems such as Linux.

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We’re back up after a very strange outage. The 500 internal server error was because our .htaccess file was sideways.

What I mean by sideways is that part of a line had been truncated which led to an incorrect htaccess rule and all sorts of error pages thrown up.

Interestingly the only thing happening prior to the first errors was a page edit here in WordPress. I updated my dd-wrt page last night right before the errors started getting tossed up. Is it possible that wordpress 2.6.3 stomped on my htaccess??? Don’t know, but we’re back up now.

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I’ve just discovered hackaday.com. For those of you interested in electronics, computers, engineering/etc….. you’ll probably find something interesting to read over there. Each day they will publish a hack from around the web, once a week though they present a video how to. Their most recent video how to at the time of this writing was a webserver the size of a business card.

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I’ve run across this a few places, where a webmaster actually BEGS users NOT to use a firefox plugin or addon when visiting their site. So, I thought it might be interesting to compile a list of those plugins that will have webmasters really disliking you, hating you, banning your ip because of abuse and otherwise marking you off their Christmas Card list.

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Yesterday news broke of an out of cycle security patch for Windows. The bulletin is available from Microsoft. Apparently the vulnerability was in the Windows Server service (XP, 2003, 2000, 2008, Vista ALL affected though regardless of server/workstation/client/desktop/etc…). The RPC handling (remote procedure call) is the achilles heel this time around. It sounds as though as many as 100 instances of this flaw being exploited had been seen in the wild, but use was increasing which prompted the out of cycle release. This is the kind of vulnerability that could be exploited by a worm that could give rise to a worm reminiscent of the Blaster Worm. (Worms are self-replicating viruses that spread over networks without user intervention.)

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I just ran across this good how-to on replacing ads using a proxy server (in this case safesquid). A proxy server is a piece of software that requests web pages for other machines and then passes the pages along to the other computers. When the server requests a page it’s possible to make alterations and this is exactly what the how to details. In this case they construct a rule to identify ad blocks in the page (by the text that they use to call the ad from the adserver). After the block is identified it’s replaced with a custom bit of html.

Good how-to and I wanted to make note of it for future reference.

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