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PyAIMt

Last week I found myself with the need to communicate with some people via AIM. I’d never bothered with that particular protocol before but being a Linux enthusiast I detected the opportunity for a bit of geekery…
All my IM needs are taken care of by jabberd running on substance. I can communicate directly with the [...]

2007 02 14 Linux Comments (0)

Fun with port forwarding

I’ve been having great fun with tunneling connections through SSH lately and today it dawned on me that I could close another hole in my firewall by connecting to my Jabber server via a tunnel. In the past, when I’ve been working remotely, I’ve made changes to my firewall by connecting to my public-facing machine; [...]

2007 02 02 Linux
Screenshot
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Site update

Over the past bunch of days I’ve been back into web-development land and seeing as I was staring at code for prolonged periods I decided I might aswell “enhance” this site a bit too.
I started with tweaking the frontpage: I rearranged things a bit and instead of displaying my latest blog entry in its entirety [...]

2007 01 30 Meta Comments (4)

Security Enhancements for Dummies

I read a thread over on linuxquestions.org recently about server “hardening” and got thinking about my own security measures and the lack there of. Here’s an example of the content of /var/log/auth on the machine this site is hosted on:
Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: Invalid user test from 203.242.160.193
Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: error: [...]

2007 01 25 Linux
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Ninan 1.0.5 on Slackware 11.0

A couple of weekends ago I decided to reconstruct the system I use for downloading from Usenet: I had been using a Debian machine which I had setup back when I was still trying to get into using Linux on my desktop and as such it was massively over-powered for the task at hand, namely, [...]

2007 01 18 Linux Comments (1)

Friday Funk

I got into the office this morning and went through my usual routine; I’d put in a good workout and the weekend is fast approaching: life seemed good. I was logged on to my workstation, launched Outlook (I know, I know) and attempted to connect to substance via Jabber and SSH. My heart fell.
That Slackware [...]

2006 12 15 Linux
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XP on Kubuntu via VMware via VNC

I finally got around to doing something today that I had been meaning to do since I got Kubuntu installed on my home desktop, namely, setting up a virtual machine running Windows XP so I can perform DVD encoding/editing/authoring. I’m a relative novice when it comes to these techniques and I haven’t put enough effort [...]

2006 10 26 Linux
Screenshot
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Firefox 2

I’ve just installed Firefox 2 on my XP workstation at the office, a week after my colleague Kevin installed IE7.
The installation went smoothly and my extensions copied across ok and eventually got updated, but the theme I had been using wasn’t compatible, a new version of it wasn’t found by the add-ons manager and I [...]

2006 10 25 Screenshot Comments (2)

First Post From Kubuntu

I finally installed Kubuntu on my desktop machine at home at the weekend and I must say I am impressed so far. From my first experience with Red Hat 5.x in early 1999 (I’m guessing the version number from the date, I bought my first Linux book just before the exams of the first semester [...]

2006 09 13 Linux Comments (1)

Here Lies Belfast

I was out and about with my sponsor on Saturday and we were walking up Stranmillis Ave and Friars Bush happened to be open for tours. My good friend Nicky K lives in one of the gate-keeper’s cottage, but in all my time living in Belfast I don’t think I’ve seen the place open to [...]

2006 09 12 Linux
Me
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