Cloudfront has a complex pricing structure. AWS charge you based on bandwidth used, number of requests, region serving the traffic, and the protocol used.
HTTPS requests are typically 1/3 more expensive than…
The Domain Name System has been around since the 1980s, and often doesn't get credit for how abundent and efficient it is. Most people know it as a way to translate website address such as craig.mayhew.io into an ip…
Open source has been the mainstream paradigm for some time now. Although I am a little late to the party with some of my code, I am continuing to open source as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This website is…
This is what happens when you ask developers to create a recruitment video: Join CRC from Client Relationship Consultancy on…
Ever needed to securely wipe a USB drive with minimum effort? How about doing it every day? This project hoped to simplify the process. All you need to do is plug in a usb drive and the process starts automatically. A…
In 2010 when Beth and I started building the reprap, we anticipated it would take us a month or two. We we're wrong. We had almost no tools, no work space and limited engineering knowledge. Sometimes because work was…
I needed an excuse to use spot instances on AWS to test them for some upcoming projects. I chose SETI and I have to say it was a nice simple experience. It took about 30 minutes to build the linux VM, set it up with…
Install nxserver
yum install nx freenx
cd /etc/nxserver
cp node.conf.sample node.conf
vi node.conf
Ensure that this line is not commented out:
ENABLE_PASSDB_AUTHENTICATION="1"
Setup NX Server
vi…
Developers have a responsibility to protect their users as much and as often as they can. I would like to live in a world where everyone leaves school with the know-how to protect their passwords with something such as…
I have replaced my ancient wordpress blog with a lean custom php framework. The blog entries, tags, categories and comments are now stored in mongodb rather than mysql. This has speed advantages in the case of a high…
First, upgrade rails. This will take some time, go and make a tea/coffee.
#gem install rails
#cd /var/www
#mv railsapp railsapp-old
#hg clone --updaterev 2.0-stable https://bitbucket.org/redmine/redmine-all…
#sudo apt-get install libftdi1 libftdi-dev libconfuse0 libconfuse-dev cmake
Download the latest source code from Telldus at: http://download.telldus.se/TellStick/Software/telldus-core/ you can use the wget command…
This details a real world example of the benefits of ZFS dedupe.My backup disk contains 2.4TB of 7z files. Each file is a website backup, a database backup or a 7z backup of an entire virtual machine / server. Many of…
Sitting down for our regular Sunday breakfast at Pitcher & Piano on the marina. I'm perusing the FT feeling more and more negative about the economy, but hopeful that interest rates will stay low so my mortgage gets…
Super Capacitors have been closing the gap with batteries over the last decade. Maxwell Institute currently dominates the Wikipedia article for super capacitors and has devices that store enough power to be a phone…
For this test I will be running FreeBSD in a VirtualBox virtual machine. These instructions will work regardless of this.Download the 64bit iso of FreeBSD. I am using version 9.1.Install FreeBSD form the livecd. I…
So I accidentally let one of my SSDs completely run out of space. My VM running on this disk then promptly crashed. I knew I had to repair it - but while I'm at it - I'm going to convert it to Oracles virtual…
This is a simple guide to setting up a PIR sensor with a raspberryPI to send a wake-on-lan packet to one or more computers. The idea being that as I walk into my office, everything boots up or comes out of hibernation…
I'm now running:
Virtualized Windows 7 64bit
I now work from a virtual machine. It is one of many workstations and servers now running on a single chunk of hardware. All main drives are 256GB ssds (VMs are…
I wondered how long one needs to wait before owning the current worlds computer processing power for under $1000.
A few studies have been done to measure the world's processing power. In 2007 the entire world's…
So I wanted to backup and archive my tweets. I threw together this quick and dirty script to retrieve the last 200 tweets of a twitter user (In this case, me).
Latest source code available here: …
I am a keen believer in law. It stops me being killed for my wallet while walking to the shop, keeps my house from being broken into while walking to said shop and my family safe.
So when a new law is passed - I do…
The BBC caught my eye with a recent article on the possibility of a UK spaceport. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18114439. This is a nice idea but I doubt we have any near term use for it.
What we really need…
Oh the fun... Hopefully this will help you with testing in IE.
Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575
Utilu IE…
I came across this recently, it had me in stiches and I have no idea if it's serious.
It's a patent application for walking through walls. There are several gems in here including "Upon reading his explanation, I…
Right click on my computer and then left click proeprties in the menu that appears.
Goto "Advanced" tab
Click "Environment Variables" button at the bottom
Click "New" under system variables.
Set variable name…
Recently upgraded one of my machines (all changed except the power supply, some drives and the case).
I've gone for the 2011 socket motherbaord P9-X79PRO due to it allowing for 8 DDR3 RAM slots and this incredible…
So I've unboxed my P9X79-PRO, screwed it in the case, fitted the cpu, heatsink and RAM. On the first boot it sits there with status code AF on the motherboard LEDs and the red LED solidly on to signify a problem with…
Absolutly awesome birthday. I've finally managed to upload the videos from my first flying lesson in an Ikarus C42. I took off at a local private airfold at 11:15 this morning (I was just a passenger for take off and…
A quick way to increase the responsiveness of firefox is to turn off the disk cache and turn on the memory cache. This will keep a cache of recently visited websites/images in the computers RAM instead of on the hard…
/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
I was thoroughly impressed with this regex. I'm not going to reiterate what other people have already explained. So instead I will place links to other blogs that explain this very cool regex…
This year has been a good haul, some awesome presents from B and family.
I'm a fan of difficult puzzles (ideally if there is a prize) to the point of sleep deprivation. Let me show you the Isis puzzle. It's…
Login to your vmware server.
Backup your virtual machine and all snapshots (The raw files on the physical disk - particularly the vmdk files as this will be what we are modifying)
Login to vmware gui.
Power off…
Researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo claim to have found a weakness in SSL encryption. It allows them to view anything that is encrypted with SSL and therefore supposedly secure. It affects TLS 1.0 and below which…
Are we finally in the age of truelly unlimited storage? It would be nice but I think the encryption issue will let it down.
Bitcasa think they can offer you unlimited storage for $10 per month. They achieve this…
Ubuntu versions 10.04 and 10.10 had various issues with the screen brightness on my HP EliteBook 8530w. It wasn't possible to adjust the brightness which was a real problem if the screen dimmed while power…
If you get the following error when your upgrading:
An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
Trying to install blacklisted version 'blcr-dkms_0.8.2-13'
To fix, simply search for the package…
In a nutshell, timthumb.php is used to resize images in many wordpress themes and it doesn't check images from remote sources to make sure they really are images and not a malicious script.
To fix you need to change…
Upgrading the turnkey vm of redmine can be painful:
Hopefully this will take away some of the pain :)
cd /var/www
mv railsapp railsappOLD
svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/1.0-stable railsapp
cp…
Would like to spread the word on this as email is taking up an increasing amount of my time (and server diskspace/bandwidth!).
I already follow most of these rules but will be making more effort with number…
Firefox 4 has added some eye candy that greys out the webpage when an alert appears. This looks nice but is very slow over a remote desktop connection as it forces the entire window to be sent again to the client.
To…
When I started developing in cuda I had a bit of a nightmare setting up the development environment. This youtube video saved the day. Many thanks to Yuber Núñez for taking the time to make…
The latest version of minecraft has been extremely unstable for me, so I've written this quick script to automatically check if minecraft is running - and reboot it within 30 seconds if it isn't. You will need php…
Generate a key:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 2048
Generate a certificate signing request (csr):
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:GB
State or…
I've installed the release candidate and had a play with the new media on a prim feature. At the moment it's only supported by the Second Life viewer. So, even though the OpenSim server supports it, none of the open…
After my last post about second life, it's time I got back on track about what I wanted from second life. For me, second life didn't allow me to design without limits. Mostly because it has an economy, an economy is…
For anyone that has accidentally clicked on an apllication, clicked "open with" and set it to open with another application by default. Here is how to fix it.
If you are lucky enough to still have a web browser open…
A very quick reference for anyone that wants to tunnel data via SSH. In this case I am using RDP over SSH.…
Native petaFLOPS Barrier
Date Crossed
1.0
September 16, 2007
2.0
early May 2008
3.0
August 20, 2008
4.0
September 28, 2008
5.0
February 18, 2009
Is growth in the processing…
TV and Radio signals from Earth have now traveled about 60 Light years. Luckily, even if the TV/Radio signals were intercepted by aliens, the signals would be very weak and jumbled together. It does give away our…