Archive for September 2007
Hard disk are about one of the more power hungery components of any computer system. This isn’t normally an issue when the hard disk is inside your computer where it can pillage as much electricity as your power supply can manage. But take a hard disk outside your computer and the story is different. Think along the lines of a USB external hard disk, with a power supply of course.
Now I use one of these as part of my backup system. Not perfect (what backup system is), but for the most part it works. That is until the electronics inside the enclosure decide not to provide enough power to the disk. Take the disk out of the enclosure, plug it into your computer and you can hear it spin up when the pc is turned on. You can even read data from it so you know it works.  Put it back into the enclosure and turn it on. What do you hear? A little ticking noise as the disk tries to power up and spin but doen’t have enough power.
Happened to me twice now. Two separate disk, two separate enclosures, two different power supplies. 
I distinctly remember reading about SCO v. Novel when I started my university placement in summer 2003. At the time I talked with a long term unix user and colleague who hadn’t seen the news. While I don’t remember what my colleague said I do remember that the general opinion from Linux users around the world was that SCO couldn’t win – and that it would damage SCO badly.
 Well it did damage SCO badly, especially when they lost the court case. But today comes the ultimate news: SCO files for US bandruptcy protection
Good bye SCO.
It’s my new budgie. I took the opportunity of being able to drive Mum’s car last weekend and went to the local pet store to select a budgie and bring him/her back in relative comfort – the alternative being on my (push) bike.
No name or pictures yet, I’m not even sure on the sex as he/she is only 6 weeks old.
Came across a tip last night that shows how to make all your web browsing about as private as reasonably possible when at work/school.
Most techies know how to hide your web browsing habits using ssh as a proxy server, but some might not realise that clues can still be found in your dns requests. Basically while the actual web traffic (http and https) go over the ssh/proxy tunnel, the dns requests to those web site are still made to your local dns server. It wouldn’t take that much effort to work out which servers you were visiting by the dns requests.
However there is a solution if you are using Firefox. Type about:config into the address bar then search for ‘socks_remote’. By default this value is set to false, double click to change to true. Now the dns requests that Firefox makes will also go over the ssh/proxy tunnel.
It worked for me last night with no real problems, but I’ve not tested any complicated web sites (read: web sites that pull from different servers and domains). I also have no idea if this setting should be turned to false when not using the ssh/proxy tunnel, I shouldn’t think so but I’ve not tested this.
