I dislike most modern music (I’m 24 and I’m turning into my grandfather!) but a couple of songs from The Streets last album were good so I decided to give their second a chance; very wise choice. The songs themselves cover a pretty diverse area, from the upbeat backing of “Fit but you know it” to the down trodden lyrics of “Dry Your Eyes” the CD contains a number of little gems. Read on →

For one of the projects I’m working on I needed to see which type of ads Google would choose to bestow on certain pages. A co-worker pointed me at Try Before You Sell at the (unofficial) Google Weblog. While this is quite handy (and easy to use in a bookmarklet) I did find it a little cumbersome. So filled with the drive of an early morning and bacon sandwiches I decided to put together a right click extension for IE. Read on →

Author: Jonathan Hassell ISBN: 0596003226 Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates RADIUS (the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) isn’t getting any younger or popular, it’s a specialised technology that very few people seem to discuss and even fewer write books about. Unfortunately the ones we do have, such as this, don’t exactly encourage it’s adoption. The book starts with a solid overview of the AAA process/framework, AAA in this context being Authentication, Authorisation and Access Control. Read on →

In my quest to learn how RADIUS works and the correct way of running my own server I picked up both the O’Reilly RADIUS book and GNU RADIUS, A Reference Manual. Neither of which are exactly ground breaking books. Now I’ve almost finished the O’Reilly book I thought it would be a good time to get my hands dirty and have a play, so I looked at XT RADIUS; which hasn’t been updated since very early in 2002. Read on →

I read a lot of books, some of them are inspiring, entertaining and relevant. Some are dull, overly terse and yet still useful; The O’Reilly Radius book is more akin to bad dental surgery. What really annoys me is that I can’t think of a better way of presenting such as dry topic, the book provides detailed coverage that is just as easy to read and understand (and as fascinating) as the original RFC version. Read on →

If you are not already subscribed then it may well be worth subscribing to the CPAN RSS feed. It’s very easy to let little gems like Test::URI slip through. The downside of course is that I am slowly running out of things I can’t test!

GLLUG, the Greater London Linux User Group, had a user meeting yesterday. It had about twenty people turn up. While this may not seem too bad this is a group that has peaked at 120 people at a single meeting and had a thriving mailing list. After the three main talks the GLLUG admin team, and a few bystanders (including me), had a chat about what we can do in the future to try and reverse the trend of diminishing numbers. Read on →

I’ve added a new script to the Unixdaemon Miniprojects Page. This short chunk of shell and awk, imaginatively named Find Duplicate Filenames, does exactly what you’d expect. It scans the mounted file systems and prints a list of files and the number of times each name (with the path part stripped) was found.

As many of my incredibly intelligent, talented and loyal readers will already know the European Union and the asshats lobbying for it are trying to get Patents bought in. Apparently the economy and IT industry haven’t had enough problems recently so they’d like to add a new, all-encompassing one. As you may gather I’m not a huge fan of patents and I’d hate to see Europe adopt them, something which has come way too close to happening a number of times; but now we have Poland! Read on →

It never fails to surprise me how I can use a program almost every day and yet still stumble on to previously undiscovered options. Yesterday I discovered the ‘–reference=file’ option while reading the manpage for chmod. When used this option takes the current permissions of the specified file and applies them to the other files specified on the command line. It’s also accepted by chgrp and chown. Note: If you’re going to use this in production please consider the potential race condition. Read on →