DavidMcGettigan.com
Varying Levels Of Amusement

I have been invited to take part in the bata testing of VMware workstation. But the link allows anyone to sign up and get a nice copy of VMware workstation to play with. I was watching a few vids online the other day and it looks like its got a few nice features, you can record an opperating system and then play it back later with the option of dropping back into the os at any time to debug.

The sign up page is: http://www.vmware.com/community/beta/ws65b/index.php. They will send you a key for both windows and linux which I though was nice.

Digiweb are offering all 3rd level students in Ireland a free domain name and hosting package for one year. They are not very strict on the signup process, so if there are any people out there with student e-mail addresses that still work why not sign up and see what happens. 

Its got all the mod cons such as:

The address is: http://www.digiweb.ie/studentoffer/

The latest browser to hit the interweb. Apparently this was not set to go live until later in the week, but someone in the newsroom hit send on the wrong email. I’m just installing it now to atcually go and have a look to see if its any different from the rest or the browsers on the market. You can download it here: Google Chrome

The user agent of this new browser is:

AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 I just took that from my apache logs a second ago.

At a first glance it does not seem to be doing anything ground breaking. Flash worked out of the box, but maybe thats cos I have it installed for IE and Firefox.

Handy one liner to get some usefull stats from apache, the following will list each ip once with the number of times they have visited today:

cat access.log | grep $(date ‘+%d/%b/%Y’) |  cut -f1 -d’ ‘ | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n -r

Also if you want to view the current number of unique visitors today run the following:

cat access.log | grep $(date ‘+%d/%b/%Y’) |  cut -f1 -d’ ‘ | sort -n | uniq -c | wc -l

Note: If you are copying and pasteing this code directly into a shell the quotes get messed up and it does not run. Just change them back to ‘ ‘. If anyone knows why this is happening let me know.

I installed openSUSE last week, I wanted to see how it would compare to the likes of Ubuntu and Fedora. I have not really been using it much but I have found one nice trick that might make it a little bit more user friendly for novice linux users. What I wanted to do was install a program from an RPM, this is usually a simple matter of just clicking the icon, or running it from a command line, but in this case there were several depandancys that had to be delt with.

By default openSUSE will not download and install the required packages for required depandancys so I had to do the following workaround:

1. Download the RPM to your computer
2. Make a folder called “RPM Installers” and put the RPM into it
3. Go to YaST and click on “Software Repositories”
4. Add the folder “RPM Installers” to the list of repositories - Click Finish
5. Click “Software Managment” and do a search for the RPM that you have in the folder
6. Install the package and all the depandancys will be handled by YaST

Don’t forget that nominations for the Web Awards close at 11.59pm on Friday the 29th of August! They are still at the nomination stages, so if you know a really cool site you can nominate it for the second round of the awards.

Cacti (Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.)

Synergy (Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems.)

Dining Cryptographers (In cryptography, the Dining Cryptographers problem studies how to perform a secure multi-party computation of the boolean-OR function. David Chaum first proposed this problem in 1988, and used it as an illustrative example to show it was possible to send anonymous messages with unconditional sender and recipient untraceability.)

USB Switchblade (The primary purpose of this tool is to silently recover information from Windows systems, such as password hashes, LSA secrets, IP information as well as browser history and autofill information as well as create a backdoor to the target system for later access.)

Greenshot (Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity. Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second. Apply text and shapes to the screenshot. Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot. Supports several image formats. This is now a must have tool for me. 10 / 10)

There are 29 pictures on the following site from the south Ossetia confilct: South Ossetia Confilct