Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Category: Computer Tech

  • IT Support effectiveness

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It’s long been a bugbear of mine that many IT Support folk have difficulty in troubleshooting IT issues. This is an area where one would expect ( and require ) personnel to have a high degree of logic ( crucial to faultfinding procedures ) but it seems that many IT engineers are almost devoid of…

  • Squid changes in 3.2 and 3.3

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    Squid, the venerable proxy/caching server, has  recently undergone a few major changes. 3.2 SMP In 3.2, one of the biggest changes is SMP ( multi-cpu or -core ) support. This could potentially have a huge impact on the performance scalability of a machine that uses multiple CPUs or cores. Previously ( in <= 3.1 ),…

  • Aaron Swartz and freedom of information

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    Robby Pedrica
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    I had a passing knowledge of Aaron but did not know too much about him beyond his involvement in Reddit. It’s very sad nonetheless to hear of his passing this weekend past. At his own hand shows perhaps a despair he may have had as a result of his legal issues. Aaron’s story will ring…

  • Downtime

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    Robby Pedrica
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    My apologies to anyone trying to access my site over the last 3 days. I’ve had intermittent firewall issues which resulted in me replacing the unit completely this evening. Probably about time seeing as the old unit was a few years old. For those interested, it started with a 100% drive failure. That’s quite rare…

  • Medical Security and Open Source

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    Earlier this year, I read and listened ( through the linux.conf.au podcast ) to what can only be described as a seminal and thought provoking paper on medical software security by Karen Sandler, opening my eyes to an entire area of software security that one doesn’t normally think about. Karen’s talk at the 2012 Linux…

  • Slackware 14.0: An Interview

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    Wow, Slackware 14.0 is finally here! To say this has been a huge upgrade cycle is putting it mildly. Nearly a year and a half I think? And 5 release candidates. That’s not of course to say there’s anything wrong with that – 13.37 has been serving us just fine since April last year. A…

  • A little hackathon

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    I recently decided to move my Joomla installation from v1.5 to 2.5, a not-inconsiderable task considering that there is no direct upgrade from 1.5. It took some time to get the Jupgrade free tool working but finally I got all my content moved across. Of course, 1.5 templates are not compatible and so started a…

  • Email delivery ( and some other stuff about email )

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    Email is still the single most used communications tool on the internet and will probably remain so for some time to come. We send in the region of 300 Billion emails per day and for the most part, everything just works. On the face of it, email is simple: compose, address and send. But behind…

  • csync CLI usage and mirall tuning

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    This post provides ad collates information regarding  the client components which is not provided as yet by ownCloud. csync cli usage The ownCloud csync version uses the same syntax as the original csync but with a differing url syntax/module. 1. create a folder/repository through the web interface that you will sync to 2. choose a…

  • Apple’s got the green. Or not. Or maybe it has. Not quite sure.

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    So last week, Apple decided it was leaving the EPEAT registry, a listing of ‘green’ products that meet certain conditions and are classed into 3 groups depending on the level of coverage. Apple was one of the originators of the EPEAT registry and so it was surprising that they decided to leave. A number of…

  • Who is looking at who

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    Analysis of website usage is a huge part of understanding how to improve websites, how to give visitors a better surfing experience and how to maximise the time a visitor spends on a site ( potentially purchasing items while they are there ). SEO, or search engine optimisation, goes hand in hand with site analysis…

  • SA Radio getting even crazier

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    The saga between NetDynamix ( the provider of streaming services to BallzVisual Radio and 2OceansVibe Radio ) and Shawn Dewberry, the author of a scathing report into possible over-inflated statistics provided by NetDynamix, has continued through the last week. MyBroadband, a leading SA online tech news site, asked Chris Grant, NetDynamix CEO, for a number…

  • SA Radio gets a little crazy this week

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Earlier this week, Shaun Deswberry released a post slating the listener/viewer statistics that had been released by NetDynamix, the company that streams the Ballz Visual Radio and 2Oceansvibe Radio online stations.He backed this up with a lot of reasonably sounding technical detail so it was surprising that NetDynamix immediately went on the offensive and said…

  • Apples can get viruses

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    After years of deceiving its clients, Apple has finally admitted that its products can get viruses, something most of us have known all along. The Mac maker changed the wording on its “Why you’ll love a Mac” page from stating “It doesn’t get PC viruses” to “It’s built to be safe”. The same page also…

  • Slackware -current May 2012

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    For anyone having some weirdness in X/KDE after updating to the latest current ~ May, there are some extras you need to do. First for the latest release of Xorg, some packages have been split and as such, you will have new packages that have probably not been installed. Go through recent entries in Changelog…