Today I started playing with “Automator”, a new program that came with OSX 10.4 (Tiger).

I am impressed, I was able to setup a task to take a screenshot of my workspace, resize it to a width of 800 Pixels, create a 128 pixel wide thumbnail, upload both into this site and then bin the local files.

The result is the “Screen” feature now on my sidebar

But the amazing thing is, it took just a few drag and drops of the commands, and then just hit “Play” for all these mundane tasks to be performed.

Very impressive, and I have just scratched the surface

Technorati Tags: OSX

Popularity: 14% [?]

I been messing for the past few days with a Wordpress plugin called jVisitors.

I changed the colors and style around, and have made it part of the template .. so looks quite good http://nullmind.com/stats/

I’m just starting to test it, but so far, looks definitely to be a must have for Wordpress blogs
Classical Guitar by Eric Clapton

Technorati Tags: blog plugins

Popularity: 14% [?]

If nothing else, I love the UK post delivery is fairly early in the morning.

This morning at 8:45 a knock on my door… it was the delivery service with my new Dell 2405FPW
My First reaction was surprise to how much wider the box itself was, compared to the 2005FPW box .. I rush in to open it up and set the monitor up, but we had an appointment for the girl’s doctors at 9:30, so it would have to wait till I come back from it before I could lay my eyes on it …

Technorati Tags: big boys toys

Read more…

Popularity: 19% [?]

I bought a set of 20″ Screens from dell a few months back, a pic of them can be seen [here]

But lately I’ve been taunted by the new 24″ 2405FPW .. that’s twenty four inches of pure TFT
So this week I gave in, since the XBOX 360 is to be release later this year, I decided just to sell my XBOX and use the cash to help get two 24″ instead.

I went back to the seller that had sold me my 20″’s and he gave me some good pricing .. so I placed the order for the first one yesterday, hopefully it will be here by the end of the week, and i’ll place the order for the remaining one next week once I get rid of the two 20″

My wife thinks I’m crazy, never being happy with what I got .. she is probably right .. but then again .. 3840*1200 vs 3360*1050 gives me 1,080,000 more pixels .. about 25% more real estate.

Amazingly enough I am looking forward more than anything to those extra 150 lines, as it means Adium will have more space to extend vertically, showing more of my 200+ contacts list.

Technorati Tags: big boys toys

Popularity: 13% [?]

Yesterday I had to go to London to install a new cluster for Pipex

My first surprise came the day before, when I was buying the train tickets .. on peak hour, they wanted 110£ ?? for a return ticket (Cardiff-London) .. so I had to leave an hour later (not peak) and it only costed 50£ ..

Only once before I had ride the tube, so when I got to London I was a bit apprehensive … but after looking at the tube’s map, it was quite clear .. and easy to navigate .. unfortunately, once I was out the tube and the guys picked me up on our way to the NOC .. the traffic in London proved to be the ultimate pain .. I made a mental note .. never to live around Webley central ..

Once we got to the Noc, I could finally get some work done, we had 13 servers (lucky number ?) to setup, and it was a breeze to do so .. well, it was until half way thru the NOC lost it’s connectivity .. it seemed they were under a massive DDOS … yep, some things never change.

XServer Bonanza

Once all the machines were up on the rack, it looked nice .. the picture doesn’t show the black dual Xeon (CP) which sits under the 2 DNS and 10 web-servers very well.

Technorati Tags: work

Popularity: 8% [?]

A while back I created some Avatars of my family on a Free Online Site for another site I got.

A friend today asked me about it, and I could not remember the site, after a search, I found it .. so here it here .. in case it might be needed again

http://abi-station.com/

Popularity: 9% [?]

To minimize the range of open ports for iptables to allow “Passive” or “PASV” connections

in /etc/proftpd insert:

PassivePorts 60150 60200

Put in under the “Port” entry

then in Iptables rules:

iptables -t filter -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 60150:60200 -j ACCEPT

Popularity: 43% [?]

What a great pair of gems I found last night for my BlackBerry.

When I am away form the office I use a BlackBerry 7100v [i] to receive my pages, e-mails, calls, etc. The device has proven to me to be indispensable .. but last weekend I found myself needing something it didn’t had .. SSH.

I was sitting on a Cafe when I got paged one of my server’s FTP was down, I knew that server’s FTP service sometimes requires a simple restart,, and I wished I had SSH right there and then, so I didn’t had to send a mail out too a tech to do it for me, another option was, if I had AIM/ICQ I could just ask one of the tech that works with me to do it,, and not need to wait for the email to reach somebody … it was not to be.

So I decided to look around,, see if this device could do SSH .. and boy,, does it ever ::)

I found Idokorro SSH [i] for the Blackberry .. costs only 99$ and it does both SSH 1 & 2 as well as Telnet,, it also has true ANSI and VT100 modes .. I installed the trial and after fiddling with the BlackBerry settings to Activate TCP/IP direct mode, it worked !!, (BTW,, for Vodafone UK TCP settings are: APN: Internet, User: web, Password: web).

The screenshot doesn’t make it justice .. the letters are very clear and legible (thanks to the superb display the 7100v has), but the camera blurred it out .. so I tried to SSH to a server and restart proftpd .. and it did just that

SSH on all it’s glory

Once I got that going, I decided to do some more digging,, what else is available for this thing I tough .. the answer .. Verichat [i].

Verichat allows me to have always on (thank you BlackBerry) AIM, yahoo, MSN and ICQ .. great feature to have on those long Train rides when you suddenly need to talk to somebody on one of those protocols.

Now I can chat on the Loo

I was surprised how nice it works, the chat is instantaneous like on a normal internet connection,, and it can run in the background, when somebody sends you a message, a warning pops up with a sound alert, so you can reply .. just great .. and at about 30$ per annum, a bargain

So now I am now looking for more goodies that can make my life easier on the Blackberry .. and to think it only costed me 50£

Popularity: 14% [?]

Today a friend of mine (Karl) asked me if I could draw him a doodle for a site called Insane Servers.

The doodle was to be something a bit cartoon/crazy looking

I haven’t draw in years .. but I sketched this in a few minutes ..

Popularity: 13% [?]

I found this nifty program called ecto, which is a Desktop Blogging Tool .. means I can use this App. on my Mac OSX desktop to compose and publish to my blog here.

Problem was, it didn’t support b2evolution .. after some googling, I found out this site .. seem Tor-Anre Gisvold was working on a XMLRPM library to b2 which allowed the use of ecto.

I contacted Tor and he sent me his lib, a little bug tweaking later and here I am composing with ecto

It sure makes composing a bog entry allot easier, it has spell checking on the fly, and it allows upload of images .. images that if too big will show as a clickable thumbnail .. very nice.

Popularity: 13% [?]