http://jadickinson.co.uk random thoughts Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:53:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This feels over engineered but... I have always wanted to be able to put my Mac Pro to sleep using the power button on the Dell display I have connected to it. If you put the Mac to sleep and then turn off the display it will wake the mac up again ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/08/28/zzzzzz/ At IETF 72 in Dublin I gave a demonstration of DNS spoofing based on the attack on DNS described by Dan Kaminsky. I was able to successfully inject a fake DNS record in to the cache of a name server with a fixed port in a few seconds and sometimes ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/08/19/dns-spoofing/ The OS X calculator is one of my favorite applications and I use it every day for work (I find  the binary display in the programmer view especially useful). So I was very surprised when I noticed that it was giving me the wrong answer for log(0.5). I was getting log(0.5) = 0.301 when it ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/08/13/log05-and-the-os-x-calculator/ I have been trying to understand how the SSH server settings are controlled on Leopard. To turn sshd on you tick the remote login box on the sharing preference pane. You can then control which users are allowed to log in by selecting them in the "allow access for" section. But ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/07/22/sshd-is-on-os-x/ I am dictating this post using MacSpeech Dictate. It is amazing and much better than I expected at understanding what you're saying. In addition to dictation it also allows you to control your computer, with commands such as "open mail" and "put this computer to sleep". When you are controlling your ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/07/15/macspeech-dictate/ Why do some applications always generate such rubbish error messages. I am using eclipse for a project and it has just failed to start. The error on the screen was That file contains this: !SESSION 2008-07-08 08:34:44.307 ----------------------------------------------- eclipse.buildId=I20080617-2000 java.version=1.5.0_13 java.vendor=Apple Inc. BootLoader constants: OS=macosx, ARCH=x86, WS=carbon, NL=en_US Framework arguments: -keyring /Users/jad/.eclipse_keyring -showlocation Command-line arguments: -os ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/07/08/totally-useless-error-messages/ To exclude the annoying ._ files from tarballs built on OS X 10.5.x do this export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true Thanks to this thread for the answer. http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/05/16/so-i-dont-forget-again/ A recent upgrade of my server to Ubuntu 8.04 beta forced me to solve an issue I have been having with the integrated MCP55 ethernet and recent Linux kernels. At boot the network interface appears to come up and shows as up in ifconfg. However, it just will not work. ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/04/16/nvidia-mcp55-ethernet/ This weekend I thought I would have a go at throwing together a Rails front end to my mythtv database. I thought this would be easy but it seemed to highlight one difficulty after another with using Rails with a so called "legacy" application (one that already exists and not designed for ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/04/14/trouble-with-rails/ I was playing with styles in the K2 theme I am using. I came across blackboard which I think looks quite nice. Everything worked fine except the sidebar (to the right) that kept appearing at the bottom of the page (but still over to the right) below the last post. ... http://jadickinson.co.uk/2008/04/06/new-k2-style/