Hewlett Packard seem to have an internal shipping and packaging manual which enforces excess, for crying out loud we don’t want our precious consignments broken so we give them plenty of impact absorbing cardboard crumple zones. The Register has been documenting HP’s packaging excess and here are their examples of cardboard gluttony.
Archive for November, 2008
The Art of Shipping, HP Style
Sunday, November 30th, 2008New Home
Sunday, November 30th, 2008My blog has a new home on a VPS hosted by Host Europe shared between me and a friend. It has a nice lean installation of Debian Lenny, running a variety of low profile or tuned applications to provide various services. We also have another 50MiB of free memory to play with.
X2X
Monday, November 17th, 2008X2X is this awesome little utility I found which allows you to control an X session on a remote computer with the keyboard and mouse on your local computer, by remote computer I for example mean the laptop sat beside you as it relies on you being able to see the output of the remote computers monitor. The Ubuntu Community Documentation has a quick how to on using this handy tool.
Punching holes in Firewalls
Sunday, November 16th, 2008It is a lot easier than you think.
OpenSSH, which can only be described as the best utility of all time, is quite a versatile tool one feature people use frequently is port forwarding. This allows you to open a port on your computer that forwards the data over the SSH connection to the destination you specify, very useful when needing access to the an intranet web server when you don’t have a proper VPN set up for example. However, SSH can also do this in reverse! It opens a listening port up on the remote machine which then relays data to the destination you specify. For example you can SSH into a remote host and get SSH to open a port on that host which relays data back to the SSH port on the machine you are connection from, thereby allowing SSH access to a machine where it would normally be impossible.
A practical example:
chris@ktulu:~$ ssh sandman.cs278.org -R 2222:localhost:22
This connects to the server sandman.cs278.org and opens port 2222 which forwards traffic to localhost:22 (localhost is the machine I am connecting from). Once logged into the server I can do this:
chris@sandman:~$ ssh localhost -p 2222
Which opens a connection back to the remote machine.
Out of Office Road Sign
Saturday, November 1st, 2008Discovered this little gem on BBC News.
The Welsh translation reads:
I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.
