Category Archives: Tips

Setting up a Dynalink RTA1335 in half-bridge mode

Posted on July 10, 2008 by segfault

Ben has a great tutorial on setting up a Dynalink RTA1320 or RTA1335 in half bridge mode so that you can have a world routable IP on a separate router (ie, a Linksys WRT54G). I have pretty much the same … Continue reading →

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Major DNS vulnerability discovered

Posted on July 10, 2008 by segfault

Dan Kaminsky recently discovered a vulnerability in the DNS protocol that could lead to DNS cache poisoning attacks. When a DNS lookup is made, the DNS server returns a random query id between 1 and 65,000. What Dan found is … Continue reading →

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Using mod_deflate to save bandwidth and traffic charges

Posted on April 30, 2008 by segfault

If you’re running a web server using Apache 2.x and Ubuntu or Debian, you can save a lot of bandwidth by turning on mod_deflate. So just how does it work and how much data can you actually save? To use … Continue reading →

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Why query optimisation is important

Posted on April 14, 2008 by segfault

I was modifying one of my queries for Electorate Finder this morning and came across a good example of why query optimisation and query design is important, especially on large datasets. I had a query like the following: SELECT name, … Continue reading →

Posted in GIS, PostgreSQL, Tips | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Getting Subversion to ignore .pyc files

Posted on April 9, 2008 by segfault

I’ve been playing around with Django for the last couple of days for a project that I’ve had in mind for a little while. So far its been going quite well and I thought I had better import the project … Continue reading →

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Debugging Exim with a fake SMTP session

Posted on July 31, 2007 by segfault

When you’re modifying your Exim configuration, for example setting up spam filtering, virus scanning or DNS blacklisting, it’s common practice to connect to Exim over telnet to see whether your new configuration works as expected. While this works well, you … Continue reading →

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Choosing a good DNS blacklist

Posted on July 31, 2007 by segfault

SANS has a good article on choosing a DNS blacklist. It’s very important that you pick your blacklists carefully. I’ve seen some business Exchange servers hosted on DSL lines that use some fairly restrictive DNS blacklists with the result being … Continue reading →

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Multiple identities in Apple Mail.app

Posted on June 23, 2007 by segfault

After trying to figure out how to set up multiple identities using only one account in Apple Mail.app and failing, I found this tip that explains how to do it.

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Neat charts for web applications

Posted on June 21, 2007 by segfault

I’ve been writing a web application recently and wanted to add some graphs to represent my data. I started by using PEAR::Image_Graph but wasn’t happy with the look of the graph. Then I came across amCharts. They are really spiffy … Continue reading →

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Removing red-eye with The GIMP

Posted on May 25, 2007 by segfault

I just came across a tutorial about how to remove red-eye from photos using The GIMP. I tried it on a photo that I had and it worked very well!

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