DNS Trouble

I was alerted by the nice people at SiteUptime that my website had stopped working at about 7:30am this morning. I had planned to go jogging with my dad and had friends coming over for lunch. I just had time to get on to putty to see if I could see what was going on. Lighttpd wouldn't start -- complaining that it couldn't resolve the domain name. A few ping attempts later it was clear that nothing would resolve. I didn't have time to figure out what had happened, but the support at RimuHosting is really superb. I sent them a support ticket and within 30 minutes their techie had updated my /etc/resolve.conf with their newest DNS cache servers and everything was working again. I can't recommend RimuHosting highly enough! They have a nice script to fix the resolv.conf in case you were wondering :-)

First Geocache Published

In a very proud family moment we've just published our first ever Geocache. You can find it on the Geocaching web site with the ID GX1YXPO. The first two people have already found it. The first one got to it at 0745 the morning after the listing went live. A Monday too!

How to Copy URL from Symbian Web Browser

I've finally figured out how to cut'n'paste from the standard Symbian Web Browser on my E71 phone. On the E61, my previous phone, I installed the Opera browser which gave me easy access to copy the current URL. I've not bothered to install Opera on the new phone. The Symbian browser lets you look at the current page URL using the Tools >> Page Info setting but has no way of copying. The solution I found was to bookmark the page that I wanted the URL of and then edit the bookmark. From the edit bookmark page a simple CTRL-A and CTRL-C did the trick.

Maths Lament and Dice Games

One of the home ed lists I'm on pointed me at this wonderful maths essay: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf It is the sort of thing that makes you (ok, makes *me*) yearn to be a mathematitican. A passage half-way through got me thinking: "SIMPLICIO: Then what should we do with young children in math class? SALVIATI: Play games! Teach them Chess and Go, Hex and Backgammon, Sprouts and Nim, whatever. Make up a game. Do puzzles. Expose them to situations where deductive reasoning is necessary. Don’t worry about notation and technique, help them to become active and creative mathematical thinkers." That struck a chord. Our eldest is now seven and although very good at mental addition and subtraction, we're struggling to get him interested in multiplications or any writing. (I know I shouldn't worry, but that's easier said than done.) Then I had an idea. He loves cricket, could I make up a game that would need multiplication and involved cricket. What I came up with was to throw three six-sided die and multiply the resulting numbers to get each batsman's score. E.g {2, 4, 3} results in a score of 24. You then of course need to add up the scores to get the team result. This game in hand #1 son wrote down all of the names of the English and Australian cricket teams (I helped with spelling) and did lots of multiplication. Past experience says this game will stick for a week or two then we'll be on to the next thing. Has anyone got any pointers to other games that need multiplication as part of the game play? Any suggestions for other simple dice-based sports simulations?

E71 New Phone and Ovi

I have a new nokia E71 for my birthday from my ever-loving wife and it is great. Will post more later about things I'm going to put on it. For now I'm signing up for 'Ovi' from nokia, http://www.ovi.com. I wanted something to sync up file from my PC and phone. I've signed up to a phone account and got some desktop software installed on the PC. I'll try it out over the next couple of days and report back here on how I get on.

apt gpg Key Problem

I run a few Debian machines and I use aptitude on all of them to keep the packages up to date. Recently on one machine only I've been getting gpg key errors. In fact it is the server that I have with Rimu Hosting (great guys) that suddenly started presenting the error:

W: GPG error: http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 9AA38DCD55BE302B W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs: 9AA38DCD55BE302B

To list the keys that I know about I run 'apt-key list':

/etc/apt/trusted.gpg -------------------- pub 1024D/2D230C5F 2006-01-03 [expired: 2007-02-07] uid Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006) pub 1024D/6070D3A1 2006-11-20 [expires: 2009-07-01] uid Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) pub 1024D/ADB11277 2006-09-17 uid Etch Stable Release Key pub 1024D/BBE55AB3 2007-03-31 [expires: 2010-03-30] uid Debian-Volatile Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) sub 2048g/36CA98F3 2007-03-31 [expires: 2010-03-30]

Like the program says, I'm missing a key. I tried the keyserver to import the key: sudo gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key 55BE302B ...and then export that key into apt's key list: sudo gpg -a --export 55BE302B | sudo apt-key add - That done, I run aptitude and I can now happily install my security updates.

Notes from Linux Magazine - May 2009

• Graphics design book using FLOSS tools available from http://en.flossmanuals.net
• Hyperic HQ looks an interesting tool for enterprise monitoring.
• 'Beginning Portable Shell Scripting' from Apress looks like a good book.
• WebHTB is a tool to manage network bandwidth allocation, although it does seem to need kernel modules compiled in first.
• agedu is a handy tool for finding old files in a file system
• Here's a list of fuzzing tools:<
  • mangleme
  • browser fuzzer 2
  • fzem
  • fsfuzzer
  • FileP
  • ProxyFuzz
  • Peach Fuzzing Platform
  • GPF
  • SPIKE
  • QueFuzz
• Fsniper processes new and updated files for you
• Chandler is interesting again. Might be the way to put the calendar, email and contact lists for the family together. Might need to run a Chandler Hub.
• Security web sites to take a look at
  • InvisibleThings
  • Matasano
  • The Fake Name Generator
  • The Milw0rm exploit database
• Take a look at the digital subscription options at http://www.linux-magazine.com/DigiSub
• Linux Magazine is published from Manchester. Add that to the list of reasons for civic pride.