Sigurd Høgsbro

I recently found XMing, a free X server for Windows, providing a useful alternative to VNC for accessing remote Ubuntu desktops. Instructions here.

On occasion I access (Ubuntu) Linux servers from Windows using Putty and WinSCP. In order to preserve UTF-8 filenames, some snakeoil is required. (more…)

scponly provides a mechanism to enable secure file-access to a server, with marked improvement over FTP.

scponly can be setup in a) normal mode, whereby the user can see the whole of the file-system of the server, or b) in chroot’ed mode, whereby the user only sees the files the server administrator has granted access to. The latter is what I wanted, but there are a few extra steps required for 64-bit kernel servers. (more…)

Until Apple release the SDK for the iPhone, we are relegated to creating iPhone aware web-apps. I was inspired by the Facebook and Google optimised pages for the iPhone to investigate the details of the Safari browser.

Here are some resources to help you create Safari-savvy pages:

• Web Page Development: Best Practices
• ADC iPhone Dev Center
• ADC Internet & Web: Safari

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As my iPhone sports Safari, I’ve been investigating this browser with more gusto than before. Safari has recently become available for Windows!

I just had a BSoD on my laptop running Vista. It rebooted, and when I selected the option for it to tell me why. It ‘fessed up to a BlueScreen crash. I took the recommended solution to install a service pack, selected all available updates and let it reboot - and now my display driver won’t load so I get 1024×768 instead of 1280×800!

Following a bit more exploration, it seems the ATI PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver grabbed some resources that the Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family Driver wanted. I rolled back the ATI driver, and now my display works again.

PS. The exercise did something nasty to the Aero Glass theme, but I’m not all that bothered about that.

PPS. I subsequently got a ‘Superfetch has stopped working’ error. Jeez, Vista is a pile of …

I’m very pleased to find Google have added IMAP support to Gmail and their hosted email services. At long last I can process my email whilst offline, and keep Gmail in sync manually. And it’s all still free!

Read Google’s FAQ on IMAP.

I spotted on Ubuntu’s news-section that Dell finally have commenced shipping products (1 desktop, 1 notebook) with Ubuntu. Available in UK, Germany and France. Excellent!

Stumbled across this Google talk, nicely illustrating the additional information that can be obtained about data if you design your platforms in a way that engages the users to enjoy a challenge. A virtual hat tip to Luis von Ahn.

In applying the latest Feisty Fawn updates to one of my laptops I ran into a problem with the bootup hanging shortly after starting. The usual snakeoil of ‘acpi=off pci=noacpi’ appended to the boot command line failed to make any difference.

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