Little Brother

I just started reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother using one of his ebooks he has relesed under the Creative Commons license.
I have to admit that I had never heard of Cory of BoingBoing fame, or his books until I read about them via CelticBear.

As a ‘paranoid’ geeked I’m hooked on Little Brother, and if you like tech, geek and drama you should check it out as well.

Update: I went to buy a copy from a local bookstore, but it is not released in Australia yet. You can read the ebook or buy it from amazon.

Coral Content Distributed network

Have you ever had your website hit on a topic that people find conflicting? When the site gets viewed by the masses, you need to be prepared. If you have access to modify your web server .htaccess file then go and have a read of the Coral CDN Overview
For those interested in the techie bits, here is my .htaccess for news site flood protection, and to allow CDN to serve up all my site images – thus offloading from my puny connection the bandwidth burden for images.


RewriteEngine On
#prevent slashdot effect
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blogspot\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} reddit\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} news\.slashdot\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} slashdot\.org
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
#Rewrite images to allow CDN to serve them
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*\.(gif|png|jpe?g))$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1/$2 [R,L]
#Wordpress rewites
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]


mod_rewrite is your friend.

Storms and Power outages

We’ve had some stong winds in Melbourne yesterday. Up to 130 kph!
These winds were good enough to cause a 24 hour extended power outage in my area, meaning my provider had upstream outages and the internet connection was down. Add that to the errant html comment in my last post which made the whole page commented out.
All resolved now. Now what else do I have to debug that is technical?

Free stuff

You may have noticed that my last 3 posts were about free software.
I like free stuff. Everyone likes free stuff. Why talk about free stuff?

A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need. You either work with the (often times) limited and expensive tool, or you extend the functions using your own coding and software.

You can keep up with 90kts and his Open Source load testing efforts on his blog.

Everyone likes free stuff.

Disco burning software updated

Disco is one of the smartest looking and basic (yet powerful) CD/DVD burning solutions for your Mac. Yesterday it was updated with a maintenance release to V1.0.3, which includes quite a number of fixes for crashing that may have occurred. It has been almost 1 year since the last update so this is welcomed.

Incidentally, the developer is offering this software for USD$19.95 (and there is a very good USD->AUD exchange rate) for a limited time.
Disco has the following features:

• Disc spanning – if the total size of the files you’re burning is bigger than the disc, it tries to divide them amongst multiple discs
• Discography – it catalogues all the discs you have burnt for quick searching
• Multi-session
• And a pledge to support Blu-ray as soon as it is available on Macs

I’m not affiliated, just a happy Disco user (Thanks Mac-Heist!)