When I installed FreeBSD onto my server it setup an IPv6 address, funky I thought although I'm never going to use it. Anyway my Mac is also built on BSD and it too has an IPv6 address. So I tried a normal ping but it only supports IPv4 so I tried typing ping6 and it worked! Cool!
So anyway I now have two computers talking to each other with IPv6.
electra:~ michaeldale$ ping6 -I en1 fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) fe80::211:24ff:fe2a:f1b3 --> fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=0 hlim=64 time=1.365 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=1 hlim=64 time=1.338 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=2 hlim=64 time=1.382 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=3 hlim=64 time=2.111 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=4 hlim=64 time=1.433 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=5 hlim=64 time=1.379 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=6 hlim=64 time=1.346 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=7 hlim=64 time=1.354 ms
--- fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b ping6 statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 1.338/1.463/2.111 ms
Also that connection is running over my wireless, pretty fast I thought. :)
The wordpress software is growing. Today on photomatt's site, the lead developer of Wordpress, he announced bbPress, a simple web standards focused forum script.
The software is currently running the Wordpress support forum found here: http://www.wordpress.org/support/
It seems very fast and anyone looking to integrate a forum with their wordpress site should look at this.
Matt said this about the software
[quote]bbPress is not and will not be right for everyone. There are open source traditional forum packages, like PunBB, that get a lot of things right and push the envelope in interesting ways, so that’s covered. bbPress is not going to have avatars, or put post counts next to your name, or give every user 80 options about how they want their dates formatted, and for some people (maybe most people) that just won’t work. However even if WordPress.org is the only site that ever runs this software, it’ll be totally worth it just to get the forum technology growing again and create a richer support experience for the WP community.[/quote]
I'll be watching this software. It might be useful for future projects.
Reminder to self. Check out m0n0 wall (http://m0n0.ch/wall/), like SmoothWall but with more features. Might be good. Has had some development lately.
Today after the movies, Matthew and Stuart came back to my place. We decided to go searching for wireless networks in the area with my new ibook. Personally I didn’t think we’d find any, but I was interested to see.
I downloaded a program called Macstumbler, like netstumbler but for mac. I like it because it continuously searches for wireless networks.
Anyway at the bottom of my street up popped a wireless network with the SSID ‘workgroup’ and no encryption turned on. Interesting. So I joined the network. I got an ip address of 192.168.0.3. So I tried typing google into my browser, didn’t work. I went to the address 192.168.0.1 and up popped a netgear password logging page. Anyway I tried the username: admin and the password: password. It worked. Scary. I had access to their wireless router. Anyway I disconnected and we continued walking.
During that time we found about 25 wireless access points. About 10 of which had no encryption, 5 of which the internet worked on (just tested doing a ping to ii.net and going to google.com), and 2 which the access point password was not changed. Most of the access points we found were running on netgear stuff.
I was really surprised to find so many networks and ones where there was no encryption.
We couldn’t pin point the houses where the wireless was coming from although I know the general idea.
I’m going to type up a thing about wireless security and do a letter box drop in the area. It was really scary!!
Anyway it was fun, we didn’t download anything just checked to see if google.com worked. Although now I know where to check my email if iinet goes down :p
Interesting Stuff.
Well I got my mac yesterday, about a week before I was expecting it so it was in time for Christmas, excellent. This is the first mac I have owned so it has been a bit of a learning experience.
As I’ve said many times before I decided to purchase an ibook 12”. I wanted a small laptop that I could move around without any problems. Everyone I talked to said that a 12” laptop would be the best thing to do.
I didn’t get a powerbook for a few reasons. Firstly a new model is thought to be out in the next few months and most people don’t recommend you get the current model as it is getting a bit old. Although it is still great. Secondly the ibook is a lot cheaper, about $600. And finally the battery life is much better in the ibook (5.5hours vs 3.5).
This model ibook has only been out for about a month here in Australia too, so it is nice and new.
The ibook comes standard with 256mb ram but everyone said that OS X really needed at least 512, I got a good deal on ram and added an extra 512mb (now 768) so that is nice.
Anyway I booted up the ibook for the first time and was greeted with a setup wizard. All pretty standard stuff, although it was a bit longer than a normal Windows one. Here I setup my user account and Wireless internet connection. Straight away the wireless connection worked, that was a good sign.
Anyway it logged in (very quickly might I add) and told me about some software updates for the OS and the Wireless. So I downloaded 150mb of patches. Then I did something wrong and cancelled the whole thing! damn. Anyway I redid the download with no problems. So I am now running OS X 1.3.7.
The first thing to check out was internet access. The mac comes with Safari as its standard browser. It has tabs and seems to work nicely. Although it uses KHTML and not Gecko as its rendering engine. It doesn’t make stuff look as good as Firefox although it is still a nice browser (I’ll talk about IE in a sec).
So off to download Firefox. I downloaded some .bin file and opened it. The file mounted itself as a hard drive and I could run firefox straight away, no install or anything. Odd. It seemed to work fine but I wanted to INSTALL it! So you just end up dragging the firefox icon out of the .bin file to your computer. Some programs do come with an installer, others don’t. I’m still getting used to that.
Now for IE. The mac came with IE 5.2 installed. Now when I think of IE 5 (or any version) I think yuck. But no! IE on the mac is good. It renders stuff almost the same as Firefox, holy crap! IE on mac is better than IE on Windows! DAMN. But there is no tabs so back to Safari and Firefox.
The funny thing I’m running both Safari and Firefox at the same time, I just switch between the two. Unlike windows changing between apps doesn’t really feel like changing between apps, its just like changing to a different IE window or something. Safari and Firefox just seem to go together. So I’m using both.
And now for the seriously cool OS X feature. Expose!! Wow. I love the F9 button! It brings up all your application windows in a minimised size and you can select a program or window just by clicking on it. So much better than alt+tab (although the mac has that too, apple+tab). F11 is like the show desktop button in the quickstart menu on windows. F10 just shows the windows from the program you are currently running. Very cool!
I’m really glad I got the ibook, the battery life is great. About 4.5 to 5 hours with the wireless turned on (bluetooth off). Speaking of Wireless, Damn! It is so good. Very fast and I can walk half way down the street without it dropping out. The netgear AP seems to be doing its job very nicely.
Oh the suspend on this thing is great. The laptop hasn’t been switched off since I got it. Just close the screen and it goes to sleep, open the screen and it is ready.
Michael-Dales-Computer:/ michaeldale$ uptime
17:34 up 1 day, 1:50, 2 users, load averages: 0.16 0.12 0.19
My poor PC hasn’t been switched on since yesterday (after I copied all my music across). The mac does windows shares very nicely too.
I installed Remote Desktop Client so I can access my windows server. I can run that in full screen so it feels just like a PC, scary!
There are still some things I need to learn about the Mac but I’ll get there. I love it!
I just need to get a C compiler for this thing.
Anyway I’ll upload some pictures later.
Merry Christmas again, have a great day :)
[added]
Here are some screen shots of my mac.
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac1.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac2.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac3.jpg
more photos to come later...
Well I got my first pay today, so I’m very happy. I wasn’t really expecting to be paid until by at least the end of this week, very cool. I am also being paid as PAYG meaning that tax has already been taken out and all I need to do is fill in a tax return at the end of the financial year.
I also got my first cheque from my shares today, although I want to reinvest it back into shares.
On another topic, Mr Kightley also rang to congratulate me on my HSC results, thanks. There are a couple of topics on marks etc in the forums: http://forums.dalegroup.net/viewforum.php?f=9
Um my server isn’t looking to healthy. The -12v rail is running at -3v and the -5v rail is running at 0volts! Argh! That is going to need to be fixed. Although the server seems to be running fine at the moment.
Okay look at this sentence:
[i]Wow i’ve just found some gold, aren’t i a smart cookie?[/i]
What is wrong with that sentence? The thing that sticks out to me is the fact that the “I” in “I’ve” and “I” is lowercase and should in fact be upper case.
But why?
We don’t start each word in the sentence with a capital letter and we don’t write “a” in uppercase (unless at the beginning of a sentence). Is it just because “i” on its own looks dirty or something; does “I” look more professional?
Any ideas?
I had nine lives but I lost all of them
And I've been searching in the night
And I've been searching in the rain
I tried to find them
But they disappeared
They walked away they dressed in black
They left my side and all i say
Is that I wasted time
When I looked for them
For now i know that things gone past
Are never to be found again
I had nine lives
But lost all of them
I had a plan
But never finished it
And I've been searching for the thought
And I've been searching in a haze
I try all days
To remember it
But now the blueprint in my mind has gone
My mind forgot the colour of direction
And my eyes they see the hands
That could have bulit
That could have constructed
The empire in my mind
The empire
I'll never find
I had a plan
But that was where it ended
The Cat Empire - The Lost Song