On a Unix machine, you can use this little ftp trick to have an idea of your throughput :

ftp somehost
ftp> put “| dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000 count=100” /dev/null
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for /dev/null (192.168.0.1,32953).
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
226 Transfer complete.
local: | dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000 count=100 remote: /dev/null
10000000 bytes sent in 2.9 seconds (3388.52 Kbytes/s)

This will generate a stream of bytes from one host to another and give you the data rate at the end

Here is the list of the software I use on my personnal computer. All of them are free for personnal use :

Malware Protection

AVG Free Edition – Antivirus
Adaware – Spyware removal tool
Spybot – Spyware removal tool

Web

Firefox – Web browser
GTalk – Instant messaging
MSN Messenger – Instant Messaging
ICQ – Instant Messaging
PuTTY – Multi-protocole remote terminal

Productivity

OpenOffice – Office suite
PDF Creator – Creating PDF
Sunbird – Calendar

System

DIRMS Defrag Tools
PowerToys – Tweak UI
SysInternals – AutoRuns : displays what runs at startup
SysInternals – PageDefrag : defrag your pagefile at boot
SysInternals – ProcessExplorer : Task Manager on steroids

Bored of fighting with MS-Word to have proper titles numbering ? Tired of messing around styles ? Want a more “meaning oriented formating” and less “aesthetic oriented formating” ? Would like to generate HTML, PDF, WindowsHelp, or anything from the same source file ?

Have a look at DocBook ! DocBook is a document standard which lets you do all of this, and much more …

And XMLMind XML Editor is a nice free (like beer not ideas) editor which lets you edit DocBook Documents in a WYSIWYG fashion.

Windows has a bad habit of enabling by default some shares on a new installation. These are, for example, C$, D$ (they give access to your partition roots) … ADMIN$, IPC$

Those shares are accessible by the administrators, but they could be a useless security breach.

Even worse, if you delete them, they will come back at the next start of the Server service starts…
If you wish to permanently disable them then create the following key in the registry (if it already exists, set the value to 0) :

if your boot block got corrupted (virus, or installation which went wrong), you may want to try to repair it by using the Recovery Console of Windows XP.

To do so, boot on the Windows XP CD and when asked, choose to repair the Windows XP installation by pushing R.

This will lead you to the Recovery Console. You will be asked for the installation to repair (ex : 1: C:\Windows), and then to enter the administrator’s password.

not to me !! 😀

The OpenBSD project needs money to hold its events (such as hackaton, where developpers gather to implement features, or usual running costs).

If you think you don’t use OpenBSD, think again ! The project OpenSSH, which implements a free, and secure SSH implementation, comes from OpenBSD. It is widely used in many OSes and appliances …

We need OpenBSD !! Don’t hesitate to make a donation !

The original post
The OpenBSD project
The OpenSSH sister project

If you like Perl and you make dynamic websites with databases backends, Catalyst is definitely worth a look.

It is basically an MVC engine for websites. It lets you nicely separate your business logic, the display and the database backend.

It has extended plugins to deal with things like authentications, sessions, templates, RSS, and God knows what 🙂

It can integrate Apache, and harness mod_cgi’s power for high-performance web applications.

It is a little bit tricky to get it right at the beginning, but there are nice tutorials.

I usually code my perl programs on a development machine, and then ty to make in run in the production environment.

I used to manage by myself the various needed packages and tried to have them installed on the production environment as needed.

And one day I had to make a script run on a machine where Perl itself was not even installed…

This has been a nightmare until recently, that is to say until I discovered the PAR module. PAR is closed to the Java JAR files.

To allow a proxy to act as a tunnel for SSL connection as in HTTPS, you actually need to provide the HTTP method CONNECT. It took me some time to realize 😉

If you do this with Apache/mod_proxy, that means that you have to use the mod_proxy_connect and allow the CONNECT method.

Few pointers :

• CONNECT method
• Apache mod_proxy_connect

If you want to convert strings from, say, UTF-8 to Latin1, then you can do this as simply as this :

use Unicode::String qw(utf8);
print utf8(“string in utf-8”)->latin1

Easy ? 😀