techblog

I'm currently moving the blog into Movable Type (free for personal use now...) Entries may look a bit screwy for a while due to the import.

Well the posts are now imported. The following perl one-liner was a lifesaver:

perl -C -pe 's/([^\x00-\x7f])/sprintf("&#%d;", ord($1))/ge;'

Converts non-ascii to XML numeric entity references. The MT XMLRPC daemon wasn't to keen on accepting files with UTF-8 chars (although that was probably the fault of the commandline poster I'm using...)

Oneliner was found at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#perl

Well it's been quite a few years since I blogged on the train. Of course, back then it wasn't called blogging; it was an online journal or diary. Things have come on leaps and bounds since then, and left me way behind. Back then venting to the Internet was a good way of helping me deal with my depression, maybe it still will be, hence the return.

I've spent too long focusing on the back-end of the Internet, how the routers and switches connect together, MPLS, SDH, WDM; and all the other alphabet soup acronyms. Recently I've been spending more time as an Internet user and have come across a number of tools which are apparently Web 2.0. Some of these I love, and I'll mention a couple of them below, others I've tried and to be honest they do nothing for me. Seems I'm not alone in this regard, found this post by my old mate Dan over on vox. Am I Web 2.0? Maybe. Or maybe I'm just too old...

A few years back I wrote a collection script for Cricket that calculated the 95th percentile data rate on an interface. I called it cricket-95.pl. Since then a PERCENTILE function has been added in the core rrdtool code. This article is my investigation on whether this function meets my needs.

In the aftermath of a spanning tree failure I found myself revisiting the IEEE ethernet standards documents. Specifically 802.1d and 802.1q. As I write this both are available as part of the Get IEEE 802 program, ymmv.

While reading the standards, and some related websites about tuning spanning tree parameters, I realised that there were a number of references to network diameter; however there was no precise definition of this term.

So I installed MT, I used StyleCatcher to pick a theme. Nice one.

Hang on... All my tag clouds are actually bulleted list without any weighting. Surely there must be a way to fix that?

For some reason the default method of setting tags in outbound atom feeds stores the numeric tagid in the term attribute. Certainly caused me some confusion to see that the Technorati profile for this blog said that my top tag was "10"

Modified the MTIfTagged section of the atom.xml template to match the following:

<MTEntryIfTagged>
  <MTEntryTags>
    <category term="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>"         
              label="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>" 
              scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
  </MTEntryTags>
</MTEntryIfTagged>

Cisco and Juniper both provide an option to easily strip private autonomous system numbers from outbound advertisements.

This article was started because I thought this aproach was flat out wrong; however during the research I managed to convince myself that it is the almost the right thing to do; just needs a couple of knobs to tweak to make it flexible enough to always do the right thing.

I've been hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu Linux for a while now.

I'm a debian boy and have been for years (I can't remember whether it was bo, rexx or buzz that I first installed… whichever was earliest). I am plenty happy with my etch box, and have no problem keeping up with the various packages, etc directly using apt-cache and apt-get; however I share the PCs at home with my wife and son and have recently started wondering whether the Debian based Ubuntu distro was worth a shot.