So there’s a funky new tool out there called KSplice:

http://www.ksplice.com/

But, people have been doing this for a while now:

http://blog.notreally.org/2007/12/19/modifying-a-live-linux-kernel/

This sort of thing is what I like about computing – finding out about the fundamentals is what keeps me interested!

So, if you’ve got a Wordpress blog and you want to access it via HTTP and HTTPS then you might notice that when using the HTTPS version all the links (and form actions) are set to use the HTTP version. Thanks to a little help from a plugin and Paul Bain we came up with a solution of putting this into the wp-config.php file:

if( $_SERVER['HTTPS'] ) {
    define('WP_HOME', preg_replace('^http', 'https', WP_HOME));
    define('WP_SITEURL', preg_replace('^http', 'https', WP_SITEURL));
}

Seems to work pretty well!

Today, I’m in Coventry with Paul (API, Website) and Stevo (Graphics) for BeerHack which is our codename for a day of fun where we are aiming to release a new version of BeerMap.

I’ll be posting throughout the day with updates of what we’re up to. So far we have had breakfast and coffee and are ready to do some UI design!

I found out today after large amount of digging at work that iPhone Mail.app is even more stupid than I originally thought. We first had issues with the fact that for listing folders it doesn’t support subscriptions, so the folder list shows our hundreds of shared folders. On a good IMAP client (even Mac Mail.app :-O) it will use LSUB instead of LIST to show only those folders which you are subscribed to. We marginally solved this issue by using a perl IMAP filtering proxy to filter out the LIST responses from the server to remove a large portion of the folder tree. This worked ok, but it doesn’t have any support for SSL.

So I set about hacking the perl to change the listening socket into an SSL socket… What I discovered shocked me. Usual IMAP clients have a security setting allowing you to choose none, SSL or TLS. The iPhone only has one which is labelled as “SSL”. So one would assume this means that you only have the option for SSL, right? No.

What it actually means is this:

if(ssl == on) {
    if(port == 993) {
        do_ssl_session
    } else {
        do_tls_session
    }
}

So, if you want to do IMAP/SSL then you HAVE to be connecting to port 993! How ridiculous is that! We needed to have our proxy running on a separate port so that we have normal IMAPS and support for our cut down mailbox filtered access. So literally, iPhone users are up a creek without a decent IMAP client…

Come on Apple, please make iPhone Mail.app better!

When I got my new MacBook Pro I upgraded the hard drive and ever since doing that, I noticed that boot times were incredibly slow. I thought it was odd so tried to track it down. What I found is that the “Startup disk” option wasn’t picking up the new drive, so it was trying to find the original drive to boot from that. So what I did was go to “System Prefences => Startup Disk” and select my drive. Now when I boot, it’s really quick!

Just a quick tip for anyone else who might have the same problem.

Well it’s another long weekend with the bank holiday Monday! But, what is there to do in and around Coventry?

Tonight I shall be going to the Open Arms which is my local pub. It’s a great local to have and the Brew XI can’t be beaten for price or taste.

Then over the weekend I’m not sure what I’ll be doing, but it will probably involve some interview preparation unfortunately. Outside of that, it might be taking in a walk around Kenilworth Castle, or a walk in Crackley Woods, both of which could end with a pint in one of Kenilworth’s many excellent pubs.

So, what will you be doing this weekend?

Well, the sun has finally started to come out this year and spring time is upon us. It’s been great seeing Coventry in the sun and, well, seeing sun generally because I’ve missed summers due to my travels around the world and timing it so that it was winter everywhere. (Although Australia was still hot!).

Last week Paul and I went out for a few pints in Earlsdon and I cannot wait until it’s warm enough to sit outside at the Oak or The Cottage. That and also our Wednesday early morning trips to Starbucks will be awesome when we can sit outside – it’s been great to see the change from the dark mornings of winter.

So, here’s to hoping that the summer will be a good one!

I’ve ordered my first Moo cards today! I chose to upload my own photos and I used 8 photos from my world tour. I hope they turn out good, although I’m sure that they will – here are the photos I used:

I did some work recently for a client at work who were having issues with their Trixbox system. This involved going on site and deciphering the problem with their network and figuring out exactly what was going wrong. It turned out that all the problems were related to a Trixbox misconfiguration in the sip_nat.conf file where localnet was set to 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.0 and thus Trixbox was trying to do NAT when talking to any phone. This was putting extreme strain on the ADSL router at the edge of the network and causing no end of problems.

It’s unsure where the misconfiguration came in, but all has been resolved now. The client has blogged about it and it has even gained some press from ZDNet.

Anyway, the way we solved the problem was by testing the network from a baseline which we knew *must* work. This led us to trap the problem between the Trixbox server and the ADSL router, which in this setup, shouldn’t have needed to talk to each other. That led us to check the NAT setup which is how we found the problem. I planned the work we carried out the day before and it just goes to show that prior planning leads to a successful days work.

I have been developing a new version of my iPhone application, Subnet Calc for a few weeks now. I decided to call the new version Subnet Calc Pro as it’s essentially an advanced version of the free one.

In order to sell applications on the App Store for money you have to complete the banking and tax information. The banking information is straight forward but the tax information is a little bit more tricky due to the strange nature of having to fill in lots of bits relating to US tax identifiers (ITIN and EIN) and so I had no idea what to do, so I emailed Apple and got an extremely useful reply which basically stated:
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