Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in Nathan Tallack's LiveJournal:

Monday, November 3rd, 2003
5:05 pm	A friend I never knew I had. Well what do you know. A good mate of mine has a blog here on LiveJournal. Sneaky little bastard. Had one all this time and never told me. Go take a look at it. He calls it "Technology & Toilet Humour" He actually has regular updates too. Not like this Journal. :P Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 30th, 2003
5:26 pm	AOL Blocks Links from LiveJournal Shame on you AOL. Check out this article on Slashdot. See for yourself. Click on this link. http://www.aol.com. LiveJournal.com is an open-source weblog site with over a million users, some of whom use AOL. Last week, AOL began blocking all HTTP requests with "www.livejournal.com" Referer headers. This is a common practice by image hosting sites to prevent off-site linking of their images and 'bandwidth theft'. However, in AOL's case, they're blocking everything, not just images, effectively breaking all links to any AOL member's site--but only from LiveJournal. To be clear: nobody on LiveJournal can even make a link to any AOL member site without getting a '404 Not Found' error. We've also heard reports of the same thing happening on AOL properties (Netscape, Compuserve). This concerns us because we have to deal with the support requests: it worked in the past for our users, and it continues to work for other sites, so our users think it's our fault. Is this something we can expect to happen more frequently in the future. Big corporations bullying community serving open-source sites? What a deplorable future that would be for the Internet. :( Current Mood: angry (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 4th, 2003
11:58 am	Microsoft: 2003 and beyond. From Slashdot: "Automation Access has a long editorial on the future of Microsoft, based on trends which are already in full motion. None of this is new or surprising, but seeing it all together in one article is well worthwhile." A very good read. Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 27th, 2003
10:29 am	Excellent SecurityFocus Article about Microsoft. Here is an excellent article written by a SecurityFocus columnist Tim Mullen which discusses how the media misreport Microsoft security holes. This article discusses the recent security hole regarding the Windows Recovery Console and Windows XP. It is an EXCELLENT read, and really draws attention to how terribly wrong the media can get when they want a story. Current Mood: disappointed (Comment on this)
Friday, February 21st, 2003
2:28 pm	Windows XP and command line dialing. For some reason I can not quite understand, Microsoft have the "rasphone" command still available in XP, but it is not linked to the internal RAS phonebook. If you want to order it to dial an entry, you have to use the "rasdial" comand. Go figure. Current Mood: irritated (Comment on this)
Monday, February 17th, 2003
3:24 pm	Updated resume. I updated my resume to include my current position. It is actually getting quite big now. I might have to consider culling it down somewhat. If you are an employer or recruitment agent and think you have something interesting for Brisbane, drop me a line and I'll send you my resume. :) Current Mood: productive (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 30th, 2003
8:50 pm	OSX and VPN problems with default gateways. I recently encountered a problem where whenever I used OSX 10.2.3's VPN client in the "Internet Connect" app to establish a VPN PPP session, it would change the default gateway for the machine to be that VPN PPP interface rather than the existing default route to the ethernet interface, and thus the Internet. Ok. I just worked out a kind of a "work around" for this problem. Once the VPN is established, open a terminal window and type this command: netstat -rn This will list all your routes. The first one will be your default route, and it will point to the gateway that is the IP address for your VPN PPP Session. Something like this: default 10.10.2.1 UGSc 9 72 en0 Ok, there will be another route that is for the IP address of your VPN server. It will be something that looks like this: 210.10.10.5 192.168.0.1 UGHS 1224 1234 en0 Now the gateway address for this route should be the address that was your default gateway BEFORE you opened your VPN, ie: the Internet gateway, in this case my ethernet card. So in the above case I would type this command to set your default gateway back to the original one: sudo route change 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 Notice the use of sudo there as you need to be root to make changes to the routing table. Thats it. For the period of your VPN session now, your default gateway will be the original one as you want it to be, rather than the VPN PPP interface itself. I hope to find a way to stop the VPN client changing the default route, but until that happens, this workaround is not too bad. :) Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Monday, January 27th, 2003
5:16 pm	Strange XP network binding problems. An associate/friend called me up on Saturday with an XP problem that had him quite distressed. Every time he booted his computer up, the IP stack would come up, and he could ping the machine. But as soon as he actually logged in as a user, the IP stack would stop responding to pings. I assumed it was another nasty little bindings problem, and after calming him down ;) I convinced him to untick all of his network bindings in his advanced network properties, reboot, and retick them all. After another reboot, it was all working fine. This would be about the 5th or so time that I have encountered serious network problems under XP that could only be resolved with this course of action. I might have to go and look for KB articles that would explain this behavior, and perhaps the causes of them. Current Mood: cynical (Comment on this)
Friday, January 24th, 2003
10:57 pm	Only with Cisco. Hows this for impressive uptime. -----snip----- cisco-ts1 uptime is 1 year, 2 weeks, 3 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes System restarted by power-on at 08:54:15 AEST Mon Jan 7 2002 -----/snip----- A client was having me look into a problem at one of his POP's where users were complaining of an unusually high occurrence of disconnections. While I could find no immediate problem with the Cisco 5200 out there, I can not help but get the feeling that it would be prudent to give that one a reboot when it is convenient. Don't get me wrong, I have every faith that the Cisco will keep on plugging away for another year without a hiccup, but it is running an ED IOS after all, and they are Mica modems it has in it. :) Anyhow, just thought I would share that impressive uptime. Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 23rd, 2003
2:16 pm	And so it starts. Well, here I am. I intend to use this journal as a professional journal. Exactly what that means I am not quite sure of as yet. :) But I will eventually figure out what kind of entries would be suitable for a professional journal, and here is where I will make them. If you were actually after a more personal journal for me, you best go take a look at my weblog which I update on a daily basis. Thats it for now. Till next time. Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)