Copyright and the World Wide Web

For me as a small time publisher, the Web offers many interesting features. It offers me a cheap distribution channel (try beating 50 euro/month for thousands of readers worldwide, and untill I get over several milions of readers it will not get more expensive), it makes that interested people can find my publications, either through others linking to them or through search engines, and it even makes for my publications being accessable when my own servers fail.

In various countries in the EU, trains are currently not running due to strikes. Train drivers in Germany are on strike to demand a 31% (!) increase of their wages, in France the strike is to protest a reform of retirement plans, and next week there will be some protest from employees of the Dutch railway who want a 10% raise. While I cannot entirely judge if the demands of those people are reasonable in themselves, the consequences of their actions are not reasonable at all.

Setting up an ati radeo card for dual screens in xorg requires editing the xorg.conf file, but is not very difficult. You will need most of the following options in the Device section of your xorg.conf file:

I use the popular monitoring tool Zabbix and wanted it to be able to send messages to cellphones and pagers. The obvious solution is to use one of the Internet based gateways, but that has the obvious problem of not workign when Zabbix wants to inform me about connection problems.

As many of you probably know, the French population voted against the proposed European constitution last sunday (may 29th). It is also likely that other countries will follow (Netherlands on june 1st, others follow later). Politicians have been loudly voicing dissapointment, and uttering stark warnings regarding the negative consequences of deciding against the porposed constitution.

Next wednesday (1st of june) I am allowed to vote on this, and I am going to vote no, just like the French did, and just like many of my fellow countrymen are likely to do. In the following 'rant' I will try to explain why I am going to vote no, and what EU politicians (and those in charge of the member states) have to do to get some working EU constitution at some point.

After having a long and interesting discussion with someone knowledgable on the patent system in the USA, I have been thinking a lot about why the whole concept of software patents feels so wrong to me as a person who deals a lot with software development.

I get asked quite often to take a look at the ip filtering rules that people have. One of the interesting things I noticed is that in many cases where people run a public DNS, they have an ip filter installed and use state keeping for DNS requests. I believe that the filter is a good idea, but the state keeping is not in this specific case.

A few days ago, someone tried a bandwidth exhaustion type denial of service attack against my home connection. They did this by flooding my (public) dns with requests for the nameservers for the . zone.

As you can read in a previous article I have a Linksys WRT54G running the OpenWRT Linux distribution. In this article I will first describe the default configuration and then show some of the things one can do by changing this setup.
The WRT54G as sold by Linksys is supposedly a router + wireless access point, providing a WAN connector and on the LAN side a 4 port switch, bridged to the wireless accesspoint. This basicly means that you end up with 2 network segments, LAN + wireless on one side, and WAN on the other side. That is what you get to see as consumer, but that is not how the device is put together.
This article is based on the WRT54G v2.2, older versions are very similar but not identical. Specifically, the names of network interfaces will be different for older versions

In a previous article I asked if the X-micro XWL-11GRIX broadband router might be running Linux. In the meantime I did get some responses from readers with additional information about this device.