Martello

If you’ve ever created or worked in a start-up company then will probably enjoy reading A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs by Guy Kawasaki.

Source: Life, is grand

We got bitten by a curious side effect of a feature of Cisco IOS recently which I felt was worth sharing. According to the Cisco Secure Router website, when enabling passwords (and secret passwords) on Cisco equipment:

Leading spaces are ignored but trailing spaces are recognized

What was interesting to me was the latter part about trailing white spaces. It may or may not be a well known fact but it was certainly not known to us. Now, take the following Cisco IOS command:

# enable secret NewPass9 ?

The inclusion of the question mark above allows you to take a look at any remaining parameters for the command you are entering, and it is very common to do this when you are new to Cisco systems. Now, consider that there are in fact no additional parameters for the enable secret command, so you go ahead and recall the above command, delete the question mark (i.e. press the backspace key once) and press Enter to commit the new password.

# enable secret NewPass9

Without realising it, you have now actually included a single space character in at the end of your password. Be careful out there!

You can say what you want about the Michael Jackson but for my money he was a musical genius and his death is a tragic loss to the world. I’m sure the debate about his many and varied character flaws will live on but not for anywhere near as long as his music will.

It’s a real shame that he didn’t get to perform the series of concerts he had scheduled for The O2 Arena in London. Who knows what other great music he might have written on the back of the renewed confidence he could have gained from them. I had the privilege of seeing him perform in Cork, Ireland in 1988 and to this day, I’ve yet to see anything quite like it.

On a related note, you can look at a collection of his finest work on the excellent MUZU TV.

Some clever one-liners that print a neatly organised version of your MySQL configuration file without all the comments:

Perl
$ perl -ne 'm/^([^#][^\s=]+)\s*(=.*|)/ && printf(”%-35s%s\n”, $1, $2)’ /etc/my.cnf

Awk
$ awk '! /^#/ && ! /^$/ {if($1 ~ /^\[/ ){gsub("\[","\n[",$1) };printf("%-35s%s %s\n",$1, $2, $3)}' /etc/my.cnf

Grep
$ egrep -v '^$|^#' /etc/my.cnf

Source: MySQL Performance Blog

The wisdom and practicality of ISPs offering “unlimited” bandwidth in a fixed price plan has come under scrutiny again as British Telecom are beginning to feel the pinch as the popularity of BBC’s iPlayer continues to grow.

The most popular (and cheapest) broadband products offered by ISPs are usually limited in the amount of downloads that can occur, and this has been traditionally to prevent en mass downloading of illegal games and videos.

However, now that more and more TV channels are making content available legally (RTÉ Player being the most recent), the ISPs are finding it tough going to provide networks that can keep up with growing usage of such legal services.

Some of the BBC executives have suggested that the ISPs just didn’t see this coming and are themselves to blame for not planning for it. This is an arguable point alright and it will be interesting to see if they learn from this experience and prepare better for the adoption of full blown IPTV.

Source: SlashDot