Month: February 2008

Technology

IPv6 Here We Come

February 5, 2008 by 0 Comments

The IPv6 debate has been rolling on now for several years with no definitive end in sight. However, for my money, the addition of several IPv6 addresses to a number of the root DNS servers earlier this week is another significant step in the right direction for IPv6.

For those of you fortunate enough not to be involved in the debate, this report by the BBC Technology website includes a simple (and brief) overview of what IPv6 is and why it is required. It’s well worth 2 minutes of your time if you have a passing interest in computing or technology generally.

Source: SlashDot

Technology

75 million lose their Internet connection

February 3, 2008 by 1 Comment

The Guardian have posted a good summary of the circumstances surrounding the loss of Internet connectivity in the Middle East and India last week. Apparently, the best part of 75 million users were affected, all because of a ship’s attempt to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather.

More interestingly, they also posted a link to a map entitled The Internet’s Undersea World (by Telegeography.com) that illustrates the mass of undersea submarine cables that deliver the global connectivity enjoyed by the millions of us oblivious Internet users every day. The speeds of some of those cables are just phenomenal!

Source: The Guardian

Sport

Who is Levan Tskitishvili?

February 1, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’ve seen some pretty unusual footballing surnames in recent years but Levan Tskitishvili can boast one of the better ones. Well, when I say better, what I really mean is “really hard for me to pronounce”. Even after my ninth attempt, I’m not sure I got it right. Admittedly, this probably has a lot to do with my lack of Eastern European linguistic talents and Levan would almost certainly struggle with many of Irish surnames too.

In any case, if you are interested, Levan Tskitishvili is a Georgian footballer that the English soccer club Birmingham City recently tried (but failed) to sign as one of their players.
Source: BBC Sport

Technology

Making scripts executable inside Subversion

February 1, 2008 by 1 Comment

The Problem

Every time you check out a script file from Subversion on a Unix system, the file is missing the execute permission and you have to manually perform a chmod +x every time. This usually happens if the file was either originally added without the permission set or if it was added to Subversion from a Windows system. But more to the point, it is extremely annoying.

The Solution

The solution to this involves adding an internal Subversion property called svn:executable to the script file(s) in question. The property can either be set using Tortoise SVN from a Windows system (as described by a posting on Late Night PC found by my colleague Máté Rácz) or can be done from the command-line as follows:

$ svn propset svn:executable true myscript.sh

Both methods work and required a SVN commit afterwards.