I uploaded their Essential Mix from March of this year at Miami. They're going to be here in a few weeks for GodsKitchen, and I think I might have to go check it out.

Have a listen to G&D lay down the major frown.

IBM sell keyboards with the UltraNav components built in. I love the nipple, and if everything goes to plan, I'll get one of these keyboards to use at home and the office. The ultimate setup for me would be their 20" screen that does 1600x1200, with my laptop in the dock off to the side giving me another 1400x1050 pixels. The issue with this is that the keyboard on the laptop would be inaccessible. Not with one of these badboys plugged into the docking station.

My biggest complaint with the Mac is the lack of nipple. I seriously love the nipple.

I picked up an old 17" screen from my parent's house this evening so I'm atleast back up and running on the laptop, even if it is through the blurry, curved, low-res ViewSonic beast. 1280x1024 isn't that much smaller, but I notice it.

There were five parts that the repair place thought they might need: the LCD ribbon, the LCD inverter, the mainboard, the LCD panel and the keyboard bezel. Why they need the keyboard is beyond me, unless they wanted to fix a few broken things on the "inside". From where I sit, it is fine.

The motherboard is over $500, and the LCD panel is $1900, which makes them excessively overpriced. I have ordered the LCD ribbon and LCD inverter for $200 combined and expect them in the next 2-4 weeks. If it's not one of these problems then we'll end up getting a new laptop, but I'd rather not bomb down $3,200 for an R52 (the successor to my R40, and the laptop Steve's getting on Wednesday) which has 500MHz over mine, and not much else. The 1.5GHz is plenty powerful enough, and gigabit ethernet isn't needed. It'd be a waste of money that I could be spending on big screen(s) instead :)

The Mac has been fun to play with, and will continue to be over the next 4 weeks; heck, we've paid for it so we may as well enjoy it. It'll get a workout at my mum's 50th this weekend, where iTunes will provide the audio entertainment, and anytime I'm offsite (read: not at home of the office) I'll need the Powerbook, but the little annoyances made it much less desirable than I expected.

I admit, having things setup the way I like them on Ubuntu does help though.

For the record, to enable remote syslog you need to edit /etc/init.d/syslogd and append the "-r" option. Restart the service and you're away (accepting remote syslog requests).

If we haven't written it, then it cannot be trusted. It really is that simple.

Today Adam send me a message asking if I knew why Apache wasn't running on Wheeljack, our backup and monitoring server. I checked it out, found a few unusual processed and Googled.

This is what I got.

It appears as though the hacker exploited Cacti, our graphing software. We use it to monitor network links and load, the other servers and anything that answers SNMP. It was installed as a Debian package from the Ubuntu Universe repository, so security patches are not maintained by the Ubuntu staff.

In the two and half years we've been running The Frontier Group we've had two hacks, and both have been through web applications that we've not written. The solution I think is to protect everything with a .htaccess file that won't let unauthorized people use these systems.

Thankfully the server doesn't do anything mission-critical yet (secondary mail and DNS, but they can/did both suffer a rebuild). It's a lesson learned, and hasn't caused anywhere near as much pain as Prime's hack did.