Michael Kratz

Discovery is yet again on-orbit (STS-120). Space walks are happening, and bits and pieces are getting shuffled around and added to the International Space Station. I’ve always enjoyed watching bits and pieces of the various shuttle missions on NASA TV, but the thing that has become annoying lately is the lack of a decent high resolution/bit rate NASA TV stream.

The streams from the NASA TV site are rather dismal and don’t come anywhere near the kind of quality one could potentially obtain over a broadband connection. It annoyed me so much, I went hunting for better quality…. Read more

I recently upgraded the traceroute package on one of my CentOS 4.4 boxes to 1.4a12-24, along with it came an annoying bug. It was picking up the MPLS hops inside the Internode network as ICMP checksum errors.

This annoyed me, so I went hunting for a fix. Turns out that the slightly later version from Fedora Core 4 (1.4a12-26) has ICMP checksum errors disabled by default which then stops the annoying errors and allows traceroute to correctly report that it is infact a hop inside an MPLS tunnel.

So, if you’re running CentOS 4.4, and you grab the traceroute package from the fasttrack for CentOS 4.5, and this annoys you too… just grab the slightly later revision from Fedora Core 4, which can be found on RPMfind right here (x86_64 binary):

http://www.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/fedora/4/x86_64/traceroute-1.4a12-26.x86_64.html

In one hour, the space shuttle Atlantis is set to blast off on it’s 27th flight in to space (STS-115). The shuttle will be up there for 11 days. The primary function of the mission is to resume construction of the International Space Station, in particular, the crew of Atlantis will be adding additional solar arrays and truss structure to the station. Read more

As many people may be aware, the current state of Broadband in Australia is pretty dysmal, apart from selected exchanges which have been ADSL2+ enabled by carriers such as Agile/Internode (the companies I work for). The majority of ADSL users are limited to a maximum downlink speed of 1.5Mbit, because this is all that Telstra allow providers to offer. Read more

Simon Hackett, Managing Director of Internode and Agile (the companies I work for), has written a very interesting summary of the history of Broadband ADSL in Australia, how it has evolved, and what’s coming soon.

Click here to check it out.

I’ve made a few websites in my time (not all listed on this site), and I believe that they have fairly good rank on Google for what they’re designed for. So, here’s my personal tips for getting your site listed well on Google. Read more

If you’re using WordPress and you’ve turned on WP-Cache and now getting problems with blank pages coming up, check out this page for the solution. It worked for me!

Apparently it’s to do with some syntax changes between PHP4 and PHP5, which WP-Cache has not accounted for yet, due to it being written for PHP4.