Michael Kratz

I’ve been quite annoyed for a while that Apple haven’t added full support for most of the recent Nokia phones, including the E70 that I currently use.

I got even more annoyed not long ago, when, with the release of OS 10.4.9, Apple added support for the E61, yet overlooked support for the E70! These two phones are extremely similar, and both run the same version and configuration of Symbian. I was very disappointed. Until now… Read more

When Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, it came along with a whole raft of ‘security’ enhancements. One of these was Security Center (I’m tempted to spell ‘center’ as ‘centre’ because I’m Australian. But, it’s called “Security Center” so that’s what I’ll call it).

Security Center was implemented to assist in encouraging general users into being conscious about the security of Windows and their computer. Security Center basically monitors whether Windows Automatic Updates and Windows Firewall are turned on; and whether an appropriate virus scanner with up-to-date virus definitions is installed and running.

This is a good thing, for the general masses. But for us technical folk, who know how to run Windows without Microsoft holding our collective hands, it’s a royal pain in the arse. Why? because it constantly nags you with those little Windows pop-ups (which don’t go away till you click on them) to “check your virus definitions” or “enable the Windows Firewall”, etc.

So… if you fall into this category where it has become a hindrance rather than a handy tool, here’s how to disable it. 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

It’s always annoyed me that my MBP sometimes gets so hot that it is no longer comfortable to sit with it resting on my legs. It irks me that Apple have chosen to set the thresholds for the fans so low and quiet that the machine has to pretty much ‘burn skin’ before the fans will kick in at any decent rate and cool the machine down. Read more

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 like me, and you make extensive use of Apple’s iCal to manage your daily scheduling, if you’ve previously wanted to sync it with a central Sun Calendar server, up until a short time ago, you’d have been out of luck. 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.