Michael Kratz

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

Are you in Sydney on Australia Day? If so, be outside! It’s highly likely you’ll get your photo taken for Google Maps!

Google Australia has organised to have an aircraft fly around part of Sydney during Australia day, taking aerial photographs of people enjoying the day.

You can find out more information, including, when the aircraft is likely to be in your area, on the information page on the Google website. Check it out here

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

In an attempt to make this WordPress template a little less ‘default’ (not that it isn’t good, I just wanted to make it ‘different’), I’ve decided to replace the default orange swirly glassy effect image with some photos of my own.

These rotate randomly using a PHP image rotator (click here if you want it). So you might see the same image twice, or more. There are about 30 images. Read more

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