Technology

In order to get your data working again after an outage of 3G or 4G you need to do the following in sequence:

1. Phone this number: ##3283#
2. Hit "EDIT" - it will prompt for a password
3. Hit 287804
4. Hit "OK"
5. Select "DATA PROFILE"
6. Go to Menu --> Restore
7. Hit "OK" [Twice]

It will reboot, and do stuff...
Then, once it has fully rebooted, go to: Menu/Settings/System Updates/Update Profile
Once that is done, your data connection via 3G or 4G should be repaired.

The documentation doesn't appear to give this up very easily: to reset to Factury Defaults, you'll need to restart the switch while having a serial console open, and hit CTRL-F (lots of times) until the boot completes, and it drops down to a boot-rom style prompt. One of the options once you see that is "Reset to Factory Defaults?" select that and reboot. At the login prompt the next time, you should get logged in using a username of "admin" with a password of "admin" Good luck from there... Here is my sequence to then add a management IP address to VLAN 1 - the default VLAN:

Console#sh ip interface
 IP address and netmask: 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 on VLAN 1,
 and address mode: DHCP.

Console#show vlan
VLAN Type    Name             Status    Ports/Channel groups
---- ------- ---------------- --------- ----------------------------------------
   1  Static      DefaultVlan    Active Eth1/ 1 Eth1/ 2 Eth1/ 3 Eth1/ 4 Eth1/ 5
                                        Eth1/ 6 Eth1/ 7 Eth1/ 8 Eth1/ 9 Eth1/10
                                        Eth1/11 Eth1/12 Eth1/13 Eth1/14 Eth1/15
                                        Eth1/16 Eth1/17 Eth1/18 Eth1/19 Eth1/20
                                        Eth1/21 Eth1/22 Eth1/23 Eth1/24
Console#
Console#configure
Console(config)#interface vlan 1
Console(config-if)#ip address 192.168.3.80 ?
  A.B.C.D  Netmask
Console(config-if)#ip address 192.168.3.80 255.255.255.0
Console(config-if)#?
Configure commands:
  end        Exit from configure mode
  exit       Exit from interface configure mode
  help       Description of the interactive help system
  interface  Into the privileged interface configuration mode
  ip         Internet protocol
  no         Negate a command or set its defaults
Console(config-if)#end

Console#copy running-config startup-config

Console#show ip interface
 IP address and netmask: 192.168.3.80 255.255.255.0 on VLAN 1,
 and address mode: User specified.
Console#
Console#ping 192.168.3.1
Type ESC to abort.
PING to 192.168.3.1, by 5 32-byte payload ICMP packets, timeout is 5 seconds
response time: 10 ms
response time: 10 ms
response time: 10 ms
response time: 10 ms
response time: 10 ms
Ping statistics for 192.168.3.1:
 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received (100%), 0 packets lost (0%)
Approximate round trip times:
 Minimum = 10 ms, Maximum = 10 ms, Average = 10 ms
Console#

The Twitter module for Drupal now needs to use the new OAuth module for authentication in Twitter.  This has broken many web sites.  I use this feature on this site to automatically post a tweet whenever I add a new blog entry.  I use a global account in Drupal to do it, rather than individual Twitter accounts for each drupal user. In order to get the Twitter module to work now, you'll need to do the following things (note that this sequence is for a single global Twitter account for all users wanting to have their tweets posted by the Twitter Module)

Steps to take:

1. Upgrade the Twitter Module from 6.x-2.6 to 6.x-3.0-beta2 or better
2. Install OAuth 2.0 (OAuth 3.0 doesn't work with Twitter 6.x-3.0-beta2) - in the drupal Oauth settings be sure to set OAuth cryptography as "HMAC-SHA1" and not Plain Text or RSA.
3. As ADMIN (User 1) Run update.php -> this will update the database to support the new version of the twitter module
4. Register your application with twitter: In your Twitter application settings ensure you have "Application Type" set as Browser and the "Callback URL" should be http://yoursite.com/twitter/oauth
5. Set up the Twitter Module on your website (at http://www.yoursite.com/admin/settings/twitter ) to use the registered Consumer Tokens: "Consumer Key" & "Consumer Secret"
6. Login as the admin user whose twitter account has been setup
7. Go to My accounts -> Edit -> Twitter Accounts (click on the "Make Global" link to the right for the global user you assign)

You should now be able to post to twitter using OAuth. Twitter should also show that the tweet has been made from the global Twitter user.

This command will give you all of the known info regarding the processor(s) under linux:

# less /proc/cpuinfo

Those out there that use(ed) Outlook Express should know that there is no such thing in Windows 7. Also true in Vista, where "Windows Mail" was released. Yet another major change for Windows 7: the new (free) email client is called "Windows Live Mail" and the most annoying new "Feature" is the missing menus. To see the old menu you are looking for; hit the "ALT" key by itself. Then, the menu will magically appear. Mystery solved!

A cool thing to do if you find yourself doing something LOTs of times: Edit your ".bashrc" (in your home directory) and create your personalised script as follows:

wch()
{
sudo chmod 774 $1 $2 $3 $4;
sudo chown www-data.www-data $1 $2 $3 $4;
}

Then you can execute the command "wch" with parameters to execute the commands you want. Very cool...

I thought this was an interesting analogy for the IPV6 Address Space: From: http://www.cedmagazine.com/ipv6-a-catalyst-for-service-growth.aspx Putting the contrast into perspective, if one IPv4 address was one picometer (one trillionth of a meter) long, the entire IPv4 address space would be approximately 4.3 millimeters long–the length of an average-sized ant. If an IPv6 address were one picometer long, the length of the entire IPv6 address space would be approximately 3.4 billion trillion trillion kilometers, or 36 billion light years. The farthest visible object in the universe from the Earth is estimated to be 30 billion light years away. That's a very long distance; that's a great many IP addresses.

Article: "Google Chrome: The Official Start of the Cloud Era" Author Lawrence Walsh says: "Google Chrome is being dismissed by competitors and analysts, but it may just be the official beginning of the cloud computing era by freeing users from big, heavy PCs and operating systems."
I commented on his article as follows: I think the ho-hum reaction you are referring to comes from the paid commentators out there with a vested interest in the continued use of fat code from Micro$oft. Show me a user (particularly one who travels a lot) and I'll show you someone interested in a thin browser-based travel device. As an IT specialist for close to 30 years, I'll tell you this for free: gmail makes outlook look like an anachronistic monster. and supporting that thing (outlook) is a genuine pain. I just got off the phone from a customer having talked her into dumping outlook completely. It was way too easy. People love the concept of a centralized data repository that enables access from ANY browser world-wide. What's not to love? The web-based solutions we are seeing from Google are really free-thinking solutions to the locked-in thinking that keeps the billions of $$$ flowing into the behemoths of yesteryear. I guarantee you that Microsoft is terrified of what Google's new OS can potentially do to its profits in the long term. If they are not, they certainly should be.

A featured story on drupal.org: Case Study of OpenTheMagazine.com
In the story, we get a fantastic closeup view of the drupal modules used and the reasoning behind their use. For a young Drupal developer/user, it is a very useful article.

The "Heroes" of the site were considered to be Views 2, CCK, & for search, Apache SOLR.
The list below of other drupal modules used by the site is excerpted from the article on drupal.org:

CCK/Views Family

• Imagefield & Imagecache: For all our image needs!
• Nodereference: A powerful module included with the CCK that allows content administrators to link / associate content together. On our site we use Nodereference when we want to manually suggest articles to the reader, create a Table of Contents for a particular issue, create a Package article which is nothing but a container for other articles etc.
• Nodequeue: Allows you to create a static "list" of articles and show it in a view. Provides a user friendly backend where content administrators can easily add, remove or change the order of items in a nodequeue. Our front page consists of many nodequeues. For example the 5 essentials on the frontpage is implemented as a view on a nodequeue.
• Filefield Paths: Very useful module that gives a high degree of control on the server path and file name of a filefield (Note: imagefields are also filefields). We use it to prefix the file name of all uploaded images with the node id of the associated article. So “baloons.jpg” becomes “2344.baloons.jpg”. Useful for tracking images to their nodes by just looking at their file name.
• Filefield Insert: Allows easy insertion of inline images into your rich text editor
• Vertical Tabs: Reduces the clutter on your node edit form
• Views Bulk Operations: A fantastic module!. We use it to make our custom content management interface. This content management interface allows users to filter nodes on the basis of content type, magazine issue date, magazine section etc.
• Slideshow Pro: Slideshow Pro is a image gallery flash plugin. This module provides Drupal Integration. See an example gallery.

Commenting

• Comment Notify: Notifies commenters that of fresh comments on articles they commented upon
• Ajax comments: Allow comments to be posted without a page refresh
• Captcha: Simple spam prevention.

Taxonomy/Tagging

• Cumulus: Cumulus presents the tags in a visually engaging manner
• Tagedelic Views (+ Tagedlic): Sometimes you want to see tags for content only from a particular section... e.g. Tags from all articles in the Business section. This allows you to get tags from a group of nodes rather than all nodes of a particular content type as is the usual case
• Hierarchical Select: Very useful module that creates a taxonomy selection widget in the node edit form. We used it mainly to force users to select the leaf nodes of a particular taxonomy hierarchy.
• Taxonomy Manager: Good for merging taxonomy terms, deleting taxonomy terms and so on

Other

• FCK Editor: Our Rich Text Editor. However we would recommend any new site uses WSIWYG API as the umbrella module for Rich Text Editors.
• Rules: An extremely powerful and useful module. It allows us to do all kinds of useful things like redirect articles on save. A great example of its use is the smallworld page (example). This page is a view consisting of many instance of a CCK content type called “Shorts”. After a content administrator make a “Shorts” content and saves it, we use Rules to redirect us to the view that would contain it. We also use rules to send emails to article authors when someone comments on the website.
• Fivestar: Used for ratings on movie reviews
• Apache Solr search: Discussed above
• SimpleCDN: The simpleCDN modules allows you to change all imagefield paths so that they point to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). SimpleCDN module supports any CDN that uses HTTP mirroring. We use it in our case, for the SimpleCDN CDN.
• Webform: Site visitors can subscribe to our paper magazine by filling up a form (implemented using webform). The Webform module tracks past submissions, validates the form and redirects the submission to the the credit card gateway.

Search Engine Optimization / Advertising / Tracking

• Global Redirect: Redirects all URLs like /node/2344 to their aliased path
• Integrated Metatags: Meta tags for search engine optimization
• Pathauto: Assigns human friendly URLs to nodes
• OpenX (formerly OpenAds): We are in the process of rolling out advertising on our site. We chose OpenX as our ad manager because Google Ads requires the website to be up for at least 6 months if your site is from India/China.
• Google Analytics: A must have for your website if you want to track your visitors

Development Related

• Features Module: An Amazing module! For CCK and Views exports (See below)
• Devel: Provides a suite of tools for the site developer.
• Drush: Command Drupal from the command line!
• Drupal for Firebug: Very powerful module! Integrates with Firebug. Allows you to look at the form API representation of a page. Execute PHP code in the Drupal context and more.
• Admin Menu: Allows easy site administration using an unobtrusive menu dropdown at the top of the page.
• Backup and Migrate: We take regular backups of the drupal database to prevent against loss of data. The module allows you to dump the contents and/or structure of only the tables you need. This allows us, for instance, to dump all the tables in our Drupal database (except for the cache tables where we only take a structure dump).

As I evaluate Windows 7 (which looks pretty good overall), I missed terribly the "Quick Launch" feature that I rely upon heavily in XP... So I found this very well done lesson on how to get the Quick Launch back in V7... http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/add-the-quick-launch-bar-to-the-taskbar-in-windows-7/ The Key thing you need to know is: Right-Click on the Taskbar, select "Toolbars" and select "New toolbar" Then paste this: "%appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch" In the address field... But if you like pictures, go to the link above. D