chrisbray.co.uk

Spent half the night last night trying to get my works laptop connected to the office via my (admittedly positively aincient) Netgear WGR614 wireless router however once Vista got as far as "Checking Username and Password" it would just hang and fail to connect.

I finally gave up last night, assuming I was using the wrong credentials or something and headed out. Only when arriving at my destination did I think "Just one more try"... Lo and behold it worked, so I *was* using the correct password!

Back at home now, googling frantically for "Netgear WGR614 GRE PPTP" and the like and I came across this very useful forum post illustrating that unless the Stateful Packet Inspection firewall is ENABLED the Netgear router won't pass the right packets, since I'd been running with the firewall DISABLED (all the permenantly connected machines run Linux and they're NATed anyway) it wasn't work.

Enable the SPI Firewall in the routers control panel and voila, perfect.

Except it's not, because enabling the SPI firewall means the router finds it prudent to drop all DNS query packets, so the cacheing DNS server running on the LAN side of the router recieves no requests rendering it useless. Great.

Any suggestions on how to disable the SPI firewall completely and make this router just route packets, without any inspection or filtering, just route every packet irrespective of content, a task I would have thought as simple as breathing to a router...

I use Gmail as my main email account I thought it'd be real nice to be able to get Gnome to launch Gmail in my default browser when I pressed the email button on the toolbar. Well, a bit of googling and here's the answer.

Create a script with the following content in /opt/gmail-integration/sendmail, chmod it 755 and chown it root:root

#!/bin/sh
# gnome-gmail - a script that passes gnome mailto links to gmail in your browser
# Copyright (c) 2006 Matthew C Ruschmann
# Version: 1.0
BROWSER=`gconftool-2 --get '/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command' | cut -f1 -d' ' `
if test -z "${*}"
then
${BROWSER} "http://www.gmail.com"
exit
fi
TOMAIL=`echo "${*}" | sed -e 's/mailto://g'`
TOMAIL=`echo "$TOMAIL" | sed -e 's/?/\&/g'`
TOMAIL=`echo "$TOMAIL" | sed -e 's/&subject=/\&su=/g'`
TOURL="https://gmail.google.com/gmail?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&to="
echo ${BROWSER} "${TOURL}${TOMAIL}"
${BROWSER} "${TOURL}${TOMAIL}"

Register it as the default email handler, and turn off the un-required console window with the following code at the console...

gconftool-2 --set --type string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command "/opt/gmail-integration/sendmail %s"
gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/need-terminal false
gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/enabled true

If you're scared of the command line you can go to System -> Preferences -> Personal -> Preferred Applications and it's listed in there in the GUI.

But there you go, clicking on the "Email" button will now launch your browser and load Gmail.
It also works for "mailto" links for emailing people from web pages.

Ever wondered why Firefox "randomly" decides to navigate Forward and Back when you're using it on your laptop under Fedora Linux?

It's related to the fact that Firefox on Linux defaults to Forward/Back rather than Horizontal scroll, and when you move your finger close to the bottom edge of your Synaptics Touchpad it's sending a Horizontal Scroll message.

I did find out how to disable this though, from a post on the Ubuntu Forums, simply enter about:config in the address bar and set the following settings in Firefox:

1. mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action = 0
2. mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = true

Voila, it works for me, hopefully for you to, let me know if you're still having problems.

Some of you may be aware that Microsoft are proposing their Open OfficeXML (OOXML) as an ISO standard. Now, I'm involved in producing an international standard (see my blog about it over at http://www.diggsml.com) and I know what's involved.

This standardisation process MUST NOT be done by one company, simply releasing what they have and calling it a standard does not make it the correct answer, there needs to be much wider industry comment and review.

This is before you see that:

1. There is already an ISO standard for documents, ISO26300 called Open Document Format (ODF)
2. There is no provable implementation of OOXML! Even Microsoft's own Office 2007 does not properly implement it!
3. The specification is incomplete, there is a lot missing from it.
4. 10% of the "examples" proposed do not even validate as XML!
5. There is no guarantee that anyone can ever implement OOXML without being liable for (or breaking the rules on) patent fees on patents owned by Microsoft!
6. This standard proposal conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash), this is proof of how ill-thought out OOXML is.
7. There is a bug in OOXML that forbids any date prior to 1900
8. Most importantly this standard proposal has NOT been created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

Please, please, support this petition opposing the introduction of Open OfficeXML as an ISO standard, it only takes a minute of your time.

http://www.noooxml.org/petition/

Following on from my previous post on setting up the rt73 based Belkin USB WiFi dongle on Fedora Core 6 I finally got round to upgrading to Fedora 7.

When the whole lot fell over!!

After a few hours (check the post time) fighting and Googling I finally found a forum post from IvD of serialmonkey detailing a bug in Fedora 7 relating to rt2500 drivers (which are related to rt73 drivers) and explaining how the rt2x00 support in Fedora 7 is a bit flaky, and that you should disable (he suggests delete) the rt2x00 modules and go back to the legacy ones built from source.

I did this and it worked great.

Simply add the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to disable the buggy rt2x00 support:

# Disable rt2x00 WiFi cards in Fedora 7 so we can use the rt73 drivers from rt2x00.serialmonkey.com
# see http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=23981

blacklist rt2x00
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt61pci
blacklist rt73usb
blacklist rt2400pci
blacklist rt2500pci
blacklist rt2500usb

Then follow the previous Fedora Core 6 instructions and you're sorted :)