Ever spend oh I don’t know, an HOUR typing up something big in a web form, and somewhere toward the end… maybe the last period or so, you press the backspace key on your keyboard and BOOM! you instantaniously get sent back to the previous webpage?

Yep, I just did that… not fun. When you’re completing forms using IE, you better make sure you keep track which window is in focus or you’re going down.

back button = backspace used to be a good idea, maybe in 1997 but not today. As one guy puts it: “It falls in to the same catagory as the f-lock key and Jar Jar Binks!”

So come to find out, you actually can disable it in firefox:

Type about:config in Firefox Location Box, and then confirm the warning message. Then locate the following preference name: browser.backspace_action

Change the browser.backspace_action to one of the following values to reflect your intention on how the Backspace key should behaves:

0: Pressing [Backspace] will go back a page in the session history and [Shift]+[Backspace] will go forward. (Default in Windows)
1: Pressing [Backspace] will scroll up a page in the current document and [Shift]+[Backspace] will scroll down. Except Camino that does not implement any behavior for the value 1, which is unmapped. (Default in Linux builds before 2006-12-07)
Any other integer number: Any other integer value will simply unmap the backspace key. In Linux builds after 2006-12-07, the default is 2.

Source: My Digital Life

Doesn’t look like there’s a solution for IE. I guess I’ll have to um, “stage” my big form entries in notepad first

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How exciting, NOT. But just in case anyone is bored, I’m driving to Wisconsin for a wedding and for your sadistic pleasure I offer up the opportunity for YOU to be BIG BROTHER for a few days. MARVEL as you watch every move I make and wonder just WTF I’m up to. Lame, I know.



NOTICE: This feed will go down promptly the minute I feel like taking it down, for certain on 7/19/2010 so get your jollies before then.

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WOO-HOO!

Twitter has been the 800lb gorilla in my social posting circle for the past 5 months or so. One day, without notice the facebook application they had so wonderfully rolled out a few years ago just stopped working.

I wasn’t the only one. A simple search reveals thousands of followers utterly PO’d by their move to let it break and leave it broken for what seemed like forever.

Today, I tried for the 3’000th time to see if it works again and IT DOES! Twitter still sucks though.

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For everyone who has owned a BB Bold 9000, you’ve likely run across this problem:

My Bold speaker is having very low sound.. While on a call when I activate the speaker is so low I can barely hear it. On the other hand my Curve 8310 is having amazing sound quality..

Is there any settings to get more sound when the speaker is activated while on a call?????

From: Crackberry Forums posting

When I first got the Bold, it had an AMAZING speaker. Over time however, the output (volume) from the speaker had seemed to be diminishing; eventually to the point where it was louder to have on handset mode than speaker mode.

In doing some research online, I’ve found most people can just take it back to the store and get a new one. Likely this would result in the same issues as I’ve come to believe RIM knows all about the issue and just isn’t doing anything about it. Additionally this can be a problem for some who have purchased ‘unlocked’ blackberries as the store doesn’t touch those with a 35′ pole if you paid them.

Another option is to replace the midplane, which works just fine but it costs $10 and can be a bit scary to someone who isn’t familiar with electronics.

The third option. By far the most ghetto but so far has seemed to work quite nicely was conveyed to me in a dream by Richard Dean Anderson playing MacGyver. It involves duct tape.

How to fix the blackberry bold speaker problem:

- Cut a very small strip of duct tape into very small pieces, about 3/4″ x 1/2″ – you’ll need 3 of these

- Layer the pieces of duct tape one on top of another directly above the flash, where the square area around the flash/camera module meets up with the main part of the case (see pic)

- Close the cover on the back of your BB, making sure that the clips catch completely and it clicks into place properly. This is very important!

- Your speaker should be as loud as it was when you first bought it. If it’s not, consider adding a few more strips of duct tape until it works.

*** The pressure between the back cover and the blackberry causes a connection that seems to get loose over time to be pushed into place when the back cover is on, the duct tape ensures that the clicked-on back cover keeps pressure on the camera/flash module so the connection stays tight. I’m not sure of the relation between the camera/flash module and the speaker but I do know that when you push it down, it seems to restore the speaker volume.

GOOD LUCK!!!

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Hot Cache: The Hot Cache is what you would see on a BigIP LTM device if you were to use an HTTP Class with RamCache enabled, the hot cache (RamCache) allows some limited caching functions and is bundled as one of the features built-in to the BigIP LTM device. This type of caching provides functionality much like a caching proxy server would in that the LTM will stand in proxy to the application server and request content on the client’s behalf – all normal application-generated caching rules apply however. Hot Cache maintains an in-memory cache of objects throughout their lifecycle.

Smart Cache: The Smart Cache is a Hot Cache on steroids, in the middle of ‘roid rage. Smart Cache is what happens when you add the Web Accelerator (WA) module into a BigIP LTM. Smart Cache is a little different from hot cache in that it not only maintains an in-memory set of the most used objects and objects which are not intelligently cached via IBR, but also does disk-based caching of other objects which have not yet been deemed invalid (IBR objects). The disk cache allows the WA to perform intelligent caching, allowing some objects to remain cached forever even if they never change on the server. The implications are insane especially for fairly static applications/sites.

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A few months ago I started a home improvement project a little different from your typical home improvement project. Home Automation.

There’s many things to consider when looking to automate your home and so many choices and paths to follow. You can do security, CCTV cameras, remote monitoring, water/leak monitoring, remotely controlled thermostats, multi-zone HVAC and we haven’t even touched on Audio/video yet!

What we did at our house was to run cat5, coax, phone lines and tie lines all throughout the house. This allows us to distribute networking, phone, and TV to all rooms. In addition, we have Cat5e tie lines from our entertainment center to the TV, utility closets and laundry room/kitchen areas. This lets us run component video, zone2 line level audio, HDMI, DVI or VGA over balun adapters to any room in the house. Doing this, I was able to sell one of my tivos since I could watch my main tivo in any room in the house now!!!

Another great feature of using multi-use tie lines is that you can run the zone2 audio all over the place. We can listen to radio in the kitchen while we watch TV in the other room. Or I can listen to FOXNEWS in the shower upstairs while my daughter watches TV. We can also take our computer out to the back porch and control what internet radio we listen to out there, while someone else can watch a movie in full 5.1 surround sound, all from the same receiver!

There are endless possibilities to wiring your home for automation, many of which I have not discussed here. You’ve got lighting, timing, security and many many other things you can do to automate your home depending on your budget, the possibilities are TRULY endless!

To get an idea of what you want to do as well as understanding what’s all entailed and how to go about it, check out this Ebook on how to setup for home automation. This book will teach you what you need to know and where you need to go to get what you need for the project. It’ll teach you how to go about it and most importantly, where to start.

It’s a tough job, but the rewards are immense and the project itself is VERY fun! Get this book on home automation and then GET WIRING!!!

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Now here’s something I wouldn’t expect to see outside of a test environment. Anyone that’s worked with web acceleration or web caching knows how easy it is to allow applications to expose the wrong data to the wrong client if you’re not setting your policies properly.

A woman logged onto facebook on her AT&T cellular phone and got ‘GASP’, someone else’s facebook account!!!

Never having worked with proxying on the ISP level, I wonder how much caching and acceleration AT&T or the other big mobile carriers are doing for their customers. I can imagine they may be dabbling with it a bit as cell phones have limited data capabilities too.

The danger here is if AT&T was web acceleration/caching on some of the more well known and widely used sites out there, such as facebook as requests entered/exited their network. Not knowing the ins and outs of the application of which you’re caching is one of the worst things you can do in web acceleration, and no doubt can VERY EASILY lead to something like this occuring.

I’ve actually managed to do something like this in a test environment before and it was quite interesting. Application X was being cached by an F5 Web Accelerator and no matter what I did, every time the RamCache was enabled and clients logged in, they would not necessarily get their intended session, sometimes (most of the time) they would get hooked into someone else’s session and was able to do, think and act as if they were some other user-possibly a privileged user even. It turns out that a simple iRule fixed the problem – disable the RamCache only for the specific file which acted much like a ‘controller’ for the application in general, not necessarily needing to be cached really anyway.

Here’s the iRule I used, very simple:

when HTTP_REQUEST {
if { [HTTP::uri] contains ".extension" } { CACHE::disable }
}

Source: Fox News, Personal experience

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Been waiting for this for a LONG time! Works with Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE out of the box.

Download HERE

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For anyone trying to implement Oracle EnterpriseOne on F5 BigIP LTM with Web Accelerator module; and although it’s mostly not recommended by F5 to do this, you’ll need an iRule to make E1 8.11 to work with Web Accelerator.

With RamCache enabled (as is required for Web Accelerator to function), some of the content in the dynamic .maf files served by EnterpriseOne gets cached and held in RamCache; it seems for some reason (and it still may be my ‘greenness’ to the F5 WebAccel) that this data is not getting moved from Hot Cache to Smart Cache, as after a few logins, causes some users to experience session re-use from other users. Very bad!

It seems that no matter what I tried to do to exclude/proxy only the .maf files in WA, they keep getting caught in RamCache (Hot Cache) and held for way too long.

In order to stop this behaviour, just use an iRule to disable cache for .maf file requests:

when HTTP_REQUEST {
if { [HTTP::uri] contains “.maf” } {
CACHE::disable
}}

That’s that! Use the F5-provided WA policy for Oracle EnterpriseOne ERP and you’re set!
If anyone has happened to know of another way to deal with this or has managed to use WA on E1 8.11 WITHOUT having to do this, I am all ears… show me how it’s done!

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The latest speed test to Dallas, TX. via comcast basic high speed internet.

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