I bought a new webcam recently. The camera worked with Ubuntu as soon as I plugged it in but but the microphone didn't work with Skype until I set it up. This is very easy but it took me a very long time to figure out so I thought I'd make a note here in case anyone has the same trouble.

In this post, I describe how to convert a Debian i386 .deb package for Shell In A Box into a PowerPC .deb. The instructions also apply to other programs and architectures, where the source code and prebuilt i386 .deb are available, but a prebuilt native .deb is not.

For my dissertation, I've shown bar charts for commits in every week. I think these are x100 better for showing ACTUAL progress and it was clear where I had made less progress than some weeks (though this was entirely justified).

Unfortunately, as good as Dropbox is, it really lacks a graphing tool (I did try to find one) or any kind of statistical analysis. It's been a bit of a pain to get what I wanted, but I managed in the end. See attachment to this post for an example :)

In this post, I describe two potential pitfalls with handling session cookies in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer while developing websites, and how to avoid them. The problem in Google Chrome relates to its handling of local/internal hostnames, and the problem in Internet Explorer relates to its privacy settings and compact privacy policies.

Many of us are familiar with Java RMI but to get it working over the internet is a bit more involved, at least in my own experience of doing so. Please note that this post assumes a basic understanding of Java RMI. If you would like to start from scratch, see Oracle's official documentation.

The solution

Like a lot of people, I'm pretty excited about HTML5, particularly for including audio and video in web pages. However, while it has great potential, there's still a lot of work to be done before it's easily usable by everyone.

It's often useful to be able to find out what your external IP address is. I often check when I'm at client sites, to discover if I'm behind a NAT, remind myself whether I'm browsing through an SSH tunnel, and so on. There are a number of sites available that provide this service, e.g. whatismyip.com and myip.dk, but I recently decided to set one up on Kitserve. It's accessible at https://secure.kitserve.org.uk/ip/.

I discovered today that the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has issued a proposal that Nominet's terms and conditions be changed so that they are contractually obliged to “suspend domains where Nominet has reasonable grounds to believe they are being used to commit a crime”. On the face of it this seems like a good idea, as there are an ever increasing number of sites out on the internet serving up viruses, attempting to steal confidential information, and so on.