http://synch.cc/synch/aggregator/categories/1 synch.cc - aggregated feeds in category From our team en http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/25/kindle-firmware-upgrades/ Remember to upgrade your Kindle from Amazon – there’s a new firmware upgrade available, taking the system to version 2.5.2 (24.3MB – you may want to transfer via USB…)Updates include: PDF Pan and Zoom (finally) — you can zoom into small print! Collections – to group books and documents by topic or type (not just [...] Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:43:32 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/25/update-seacom-cable-back-up-for-now/ Notification at 20:04 on 23 July 2010 read that the link was back up and stable. For now.From the update from SEACOM: SEACOM is pleased to confirm that all repairs to the submarine cable have been successfully completed. With the entire network now fully operational, our technical teams will continue to work closely with customers [...] Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:27:52 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/22/update-seacom-finally-a-light-of-hope-after-outage-and-down-time-23-july-now/ SEACOM expects all connectivity to be restored to full pre-crash conditions by 23 July 2010. The repairs are not complete yet, but, officially, “in the final stages of completion”, with only testing to go before the cable goes back down into the water. SEACOM’s official statement made today just after lunch: SEACOM is pleased to [...] Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:03:43 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/17/update-seacom-operational-update-re-repairs-and-down-time/ Finally, SEACOM has posted new (well, another) report regarding the undersea outage off Mombasa, which, though initially projected to be completed by 11 July will most probably only be finished by 22 July 2010 according to latest reports. Finally, though, they have announced that the “designated ship has been deployed to the location of the [...] Sat, 17 Jul 2010 04:57:12 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/15/update-seacom-still-eyeing-the-22-july-as-targeted-restore-date/ Nothing much new, there is not even an operational update from SEACOM. However, unofficial reports are still pointing to 22 July 2010 as the targeted completion date forthe service to be restored for the submarine cable running up the East African coast. At present, though, “they have not yet settled the mobilization of the repair [...] Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:00:39 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/14/on-the-fly-compression-of-a-tar-ball-or-mysqldump/ Just to jot it down lest I forget: Tar’ing the local directory and streaming the tarball straight to gzip: tar cvf - . | gzip > target.tar.gz MySQLdump’ing directly to gzip: mysqldump --opt --single-transaction -h HOST -u  USER -pPASS DATABASENAME| gzip > OUTPUT.sql.gz Using --single-transaction above to avoid locking restrictions on the tables, and it’s [...] Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:47:49 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/13/solved-qlikview-installation-on-windows-7-installation-error/ You may encounter the following error on installation: Installation ended prematurely because of an error when trying to install 32-bit or 64-bit qlikView on Windows 7. With or without UAC (User Access Control), installation fails. Suggestions to (re-)install vbscript.dll using regsvr32 vbscript.dll in the c:\windows\system32 (64-bit equivalent) directory didn’t help. On execution of the installer, [...] Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:23:05 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/12/end-of-life-for-ubuntu-versions/ In the story relating to release upgrades for Ubuntu, below the end-of-life table for the Ubutu Releases from the Ubuntu Wiki – just to have it all in one place; I’m only including the LTS (long-term support) editions, as these should be the only ones deployed on live production systems. In the meantime, Maverick Meerkat [...] Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:22:07 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/12/update-seacom-no-news-is-good-news/ Since their last update, SEACOM – via their news section or the SEACOM Blog which are ostensibly the same (sort of very weak SQL coding and gaping holes asking for SQL injection) – has not released any further news since 9 July 2010 — the target date of recovery is 22 July 2010. I loved [...] Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:49:19 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/09/update-seacom-cable-outage-update-new-eta-down-until-22-july/ There has been a flurry of updates relating to the repairs to the SEACOM cable. In short – don’t expect anything before 22 July – previous expectations of “5 – 8 days” were over-enthusiastic from the operator themselves… While restoration capacity has successfully been sourced and implemented from other cable operators servicing the eastern and [...] Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:44:29 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/09/update-seacom-down-due-to-router-off-mombasa/ So the site’s back, but there’s no news. No news is good news? Please note that our News module is currently unavailable, due to a security patch implemented by Hosting – we are working on the problem and the news will be back ASAP. Media Contact / Spokesperson: Frederic Cornet Public Affairs, Communications and Media [...] Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:26:30 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/08/update-seacom-down-now-their-website-too/ The official source for SEACOM press releases, www.seacom.mu has decided to follow suit on the router off Mombasa that has decided to crash, with a very boring bog-standard JET Database error message after the “Detecting Flash” redirection: Microsoft JET Database Engine error ’80004005′ Unspecified error /index2.asp, line 10 Not a good sign with regards to [...] Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:17:07 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/07/floating-spider-camera-at-the-world-cup-south-africa/ The Spidercam that has been hovering above the pitch in four of the stadiums for the World Cup in South Africa is manufactured by spidercam GmBH (headquartered in Austria). The company was founded in 2000 as CCSystems Inc and the prototype free-flying 360° view camera came into play in 2003. 2007, spidercam GmBH was founded. [...] Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:06:54 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/07/update-more-news-seacom-router-down/ Local ISPs have been making a variety of attempts and efforts to reroute local traffic to bridge the virtual shut-down of the connectivity of those users solely dependent on the SEACOM fibre-optic cable for their Internet access. Internet Solutions in South Africa have put in place a variety of rerouting options which, depending on the [...] Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:11:20 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/06/uruguay-vs-netherlands-tickets-still-available/ FIFA just released another 1600 tickets, so there are oodles of Category 1 tickets still available! Only R 4 200.00 each! So hurry over to https://lmsfwctickets.fifa.com/LMS/UserArea/Wizard.aspx if you’re that way inclined… I wonder how close to the “64 100″ attendance in the 68 000 seater stadium we will get today… R 6 720 000 more [...] Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:20:08 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/06/update-seacom-cable-offline-until-at-least-11-july/ Slow Internet access (if any – in some cases, you can’t connect to sites without using a proxy) in South Africa… SEACOM has announced that the actual repair on the repeater in segment 9 will take only a few hours, though the full process may take at least 6 – 8 days. The ship is [...] Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:07:59 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/06/vmware-console-and-firefox-3-6-6-workaround/ As the VMWare plugin does not work with Mozilla‘s Firefox 3.6.6 – and as it cannot launch a virtual machine console – you’ll have to use a workaround. This post results from the error I kept receiving: Cannot access virtual machine console. The request timed out. The paths are applicable to your OS and version [...] Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:17:27 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/06/update-seacom-down-again-a-ship-a-ship/ New update at 5am SAST: So they have initiated the deployment of the ship to the wet plant. That does not mean, though, that the ship is actually is already on its way – it’s deployment is initiated… Official communications from SEACOM have been promised to follow… In addition: SEACOM’s investigations have revealed that an [...] Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:32:03 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/05/iol-with-some-issues/ IOL – the online offering of Independent Newspapers – seems to have issues — only two stories show up – one about Nigeria reversing their ban on its soccer team (and announcing that the football federation said it would disband and rebuild the side) and another after a very strange story about the Gatsby International [...] Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:13:46 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/05/update-seacom-down-again/ One of my service providers have forwarded me an update to the latest SEACOM outage: According to the update, SEACOM has sent out notification that they are currently localising the fault from both Mumbai and Dar-es-Salaam (in Tanzania). There seems to be a repeater of theirs that has issues which has resulted in them running [...] Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:11:51 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/07/05/seacom-down-again-cable-break-in-kenya/ Afrihost, as well as a range of other resellers of SEACOM bandwidth, again had to post notifications today of network downtime: We are experiencing an intermittent International ADSL connectivity problem. Our upstream service providers’ engineers are investigating the cause of the problem. We will post more details here shortly once we have more information. Services [...] Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:08:57 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/06/28/symbolic-links-in-windows/ Windows Vista and 7, if not before, allow symbolic links — mklink is your command-line friend! Creates a symbolic link. MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target /D      Creates a directory symbolic link.  Default is a file symbolic link. /H      Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link. /J      Creates a Directory Junction. [...] Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:16:26 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/06/28/firefox-3-6-6-crash-protection-crashing/ Is it just me or is the new version of Crash Protection which pushed itself via a new release of Firefox up to 3.6.6 marking every instance of Flash as crashed? On the one hand, this may be a little salute to the Flash – Apple situation (though I hardly think it likely). Am I [...] Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:22:03 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/06/28/create-a-tar-file-from-directory-and-all-subdirectories/ It’s a simple one-liner that one tends to forget (that is, one that I forget as I untar more than I manually tar). So creating a tar file from directory and all subdirectories is as simple as tar -cvf file.tar directory To compress it on the fly, pipe it to your favourite compression application (compress, [...] Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:11:41 -0400 http://blog.sven.co.za/2010/06/20/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-06-20/ Well done to #MEX! # #Mex now on their third goal in the #WorldCup against #Fra – 2101st goal!! # #FRA will have to catch up! # Hurray for #Mex for their second goal in the #Worldcup # 2100'th #FIFA #Worldcup Goal! # Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:04:00 -0400