I found a real strange bug. A client of mine has two sites. One I host, the other is hosted by a 3th party. Now the client has a domain control panel for the other site and rerouted the other domain to the one I host, but the system just makes a frameset. Not real SEO, but okay. After a few days bug reports came in. Can not log in etc. Can only be the sessions? But after testing I found that the bug only appears in Internet Explorer (tested only 8) and only on the rerouted domain, not the one I host. Fix was easy. Just added a little javascript to break out of the top frameset and everyting was working again. I think it’s Microsoft’s Phishing filter that is kicking in, but have to test further.

Here’s my litte fix: :-)

if(top.frames.length){
top.location.href = self.location.href;
}


I want to have internet all the time. And I have… I have a HTC Touch Cruise running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro with a HSDPA connection. Now this is a way to connect the EEE to the HTC via bluetooth and use the windows mobile device as a gateway to the internet. By the way, I’m running Ubuntu-eee… If you are running Xandros, the default distro, try to Google on “Xandros bnep0 windows mobile”

First get the right software. Open a terminal and install the Bluez gnome utilities.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bluez-gnome


Now open the file ‘/etc/default/bluetooth’ and be sure that the following is set;

BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=1
PAND_ENABLED=1


Now I did a reboot, you could restart some services, but I was lazy. Now, after you insert your Bluetooth dongle (or when you have it build in), you should have a bluetooth icon in the upper right corner. With that tool you should be able to pair with your Windows Mobile device. If you don’t know how, try it the other way around, use your mobile to pair with your eee. After the exchange op pins the two devices should be paired.

Open up the terminal again and do the following command to scan for your mobile…

sudo hcitool scan

You should get something like this;

Scanning ...
00:17:83:xx:xx:xx HTC_P3650

This is the mac address of your mobile device and you’ll need it later on to connect.

Okay, we have a working bluetooth dongle and we can see the mobile… Now some config we need to have to get the link working. Append the following to ‘/etc/network/interfaces‘;

iface bnep0 inet manual
down dhclient -r -pf /var/run/dhclient.$IFACE.pid $IFACE
down pand -K
up pand -Q -n
up dhclient -pf /var/run/dhclient.$IFACE.pid $IFACE


We are done configuring the eee. The following steps should be made every time you want to get the eee online:

Open on your Windows Mobile device the application ‘Internet Sharing’, you can find it in your Programs folder. Start a Bluetooth PAN connection and wait for it to start.

Open up a terminal on you eee and do:

sudo pand -c 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx -n

Ofcource, you’ll have to replace the 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx with the mac address of your device.

You should get this as result:

pand[8033]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.26
pand[8033]: Connecting to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8033]: bnep0 connected


Now bring the network interface up and get an IP from the windows mobile device:

sudo ifup bnep0


Now wait for the following result, it should look something like this:

pand[8060]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.26
pand[8060]: Inquiring
pand[8060]: Searching for NAP on 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8060]: Connecting to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8060]: Connect to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx failed. Connection refused(111)
pand[8060]: Searching for NAP on 00:16:CB:xx:xx:xx
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.6
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/bnep0/00:10:60:a2:8c:dd
Sending on   LPF/bnep0/00:10:60:a2:8c:dd
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.85 on bnep0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.85 from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.85 -- renewal in 111983 seconds.

YES! We have an IP! You can double check with the ‘ifconfig’ command, or just try to open up Firefox and start browsing ;) Now close your eee, walk to the pub, get a nice cold one. Open your eee and start browsing the net ;) w00t!

To get the interface down again, use:

sudo ifconfig bnep0 down


Most of the info I’ve used, can be found in this forum post. Ive written a little shell shell script to bring the connection up, because it’s hard to remember all of this after some beers ;)


#!/bin/sh
sudo pand -c 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx -n
sleep 5
sudo ifup bnep0
echo "Drink beer!"

Don’t forget to make the file executable with ‘chmod +x myscript.sh’, or something like that…

Finally, I’ve got it working… There is so many documentation on the net on how to config your avahi-daemon under Debian, so it’s working under MacOSX Leopard. But what ever I did, the server showed up in my Finder, but when I tried to connect by clicking the server icon, it didn’t work… Googled around, but never a solution. I could not connect to my Netatalk daemon. After I added a configuration so I could click the server to connect to my sFTP server in Cyberduck, (same box as the Netatalk and Avahi daemon) and it worked?!

Now I know why… What I had in my Avahi configuration for my Netatalk daemon, was in my afpd.service file a host-name definition. But in my sftp.service file no <host-name> line.
So what I did, was simply remove the line, restarted Avahi and there it was!

So my working config file: /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
</service>
</service-group>

More usefull documentation:
Netatalk 2.03 with encryption support for Debian 4.0
http://www.disgruntled-dutch.com/2007/general/howtodownload-netatalk-encryption-support-debian-4/

How to use OS X Leopard screen sharing with a Linux machine
http://www.sanityinc.com/articles/mac-screen-sharing-with-linux

IE6 is an hell, I’ve posted this more than ones, but now there is a new online campaign, that tries to move the current IE6 users to upgrade there browser. savethedevelopers.org I’ve added the little simple javascript line to my site, to help all MSIE 6 users to upgrade to a better browser. IE6 is a hell for developers, so more and more developers are skipping the ie6 compatibility. I do! I just leave the non working features out for IE6 browsers… When you have a IE7, Firefox, Safari or Opera, the features will work fine. So please, help to save the developers and upgrade your IE6!

Okay, after some googeling I’ve found two options for a free GPS and navigation solution. The first one is a multi-OS GPS software ‘Roadnav’ http://roadnav.sourceforge.net/ This GPL-ed software is build for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Also source packages are available. Maps are available and downloadable for free!
The second is for smart phones, ‘Nav4all’ http://www.nav4all.com/ I’ve tested it on my Nokia 9300i and it works like a charm. Only thing is that you’ll need a working internet connection. Trough GPRS or WiFi. I have a flat-fee GPRS account, so I have no worries. It is real fast. More info coming later. Will test the two packages now! ;)

Wow, so much frustrations, just don’t know how windows works… This here is just for me, cause I keep forgetting!

On client machine:

• right click on My Computer
• Properties
• Machine name
• Change domain button
• Add to workgroup
• Restart…
• right click on My Computer
• Properties
• Machine name
• Change domain button
• Add to domain
• Join with login and pass
• Restart…

Done…

Then sync time with domain controler…

• Login with administrator account.
• Open command prompt.
• Type following:
  
w32tm /config /syncfromflags:domhier /update
net stop w32time
net start w32time


Done…

For my father in law I had to install on his iPaq 3970 with TomTom 5, cause he could not get his BT GPS module to work. After searching the web I found the solution. Pear the GPS device (mouse) as you normally do, start the connection to the GPS . Now fire up the TomTom application. Instead of selecting the normal BT device/mouse, you choose: Other cable-NMEA-GPS (Andere Kabel-nmea-gps), select 9600 as the baud rate. Then select the Bluetooth port 5, and confirm your configuration. Now it all should work! The problem is that the bluetooth driver in the new TomTom 5 does not connect at 9600, but the BT mouse can only do that speed…

So, I start with this; please don’t use MSIE 6.0, it is a disaster for web developers! Now, this is what I ran in to last night, a bug in MSIE 6.0. Every item with a transparent PNG as background image, done with the CSS hack/workaround (AlphaImageLoader filter) and the sizingMethod set to scale, all the child objects are locked. Nothing works anymore! No more forms, no more hrefs, no text select, no nothing… I spend 5 hours last night searching the web to solve this problem! (Send the bill to Bill?)

The solution is, or rather the bug is: When the width OR height of the dimensions of the transparent 24bits PNG image is less than 64 pixels, and the sizingMethod set to scale, the bug appears.

If that is not a bug… Please remove all your copies of MSIE 6.x and use a more developer friendly browser like Firefox. Or if you feel the need, upgrade to msie 7.0. IE 6 is a developer nightmare!

Check these nice QuickTime movies and make your choise, Windows Vista or Mac OS X… I know ;)