Some times the simple solutions, make the biggest difference to a user experience….

Colorful Tabs | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation
The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. An essential.

UPDATE: It seems that the Colorful Tabs authors homepage is down, as a result I appear to be getting hits from google and comments about features. I’d like to stress that I have nothing to do with the development of Colorful Tabs and you have my apologies if my post appeared that way. You have stumbled across a post from my firefox recommendations category where by I post links to firefox add-ons I like have installed and recommend to my friends.

UPDATE: This theme has been updated, please see the new post, thanks.

I’m thinking about hosting a forum for some friends to use, so I thought I’d take a look at bbpress; I look after phpbb for my better half, and find the patching & modding a bit of a pain, the stuff photomatt does never lets me down, so I thought I’d take a look at his attempt at a forum.

For “regular” forum users I think they may find the interface a bit of a shock, but that doesn’t bother me, there are some features missing, but the community have been putting plugins together to plug the gap (poor, poor pun, sorry !).

Recently I decided to re-organise my bookmarks toolbar, and added links to my nagios and cacti installations. I noticed that the favicons where missing.

For cacti, there’s a how to, but I found it a little over kill - I didn’t need step 2 , as my catci install is an rpm from dag, and I didn’t bother with step 4, as it worked without it, but hey ymmv!

Nagios was simpler, depending on how you installed nagios, will effect file permission , owners, directories etc. Again, I’ve got another dag rpm, so for me I logged in as root,

An absolute must for anyone who uses a google service, best enhancement is adding https to things like, docs, gmail & calendar !

CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience — Firefox Extension
CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).

I noticed the other day, that the google rank for linickx.com has dropped from a respectable 4, to a pitiful 0 !

The reason for the drop is obvious, November & December have been busy real work months for me, and I’ve not been able to post much online.. no art, no php, no comments, nothing ! Now photomatt has recently blogged about the disconnect between productive good techies and people who have time to blog, so I won’t go into it here; I will just say that I agree, and I think my blog reflects that. What I didn’t realise about my google rank is that the age of your links contributes to your overall PR. So although all those other links to linickx.com still exist on the web they’re getting older so they must not count as much; of course this is speculation, google keep to themselves how their ranking is made up, but it’s the only thing that’s changed.

• LinuxToons
  LinuxToons - Linux in main-stream cartoons
  (tags: comics linux)

I think it’s safe to say, if you can’t get something to work then the manual is rubbish or the user is stupid, with setting up snmp v3 on linux, the user is me, so the fault is probably lies there.

SNMPv3 moves away from the community string idea from older version, and into a username & password combo. The correct tool for creating users is snmpusm, but no matter how many times I read the man page I can’t work it out. I get that you copy a user from the initial user, but how do you create the initial user ? If I try on my box I just get an “snmp timeout” error.

I practiced a new x-mas change freeze idea this year, shut down un-important systems.

The idea is simple, systems are at “risk” if you don’t update them, if you update them then they change, if they change they can fail, if they fail you’ve got work to do

• Box Backup
  (tags: backup)

• Nicks Google Public Notebook
  added to del.icio.us so that I can find this page from other peoples browsers
  (tags: google notebook)
• CipherDyne
  (tags: linux security)