Foddrick - Eureka

Canon Fax Received in Memory

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:31:30 +1000

I have never been a fan of printers and less so multifunction printers. Recently, I've been wrestling with my fax because it stopped printing rx reports so I didn't know whether or not it was successful. Additionally, it was low on toner, and it was constantly flashing "Received To Memory". These problems are all related. It seems by default when the fax is low on toner, it won't print any reports or automatically print faxes. The solution is fairly simple.

If your machine is anything like mine, press menu, find "Fax Settings" -> OK -> Find "RX Settings" -> OK -> Find "Toner Supply Low" -> OK then choose "Keep Printing" and press "OK" again. If your problem is similar to mine, your printer should spring to life and output the missing reports and faxes. You will of course use up your toner more quickly.

Importing data into MYOB

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:33:40 +1000

It is bad enough that I am at a point where I need to use MYOB. I tried to speed up the process by importing some data from another database, but no matter how I formatted it, with CRLF or just LF, every time I tried to open the file, MYOB gave me a helpful I/O Error on put. I finally figured out that MYOB wants to be able to open the file in write mode, and I had created a readonly file!

Greasemonkey Suncorp Menu Fix

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:46:43 +1100

A quick script to undo the change that suncorp made to their left menu with all the opening and closing sections. This makes all the menu items visible all the time as it used to be.

It's all about the ACKs

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:56:01 +1100

I've recently set up VOIP (via engin) and did not want my other net activities to interfere. I had my download client throttled to 5kps and I was running wondershaper but it didn't seem to make a difference. It finally dawned on me that it was my ACK packets that were flooding my upload link. Once I added some iptables entries to mark the packets from my download software, and gave them the lowest priority, all was good.

Gmail Action Links

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:02:59 +1000

Here is a script that I originally found on http://www.arantius.com/article/gmail+action+links.
Unfortunately, gmail has changed since that script last worked and it doesn't seem to be actively maintained. I love this script and keep making changes to keep pace with googles changes to gmail. Here is my latest version which was working as at 1st August 2006.

New server

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:26:06 +1000

Welcome to the new server.
After 3 weeks of renovations and procrastination dominated, I've finally moved 1 site over to my new dedicated server. And I discovered the cause of the funky stuff in drupal when you upgrade to php5 is that you shouldn't be using the xtemplate engine with php5. Upgrade to 4.7 already anyway!

Illegal Extension in gmail fixed

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 21:11:36 +1000

Ok, if you are like me, where you have your own domain, and merely forward all email to gmail, make the illegal extension problem go away by filtering your email through this sed script.
/Content-(Disposition|Type):/ { /name=/!N s/(.*name="[^\.]*\.)(zip|exe|mdb)(.*)/\1\2\_\3/g }
I commonly get exe, mdb and zip files with illegal files in them, if there's others you want to receive insert them into the appropriate place.

Spamassassin Rule

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:53:38 +1100

Do you always get spam sent to some other name at your email address ? Here's a great SA rule to stop that.

header NAMEWRONG To =~ /(?i)(?!.[^"]*your first name[^"]*)[^\<]*\<your\@email.com\>/

score NAMEWRONG 4.0

Just replace your name with your first name and your\@email.com with your email address. The \ is required.

I suspect this one rule will slash my spam count.
You'll need to write more rules for any regularly spammed addresses.

Edit:Hmmm.... While useful, it doesn't look like this traps that much spam.

A Watershed Night

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 09:36:46 +1100

Last night the kids bathed, dryed put their pyjamas on and went to bed ! I'm still pinching myself ! More of the same improvement to come please !

Automatic radar animations

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:28:42 +1000

I'm pleased to announce that my radar animations are now completely created without my intervention. Enjoy the radar animations here.

Unexpected ORA-1406

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 21:30:58 +1000

Today I started getting ORA-1406 errors from VERY well tested code.
Not tested well enough it seems. Some OCI library code that I wrote to simplify the task of fetching data was getting ora-1406 errors.
It turns out that OCI (or the calls that I use) does not take into account the local character set when advising on the maximum size of a column. My local charset was UTF8 but the databases was USASCII. I hit an (erroneous) hi bit character and it exceeded the size that I had allocated. If anyone knows how to ask OCI for how many bytes a field needs taking into account your local characte

Holy mail loop batman !

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:30:54 +1000

I'm a great fan of gmail, and therefore I forward a copy of all my email to there so I can reference it easily online.
This plan works great until gmail bounces a message with one of it's 572 illegal attachment messages and leaves the bad attachment attached. So my auto-forward script forwards the email back and this happens ad infinitum... Of course all of these messages are being scanned by virus scanners and spam scanners. It really bought the server to it's knees. At least now I've modified my mailfilter...

Nifty Corners Gotcha

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:10:14 +1000

Just tried out nifty corners today and I have to say that I am quite impressed. Though I feel compelled to vent about this gotcha that held me up for a good hour. As hard as I tried, I couldn't make ie6 work if I tried to round a <li>. If anyone can prove me wrong, feel free.