Rachel’s Blog

VirginBroadband 50 Mbps service – check upload speed before ordering

July 20th, 2011

I get broadband Internet from Virgin, was 10 Mbps but I got seduced by the promise of a 5 Mbps upload speed to upgrade to the 50 Mbps service.

Engineer came, replaced old cable model with whizzy new SuperHub, left.

And that’s when all my problems started…

3 problems:

engineer didn’t use power supply which came with the hub, just reused the old one (wrong voltage, wrong amps, ran far too hot)
Upload speed still less than 1 Mbps.
Previously reliable ssh connections time out after approx 2mins

Solutions:

They’ve sent me a new hub (apparently this is easier than just sending the power supply)
After several phone calls, they tell me that the faster upload speeds haven’t been enabled yet at our local exchange.

And the ssh timeouts, ah, well that deserves a separate blog post…

Rather annoying, the upload speed business. I’d specifically told them that this was the reason I wanted the upgrade… So I’ve downgraded back to 10 MBps until they can supply what they sell…

Posted in VirginBroadband | No Comments »

Selenium WebDriver won’t let you add/change request headers

July 14th, 2011

Selenium looks like being a good tool for writing some automated browser tests.

Selenium WebDriver with the python bindings looks like it could be fantastic for doing this.

But then they go and spoil it…

I need to be able to modify the headers in my requests as part of my tests. WebDriver doesn’t let you do that. Worse, its a conscious design choice they have made to not let you do this since they want WD to only do what a user can do.

But, um, doesn’t WD allow you to set/change cookies? Go figure…

So their suggestion is to use a proxy for this.

So AFAICS they’ve taken the main benefit of using WebDriver over the original Selenium (you don’t need to run a separate server process) and removed it. As a design choice….

Looks like I’m not the only person who wants this feature..

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=141

Posted in Selenium | 1 Comment »

How to import extra INSTALLED_APPS from an external settings file

March 23rd, 2011

from test_settings import *
applist = list(INSTALLED_APPS)
applist.extend(INSTALLED_TEST_APPS)
INSTALLED_APPS = tuple(applist)

Tags: Django
Posted in Django | 4 Comments »

Ubuntu Maverick upgrade removes Workspace Switcher names

February 5th, 2011

This is because Maverick uses compiz, which doesn’t support them.

Change to metacity, which does.

$ metacity --replace &

Posted in General | No Comments »

rpm: which package provides that file?

October 18th, 2010

rpm -q –whatprovides /full/path/to/file

Posted in Linux | No Comments »

“LESSjs will obsolete css”

August 31st, 2010

http://fadeyev.net/2010/06/19/lessjs-will-obsolete-css

Posted in css | No Comments »

How to import a module programmatically

August 30th, 2010

To import a module where you have the module name as a string and want to do it programmatically:

X = __import__(‘X’)

X is now a variable that can be used in your code:

e.g. getattr(X, method)

Posted in Python | No Comments »

converting ssl cert from PKCS#12 to PEM

July 28th, 2010

$ openssl pkcs12 -in /path/to/my/cert.p12 -out /pathto/my/cert.pem

If you get “X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch” e.g. with stunnel, then try adding -clcerts

$ openssl pkcs12 -clcerts -in /path/to/my/cert.p12 -out /pathto/my/cert.pem

Posted in OpenSSL | No Comments »

HOWTO install couchdb 0.11.0 on Ubuntu Lucid from source

June 30th, 2010

Only 0.10.0 available in ubuntu package, but I want 0.11.0. Here goes…

Get couchdb tarball from apache couchdb website.

sudo apt-get install xulrunner-dev libicu-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev erlang-dev help2man

You need xulrunner-dev as a replacement for the Mozilla spidermonkey which used to conflict with Mozilla and is not available in Lucid.

Then follow the rest of the instructions at http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Ubuntu (look for the section called “Ubuntu 10.04″)

Posted in CouchDB | 2 Comments »

iPad annoyances

June 8th, 2010

1. Can’t use certificate authentication with Safari, so there are some websites I can’t access that I can from my laptop.

2. iPhone-native apps don’t rotate into landscape mode.

3. Book selection in iBooks is paltry.

Tags: iPad
Posted in General | No Comments »