Stuff I do

So I got a task the other day: install php 5.5.9 onto a fairly old (10.04.4 LTS "lucid") Ubuntu machine, without breaking the already existing prehistoric php, installed from the default repository. Also, compiling from the sources was out of question, since my colleges wanted to keep the update procedure as simple as possible. So how do I install a 14.04.1 LTS "trusty" package onto lucid without wreaking havoc among the packages?

Before you begin If you follow this series of articles and maybe do some research on your own, you'll be able to build a simple radiation detection device and perform some simple, interesting experiments. I chose to build a simple, but surprisingly effective device called an ionization chamber or ion chamber , which is just a very sensitive current sensor, or resistance measuring device, the difference being only the point of view. A great source of information on ion chambers is: http://www.techlib.com/science/ion.html Ion chambers are not Geiger counters, however they work according to the same basic principles, as will later be explained. You will need to be able use soldering iron, and perform current and voltage measurement. If you don't know how to do these things, it's better to ask someone to show you. Please only perform the tasks written here if you know what you are doing. Soldering requires high temperature. We will work with high voltages at some...

*UPDATED* Hashlimit is an iptables module that allows one to define rules that in effect will limit traffic speed (bytes / time unit) or frequency (connections / time unit) per target or origin ports / IPs. The inner workings of this module and / or how to make it work correctly remains a mystery for many. Hashlimit is also close friends with the limit module, only much more powerful, capable of expressing rate limiting per source IP (for example) in a single rule.

TL;DR: firefox won't start a request for an URL if a request is already being executed for that same URL. If you open http://example.com/foo, and it takes several seconds to complete, when you simultaneously open a new tab and enter the very same URL, the latter request WILL NOT BE SENT until the former has completed. If you ever need to make parallel requests for the same URL make sure you put some random query string in them, so the browser won't serialize requests for them. I was testing a concurrent web application written in Haskell, Yesod. I love Haskell and the Yesod framework, this combination gave me the best web development experience so far. I especially loved how easy it was to develop a simple web-based chat application by using TVars and TChans - variables and "channels" - basically message queues - to store state in a Yesod web application and pass messages between threads. I stumbled into a strange bug, and it took a good two hours of my life...

IPv6? Internet Protocol version 6 is a network protocol that will soon replace  the current Internet Protocol version 4 - the protocol that runs the Internet, and has those familiar four-number addresses like 183.43.221.13 With IPv6 are coming a plethora of changes, probably the most end-user-alarming one will be the change in the address format demonstrated above. The four-times-one-byte address will be replaced by a eight-times-two-bytes address that looks like some fancy password from a bad computer movie. The new addresses will take the form of 4367:9987:a01b:0000:0000:0007:cafe:babe According to the simplification rules of IPv6 addresses, this can be written as 4367:9987:a01b::7:cafe:babe Since with a double colon you can jump through all of the all-zero address parts, and leading zeros can also be omitted.