Nigeria Settles Paris Club Debt

Thought I should throw my tuppence worth in about this.

Finally we can see that the huge profits Nigeria accrues from oil are actually ending up in the right places, paying off debts that will mean the money can now be used for the development of the country. I am very happy about this, I wonder what other debts can now be paid off soon, and what we will now see happening in the country.

I'm a little worried that this is just political propaganda for the presidential election next year, it seems that this news would be a good excuse to keep Obasanjo in the Presidents seat.

Technorati Tags: Lagos, Nigeria, Lagos, Nigeria, Paris Club

fixed debian unstable udev causes x windows crash

I've had a problem with my laptop since December last year. My laptop is a Debian unstable system and Whenever I would update the udev package to anything post 0.70 I would get a hard crash in X.org once it was started. I had to downgrade the udev package and reinstall the hotplug package it replaced in order to avoid the crashes. It's important to keep udev up to date because it handles loading drivers of hardware and responding to new hardware like usb devices when they are inserted when the computer is running.

I figured that this might be a temporary problem with Debian Unstable, as happens occaisionally, because at the time there were a number of large upgrades added and I thought one of these might have caused the problem. I wrote to Marco d'Itri the maintainer of the udev package to ask him if he could help me and his reply came back just 1 hour later.

udev cannot cause your kernel to just crash. I suggest you compare the lists of drivers loaded, and if this still does not help try getting the error messages with netconsole or even better a serial console.

-- ciao, Marco

So no clues there, I had already tried reading error messages and there was nothing but because my laptop has no serial port it is not possible to use serial console as far as I know. I compared the drivers loaded with each version of udev with lsmod but the same drivers were loaded in each case.

Anyway, as you can see from the title of this post I think I've fixed my problem, it turns out it wasn't udev's fault at all. I found some strange error messages in my X.org log file recently after updating to x.org R7.0, all involving drm, which is for accelerated 3d graphics as far as I can see. So I decided to try removing the DRI drivers from the xorg.conf file since they didn't seem to be working and lo and behold not only did the error messages disappear but the crashing with the new udev packages stopped too! Yay!

I will try and work on the DRI driver see if I can get a bug report about it but in the mean time I am happy now that I have finally got udev installed.

I'm posting this here in case anybody else has the problem.

Technorati Tags: Debian, Debian Unstable, udev, X.org, crash

Routers for the Small Office

I've been looking at getting a new NAT router for my home internet connection. I've been looking around at all the standard fare but I didn't see anything that would really make things better.

Features I want are...

1. VPN built in. so I can connect from outside safely and have no VNC or SSH ports left wide open.


2. A Real Hardware Firewall with Stateful Packet Inspection.


3. Some method of Intrusion Detection. I may still set up a Snort box, but at least I should have a log of attempts to reach my private network.


4. Traffic Shaping or some kind of Quality of Service (QoS) system that will give higher priority to email, chat, VoiP and browsing than BitTorrent, eMule or <Insert Bandwidth Hog Here> to stop those long delays and failed connections if someones downloading something huge (Like Knoppix DVDs or Debian DVDs).

I was quite surprised that the first three required features are fairly common now on NAT routers in the medium price range (£50-£100) but the Traffic Shaping option is difficult to spot. I thought I would have to save my pennies and get a Cisco router to do it, but eventually I found a few that do seem to do all of these and not cost thousands. D-Link DFL-200 and DFL-700, and3com 3CR860-95 among others.

However the one I have found most interesting is one from a company I have barely heard of. Draytek and it's their Vigor2900 I'm interested in. I will probably order one soon and blog about it later.

Technorati Tags: Router, Firewall, VPN, Traffic Shaping, QoS, Bandwidth Shaping

Lagos Island Snap Photo2

P0002629
Originally uploaded by ajbrowe.

A cool shot from the West bound flyover at Marina on Lagos island showing the building that recently collapsed on Lagos Island. Scary stuff.

Lagos Island Snap Photo

P0002628
Originally uploaded by ajbrowe.

A shot from the West bound flyover at Marina on Lagos Island of a nice Church that for some reason looks a bit blue.

North West(ish) view from Eko Hotel

North West(ish) view from Eko Hotel
Originally uploaded by ajbrowe.

This photograph was also taken from the dirty 11th floor windows of Eko Hotel. It shows the view to the north west of Eko hotel which is on the East of Victoria Island.

The road in the foreground is Adetokunbo Ademola Street. The other side of the road is a school. I can't remember the name of it right now.

Further back are some of the high rises of Victoria Island, many are residential but there are some commercial too.

In the very far distance you can see the skyscrapers of Lagos Island.

North View from Eko Hotel

North View from Eko Hotel
Originally uploaded by ajbrowe.

This photograph was taken from the dirty 11th floor windows of Eko Hotel. It shows the view to the north of Eko hotel which is on the East of Victoria Island.

In the distance you can see the dark grey and orange tower blocks of 1004 flats which are all empty now for 'redevelopment'

The taller white building in the middle distance is Stallion House. They recently had a fire on the top three floors and you can see the smoke damage.

In the bottom left of the picture you can see part of kuramo lodge, part of Eko Hotel.

The other buildings are unknown to me but most are apparently on the grounds of Eko Hotel.

The building under construction is interesting due to it's rathe neat example of Bamboo scafolding and use in construction.