muse @ thegovernment

My main gateway computer is powered by Windows XP home edition, and for a rather long time it was running XP Service Pack 2. I use it with Internet Connection Sharing to allow my network computers access to the internet, and to allow outside computers to access my development server by forwarding the proper ports (80, 443) to the server.

After updating from XP Service Pack 2 to XP Service Pack 3, port forwarding stopped working.

Why? As far as I can tell, the Home edition update disables port forwarding--but not in any place you can find it in the GUI. It took a minor registry change, as documented at this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article , to re-enable port forwarding.

In case the article becomes unavailable, here are the steps. Be sure to back up your registry, know what you are doing, etc. I will not be held responsible if you destroy your system!

1. Start the Registry Editor (Start Menu » Run » regedit.exe)
2. Locate the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
3. Set the registry value IPEnableRouter (of type REG_DWORD) to the value 1
4. Reboot

That should be all you need to re-enable port forwarding. Of course, ensure that you have your firewall exceptions and port forwarding rules set up, and that a third party security app (I'm looking at YOU, app-that-rhymes-with-McCaffine) isn't blocking the ports you desire. Good luck!

I am a Linux traditionalist. 'New', cutting-edge distros such as Fedora and Gentoo are terrifying conglomerations riding the high currents of trendy changes within the Open-Source world, and more often than not, upgrading a version comes with a substantial learning curve for new packages, daemons, or systems. On my home systems, stability is more desirable than features.

Eventually, however, I got desperate for updated packages, which my Debian (Lenny)-powered desktop couldn't provide without installing from source. And I am pleased to find that the switch from Debian 5 to Ubuntu 9.10 was extremely easy. Many of my previous complaints about Ubuntu are null, especially those regarding the 'simplicity' of the distribution--hardly! After some minor tweaks to my tastes--for example, giving root a password, installing the full vim package (not having the full version of vim was a major irritation), installing Subversion and Bazaar, the latest nVidia driver, SRWare Iron (a fork of Google Chrome that does away with all the privacy-violating nonsense), etc--I am just about settled in. Ironically, my system is much cleaner and leaner than the old Debian system, which had been collecting dust for a few years and had begun to act...odd.

Sure, I've spoken out against Ubuntu many times to anyone who will listen. But there was no use sticking with an operating system that was beginning to get in the way more than it served, and as Ubuntu shares its Debian ancestory--including dpkg, which I find more friendly than rpm--the switchover was easy and painless. I still prefer Debian on my server though--stability, stability!

Yay, my first bug, fixed. I feel so proud. Excuse me whilst I go brag. As a side note, Python is truly a beautiful language. If only it were a little better supported out-of-the-box for web applications...

Planning a novel or other complex project is difficult. Luckily, there is a program to help with the process: kabikaboo. Described as a "recursive noetpad", kabikaboo allows the writer to arrange and maintain a group of related notes in a hierarchal manner, allowing for quick and easy drafting.

Kabikboo is an open-source application written in Python. It organizes information into a hierchal tree, according to the user's specifications. In Kabikaboo, everything is a 'node'. Each node can contain child nodes, and each node can either be an information node--containing notes, for example--or a 'view' node--organizing and displaying the information in all the nodes below the view node. So, for example, you could define a node of "Characters"--make it a view node. Beneath that would be nodes for each characters, and possible nodes beneath *those* nodes for each character's backstory, motivations, and so forth. The Characters node would display and sort all the information for you!

It's a little hard to explain without images. Here's a screenshot of Kabikaboo 1.7 under Ubuntu Linux. Of course, the nodes are not pre-defined--that's the beauty! The writer has the ability to define nodes to his or her liking.

Kabikaboo was developed on Ubuntu Linux, but I have put together a Windows port for version 1.6, which can be found at this location. The installer is named "kabikaboo-1.6-setup.exe".

Ubuntu users can add the PPA to their apt sources list; the PPA repository is listed on the Launchpad site.

Links:
Kabikaboo website
Windows downloads

Now there's a novel idea: a blogging suite written in Bash. It's just too fascinating to resist!

nanoblogger