Max Lyth

I’ve been working in the United Arab Emirates on and off for the last year and have been getting by on a 30 day visit visa. This visa is a standard tourist visa and issued for free to citizens of 33 countries (inc EU, US, Aus, NZ, JP, HK) on arrival at an UAE border and is valid for 30 days. There is a 10 day grace period on this visa so you can stay up to 40 days without penalties, beyond that there are heavy fines.

Due to scheduling on the current project phase I decided not to take my monthly flight home to London which left me with a problem. You can pay AED500 and suffer a long queue to extend a visit visa for another 30 days but I heard that you could simple exit and re-enter the UAE to get another 30 days for free (not quite true). I had actually done this once already by accident when I decided to enter Oman while exploring Fujairah but the east coast border was slow and frustrating and I wished I had never done it.

I had read on expat web sites that the Hatta-Oman border was a common destination for “visa runs” so I thought they would be more efficient. It turns out that while quicker, the process is not straightforward so I figured I would document a simple step by step:
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I recently bought a HP LP2475w for my MacBook Pro as it was the best value 1900×1200 In-Plane Switching (IPS) on the market at the time. What I did not realise was that it was a ‘wide gamut’ display. This means that the 100% red is a lot more saturated 100% red than a standard monitor. This has two unfortunate side effects which are catastrophic if you want to do any image editing, namely that colours are so saturated that flesh tones and trees look like they have been sprayed with fluorescent paint and secondly there is noticeable posterisation in such a wide gamut.

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I implemented fail2ban because of dumb Botnets that constantly try to relay through my server, 100k’s of failed attempts a day. The PenaltyBoxExtreme went some way to quench the bombardment but still consumed connections and flooded the logs with detritus.

To get fail2ban to work you first have to change the default date format in the ASSP log as it is not one of the formats supported by fail2ban. I changed LogDateFormat to ‘DD-MMM-YYYY hh:mm:ss’
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I had been using the iPhone WordPress app to moderate my blog since it was released but I started getting an ‘NSXMLParserErrorDomain Error 64′ error in the last few months when using the app. I thought it was a bug either in WordPress or the App but several revisions had gone by so I figured it must be my blog at fault.
A bit of Googling reveals this is a Cocoa error where the XML parser does not find the opening XML tag where it expects it. This problem is usually caused by extra carriage returns at the top of the XML RPC response.
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I recently wanted to temporarily move our Mac OS 10.5 Server from our G5 XServe to an Intel MacMini during an office move. I had an extra disk that would hold the live data during the transition.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to migrate the data to the external drive in two passes. The first pass was while the server was running and got 95% of the data to the external drive. When I was ready to transition I shut down all the services in Server Admin and then re-ran Carbon Copy Cloner in update mode.
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