Nice try idiots

Posted about 4 months ago on: 20/10/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: idiots, spam, bot-net, windows, microsoft, phishing.

From: no-reply@tek.org.uk
To: tek@tek.org.uk
Subject:A new settings file for the tek@tek.org.uk has just been released
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:15:49 +0530 (08:45 BST)


Dear user of the tek.org.uk mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (tek@tek.org.uk) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://tek.org.uk/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=tek@tek.org.uk&from=tek.org.uk&fromname=tek

(which was actually http://tek.org.uk.ttl1lll.net/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=tek@tek.org.uk&from=tek.org.uk&fromname=tek)

Best regards, tek.org.uk Technical Support.

Nice Try, shame I am the admin, user and owner of the box and domain eh?

When will these pricks learn.

Edit: Since this post I am now getting a massive amount of them from different "accounts" @tek.org.uk all targeting my tek@ account, it is amusing and ANNOYING at the same time. Every single email suggests they're being pumped out of a bot-net and each box is, funnily enough, using Outlook to send them. It's at times like this that I hate a certain OS vendor.

GDM Greeter Builder

Posted about 4 months ago on: 19/10/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: gdm, gnome, builder, web-app.

I've been building & testing some code recently. I'll get what I've been working on up sometime tonight. Basically I have been making a web-app that you can make GDM Greeter Themes with. GDM is the logon screen for GNOME if you aren't aware. So.. You upload a picture of your choice, fill in some other details and you have a greeter.tar.gz file spat back at you which you can use to install the theme.

So far it's quite basic, you can choose colours and upload a background image; but that is all. The idea is not to create visually stunning themes with multiple images, but allow perhaps the less technical users a chance at having a more personal login theme.

Edit: Obviously I didn't get chance to put the GDM Builder up, I was way to busy reading through the Twitter API and messing about with it. Sorry.

BrightKite and the XFCE Dusk Theme

Posted about 4 months ago on: 15/10/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: greasemonkey, brightkite, script, xfce.debian, iceweasel, firefox.

I use a dark theme on my notebook (XFCE Dusk) and with the new BrightKite the text areas for comments have been given a background colour (background:) of white, but the foreground (color:) doesn't seem to be set or my theme is overriding it in IceWeasel (The Debian version of Firefox).

So I decided to make a simple GreaseMonkey (developer site is here) script to correct the problem for me. If you've never used GreaseMonkey it's a brilliant add-on for Firefox that allows you to automatically affect the DOM (the web page you've loaded) so you can remove or even add elements to the page, add or remove CSS and pretty much anything else you want to do.

You can download the script here.

Vanishing Bees

Posted about 4 months ago on: 13/10/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: bees, vanishing, colony collapse disorder, varroa, economy.

In the UK, around one fifth of honeybee hives were lost in the winter of 2008/09. Bees pollinate a third of the food we eat, and this contributes £200million a year to the UK economy.

Vanishing of the Bees, is an eye-opening account of the shocking truth behind the declining bee population.

See more at the Vanishing Bees website.

Smart meters No thanks

Posted about 4 months ago on: 12/10/2009 - 4 comments
Tagged in: big-brother, privacy, insane, smart meters, .

Wow, this country is just getting (gotten?) over the top.

The devices, which the government plans to install in every home by 2020, will also tell energy firms what sort of appliances are being used, allowing companies to target customers who do not reduce their energy consumption.

Privacy campaigners have expressed horror at the proposals, which come as two million homes have 'spy' devices fitted to their rubbish bins by councils who record how much residents are recycling.

It's just insane. Read the rest here.

Things are likely to be b0rked

Posted about 4 months ago on: 12/10/2009 - 2 comments
Tagged in: note.

As you can see new look, I'm sure things will be broken all over the place. I have put in place mod_rewrites to hopefully ensure that none of the permalinks are broken but you never know.

If you see anything stupidly broken please get in touch via comments on this post or by any other means you know.

UK trade unions pass boycott vote

Posted about 5 months ago on: 19/09/2009 - 1 comment
Tagged in: israel, trade union, palestine, boycott.

In a landmark decision, Britain's trade unions have voted overwhelmingly to commit to build a mass boycott movement, disinvestment and sanctions on Israel for a negotiated settlement based on justice for Palestinians.

Read original article here.

Quote of the day

Posted about 5 months ago on: 08/09/2009 - 2 comments
Tagged in: quote, george.carlin.

"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man... living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But...he loves you." ~ George Carlin

Debian and my Toshiba R100

Posted about 6 months ago on: 01/09/2009 - 4 comments
Tagged in: blog, toshiba, r100, debian, gnome, xfce.

I recently had a hard drive failure on my laptop which was quite annoying for several reasons. Not least since Toshiba don't make the drive anymore and the fact it's about 3 inches long and thinner as a Swan Vesta matchbox. To quote the guy at a shop, "I've never seen a drive that small and I don't think you're going to be getting one through us." - He wasn't kidding either. This drive has been a royal pain to try and track down.

In the end Steve Jobs came to my rescue.

That's correct; Apple Inc. came to my aid. You see it turns out that this drive is also the very same drive that went in to the first and second generation iPod. Apple had Toshiba make the drive and then Apple just stuck a sticker on it.

So I ended up getting one and to my relief it does actually fit perfectly and better still, it works. The only issue is trying to get rid of what I believe is a hidden partition on the drive, which presumably holds some information for the embedded iPod software. It seems I have lost about 5 gigs from a 20 gig drive. Anyway, I'm not too bothered as I tend to use removable media for most of my storage needs. 15 gigs is more than adequate for the OS, a simple home mount point and some swap.

Getting Debian on to this laptop the first time was a pain (BIOS is so old it won't boot from USB), I had to use a PXE server to get the net-install ISO running and then go from there. Quite simple with my network but I am lucky that I know what I am doing. I'm part way through a simple instruction list to post here for anyone else like me that makes use of older hardware and I'll have that up shortly.

Trying a different desktop.

For I don't know how long I have been using XFCE as my main desktop manager. On this new install I was busy with other things while the installation took place so I decided to default everything and GNOME was installed. I've decided to try GNOME again, I've not used it in anger since about 2003; so let's see if it can do the job. Of course I have already installed XFCE as a back up should I need to instantly feel at home ;-)

I'm already seeing that GNOME has come a LONG WAY since the last time I used it properly. It seems quite extensible now compared to when I first used it and also it doesn't seem as "heavy". Who knows, maybe I'll become a convert in time. Some of the defaults have already had to be changed though. I'm not really a fan of the default icon set, nor most of the themes available. Easy to change though and a lot better than XFCE for managing them to. I had a quick look at gDesklets and was quite impressed, but sadly I am not a huge fan of Python, so it's unlikely that I will be developing any of my own (unless I can use PHP or Bash instead? Can PHP-GTK be used instead of Python? Anyone know?).

It's taking some getting used to because I am used to having the bars the opposite way round and I've resisted so far in moving them about. This is to try and see if it makes more sense to have them this way around. So far I am not finding it as intuitive a setup as XFCE, maybe this is just because I am used to XFCE.

The next thing is to find replacements for all the apps I used to use in XFCE. I'll post some more about my experience as time goes on.

Need to reclaim the good old days

Posted about 6 months ago on: 17/08/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: thoughts, micro, blog.

That is all.

Layout changes coming soon

Posted about 6 months ago on: 11/08/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: layout, blog.

Although I like this layout it's annoying me. So expect the site to go back to it's more simple look and feel shortly...

Dear Israel

Posted about 7 months ago on: 31/07/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: israel, media, wp, gaza.

Israel has admitted to using white phosphorus during its war on the Gaza Strip earlier this year, but says it did so in accordance with international law.

The admission came in a 163-page document published by the Israeli foreign ministry on Thursday ahead of a UN report next week.

The Israeli army "used munitions containing white phosphorus" in Gaza, the document said, but it denied violating international law, saying it had not fired such weapons inside populated areas.

Cite: original story

Dear Israel,

Please see the below photographs. I think it's unlikely you can EVER say you didn't use them in areas populated by civilians.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

So stop trying to lie to yourselves.

Free QR Code Generator

Posted about 7 months ago on: 14/07/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: qr codes, qr, generator, free.

A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes. Moreover, most current Japanese mobile phones can read this code with their camera. (Wiki Page)

I decided to make this QR code generator, mostly to add the functionality to my own blog so people can scan the QR code and get the URL for later browsing. I also made it just for the laugh, I'm funny like that.

Thought I'd throw it out there for a few people to test and let me know if it works as expected.

If you do use the codes generated somewhere then a link back would be nice.

QR Code Generator (http://tek.org.uk/qr)

Good resource for QR Codes and phone software to read them: www.mobile-barcodes.com (thanks to: guriben :o)

Quick thoughts on Google OS

Posted about 8 months ago on: 08/07/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: GoogleOS, blog, privacy, security, Microsoft, Google.

Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers, in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.

Source: BBC News.

Interesting, could a large blow for Microsoft? I think that's unlikely, it's more likely to affect us Linux folk a lot more. My personal view is that Google should have backed a major Linux OS, but hey that doesn't play well with there world domination plans now does it. I'm pondering things like, if the Google OS will present a whole new set of attack vectors for malicious crackers. What about privacy? That's something that's always been on the field with Google for a long time. How much will this OS want to call home like Chrome does?

The more and more we move to "the cloud" the less and less control individuals have over there own data and therefore there privacy too. If you've ever bothered to read the small print regarding Google Docs you'll know what I am on about. People worry about CCTV, linked with databases, linked with registration plate recognition and so on... Consider the idea of knitting together a phone, an OS, with all the apps, search and so on in "the cloud" - not a single aspect of your digital life not exposed to something Google has made. Does this not strike anyone as a little 1984? What about Anti Trust? We hung Microsoft out to dry because of bundled browsers; will we be able to run anything else on this Google OS? Only time will tell...

Up and testing, expect b0rked stuff

Posted about 8 months ago on: 05/07/2009 - 1 comment
Tagged in: blog, site, hosting, testing.

Parts of the system are back up, bits are not; not everything is working. Some of you might know and others don't that I had to move hosts recently - that's done and I decided to get the site back up mostly to test the new host (which I might point out we're really prompt at getting this box up and sorted for me, thanks KimiSurf).

One of things that I have in beta is my lifestream plug-in that will pull feeds from all the social networking sites I use and integrate them in to my site here in chronological order - I plan on rolling that out sometime later this week. It wasn't that hard to put together but my choice to use UNIX timestamps in my database has caused some problems for me in getting relationships between the various incoming feeds a little harder; if only I had used the MySql data function eh?

The idea is quite simplistic, get everything in to arrays and merge them all. The hard part is using the date as pointer across them all. One of the things I found was server times were different and of course I had added fixes for GMT which through everything out that I pulled from my blog by an hour. The sooner the world moves to UTC the better in terms of coding, not sure I'd like the lack of sunlight though.

I have to put a fix in for all the old linking structure, that's going to be a whole lot of FUN, honest.

Edit: Also I've decided, like a lot of other developers, to bin support for IE6; the sooner someone takes that browser around to the back of the shed and does the right thing the better.

Five geek things to get done in 2009

Posted about 1 year ago on: 17/01/2009 - No comments
Tagged in: list, meme, blog.

1. Build a new server
2. Get a new laptop
3. Sort out a wireless router at home
4. Re-write tEngine (partly started)
5. Try a new Linux distro that isn't Debian based

I'll throw this one to Skeddy, Caolan, Guri and Narelle as it would be interesting to know.

Bring on 2009

Posted about 1 year ago on: 22/12/2008 - 1 comment
Tagged in: yule, blog.

I guess this year has been quite a disappointment in terms of blogging for me. I'll be back next year with renewed vigour and quite possibly a brand new website.

Have a great Yule and a good New Year.

I miss my dog a lot :-(

Posted about 1 year ago on: 13/12/2008 - No comments
Tagged in: lady, sad.

I found this today, I'll be honest, I had a hard time not bubbling at my desk. I think it was mostly the shock of opening it to find it was a close up.

You're sorely missed Lady and not just by me, your daughter hasn't really been the same no matter how much love I give her :,-(

Remembrance Sunday

Posted about 1 year ago on: 09/11/2008 - No comments
Tagged in: remembrance, sunday, war, family.

I'm not an advocate of war but I do believe people should remember those from the two world wars, especially World War One.

Site changes and SSL

Posted about 1 year ago on: 03/11/2008 - No comments
Tagged in: tengine, blog, ssl, encryption.

With Skeddy's comment a few weeks ago and with me not taking on freelance at the moment I've decided to continue work on the blogging engine that runs this website. I've been designing a "plugin" engine that I'm going to replace Tengine with.

It will then be much easier for me to extend the core engine (which really is just database connectivity) with anything I want. I've been trying different designs for a plugin engine but I think I've settled on the XML features of PHP (so it's strict) and XML's general extensibility. So a basic SAX Parser will process all plugins, do the needed and constructor classes are called, which in turn will provide all the output back to a library that will then fire this through a template plugin (XLST) at the end. Pretty basic but easy to maintain and administrate on the server.

Easy to port tengine to this as well, as all functionality is already split in to classes :-)

Might even refresh the look while I'm tinkering.

Oh and while I'm here you might as well know that shortly that this site will begin to provide SSL connections as well as standard port 80 ones. The CERT will of course be self signed by me but I don't want your bank details. So if you like encrypted connections you'll be able to have them.

RIP Baby Lady - 1988 - 2008

Posted about 1 year ago on: 23/10/2008 - 8 comments
Tagged in: lady.

After suffering another stroke a week ago and even with all the love and care I've given her since last week, sadly at 17:50 today I had to have her put to sleep. I'm sure every pet owner thinks the same but I can say without a shadow of a doubt she was a dog everyone loved and will miss deeply, a real character with tenacity in buckets; at 20 years of age she'd lived probably one of the best dogs life I've ever known of.

I will miss her deeply every day. Rest in peace Baby Lady.

Syncing PIM Information

Posted about 1 year ago on: 29/09/2008 - 11 comments
Tagged in: sync, work, blog, windows, microsoft, linux, debian.

One of the things that being 100% on Linux and having a Windows based mobile phone has brought me up against is the need to sync my calendar, tasks and contacts at home (mostly to ensure I don't loose them). I had an iPAQ and a Nokia a year or so ago and I could separate work from personal simply by keeping work on the iPAQ and personal on the Nokia. However last year I decided to merge devices and ditch the iPAQ and get the HTC Kaiser. This would provide everything I needed and be compatible with works mobile email server which included push email. Everything is working as expected and I'm impressed with the push service, well it's a fake ping-to-pull rather than a true push, but it works for me! The problem I have is that I want to be able to back up my contacts, calendar & tasks using Linux at home. The reason is that I have a huge mix of work and personal contacts but the personal ones do not get synced with work (stored on SIM). Dangerous... and the reason I say that is that I don't trust Microsoft based software, all too often it fails just when you really don't need it too.

So I've looked in to the vcs/vcf/ics formats and looking around for software to do this only provides Evolution that can, in one package, do all I want but it can only publish in iCal format on to a server and this is not compatible with my device *sigh* (even though it should be considering iCal is a more grown up version of the vCalendar format (.vcs). Sunbird doesn't work out the box on Debian for some reason (which I'll guess is lib based or it requires QT version to be higher than I have – frankly I don't like anything Mozilla offer other than Firefox. I'm not prepared to upgrade a perfectly stable version of Debian just to have another ram killing application from Mozilla.

What to do... what to do... write my fecking own...

Once again I am left with the task of writing my own. I want an online service that I can upload/email contacts, tasks, calendar events and have it automatically added to my account, I want to be able to log in and see all my current tasks, latest contacts and so on. I want to be able to email vcf cards to other folks as well. All of which I want to be able to export back and sync with my mobile... never had this problem with my Palm... grumble grumble...