• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Just a little follow on form my earlier bit of un-planned down time. The reason for the downtime was that I ran into three problems while upgrading the php5-cgi port. In this post I’m going to detail the solutions, mainly so I have easy access to them next time I upgrade PHP5 on a FreeBSD machine, but also because this may be of some use to someone somewhere some time.

[tags]FreeBSD, PHP5[/tags]

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Tagged with: Unix • PHP • FreeBSD

Sorry about the half hour of down time just now. PHP5 didn’t play nice when I tried to upgrade it. Anyhow, all back to normal now and safely running the latest and safest PHP, Apache and MySQL. Only lost most of my hair 🙂

The image below is grainy, small, and to anyone not familiar with the situation in Northern Ireland totally boring looking. To those of us living on the Island of Ireland it’s probably the most historic picture we’ll see in a very long time. I personally never dared dream I’d see Ian Paisley in a joint news conference with Gerry Adams announcing a plan for joint government between the protestant Ulster Unionist Party and the Catholic and Republican Sinn Fein party. It may be a picture of two old men smiling but it’s a portrait of progress. Lets hope they can make it work and that Norther Ireland can return to local government as now agreed on the 8^th of May.

Passwords are an annoying fact of life in our modern electronic world. If you’re any sort of regular computer user you’re going to start building up quite a collection. You could use the same user name and password for everything, but that’s very insecure. Also, you often don’t have a choice of user name, or you can run into very restrictive password policies, either way it’s unlikely you’ll manage to get the same user name and password everywhere even if you tried! Remembering the details for things you log in to every day is never the problem. It’s the passwords for the things you only use a few times a month or even a year that cause the problems. Saving passwords in browsers can help a bit but it makes things even worse when you try to use another computer and of course your browser isn’t going to be any help when it comes to remembering your domain password at work or your FTP password for that website you only update every few months. On top of all your passwords you also have software registration codes to keep track of and your browser certainly isn’t going to help you with that. Inevitably you end up getting locked out of sites or services and having to re-buy software you’ve bought before because you can’t find your registration key.

[tags]PasswordVault, PasswordVault2Go, Lava Software[/tags]

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Tagged with: Linux • OS X • review • software • Windows • password manager

I get asked this a lot. Outside of Apple I don’t think anyone knows. Just this week I’ve seen two conflicting reports citing ‘industry sources’, one predicting Leopard will ship in Mid April, the other predicting October. The only official line we have is ‘Spring 2007’. Depending on who’s definition of Spring you use that means any time before June 21^st. That really is all we know. Any predictions you hear are just that, predictions. My regular readers have probably noticed that I like making Apple related predictions on my blog so that should I ever be right some day I can point back to the post and say ‘look – I told you so’. Sure, it’s childish but hey, I’m a bloke, and we don’t grow up, we just grow old …. so … lets do some predicting 🙂

Considering just how much Apple made fun of Microsoft for delaying Vista I really don’t think they want to let the ‘Spring’ date slide. However, from what I’ve been reading on various technology blogs it seems the latest developer build is still far from a final product so it appears Apple still have work to do. This makes it likely we’ll see Leopard right at the end of Spring. Apple moved their developer’s conference (WWDC) forward a few months to June 11-15. I think they did this for a reason and I think that reason is Leopard. My prediction is that Leopard will be announced at WWDC and will ship a few weeks after that.

[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, OS X 10.5[/tags]

Tagged with: Apple • OS X

Like just about everything in IT the computer security landscape is constantly changing. As the computer industry strengthens our defenses, and as old avenues of attack are closed off, the attackers change their strategies, targets and techniques. It’s a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse and the rules are always changing. However, there is one element that remains constant, uneducated and innocent users are always the prime target. Hence, the best defense is education, if you don’t understand the attacks you haven’t a hope of defending yourself. This is the first part of a two-part series to try to give people an introduction to this complex and dynamic field. Reading these articles won’t bring you even close to being an expert but they should give you a basic overview of the computer security landscape. In this first part we’ll have a look at what the bad guys are trying to do to your computer and why, as well as some of the simple things you can do to protect yourself. In the second part we’ll look in more detail at how your computer may be attacked and how I see the attacks evolving over the next few years.

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Although I was very happy with the Blue Zinfandel Squared theme as it was out of the box there were one or two things about it that annoyed me so I spent this evening fixing them. I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised when I dove into the code, it was clear, simple and well documented! All my changes were minor, no more than a few lines of code each but they make things pretty much exactly as I want them. Anyhow, in case you care these are the tweaks I made:

• I moved the search box up to the top of the side bar
• Fixed the way the categories were shown – it wasn’t playing nice with nested categories
• Added the full date to the information at the top of posts
• Added an “edit” button to each post that only shows up when I’m logged in
• Tweaked the way lists are rendered in posts
• Tweaked the page header and footers a very small bit

And that’s it. That’s all the changes the theme needed. I really can’t give it high enough praise!

Tagged with: web site • site news • Wordpress

I did a review of the pre-beta preview release of NetNewsWire 3 for Allison on the NosillaCast. Check it out in Episode 85.

[tags]NosillaCast, NetNewsWire[/tags]

Tagged with: software • OS X • review • RSS Reader

With the pending court cases around Europe and Steve Jobs’ recent open letter ‘Thoughts on Music’ there’s a lot of talk about DRM at the moment, so, I thought now might be a good time to have a closer look at what it’s all about. In this article I’ll start by having a look at what DRM is, what effects it has on us, the consumers, and why I feel it will never work. I’ll end by having a look at how DRM is counter-productive for the content producers and at some alternatives.

[tags]DRM, Piracy[/tags]

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I observed the eclipse from the end of the umbral phase when you could start to see some limb darkening through to the middle of totality. There were three of us to start with, myself, my better half and a mate, but since I set the telescope up in the driveway we soon had a collection of passers by having a look through the telescope and the binoculars and we wowed a few of the more interested ones with a quick glance of Saturn. One of our neighbors came round for a few looks and brought us some beers as a thank you (cheers Michael, much appreciated). All in all it was a good observing session and the things that we noticed were:

• That there was a blue tint on the edge of the umbral shadow
• That even during maximum eclipse the moon wasn’t very red, more orange
• That even during maximum eclipse we could easily make out the larger seas with the naked eye, with binoculars loads of surface features were easily visible, and with the telescope even lunar rays were easy to see.
• The top edge of the moon was always that bit less dark than the rest.

This would lead me to the conclusion that this eclipse was at point 4 on the Danjon scale, i.e. the least dark kind of lunar eclipse. The fact that the earth didn’t pass through the center of the Moon’s shadow probably played a part in this as did the fact that we’ve had no major volcanic activity recently.

All in all it was a great nights observing with no real weather problems, we had the occasional whisp of high cloud but they passed by very quickly. The most important thing was that a good night was had by all.

Tagged with: astronomy • Moon • observation log • eclipse

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