The Author – Bart Busschots
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Apr
15
Another UnCharactaristic Personal Post – But Good News This Time
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | 7 Comments
It’s been an eventful half week. Having gone about two years without feeling the need to post a single personal post now I’m writing a second one in less than a week! The first one was a difficult post to write. Mind you, writing it was very therapeutic so I’m glad I bit the bullet and did it. This one however isn’t hard to write at all, quite the opposite in fact. The short version is that myself and my partner are back together, and back stronger than we were before. In fact, we are now technically engaged.
Apr
13
Well, I had predicted that Apple would try get Leopard out by WWDC. In a statement today Apple did say that was their plan, but it hasn’t worked out. Apple blame the iPhone saying they have had to borrow developers from the OS X team to get the iPhone ready for June. I guess the good news is that the iPhone is on target for its June release date, but the cost of this is that Leopard will not be out till October. The only silver lining I can see is that Apple say OS X 10.5 will be ‘feature complete’ by WWDC and that developers will be getting a beta version at WWDC. This means that although we won’t get our hands on Leopard in June, we should at least get to see the final feature set. Putting my prediction hat on I expect we’ll see an extended Leopard demo during Jobs’ keynote at WWDC in June.
[tags]iPhone, OS X Leopard, OS X 10.5, Apple[/tags]
Apr
12
An Un-charataristic Personal Post – The End of an Era
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | 6 Comments
I’ve always said I wouldn’t blog about personal things but this is my blog so I can break my own rules when I think it’s the right thing to do. I see this blog as a tool, and right now I need a tool to save me having to repeatedly re-tell something that it will hurt me a lot to have to keep repeating. Myself and my partner of over three years have parted ways. I’m pretty devastated, to put it mildly. In my mind I had been planning our life together and really thought this one was for the long haul. Now there’s a very large hole in my life that’s going to take some time to build a bridge over. Right now I’m still very numb and have lost interest in all the things I used to do and care about. I don’t feel in the humor for working on www.IrishAstronomy.org and blogging is not really something I think I’ll be in the humor for for a while. I’m working on a lot of posts at the moment but I just don’t see myself having the energy to finish them just now. Somehow, not having someone to share my daily life and minor triumphs with makes everything seem rather pointless. I’m also going to have a lot of very unpleasant and difficult practical tasks to do to un-tangle our very inter-twined lives, joint bank accounts to close, a room with our stuff to separate, both of us being total nerds, a joint server to separate out and that kind of thing. I think that will be enough to keep me ‘entertained’ for a while anyhow, after that’s all done I’ll probably be able to start getting back to a normal life and settling in to being single again.
Apr
3
Apple Puts It’s Money Where It’s Mouth is – iTunes To Go DRM Free
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech | 7 Comments
I’m in my parents place this week and out here in the heart of Ireland broad band is not available. I find dialup so frustrating that I generally don’t bother even going online. So, I managed to miss Apple’s big announcement till now. For those of you on another planet (or deprived of broad band like me) Apple and EMI announced on Monday that they would start selling high quality DRM free music on iTunes. The price is the same for albums but more expensive for individual tracks. Since the quality is higher and the files are DRM free that seems fair enough to me. I just hope this experiment goes well. I really want this to be the start of a whole new era for digital music, the end of the failed experiment that is DRM.
[tags]DRM, EMI, Apple[/tags]
Mar
29
Some Things to Watch Out For When Upgrading PHP5 on FreeBSD
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech | 5 Comments
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]
Mar
29
Apologies for the Short bit of Down Time
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | Leave a Comment
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 🙂
Mar
26
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 8th of May.
Mar
25
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]
Mar
23
When Will OS X 10.5 Leopard Be Out?
Filed Under Computers & Tech | 3 Comments
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 21st. 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]
Mar
19
The Changing Face of Computer Security – Part 1
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security | Leave a Comment
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.