Yup, i've been... elsewhere. The reason is, generally speaking, life in that it's been rather "variable" of late and i've had a lot on my mind, none of which was really relevant or indeed worth documenting in this blog.
Since i'm here, one techie thing i've just found incredibly annoying is how Blogger handles autocompleting on post tags; in order to enter "life" as a tag i couldn't simply type "life" and then a comma because it insisted on completing it as "lifestyle change". It's either an annoying feature on their part or Blogger is trying to tell me something.
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Here's one i made...
Today i've been spending some time writing a new CV; i'm not specifically planning on any jobs to go hunting for (well, there's one i'm going to send it towards once i've proof read it and got the Boss to take a look) but it might be time to go hunting for more... well, lucrative employment. It's been rather weird writing a CV after a decade of not needing one and i've been putting it off for a few weeks because of that. i'm finding myself wondering what exactly i need to include, how far back in my employment history to go and so forth. The education history was amusingly brief, four GCSE C or B grades, one for a subject that doesn't exist in the modern curriculum ("Computing", back in the olde days when they taught BASIC programming in schools) and all about as unrepresentative of myself or my current skills as it's possible to get! And i'll be honest, i've had to either look up or pretty much guess a few dates because i can't remember that far back any more...!
i've decided that it's time that my build server was rebuilt as well. i'm never keen on rebuilding computers (at least, not the ones i use personally) because it always takes me an age to "settle in" afterwards; this machine was rebuilt recently and i've still not finished straightening the start menu out and so on...
i've decided that it's time that my build server was rebuilt as well. i'm never keen on rebuilding computers (at least, not the ones i use personally) because it always takes me an age to "settle in" afterwards; this machine was rebuilt recently and i've still not finished straightening the start menu out and so on...
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Phishing season
So i was checking my emails earlier and in my spam box was a reasonably well done forgery. It purported to be from PayPal and stated that a £100 transfer of funds from my account had been cleared for a subscription to a website called Play And Connect... that was something of a surprise since i've vever heard of the bunnies i'd apparently given a ton to and only ever had that much money in my PayPal account twice and neither was this year!
So despite it already being filed as junk, i did some digging around; Play And Connect haven't got a site up right now but there's a note saying they've nothing to do with the emails, that meant a little digging around through the email itself to see where the "trick" was. The sneakiness laid within the "cancel" link, the text version pointed to PayPal.com but the actual link read PayPal.co-uk.***.pl (i've not posted the full domain, but it was only three characters long) followed by a legitimate-looking command string. Presumably the less tech savvy readers would either not look at the real link or if they did merely see the PayPal at the start of the link and miss the .pl domain.
One little twist is that the reply address points to a parked domain, PayPals.co.uk (note the plural) and i assume that's because if they'd forged a straight PayPal address it would've been picked up by the spam scanners far more quickly.
So despite it already being filed as junk, i did some digging around; Play And Connect haven't got a site up right now but there's a note saying they've nothing to do with the emails, that meant a little digging around through the email itself to see where the "trick" was. The sneakiness laid within the "cancel" link, the text version pointed to PayPal.com but the actual link read PayPal.co-uk.***.pl (i've not posted the full domain, but it was only three characters long) followed by a legitimate-looking command string. Presumably the less tech savvy readers would either not look at the real link or if they did merely see the PayPal at the start of the link and miss the .pl domain.
One little twist is that the reply address points to a parked domain, PayPals.co.uk (note the plural) and i assume that's because if they'd forged a straight PayPal address it would've been picked up by the spam scanners far more quickly.
Friday, 20 March 2009
Computer says "no"
In fact my work box decided to constantly say that it was "unable to run" just about everything so i pretty much took it as read that the nearly three year old installation of Windows 2000 had finally eat itself. But we can rebuild it, we have the technology and it's been lying around waiting for a few final parts for a couple of weeks now; the new version of the machine known as Ikaruga goes from 1.5GHz up to 2GHz and now has three (count 'em) 80Gb hard drives... and none of my development software so i've got a couple of days installing to get through before it'w workable! [Sigh]
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Enter my domain
i launched a new website at the start of January, it's called Retro Tat and is pretty much just me playing console remakes like Outrun 2 or classics collections like Midway Arcade Treasures, looking at assorted LCD-based toys and having fun with NES and Megadrive hardware clones; i mention it now because it seems i forgot when the site actually went live and the next bit at least requires knowledge of it...
Y'see, when i was putting the thing together, i decided that rather than splash out on a .com or even .co.uk address, since it was going to just be a personal indulgence i'd get the cheapest domain going; so i grabbed a .info and paid the princely sum of £1.14 for it - bargain. At the same time i was registering the domain i looked at the alternatives and the .com was unavailable, it was in redemption and had been for over a month so i decided that "if that ever comes free, i'll get it" but thought no more of it at the time. About two weeks after the new site went up, it did come free and the first i knew about it was getting an email from one of those firms that picks up domains and tries to sell them on for a profit... three emails arrived in total, each asking $99 for the .com and saying about how much better it was. Since i'm a little less than rich at the best of times i duly ignored it and the two reminders that followed.
Probably for the best really because a week later a second company was in touch, this time offering to do exactly the same as the first but for half the price - wow, now i'm impressed, $49 to get a domain makes the $1 or thereabouts i paid look so huge doesn't it? Well, i had to be held back otherwise i'd have bitten their arms off (nothing to do with the domain, i'm prone to acts of random and surreal violence) and promptly ignored the reminder from that company too; i remember saying that, if things carried on the way they were going, they'd be offering me a tenner to take it away sooner or later... instead the domain has been detagged so now it costs the same as any other .com to register!
There isn't much point though, at the moment i've managed to get to the top of Google for the search term retro tat on the current domain and i'm more than happy with that; .com domains are fun to have, but for a site i fell into doing by accident and am just doing for the fun of it, the money for a flash domain could be paying for a supply of coffee to fuel writing. Speaking of which...
Y'see, when i was putting the thing together, i decided that rather than splash out on a .com or even .co.uk address, since it was going to just be a personal indulgence i'd get the cheapest domain going; so i grabbed a .info and paid the princely sum of £1.14 for it - bargain. At the same time i was registering the domain i looked at the alternatives and the .com was unavailable, it was in redemption and had been for over a month so i decided that "if that ever comes free, i'll get it" but thought no more of it at the time. About two weeks after the new site went up, it did come free and the first i knew about it was getting an email from one of those firms that picks up domains and tries to sell them on for a profit... three emails arrived in total, each asking $99 for the .com and saying about how much better it was. Since i'm a little less than rich at the best of times i duly ignored it and the two reminders that followed.
Probably for the best really because a week later a second company was in touch, this time offering to do exactly the same as the first but for half the price - wow, now i'm impressed, $49 to get a domain makes the $1 or thereabouts i paid look so huge doesn't it? Well, i had to be held back otherwise i'd have bitten their arms off (nothing to do with the domain, i'm prone to acts of random and surreal violence) and promptly ignored the reminder from that company too; i remember saying that, if things carried on the way they were going, they'd be offering me a tenner to take it away sooner or later... instead the domain has been detagged so now it costs the same as any other .com to register!
There isn't much point though, at the moment i've managed to get to the top of Google for the search term retro tat on the current domain and i'm more than happy with that; .com domains are fun to have, but for a site i fell into doing by accident and am just doing for the fun of it, the money for a flash domain could be paying for a supply of coffee to fuel writing. Speaking of which...
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Driver disks
Today i'm re-installing (along with two other machines) a desktop computer with a clean copy of Windows XP. The install goes okay, then i need to find the drivers for the motherboard, video, audio and network but there doesn't appear to be a disk... instead there are drivers for the monitor. Has anyone in the history of computing ever installed monitor drivers? i mean, every monitor i've ever unboxed (and that's quite a few now, for the facility i'm currently upgrading we're talking thirty one machines) came with a disc but i'm i've done anything more than use them as coasters... do they actually serve a purpose other than making the manual rigid?
Now i've started thinking about it, i'm wondering if i should pop one in the drive to see what's on there... i bet it's blank!
Now i've started thinking about it, i'm wondering if i should pop one in the drive to see what's on there... i bet it's blank!
Sunday, 28 December 2008
i'm 18, honest!
i've just been reading a report on the BBC news website about how culture secretary Andy Burnham is wanting to have all websites rated for content. As is usually the way for these things, Mr. Burnham hasn't actually presented any sensible or logical way to actually achieve this, just said it should be considered. Well okay, i'll give it some consideration... it's a stupid idea. i wasn't really rebellious during my teenage years but even i drank before i was legally allowed, looked at pornography on a few occasions behind the bike sheds and frequently i saw movies rated over my age. i wasn't meant to be able to achieve any of that and there were and indeed still are legal safeguards in place; the point is that, as a teenager, i and my friends felt the need and found ways to circumvent those safeguards.
Around the same sort of time, computing was just starting to become prevalent in both homes and schools; in both cases there were protections in place to prevent users in general doing certain things, either it was the copy protection to prevent the illegal distribution of computer games or password protected user accounts on the school network. And again those safeguards weren't impervious to attack, as with the physical safeguards such as age restrictions, they were actively seen as challenges, to a certain degree rites of passage that would win favour with peers.
And any measure Andy Burnham or the people he's brainstorming with regarding this issue come up with has to survive that; it's going up against children aged from nine upwards and, since i have some experience providing computing services to kids in that age range, he might as well be putting bullseyes on the firewalls because that's how they're going to be seen. There are probably few things more scary to a network administrator than a teenager on a mission, just about everything bar the kitchen sink will be thrown at whatever security measures are put in place on school networks and any little chink in the armour will be leveraged and widened as far as it can go; i've heard stories of supposedly secure systems where kids have found vulnerabilities in the way Windows Explorer displays printers to get access to drives and shares they weren't meant to and from there install software - and i've seen first hand that spyware can, regardless of user level, install itself past managed desktops and firewalls so there are ways and means for a creative child to see what their parents don't want them to, just as there have always been and, regardless of what campaigners think, will always be.
Don't get me wrong, i'm all for protecting children from seeing things that are meant for a mature audience and, although i may be a more liberal parent than most as to what i allow our kids to see, i do take measures to at least monitor what our kids are up to such as checking the caches from time to time and watching what is going through our gateway machine. What i have absolutely no time for is the concept of slapping age ratings on sites or the people who believe that this is going to keep kids away from that content if they really want to see it; the only thing that can police children on the internet is their parents, trying to do that kind of policing at an ISP level is just passing the parenting buck. That isn't the job of the state or legislation, it's not the job of internet service providers either - if parents are worried about what their children might see online then they should be watching where those children are going. And if they haven't the technical knowledge to do so, it's time to start learning rather than expecting someone else to do it for them.
Around the same sort of time, computing was just starting to become prevalent in both homes and schools; in both cases there were protections in place to prevent users in general doing certain things, either it was the copy protection to prevent the illegal distribution of computer games or password protected user accounts on the school network. And again those safeguards weren't impervious to attack, as with the physical safeguards such as age restrictions, they were actively seen as challenges, to a certain degree rites of passage that would win favour with peers.
And any measure Andy Burnham or the people he's brainstorming with regarding this issue come up with has to survive that; it's going up against children aged from nine upwards and, since i have some experience providing computing services to kids in that age range, he might as well be putting bullseyes on the firewalls because that's how they're going to be seen. There are probably few things more scary to a network administrator than a teenager on a mission, just about everything bar the kitchen sink will be thrown at whatever security measures are put in place on school networks and any little chink in the armour will be leveraged and widened as far as it can go; i've heard stories of supposedly secure systems where kids have found vulnerabilities in the way Windows Explorer displays printers to get access to drives and shares they weren't meant to and from there install software - and i've seen first hand that spyware can, regardless of user level, install itself past managed desktops and firewalls so there are ways and means for a creative child to see what their parents don't want them to, just as there have always been and, regardless of what campaigners think, will always be.
Don't get me wrong, i'm all for protecting children from seeing things that are meant for a mature audience and, although i may be a more liberal parent than most as to what i allow our kids to see, i do take measures to at least monitor what our kids are up to such as checking the caches from time to time and watching what is going through our gateway machine. What i have absolutely no time for is the concept of slapping age ratings on sites or the people who believe that this is going to keep kids away from that content if they really want to see it; the only thing that can police children on the internet is their parents, trying to do that kind of policing at an ISP level is just passing the parenting buck. That isn't the job of the state or legislation, it's not the job of internet service providers either - if parents are worried about what their children might see online then they should be watching where those children are going. And if they haven't the technical knowledge to do so, it's time to start learning rather than expecting someone else to do it for them.
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