I just came across this article on ZDnet from Richard Stiennon and felt I had to say something about it as it’s the most rubbish I have read in a long time and displays a complete misunderstanding of the issues at hand from a so called “industry consultant”.

“Evidently the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee is discussing classifying IP addresses as personally identifiable information. That is crazy talk of the third degree. They think of IP addresses as physical addresses when they should think of them as freeway exits. I, for instance, live nearest to exit 69 , Big Beaver Road, off of I-75. (yeah, yeah, its a big joke around here). And, of course, that exit number can change at anytime, arbitrarily. I can see how the clueless can be confused by IP addresses.”

Not everyone has a dynamic address you know, and a static address is personally identifiable information and should be protected as such. You can often resolve an IP to a physical address using an ARIN or RIPE search. Even with DHCP, some cable/DSL providers assign the same MAC address with the same IP everytime, which in essence becomes “your” IP until you replace your modem.

A google search for my own IP throws up results for server logs of many sites I have visited in the past. While the Commission have come up with some crazy rules, this is one of the better ones. Crazy talk? I don’t think so, not if you value your privacy.

It seems that the latest release of Google Earth has some hidden features that Google didn’t tell anyone about! In addition to Google Sky, a flight simulator mode has been added too. It’s been possible to fly around in Google Earth using a joystick for a while now but this is more of a full on flight sim with two aircraft to choose from.

Your probably better off starting with the SR22 as the aircraft can be hard to control with the keyboard. You can view a full set of the controls and instructions in the Google Earth documentation. When in flight sim mode you have a Head’s Up Display (HUD) which shows your direction, rate of climb, altitude, speed and flaps setting.

It’s much more playable when using a joystick as with most flight simulators. It’s not on a par with MS Flight Simulator quite yet, however with Google looking to compete with MS on every front, who knows where development on this might go in the future? Will Google allow people to develop add-ons in a similar fashion to MSFS?

There are utilities that allow you to plot your location from MSFS in Google Earth and the free Flight Gear using Google Maps data for it’s own multiplayer servers and I’ve always wondered if someone would ever develop an add-on to Flight Simulator 2004 or X to use Google Earth or Maps data as scenery within the game itself. Now it appears there might not be a need. You can find more information and some more screenshots at Marco’s Blog and the Google Earth Blog.

I’ve always had an interest in the weather, it’s the one thing in Ireland that can make or break your day. As the say goes, “You don’t go to Ireland for the weather”! Anyway, I decided to go out and buy myself a weather station. I didn’t fancy spending €600 or €700 on something like a Davis Vantage Pro as I wasn’t even sure I had a suitable location for the station itself. I decided to try out a La Crosse WS-2308.

I setup Open2300 on my Sun Blade running Ubuntu and connected the console of the 2308 via serial. After a bit of messing about with the positioning of the sensors, the main unit and temperature sensor was receiving direct sunlight in the late afternoon and the wind sensor seemed and still is a bit too sheltered, everything was working pretty well.

I’m using mysql2300 to upload the values to a database and I wrote a few PHP scripts to generated some graphs using JpGraph. You can see the results of my efforts here.

We’ve been working our way through our stash of Wyse 60 terminals in work over the last few years. They used to be used extensively on desktops but have been replaced by PCs over the past 10 years and are now mainly used in a few small areas where only access to our character based ERP is needed. As one would fail we’d just pull one retired from a desk out of storage and replaced the failed unit.

Well, we finally have run out of spares so we decided to trial run some Sun Rays in their place. I picked up 2 refurbished Sun Ray 2FS systems from our Sun dealer and set about getting the things up and running. I decided to setup a small test network with my laptop running the Sun Ray software either under Linux or Solaris, we had a spare SunFire 280R but it was due to go live in about two weeks and didn’t feel like having to rebuild it after I was done testing. I was running Gentoo on my laptop at the time (I switch distros on my laptop wayyy too often) and had a feeling the Sun Ray software wasn’t going to play nice so I decided I’d give Solaris a try.

I grabbed a copy of Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) and set about installing it. To put it quite simply, I was amazed, apart from the usual clunky Solaris installer, everything worked perfectly. I’m used to having to install drivers for wireless and graphics with most Linux distros, but SXCE included everything. Now this may be down to Sun being able to ship binary drivers as part of the standard build, but it still impressed me. The only things that weren’t working were the volume buttons and my fingerprint reader, both of which can be enabled just as easily as in Linux. After playing around for a few hours, even getting Compiz up and running I set about getting the Sun Ray clients setup.

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I’ve updated urlmarkr so it is now working again on Rails 1.2.3. I have also re-written the authentication system using acts_as_authenticated, added support for snap.com thumbnails and fix lots of small bugs and problems.

You can grab a tarball of the latest SVN trunk or browse the repository.

I hope to have a live demo up and running shortly, however I’m having a few issues with the load on my VPS at the moment with some of my other projects and I get the feeling I’m going to have to move to a dedicated server rather soon. If you happen to know of any good, reliable and cheap dedicated hosting providers please let me know!

Just one day after it’s release, there are already exploits circulating for Safari for Windows. Thor Larholm has discovered a remote command execution vulnerability and some other researchers have reportedly discovered more vulnerabilities too.

The hole can be used to execute arbitrary code simply by making a user view a malicious web page in Safari. So much for “Why you’ll love Safari for Windows” reason #12: “Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one”. Secure indeed!

Apple’s Safari browser has just been made available for Windows, although it’s still in beta. This caught me totally by surprise, but it seems there have been rumours going around for a bit now. Even if I had of seen the rumors I wouldn’t have believed it! Here’s some screenshots of it in action:

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A few months back I purchased a Meade ETX-80 telescope and managed to get everything up and running. I was able to view some excellent shots of the Moon and also of Jupiter. Part of the draw of this telescope is it’s “Autostar” controller, which once programmed and aligned allows you to simply enter what you wish to view and it will turn and rotate to zone in on the object you selected.

There is also the option to connect the telescope to your laptop and use the AutoStar package to it. I was going to purchase the cable to connect it up until I came across the Meade MySky. It’s not available just yet, but it looks excellent. You can simply turn it on, point it at a object, and then pull the trigger to identify planets, stars, nebula and galaxies. It has a 480×234 full-color LCD screen, uses SD cards for storage and a 12 channel GPS unit. Best of all, it will connect to my existing ETX-80 telescope and control it too. I’ll have to get my hands on one as soon as they are available.

I’ve decided to move my blog and the Urlmarkr site away from Dreamhost and to a VPS hosted with Bitfolk. The main reason for the move is that now my exams are finished I hope to be able to spend some time working on urlmarkr and a few other projects and Dreamhost’s Ruby setup just didn’t cut it.

The Urlmarkr site is now running on Mongrel with Lighttpd 1.5 at the frontend. So far everything seems pretty stable. The new VPS is also a lot closer to home than Dreamhost, only 4 hops away with a response time of less than 20ms compared to the 18 hops and 200ms response from Dreamhost.

Just recently, I got my hands on a new Dell Latitude D820 laptop and it took me a few days to get everything migrated from my old laptop. Everything was running fine, including Joost, until that is, I joined my machine to our Active Directory domain at work. Every time I attempted to start Joost, tvprunner.exe would crash with the error: “The exception Breakpoint. A breakpoint has been reached.”

I tried deleting Application Data\Joost and Local Settings\Application Data\Joost but to no avail. I then tried running Joost as another domain user but the same error appeared. What I then tried was logging in as a local user, created during the initial XP install and low and behold, Joost ran just fine. I now just use “Run as…” and use a local account to launch Joost when logged in as a domain user.

This problem seems to be widespread on certain Dell machines, notably on Latitude D820s, three of which I tried myself and others which have also been reported on the Joost forum. However it runs fine as a domain user on both my Dell Precision desktop in work and a Dell XPS laptop I tested on. I haven’t had a chance to try Joost on a non-Dell build of XP on a Latitude yet to figure out if it’s something with the Dell supplied install of XP. Both the Precision desktop and XPS laptop were running standard builds.

I just received a Joost invite from Pallab and I may aswell jump on the bandwagon and give away some Joost invites just like everyone else.

If anyone would like a free Joost invite, simply leave a comment here and I’ll fire one off to you! Don’t leave your email in the post itself, just simply enter the correct address in the email field and I’ll get one through to you.

I promise your email address will be safe and I will delete it as soon as the invite is sent, so you don’t have to worry about any spam!

Update: I’ve given out over 80 invites, keep those requests coming! Everyone who’s commented as of 21:30 IST should have received theirs by now, if not, use the contact form to let me know!

A (not so) simple number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

 

 

 

 

Earthlings has certainly given me something to think about, and I hope it gives you something to think about too.

 

 

 

 

 

 
I’ve never been a big fan of meat, but my wife and I have decided to try cut it out completely.We’ve also decided to give up the smokes too! Giving up cigarettes and meat in one week? I’m almost scared I’m going to become one of those health freaks I have always hated!

Here are some pictures of the total lunar eclipse currently happening across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. I’ll be updating the pictures throughout the night.

Update 00:13 4th March: As usual the Irish weather has come along and is trying to ruin the spectacle! A bit of high cloud cover has moved in which is causing photography conditions to deteriorate.

Update 01:46 4th March: Well the moon has now left the Earth’s Umbra so it’s all pretty much over. The cloud tried to ruin things at the end but was high and thin enough not to block out everything. All in all it was a pretty good night. It’s times like this though that I wish I’d invested in a Cannon EOS 30D or 5D but my old Fuji S5600 still produced some good shots.

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It appears that the 2.1.1 version of Wordpress available for download over the past few days ago contains malicious code. It seems that the one of the Wordpress servers was compromised and the download modified to include the malicious code. You can read more details on the issue over at wordpress.org but the best advice is to upgrade now.