Planet #LUGRadio

sward: OpenSSL Certificate Authority

Sat, 17 May 2008 11:30:45 +0000

Debian’s predictable random number generator bug in OpenSSL saw me regenerating SSH and TLS keys. I almost always have to look up how to use openssl for certificate generation, so I improved my tiny personal certificate authority setup with a makefile, similar to the one used in this howto by Jeremy Mates.

jono: Life ain’t dull

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:57:36 +0000

Right now I am over in beautiful Prague for FossCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Running and attending these events is always a real treat - there is always a genuine feeling of free software in action; a real meeting of minds coming together with a common ethos. Part of why I love the FossCamp/UDS trip is that it involves a huge amount of diversity. Here at FossCamp we have people from a tonne of projects, including Ubuntu, Jokosher, Sun, EFL, Terminator, Strigi, Xesam, Ubuntu Brainstorm, Linux User Groups, GNOME, Glom, gtkmm, Campware, KDE, Amarok, KOffice, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Tango, Novell, Red Hat, Inkscape, freedesktop.org, OpenSuSE, OpenChange, Samba, Debian, MOTU, swfdec, gvfs, OpenOffice.org, eBox, LKSCTP, Elisa, HAL, dbus…

Its been a busy time recently and I have been out on my travels over in San Francisco, Boston, Cambridge, Detroit and London. Its been a hugely fun time, and I got to meet some incredible people - thanks to everyone who made me feel exceptionally welcome. I also want to give a quick shout out to the folks at ubuntu-ma, PenguiCon, CommunityOne, Creative Commons, Mako, Matt Lee, Barton, and my friends over in Lexington who are making Ubuntu work on things that live in your pocket.

Oh, and as a slight postscript, I have finally fulfilled one of life’s little ambitions - to not only meet, but a share a photo with the venerable tron guy:

Not only did I have a photo taken with tron guy - he came looking for me to deliver a parcel with a fake beard in it. While it was happening I felt like I was in some kind of acid trip. We then had a serious and detailed conversation about MOTU, while he was stood there in full tron regalia. Just when I thought my world crazy, it got a little crazier…

I was going to finish this entry here, but sod it, here are a few other things living in my brain right now:

The Severed Fifth machine continues to roll - the server is up, the mailing lists are on their way, the announcement is written, the logo ideas are flowing in, the photo-shoot is in post-processing, and the content is nearly there in terms of initial work. Thanks to that group of amazing people that are making it happen.
You know, gyms never really had an appeal to me, but I have been a few times recently - I had a really good session in there a while back and figured it would be fun to repeat.
Wow, it seems this post of mine caused a bit of a stir over what is considered music. Always amazes me when people accuse creativity that does not meet their taste as being unintelligent or just noise. I am not expecting people to like the music I like, but I am expecting people to understand and respect the work that goes into any art-form, irrespective of their taste. Everything is worth listening to, even Cannibal Corpse, lounge style or flute beatboxing.
Someone should invent an “anti-mint”, something you put in your mouth to take away the taste of mint. Imagine those situations when you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth and then want to drink orange juice. Personally, I want both clean teeth and orange juice and to not sacrifice one or the other. Someone…the anti-mint…lets make it a reality.
I bought GTA4 and it rocks. It also drove me to be involved in a police chase, but that’s a story for another time.
While in video game news, I got totally whipped at Guitar Hero III, and while despite fervent denial, I got completely annihilated. Mind you, I spent more time posing and prancing around the living room at my competitors apartment than focusing on the game in hand. Well, that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it.
Recently jonobacon.org seems to have been picked up in some of these “top blog” listings. You are as surprised as I am, but for my regular readers, thanks for helping to push my little chunk of randomness up in the blog ranks. It really does go to show how many bored people are populating the Internet.
You know, Cancun is an amazing looking place, would love to get over there sometime.
Thinking of a new phone - Nokia N95 8GB or a Blackberry? Any thoughts? It should be good for email, have a decent camera, preferably have a GPS and preferably have an alpha-numeric keypad.

I think that’s enough for now.

GingerDog: A simple tale of SQL Injection .....

Fri, 16 May 2008 21:24:16 +0000

Today, I was giving a one-on-one PHP training course covering databases (we were trying to get mssql to work with PHP on Windows, but various factors seemed to conspire against us - possibly permissions related, as it seemed to refuse to allow us to select from a table that fricking well did exist.). Anyway, the amusing story was.....

I have a habit of "probing" most web sites to see whether they're vulnerable to SQL injection - normally inserting a simple single quote into a URL will show one way or another. Unfortunately, for the delegate, he hadn't come across SQL Injection, but had written a website for his local village, in .asp.....

Cue login as "admin" with a password of "' OR '' = '".

Suffice to say, we then had a good laugh at the classic XKCD strip about poor Robert and he now knows how someone hacked into the site a few months ago.

schwuk: Links for 2008-05-15 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 16 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

JsUnit
JsUnit is a Unit Testing framework for client-side (in-browser) JavaScript. It is essentially a port of JUnit to JavaScript. Also included is a platform for automating the execution of tests on multiple browsers and mutiple machines running different OSs.
doctype - doctype - Google Code
Doctype is a Google-sponsored open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications. By web developers, for web developers.

neuro: Dark Days

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:29:53 +0000

First, Rangers get beaten in the UEFA Cup final, then a core of arsehole Rangers fans decide to rampage across Manchester’s city centre, and now news that Celtic legend Tommy Burns has died. These are dark days for Scottish football.

port7: Pimping Dom

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:46:06 +0000

It seems my musical prodigy of a brother now has a myspace page. Check it out, he describes his music as ‘ Acoustic / Experimental / Ambient’, its all self-taught and really took us by surprise a few years back.

davee: SSH/SSL vulnerability in Debian since late 2006

Wed, 14 May 2008 18:24:15 +0000

Oops

It was revealed yesterday that there has been a great big security hole in the Debian-distributed SSL code, introduced in late 2006. This ill-advised Debian modification meant that all SSH and SSL keys were insufficiently random (the change removed part of the random seeding which normally takes place). This means that instead of there being a total of $BIG_NUM possible keys, there were only around 260,000 possible keys. This makes brute-forcing the key almost trivial.

Note that, unlike other security updates for your system, merely installing the updated packages is not enough. One must also remove and regenerate all affected SSH and SSL keys. Depending on your setup, this could be a massive task. It will also be very disruptive to end users if you’re changing host SSH keys for example.

What’s affected:

Any SSH or SSL keys generated on Debian Etch or recent Testing/unstable;
Any SSH or SSL keys generated on all Debian-derived systems corresponding to “Debian Etch and later”: for Ubuntu, this means Feisty 7.04, Gutsy 7.10 and Hardy 8.04
Any DSA-style SSH keys used on a system with a vulnerable host key, even if the keys themselves are not vulnerable.

What you need to do:

Get the updated openssl and openssh packages on to your system. Debian and Ubuntu’s openssh package includes a check on the SSH host key and also includes a tool to check user keys. Where possible, run ssh-vulnkey -a as root to check all users’ keys and authorized_keys for the vulnerable ones;
If you generated any other SSL keys, such as for HTTP/SSL certificates, figure out when they were generated and whether the system was running Etch or later at the time. If so, these should be considered compromised and regenerated. As far as I can tell at the moment, there is no automated tool for checking SSL keys and ceritificates

The dust has finally settled on this one here, I hope, and this is what I found:

At work, all our servers were originally installed as Debian Sarge and so none of the host SSH keys were vulnerable, even though the systems themselves are now running Etch;
No vulnerable SSH user keys (apart from one that I created solely for the purpose of seeing whether it could be detected by the vulnerability scanner: it could), since hardly any of us use them and those of us that do had generated them during the Sarge era: being rather sluggish upgrading from Sarge to Etch actually helped here!
No vulnerable SSL keys for our external sites: they were all made a while ago;
About a dozen vulnerable SSL keys on internal servers: these will need to be replaced, but as exposure to these is limited, that’s less of a risk;
At home: main PC has evolved from Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 and so has keys generated before this problem arose; my laptop was installed as a pre-release Ubuntu Hardy 8.04, but I never put openssh-server on it, so no vulnerability there. Also, the home partition was inherited from an earlier release and the user keys were not vulnerable either; the fileserver was installed as Etch and had a vulnerable host key, which has been regenerated. And my newly-acquired Asus Eee (more about that in a later post!), which is based on Xandros which is derived from Debian, appears to have a vulnerable version of the SSL code installed, because the key I generated on it was identified by the vulnerability scanner on another system.

As Bruce Schneier once said (I think): “Bad crypto looks just like good crypto”

Updated 15 May 2008: It has occurred to me this morning that all systems which support SSH are potentially at risk here, not just Debian-based ones. For instance, any system which has an uploaded weak user key is vulnerable to that user account being easily cracked, regardless of the OS which that system runs. e.g. if I generate a (weak) key on a Debian system and then upload the public part of the key to an OpenBSD server, then that OpenBSD server is vulnerable. All systems running SSH should probably check for these vulnerable keys: Debian and Ubuntu have released patches to reject vulnerable keys: I trust we’ll see the same thing for other OSes too.

mrben: Inoffensive Advocacy

Wed, 14 May 2008 11:23:57 +0000

This morning I had a really long and interesting conversation with Aq on IRC. One of the ideas I was discussing with him was using technology to cleverly, and inoffensively, promote Free software within Linux. (For those of you who haven’t listened to the latest episode of LugRadio, Aq had been bemoaning the continuing issue of people who use Linux but aren’t necessarily using or interested in the concepts of Free Software as a whole - but more on that another time).

A good example of what I am talking about is the Restricted Drivers manager in Ubuntu. If Ubuntu has to install proprietary drivers during installation, most likely either for a graphics card, or a wifi card, then it pops up this box to inform you that it has done so. There are 3 points to note with this dialog:

1. It still works - it’s not forcing you not to use them (unobtrusive)
2. It informs - it gives you the reason _why_ proprietary drivers are bad (informative)
3. It only appears _if_ you have the (in)appropriate hardware (relevant)

I think we could use similar prompts for other areas, and one area I thought might be good would be the area of closed media formats. (I have talked a bit about this in the past - I’m not going to go into the reasons why closed media formats are bad here, but a good starting point if you’re interested would be this video about DRM (although DRM != closed formats, it’s still a hot topic ))

Thus, I propose an additional script to go into Linux that works in the following way:

1. When you plug in your media player (iPod, iRiver, Archos, some random Korean player, whatever), as part of the auto-detection it scans a database of media players to discover if it has support for Ogg Vorbis
2. If Yes, then it pops up a window (see below) confirming that Ogg is supported, and offering to convert any existing media folders from MP3 to Ogg, while giving a reason why this is a preferred option.
3. If No, then it just does the normal operations for when you plugin a media player

Note that the box has a “Never ask again for this device” option, so that it doesn’t nag you - the idea is that, like the restricted drivers manager, you only ever see this box once (per device). It also fulfills the 3 points I gave above - unobtrusive, informative, and relevant.

The table view is supposed to contain a list of folders which contain MP3 files (or other proprietary formats) and checkboxes for you to select if you want to convert them.

[edit]Oops - the image is a bit wide for my theme. Click on it to see the full thing[/edit]

Also note that this is just a mockup - there are probably a few things that could be improved upon/changed. But hopefully you get the idea.

mrBen

grifferz: obstler

Wed, 14 May 2008 01:08:20 +0000

I’ve not long got back from colo’ing the new server, obstler. Tonight was the only night I could do it before next week, and Graham very kindly offered to give me a lift from home at 6pm, aiming to be there by 8pm.

I left dayjob early and rushed home but unfortunately Graham got held up in bad traffic coming across London and it was more like 7pm when he got to me. The M25 anticlockwise was pretty clear though so despite my mere presence breaking the satnav and making the indicator relay go into overdrive (*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click* …. *click*click*click* … *click*click*click*click* ………… *click*click*click*click* ……………. *click*click*!), we made good time and arrived at about 8.30pm.

As it happened, Andy Millar who was also colo’ing his server today had had some technical difficulties and so things were running late anyway. In fact we had some time to wait around while that was finished off. It turns out that his HP power supply was drawing 1.1A, which went down to less than half that when replaced with a Sea Sonic one. I shall have to investigate that for myself, as it looks like it would save me about £20/month per server!

obstler was pretty quick to colo, then we headed off to some Chinese restaurant near Canary Wharf Pier. As usual I became totally disoriented by the twisty turns around that place.

I couldn’t remember exactly when my last direct train from Waterloo was, but thought it might be 23:50. It was actually 23:58 so I made it with plenty of time, got home about 00:45.

A good night’s work; won’t be able to finish configuring obstler or doing much of anything useful with it for a couple of days, but really glad it’s finally in.

Thanks again to Graham for giving me a lift with the server!

yonkeltron: Not your Mama’s skin condition

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:59:45 +0000

I just got done watching Ben-Hur for the first time in several years. Naturally, I was prompted to check the Leprosy article on Wikipedia. Much to my surprise, it would seem that there is a difference between true Leprosy and the biblical plague known as Tza’arat (צערת). While the former is a legitimate disease, the latter is actually a condition comprised of a number of illnesses, afflictions and maladies capable of affliction people, clothes and houses. Basically, don’t get Leprosy because it’s a horrible disease which will ruin your body and don’t piss off God because Tza’arat is worse and will consume both you and your stuff.

grifferz: Opt-out organ donation

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:30:11 +0000

Jake, absolutely! But there are far too many people with illogical ideas about the sanctity of corpses to stand for it, I fear. As Niven suggested, will we see this first applied to prisoners, and then the death penalty for jaywalking?

Aquarion: Journal - Angle Brackets

Tue, 13 May 2008 09:05:18 +0000

Coding Horror – The Angle Bracket Tax vs. ESF, now coming up to its sixth birthday with no revision.

Coming up on Aquarionics:

* LARP * Dante 01 * GTA4 & XBoxes * Pareidol * Your Interface Sucks.

... as soon as I get around to writing this stuff.

mrben: Zattoo

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:37:33 +0000

Firstly, apologies for a distinct lack of posting in the last few weeks (months? ). I hope to improve on this. I do have a few projects in the works, which will be revealed here hopefully within the next couple of weeks.

Quick pimp for an excellent piece of software called Zattoo - it basically allows you to watch terrestrial TV on your PC over the internet (no TV card required, but you should have a TV license). A great way to add another TV to your house.

mrBen

jono: Destroy Everything

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:40:46 +0000

You know what, every so often you see something and it directly equates to your dream for a particular part of your life. In terms of my musical ambitions, the video to Destroy Everything by Hatebreed perfectly sums up perfectly what I would love to do with my music, and not only that, but I utterly love this crunchy, fat, grindy, anthemic song:

Can’t see it? Click here.

Wicked.

GingerDog: LRF Bromsgrove 10k race - I came 26th :-) (Run Dof Run! 2)

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:31:51 +0000

This year, again I entered the Bromsgrove LRF charity fun run, and despite the horrible temperature, managed to finish 26th with a time of 44 minutes and a few seconds.

Last year, I did it in nearly the same time - although it was somewhat cooler and I hadn't been off-colour for the preceeding week.

schwuk: Links for 2008-05-09 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows | A Padded Cell

sward: The Inconvenience of Door Locks

Thu, 08 May 2008 21:35:44 +0000

The fool that I am, I locked myself out of my flat (again). This time, thankfully, I didn’t end up paying some extortionate amount of money to call someone out to slide a piece of plastic through the latch. Instead, as well as realising I had left my keys inside, I realised I had left a window open, and borrowed some ladders from a neighbour.

The latch is effective enough to keep someone unprepared out, but with just a piece of plastic can be opened in less than five minutes. Normally, I’d lock the mortice lock too, but then if I could lock the mortice lock I would have my keys. That would then have been of little use had I not realised I left the window open, which is probably the way things would have gone had I not forgot my keys. Arrgh!

To complete my mini adventure, the reason I left my flat in the first place was to go to a shop around the corner. I bumped into PerfDave and said “hello”, etc, went into the shop to find they didn’t have what I wanted, went to another shop across the road and bumped into PerfDave again, who thought I may have got lost because I was coming from the wrong direction.

yonkeltron: Getting philosophical about learning and computers

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:53:08 +0000

In what has to be one of the most philosophical CS papers I have ever encountered, a team of researchers from Brazil and Luxembourg have presented a fascinating overview of many issues surrounding the area of computer-based learning. In their paper, Redesigning Computer-Based Learning Environments: Evaluation as Communication, they make reference to everything from psychology to meta-communication and citing a broad yet well-chosen set of authors from Claude Shannon to Gregory Bateson.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this paper is it’s writing style. These authors have clearly given the subject a great deal of thought and have not been shy about getting philosophical while expressing their opinions. In fact, these authors have gone out of their way to use their variety of interdisciplinary sources to help illustrate the idea that issues in computer-based learning are never purely technical. One of the first communication models they discuss is the well known psychology concept of the double bind. While the concept isn’t worth explaining here (given the ubiquity of detailed explanations), their relation of the concept to educational evaluation is certainly significant.

Evaluation is also trapped in the double bind. Student and teacher or even the other characters such as colleagues and parents exchange many contradictory stimuli about learning. For example: have critical sense versus accept as truth what is in books, express yourself efficiently versus do not talk, concentrate on homework versus play with friends, etc. These situations are inherent to evaluation in the same sense the double bind is part of communication

The tensions described here are all-too-familiar to students, both past and present. Issues such as the ones mentioned in the paper are very real obstacles that must be overcome in classrooms all over while their complexities are only emphasized further by the still-developing experience of computer-based learning.

…the computer-based learning environment must support and, if possible, amplify the expression and the emergence of contradictory relations. These are essential to the evaluation process, since provocative statements may communicate how teacher and colleagues perceive one’s performance and understanding.

With this in mind, they conclude their discussion by explicitly stating the importance of letting real-world factors influence the design of learning systems. This exceptionally well thought-out piece of technical writing should be required reading for any educator considering the deployment of a computer-based learning system or struggling with the design of an alternative assessment mechanism.

grifferz: Alan Keen, I take some of it back

Thu, 08 May 2008 10:47:15 +0000

My MP, Alan Keen, finally wrote to me after about 6 weeks to say he had signed Early Day Motion 1155 on public photography. fanks mister! \o/

A cynical man may suspect that all labour MPs have been instructed to make nice after their local election hammering, and otherwise ignored communications from constituents have been revisited.

aquarius: LugRadio Live USA videos

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:47:11 +0000

For those of you who missed the greatness that was LugRadio Live USA, or those lucky lucky people who were there and couldn’t see all the talks, we’re now starting to make videos of the talks available for download! Tony Whitmore, our hyper-competent video guy, is busily processing the videos, and as they’re made available we’re adding them to the LugRadio Live USA schedule. Currently there’s video of the LugRadio live show recording, Ted Haeger talking about “Freedom and the Cloud”, and Emma Jane Hogbin talking about women in open source. More will be appearing over the next few weeks! Keep an eye on that page to find video that you can stream or download in a load of formats.

(Those of you who are hyper-keen can actually get the videos quicker by watching the official video thread in the LugRadio forums, too.)

schwuk: Links for 2008-05-07 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 08 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Ubuntu Story - Share Your Linux Story!

popey: Ubuntu UK Podcast Episode 5 is Out

Wed, 07 May 2008 21:22:48 +0000

Once again proving his editing prowess, Tony has managed to squeeze around 4 hours of wibble into a 40 minute podcast. Nice one.

In this episode:-

Discussion:
- An interview with Pete Savage.
  - progbox.vid
- A chat with Phil Newborough.
  - Random Ubuntu Advocacy
  - Crunchbang Linux
- We rate our Hardy upgrade experiences.
- Following up with our CLI vs GUI discussion with Laura Cowen.
In the news:
- gNewSense release version 2.
- Adobe opening up the FLV specs.
- The UK's Unix User Group has convinced the High Court to carry out a judicial review of the British Standard Institute's decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's controversial Office Open XML (OOXML) specification.
- 30th birthday of spam
- Sun in process of certifying Ubuntu.
Competition results!
- The winner of the trivia competition is announced. We'll send them a coupon for the Canonical Store to spend on whatever they want! We'll have another competition in Episode 6.

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc

Aquarion: Journal - GameCamp London 2008

Wed, 07 May 2008 10:49:29 +0000

I went to Gamecamp. It’s becoming quite common in reports of this event to wax lyrical about the location for a little while first, so I’ll do that. It was held at 3Rooms (I’m sixth from the left in that photo), which is a PR venue belonging to Sony’s PlayStation division. Effectively, it’s where they take journalists to demo new products.

It’s pretty.

Level 1 is white. It’s a large loft-style space, split into areas with screens and curtains and shelves, with textures and soft furnishings everywhere, bright splashes of colour, Huge Sony Bravia TVs everywhere (all with PS3s attached) sunken sofas, shelves full of interesting-looking tat, bright and airy and absolutely glorious.

Level 2 is black. It’s a dark bar with mirrored surfaces and a (non-alcoholic) bar, with a raised area surrounded by sofas and a coffee table with board games. There are huge jars of Jelly-Belly scattered around, and a large projection screen with a PS3 attached.

Level 3 is green. It’s is a roof garden with views over central London, wooden tables and chairs, sofas and plants. Relaxing and bright.

The entire building is exactly where I would live if I didn’t have limitations of money. I am not in any way kidding, it’s wonderful, and designed specifically for me.

Enough about the venue.

Reports about the event are around from mssrs Gillen and Curran, and are entirely accurate and worthwhile. It was an “Unconference” style thing, in the style of Foo & BarCamp and other such events. I ended up going to a session on “Indy tabletop RPG games are flourishing. We’re not competing with computer games. Really. We mean it. See? They don’t scare us with their billion dollar budgets. Not even a little” and another on how to play a russian card game called Durak. After that I kind of got distracted by Echochrome and Rock Band. I went to a session on “The Revolution” in which under-21 gamers got shot, the Wii didn’t, and mandatory installs did. The sessions I did go to were fun, and though them I’ve become more interested in indy roleplaying games – since that was the aim of my first session, that’s probably a good thing – including Dogs In The Vineyard, a game about Mormon cowboys. I should set one of these up at some point. Also there was the inventor of the game Baron Munchausen, which various people in Cambridge were playing while I was Maelfrothing a couple of weeks back. The entire event was wonderful, and I look forward to the next.

The (video) games that I played:

Echochrome, upon which I’ve splattered forth fanboyism before is quite good, but doesn’t live up to the idea. The controls are a little slow – often you’ll fail a level because you simply can’t rotate the screen fast enough – and imperfect (Sometimes you’ll connect up a ledge but it doesn’t connect because it needed to be connected at the edge 90^o instead). It may have been that the demo came from early code, though. Either way, since I have neither a PS3 or a PSP, it’s all distinctly academic.

Rock Band Rocks. There is little more I have to say. I spent more time on guitar than anything else, simply because there were two of them. Drumming is hard, singing is easy, YMMV. Guitar is the most polished of the experiences, fairly obviously, but the ability to declare both players as lead guitar fails on 90% of the library as it simply randomly assigns one to be the bass line if it only has one guitar track. I sang Creep, by Radiohead. I do that a lot.

GTA4 also rocks, but you possibly don’t need me to tell you that bit.

Aquarion: Journal - They say we want a revolution

Tue, 06 May 2008 20:33:31 +0000

I didn’t expect Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson to be the new London Mayor. I hoped Ken would carry on, because I live in (the outer edges of) central London, and everything Ken’s done over the last eight years to join up the transport network has improved the live of me, personally. I am a fan of the congestion charge, and that it isn’t on account, because it means taking the car into London means you have to do admin, and so people don’t do it. It’s a simple tactic, but it’s made the transport network work, as the buses can get around.

I can’t help but wonder if Ken Livingstone would have been expelled had he remained Independent as he was when he first got elected. Whilst the righteous anger of the London suburb belt and South London waxed wroth, I’m not sure it could not have been overcome had Ken not also had to face the backlash against Labour’s first decade. The mayoral position, for all that Ken is a card-carrying classic breed Labour member, has never really been a party political one, until now, where the hopes and dreams of the Conservative Party now rest with the haystack who walks like a man. The London Mayor is now officially a beacon of politics for the rest of the country, where Ken’s strengths were always where he was just trying to get London to work properly. Capital though it is, the idea of my local government becoming a national issue, requestioning every little bikeshed decision to see if the Conservatives could possibly be allowed to run the country again.

I’d like to think people have a long enough memory to realise the parallels between now and ~1995, before we swapped the men with the blue ties for the men with the red ties, and tried something new. However, until either the Liberal Democrats tie their act together with a neat little bow and start actually getting press for policies, or another political party is formed somehow; we’re just going to flick back to blue in a couple of years mostly because we don’t like red anymore.

I’m also – too many paragraphs beginning with “I” – not a fan of a number of Boris’ policies. The idea of building 50k affordable homes is a nice one, but given that he’s mayor of London and not, say, the Home Counties, where does he intend to build them? And with what money? As I understand it, any excess budget is – rightly – going to make sure the city doesn’t collapse under the weight of the Olympics; during the run up to which the administration will be running their reelection campaign, a fact which amuses me. He wants to put the congestion charge on account also, which misses the point somewhat. The money the congestion charge is – £5 to bring your car into the centre of London – isn’t much more than a token, really. It’s more the fact that you have to pay on the day or within a few days. It’s administrative faff, which puts people off more than the charge does, otherwise the city-boy types will just set up a direct debit to take the money out and ignore the thing completely. The reason the congestion charge is important to me, personally, is because it means that buses are suddenly able to get from A to B without a traffic jam, meaning they’re a viable form of commute. I’m in favour of people who actually have to go into London with a van and cannot justify a “Fleet” account (And here I mean things like plumbers, rather than those who cannot be bothered to drive to the nearest tube station. They can pay for parking with the money they save by living far from where they work. I’ve little sympathy for the people who complain that they cannot have their outer-suburbs cheaper housing/rent and keep their inflated London salary) getting a discount or something, but the point of the exercise is not so much to charge people to get into London. This is not to say that the outer-London transport network doesn’t need a great deal of expansion, it does, but inner London transport was actively broken and the money to fix outer London did not go – as the suburbs appear to think – to upgrade the Jubilee line with gold plated fire alarms, but to bailing out the private companies that almost caused the entire underground network to go bankrupt.

None of which is actually Boris’ fault, but his campaign policies did seem to mostly focus on capitalising of feeding money into the areas the previous administration didn’t have enough money to give to, balanced against mass-populist whitewash. Neither of which contained any reference to where they were going to get the money to spend on this thing. What’s the betting the rise in my – already high – council tax is higher this year than last?

If I sound panicked about this, it’s because almost all of the policies thus far explained are either going to require more money from taxpayers, or a poorer quality of transport inside the capital, or another inconvenience for me; all of which starts to drain on my ability to remain living in the city. And if I, an engineer with a reasonably good job, cannot afford to live on the outskirts of the city I work in, something somewhere is drastically wrong.

All of which ignores the other issue, which is Johnson himself. For – more than once – referring to Africans as “Picaninnies”, for being banned from various other cities any other person would have been shot at dawn. I see Johnson’s election as a triumph of celebrity over talent or policy or politics, as much as Schwarzenegger’s election was, and I’d prefer for this city, and this country, to be less of a laughing-stock than it already is.

Ideally, we’d also win the cricket, and while I’m wishing I’d like a pony.

GingerDog: Howies Dyfi Enduro 2008

Tue, 06 May 2008 10:46:48 +0000

On Sunday, I did my 5th Dyfi Enduro (at least, I think it's my 5th). As always, I had a great time, and pretty much knackered myself - which is to be expected. Oddly I reached the half way point and felt quite perky, so decided I'd better push myself harder in the second half. Thankfully I completed it, and now have one more mug to add to my collection :-)

There are photos up for it - see here. I found myself in two photos - the first doesn't look particularly good (here) and the second was on a downhill bit - so was a little blurred - here - so I'm not sure if I'll buy either.

Anyway, as before, it was a very well organised event with a much improved "camping ground" (although I didn't make use of it). The course itself seemed significantly different to previous years - which was nice - it's definately improved over the years anyway. As always there was the killer ascent at the start, with a rock band and cheer leaders near the top (Thank you!) followed by a number of excellent technical downhill parts which had me keeping my bike under control by the thinnest of margins and the traditional long forestry road uphill sections (where I tend to overtake people).

The weather mostly held off, and although there was some light rain, it never made me put my coat on - so clearly carrying it around was a waste of time in retrospect.

While I was getting very muddy and enjoying myself, Kat took Rowan to Corris craft centre and bought an assortment of toys for him; they both seemed very pleased for themselves anyway.

In the evening, we had a curry at the Agra (Aberystwyth) with Paul, Hannah and Jo - which was intended to restore my knackered body to it's normal shape. I'm not sure it did that however (this might be related to eating dodgy eggs the previous night). Eventually we made it back to my mothers along the A44 by 23:30. It was a long day - after starting at 5:30am, but well worth it.

sward: Stuffed

Tue, 06 May 2008 05:47:40 +0000

The day after the RMS speech, and it was time for currybeer again. Paul was skiving, so I took the twelve of us off to the Punjab restaurant. We have been there before, but with a larger group that ended up sitting around two tables. This time we got one, although there was still no talk between the extremities of the table.

I had keema dosa, which was quite filling. So filling I didn’t eat all of my main course, which was a fairly nice dish that I can’t remember the name of (a Punjab special tawamix thingy).

sward: RMS Speech a Success

Sun, 04 May 2008 23:11:34 +0000

I didn’t say an awful lot in my last post. I was a bit tired by that point. The RMS talk was indeed a success.

Before the talk, a few of us handed out flyers for Manchester Free Software and the Free Software Foundation, hopefully gaining some publicity there.

The badgering to get the larger lecture theatre (and possibly the blog posts too) paid off, with the talk being moved from a 100‐seater to a 300‐seater room. Most, if not all, of the seats were taken, with some people sitting on the stairs or standing at the back. I was one of the latter. I tried some different positions that didn’t make me any more comfortable, but I lasted it out.

Stallman’s talks mostly boil down to one of a small number in similarity, and this was one of them. He covered off the GNU project, the principles of free software, some of the bad things about proprietary software, and free software in educational institutions. I had heard most of it before but it still interested me and possibly filled some bits I had missed. I suspect a fair number of the audience hadn’t.

The questions and answers at the end lasted a long time. There was something about how works of art compare to software, and how computer games fit in; an amusing look into the future when machines may have freedom; and a drawn out debate from someone desperately trying to argue that they should be allowed to make money through proprietary software and, in Stallman’s view, subjugate the users.

RMS then auctioned off a copy of “Free Software, Free Society”, which was fun to witness. John Leach put in his first (or second?) bid following with a request for a hug. The next bidder requested not to get a hug, with Stallman saying “how much will you pay not to have a hug?” (maybe paraphrased). Eventually, I think £90 was raised for the FSF, and the winning bidder (not John) got a hug.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk, and wish Richard Stallman well. Also, thank you Matt Lee for setting things in motion, and Paul Waring and the BCS for the effort that went into organising the event, and Paul Robinson for hosting Richard Stallman during his visit.

popey: Zatto on the Asus Eee PC 900

Sun, 04 May 2008 22:20:31 +0000

I recently got hold of an Asus Eee PC 900 - the newer version of the Eee 701. It's a lovely piece of kit, which I'll probably review more fully on the podcast.

After playing with Zattoo on my Ubuntu laptop, I thought I'd give it a go on the Eee 900 which is running the default Xandros Linux distribution (which I actually quite like).

Here's what it looks like once installed:-

Unfortunately the Asus software repositories don't contain the Zattoo package, or the dependency that allows Zattoo to install cleanly. However as Xandros is based on Debian Etch, so it's possible to fix this issue quite easily.

Here's what I did:-

Download the zatto deb package.
Download libgtkglext1 from the Debian Etch repository.
Open a terminal with [CTRL]+[ALT]+t
Install the two deb packages downloaded using the following command

dpkg -i *.deb

Then you can run zattoo from the command line.

You can of course zoom in.

Full screen works very nicely.

One thing I have yet to figure out is how to add an icon to the big "telly tubby" menu.

Update Found out that editing /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc enables me to maintain the graphical the icon for the zattoo_player executable.

Bryn_S: Lenses, Elections, Moving and getting Older

Sun, 04 May 2008 19:59:52 +0000

The title pretty much sums up what I intend to talk about, so feel free to skip over it if you prefer. This also ensures my average of one post a month this year is maintained.

Lenses

Yes, I have now gotten rid of my old eyeglasses and replaced them with a rather neat set of contact lenses. Given a rather high astigmatism in both eyes, I’ve had to take the toric based lenses (which are only available in the 30 day continuous wear lenses). It was quite odd to fight the reflex reaction of my eyelids to put in and take out a thin sliver of plastic, but I’m getting better at it (Although on Election Day, I found myself at 4AM trying to put the lenses in, poking myself in the eye a few times before realising the lens wasn’t even on my finger…).

Having worn them for a week, I’ve found my eyes have adjusted to them to the extent that I worry they may not even be in. I’ve found that when walking outdoors, they do dry out on occasion, but a quick few blinks sorts it all out. Next week, I need to wear them all day and then sleep in them, which I suppose will be the real test.

I’ve found that some people are rather squeamish about the idea of sticking a bit of plastic onto your eyeball (I tormented my poor sister over the weekend by discussing some of the problems I’d had). Still, it’s an experiment, and a worthwhile one I think.

Elections

Election Day - May 1st
I took a few days and volunteered for the Chester branch of the Conservative Party during the local elections. Several good friends of mine were standing for election to the new Cheshire West and Chester Unitary Authority. A 4AM start on Election Day to deliver leaflets reminding our members and those who’d intimated their support for us during canvasing that the elections were today and they should vote.

After two hours of walking about delivering leaflets, I returned and was send out to Tell at a poling station (for those not in the know, a Teller is one of those people who asks to see your voting card on the way in to make a note of your number. This is then used to mark off the people on the pledge list compiled by the canvasers. Those left on the list are then either given a phone call or visited by a party worker to remind them to vote).

The rest of the day was spent pounding the streets going door-to-door giving out leaflets and talking to voters from 11:00 in the morning, through to 21:00 in the evening. Our count had the margin in the 100s. During the latter stages, we spotted Labour members out knocking on doors within the city, having decided to branch out from their “strongholds” out of the centre of the City to try and capture some last minute floating voters.

At 21:00, we called an end to it, and all of us from the CF retreated to the bar to take the weight off and discuss the day. The entire campaign team went out for a meal togther and waited for news to come in from London. We got wind of an Exit Poll in The Sun which called the race as a win for Boris, by 10 points.

Following Morning… May 2nd

The sounds of Evan Davies on the Today Programme woke me up to the news that the elections had been a bloodbath for Labour. Harriet Harman was being dragged over the coals by John Humphrys. I lost count of the number of times she said that Labour were now “Listening” (seems to be that whenever they’re in trouble, they keep repeating some reassuring keyword, “Prudence”, “Stablity” and now “Listening”). Mr Humphrys retored with “A bit late now, isn’t it?”. Spoke for us all I think.

The BBC had been projecting a 44% share of the national vote for The Conservatives, against a poor Labour showing of 24% (with the Liberal Democrats on 25%). Several Labour commentators had suggested that we needed to score 47% to have a really good day (this was based on their successes in ‘95, when Tony Blair landed a massive blow to John Major’s ailing Conservative Government by taking 47% of the vote in the local elections).

Noone was buying their line, they’re in trouble.

I went on to see the count at the City Hall, which was a lot more tense than I’d expected. I spent my time monitoring the count for the Hoole & Newton ward, a former Liberal stronghold. As the votes stacked up, it was looking like a close one. We were ahead on the block votes, but it came down to the wire with the split votes. Two of our guys got in, but a tie for the 3rd seat resulted in the Lib Dems gaining the 3rd after a recount. (Hoole & Newton Ward).

City Ward fell (electing Richard, Tom and Max as their new Conservative Councillors - scalping two high profile Labour candidates), 88 votes the margin (our estimate had proven to be more or less accurate, and justified the last minute push for votes). Within Blacon (previously a strong Labour ward), Charlie came close to overturning a massive Labour majority (the votes recorded a 10% swing away from Labour, the best result within that ward for a generation). Damned fine work, and a brilliant platform to go again in 2011.

Birthday

In the middle of all the Election hoo-hah, I found time to have a Birthday… I seem to have reached the ripe old age of 25. Spent the birthday evening with the family, who’d gotten me a Dalek cake :).

Thanks to all of you who got in touch via the various methods, there are far too many of you to be able to answer individually, so I’ll just say thanks on here. You’re all ace.

Moving House

Yes, I have now also completed a house move. I’m still in Chester, but moved down deeper into Boughton. That’ll mean more to you if you know Chester or have the ability to use Google.

Well, that’s enough from me. Should keep you going for another month.

Aquarion: Journal - Stuff

Sun, 04 May 2008 19:44:30 +0000

London has elected Boris Johnson mayor of London.

This is Not Good. However, I am – from now – reserving judgement until he actually manages to screw up. Clock starts in three and a third hours.

New design is New, and is light and airy and calm, which is nice. It’s also simple, which is even nicer. I’ve still got to fix the right hand column, which is a bit texty and stark. I’ve also got to fix my admin system, which is displaying all text boxes at 40 characters wide, which is annoying. New things include the replaced Gallery (Well, part of it. Actual viewing of sets and pictures is still handed over to Flickr, but that’ll change when I get another burst of arsedness)

As I mentioned, I have bought GTA4, and a 360 to play it on. I fail at resistance to shiny. However, I haven’t had much of a chance to play on it due to going places and doing things. I shall fix this now.

I went to GameCamp London, which was fun. There are photos on Flickr and in the gallery.

No': Much ado for nothing

Sun, 04 May 2008 18:41:52 +0000

Much ado for nothing.

Well, it looks like it's good news for users, and bad news for Microsoft and Yahoo! shareholders.

But what a waste of time...

tonytiger: LUG Radio Live USA (Part 4)

Sun, 04 May 2008 15:22:50 +0000

And that’s about it. I interviewed Adam in Union Square on Monday morning before they all left for the airport. (We were staying out in the US for a bit of a holiday.) Waiting for the taxi in the hotel lobby, we started disecting what lessons from the US event could transfer to the UK one. This included Aq doing some “blue sky thinking” in the hotel lobby on Monday morning which was cool but potentially landed me with a shed load more work. Nothing unusual there!

The rest of the holiday was not really LUG Radio related, apart from shooting some video of the sights and sounds of San Francisco (cable cars, Golden Gate bridge etc. etc.) I also edited the live show recording whilst in Pacific Grove. It’s not brilliant but not bad for being edited on a laptop’s sound card on the road. I think this is the first LUG Radio episode not mixed for release by Jono.

It was a pleasure to travel with the gents and to hang out for a few days. Usually we meet up and LRL and chat online but the former is frantic and the latter isn’t a fantastic communication medium. Having a couple of days of chatting, coming up with stupid ideas (some of which might even come to fruition) and getting to know everyone a bit better on a personal level was cool, especially Adam and Chris who I got to spend more time with than the others.

Laura and I were invited to visit the Google campus (aka the Googleplex) by Kynan so we dropped in on the Wednesday. It was great to wander round the various buildings, conference areas and see the fantastic range of facilities, especially the food. With the vibrating chairs, sleep pods, swimming pools, a gym and more besides it seemed like a pretty cool place to work.

Aquarion: Journal - Hate Technology

Sun, 04 May 2008 11:48:11 +0000

Thursday, 22:00: Accidentally buy an XBox 360
Decide it needs to talk to the network (before playing any games on it)
Current Network: Desktop (“Tsunami”) & 360 plugged into Belkin Wireless Router, laptop and Wii talk to it remotely. Cable modem is upstream on Router.
360 cannot phone home due to closed ports.
Open ports
All ports not documented.
Fuckit(1): 360 in DMZ
360 can talk to home for twenty minutes, then cannot anymore.
Reboot router
Reboot modem
Another 20 minutes
Fucket(2): Play GTA4 for a while, ignore the network. (Friday, 02:00)
Saturday, 06:00: Up early, decide to fix network.
Fiddle around with ports for a while, decide the route is at fault.
Attempt to reroute everything though just a hub.
Realise that takes away the single point of entry for the cable modem, which can therefore not connect.
Also: No DHCP server. Things complain at me.
Fortunatly, I have a spare firewall box (“Boilingpoint”) which still has IPCop on it from when it was my firewall in Bedford (and, before that, in Reading and Cambridge)
Boilingpoint has a network card and a PCI ADSL modem. On-board motherboard has no network. Turn out boxes of hardware looking for spare network card to use for upstream connection.
Fail. Find old desktop machine whose motherboard does have onboard networking, and cobble together bits of it and Boilingpoint until it works. (07:00)
(07:10) Machine stops booting (Fans spin, nothing happens), fiddle with connections and reseat ram to fix it.
(07:20) Machine stops turning on at all.
Transfer everything back to Boilingpoint, which at least boots, for fucks sake.
(07:45) Get tea, shower, email, clothes.
Find spare network card in sock drawer.
Install network card into IPCop
Attempt to reconfigure IPCop as GREEN/RED instead of GREEN/RED
Discover I can’t remember the root password for boilingpoint (Installed ~2003 and has Just Worked since then)
Decide to screw this for a game of sontarians, and install Smoothwall instead (IPCops website is down. Brand loyalty is strong within me. Plus, Neuro’s been recommending Smoothwall instead forever)
Realise I can’t install Smoothwall for the same reason I can’t bypass root on boilingpoint: because the reason it became a firewall box was that the PS/2 ports don’t work anymore, so cannot access it locally.
I don’t have a USB keyboard.
Plug the hard drive and network cards from Boilingpoint into Tsunami (Desktop) and install Smoothwall onto hard drive on that
Transfer everything back over.
This doesn’t work due to hard-drive naming.
Cannot SSH into new box because default smoothwall install doesn’t have SSH.
Cannot access web interface either. Don’t know why.
Resolve to borrow a USB keyboard from someone.
Now have to leave for Gamecamp London. Do so (10:00)
Gamecamp is awesome. I’ll write more about it soon.
After Gamecamp, go to party. After party, borrow USB keyboard from friend. Get home (02:00)
Discover that Boilingpoint predates having USB ports on the motherboard.
Search for PCI USB card we used to put a USB ADSL modem onto boilingpoint before we got the PCI modem.
Fail
Swear. Go to bed.
Have another thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, and didn’t get up until the following morning.
This morning: Decide to fix this once and for all.
Search for ages. Find USB card in box with university diploma in it, on top of a book case.
Repress momentary flash of optimism.
Install PCI card, configure Smoothwall
Access web interface.
Configure SSH!
Configure DHCP!
Connection to cable modem (RED) doesn’t work.
Swap network card roles a bit to see if it is a driver issue.
Isn’t.
More tea.
Remember that ex-NTL Virgin Media customers will still suffer from the fact that once Virgin have a MAC address for the connecting machine, they won’t accept a connection from anything else.
Put network back together. Access interwebs.
Discover that Smoothwall corp count MAC spoofing as a premium fucking feature, not to be fucking included with the free fucking distrifuckingbution.
Am a little put out by this.
Find out how Smoothwall works a bit, and hack the config file to run ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55 to set the mac address when the RC script sources the file.
There are more elegant solutions than this, including paying for the software.
Get a DHCP address!
Get a connection!
GET THE INTERWEBS!
Boot Xbox 360. Remember the Xbox 360? This is a song about Xboxes.
Cannot connect to XBox Live.
headdesk
headdesk
headdesk
Find a guide to opening up all the required ports to make an Xbox 360 work though Smoothwall
Assign the open ports to a static DHCP record
Xbox refuses to pick up the DHCP record.
Cut all electricity to the network, TV & surrounds and everything for a while.
Bring up everything in the right order.
Xbox still picks up a standard DHCP address. Same one, in fact.
Give in and move all the port forwarding to the address it wants anyway.
Connect to XBox Live.
Play GTA4.
Get stuck.
Write up all this.
Hate technology.