I was once lucky enough to see a battered escort driving past in Sheffield on a couple of occasions sporting the M badge, which amusing as it is to me usually makes nick quite annoyed. Still the common practice of sticking random performance badges on cars reached a new peak today:
A Renault Twingo ‘carrera’ !
All my worldly possessions were packed up and placed in a Ford Transit van over Saturday and Sunday. It’s quite eye opening to see your entire life and all the possessions that you feel you ‘need’ in order to function from day to day life all crammed into the back of a van. The contents of a two bedroom flat all packed into numerous boxes, wrapped in bubble wrap and stacking in the van was an upsetting sight. Not as upsetting as walking around the empty flat, especially given all of the craziness the last two years there have provided. 
The journey took over 17 hours, 2 of which were set in the VIP section of a ferry. We were delayed with accidents on the M25, road works on various roads and horrific weather through Belgium reducing visibility to only a few car lengths. Still at 10:30 the next day we finally arrived outside the new flat in Germany and proceeded to carry my worldly goods up four flights of steps (what you want after no sleep for 27+ hours). Everything is in the flat now, many boxes to go through
Journey from Sheffield to Germany
Thought i’d throw a couple of images from Germany taken from my iPhone on the internet. Pay particular attention to the image of Kim and Nick looking incredibly confused at the ticket machine in the train station. Also the photo of the toilet might look a bit odd, but look closer, there is a little football net and ball to keep you busy whilst on the toilet. 
I was recently reading an article on wired.com, which I must say irritated me greatly. Basically it was an article saying how the latest round of zillionaires in silicon valley have decided the newest and coolest craze over there is to drink tea. Obviously being british I was onto my first cup of tea 0.5 seconds after emerging into this world. However, they’re not going to be drinking your average ‘normal’ teas nope and don’t get me wrong i’ve tried these teas. I’m sure some zen master from the mountains of china loves his crazy brew, personally I find it like drinking swamp water. So after reading the article for a min, I decided to find out what this guy (who looked far too young to be a zillionaire) had done to net him his millions.
Turns out that he holds a world record for tango dancing …. can’t imagine that netted him millions. He also wrote a book …. this is my source of irritation.
His book ‘four hour work week‘ is apparently the book ‘du jour’, found in the book cases of all megalomaniac CEOs next to all the other bullshit and no doubt a copy of mein kampf. In this book we’re told that to be more successful we need to keep away from email/texting, instant messaging etc… as they complicate life etc…
Turns out that he built pre-release hype by posting on blogs and messaging people, what a hypocrite …. obviously can’t complicate life that much. Plus the premise of the book is ridiculous, less distractions means people will work more efficiently. I’m thinking of bringing some books out myself:
A guide to winning for Olympic sprinters - “Run faster”
How to to lose weight - “Stop eating fatty food”
Those millions are going to start rolling in any time soon, but in the mean time I think I’ll open a tea bag shop in silicon valley.
Wired article can be found here
This script is a little one i’ve just thrown together to make it easy to move around and reconnect to proxies. Could be made a lot better but for basic needs it will suffice 
# Assuming Use of Airport, change SSH_HOST and SSH_PORT and needed
NETWORK_SERVICE=“Airport”
SSH_HOST=“hostname”
SSH_PORT=22
PROXY_PORT=8080
echo “Checking IP of Airport to ensure network connectivity”
sudo networksetup -getinfo $NETWORK_SERVICE | grep “IP address” | grep -v v6
sudo networksetup -getairportnetwork
echo “Configuring Proxy … “
sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy $NETWORK_SERVICE 127.0.0.1 $PROXY_PORT off
echo “Connecting to SSH host. (Press Ctrl+c to exit)”
ssh -q -D $PROXY_PORT -C -N -x $SSH_HOST -p $SSH_PORT
echo ” “
echo “Returning settings to default”
sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate $NETWORK_SERVICE off
echo “exiting….”
VMware Fusion is a brilliant application allowing seemless use of numerous operating systems. However they’ve added a feature (enabled by default) that I would regard as more of an annoyance than a ‘feature’.
The default setting is to have OS X open menus polluted with the possability of opening documents with applications inside virtual machines. If I right click on a jpeg file for example, I get mspaint.exe, preview.exe, runasdll.exe etc… Should I accidentally click on any of these the XP VM will boot up, however more amusingly it looks as though it wont start the application (i.e. mspaint.exe).
To remove these context menu additions i’ve read numerous things about emptying LaunchService caches etc.. Turns out there is a correct way to do it.
I think we can start this article off with a link to one of more pointless paranoia defences -> TFH
Obviously being quite a few miles away from friends and family over here in Germany, I appreciate any quick and easy method of communication with them. I’m usually on the Internet in many forms through the majority of the day (msn/irc/twitter/facebook/email etc..) however I’ve started to notice that people are dissapearing.
There is the ’sheep’ effect to take into account, basically people will only use the latest and greatest social tool that all their friends are using. This obviously makes sense in that, that’s where everyone has gone and is now using to communicate. However people are starting to develop what can only be described as a paranoia complex regarding the internet. It’s common knowledge that viruses/spyware and worms have been around long before 99.9% of the people on the internet had even heard of them. However the problem here really is down to crafy social engineering from the virus creators and ridiculous lapses in judgment by the end user. It has gotten to the point where this paranoia means that everyday it delays me in everytask I do.
The most common application used is no doubt going to be Ms Office, used the world over for things such as document creation to managing the finances. However due to incompetancies from end users again, using any of these documents on any machine requires 15,000,000 ‘Are you sure?’ message boxes. This is then followed by a several minute delay whilst the badly written virus engines pull these files apart whilst trying to occupy as much system memory as humanly possible. Why not a simple checksum to see if the document has been altered?
As social networking took off, from a rather pokey AIM and then through to MSN, the amount of people using computers boomed (especially young kids, with a rather naive view). Around this time people were usually using file transfer to send one another silly junk such as daft animated gifs and nude pics of whatever. When flash games became all the rage, and it was possible using Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash to package these up as small executables and run them stand alone. All of a sudden executables are flying back and forth at a ridiculous rate and in steps a huge problem. As most of the previous junk was a data file it was never executed and thus a virus would be pointless being attached to it. Once executables are flying around viruses attached to these are flying around with them. Suddenly MSN comes with stern warnings regarding sending and receiveing executables over the internet. The viruses creators went one step further and started writing code that made the virus act like the user, sending fake links through msn to the contact list and attempting to send itself etc.. So MSN suddenly isn’t safe anymore.
As the technology increased people went from having their own webspace on places like tripod/geocities to having a pre-created area for them to upload pictures and submit updates. Websites like faceparty and bebo appeared then followed by myspace which really was the big global phenomenon. Soon everyone would be ‘myspacing’ one another and added god awful mp3’s to their profile pages. Paranoia swept in withing 0.5seconds of it taking off, and newspapers pointed out that it was ‘probably’ full of paedophiles. However once the viruses writers found simple ways of infected peoples profile pages that was pretty much the end of myspace. This brings us onto where we are now, which is the current social networking site everyone is using.
Facebook :|
Luckily facebook has managed to stay clear of a route of virus transmission so far. There has been the odd security breach and compromised account and the administrators managed to curb the tide of ridiculous facebook applications swamping peoples profiles. Facebook has been affected by a new paranoia, which is perception. Suddenly having a profile that you’ve put all your deepest darkest secrets is a new threat, why you put them there in the first place is beyond me. There has been many news stories regarding how your facebook page can affect you in life. People have been divorced, arrested and lost their jobs over facebook.
Which brings me onto the latest paranoia craze that people seem to use as an excuse to steer clear of social networking. Friends have started leaving facebook due to a ‘rumour’ that the CIA are using it to spy on people. That’s right, wrap your computer in tin foil quick ! As crazy as my friends are, AND in the unlikely event that the CIA are using facebook to monitor people, what do my friends think they are doing that is so exciting that teh CIA will care? Furthermore, there is no proof anywhere that there is any fact to this rumour.
sigh.. (p.s. don’t wrap your computer in tin foil)
I’ve put together a little script, which allows you to pass a few simple parameters and retrieve an up-to date list of films and TV series from a couple of pretty good sources on the internet. It need some tidying up as the output isn’t formatted for piping into awk etc..
Spending my days logging into systems remotely i’ve spent a good many years using many various text based applications that would under most circumstances completely depend upon a GUI. Also the fact that the display is based upon 80×25 characters, makes for multitasking applications that have text based user interfaces nigh on impossible without some help. I think i’ve pretty much gotten all of my configuration files sorted, and my set up is pretty much rock solid.
I’ve thrown together of scripts as well which make my life a heck of a lot more easier. I intend to comment through my configuration files and upload them, hopefully i’ll make someone else’s life a little bit easier.
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