| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Oct | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
Apologies for the loooooong break between posts, I got really really busy with work and had a short break to regain my sanity (at least what little remains). Normal service will be resumed presently, but what’s more important is that it’s concert season again, now that all the festivals are done with, bands all over the world are back on the gigging circuit again. Time for me to go and find myself some gigs to shoot. Watch this space.
I’m a little short on photography news right now folks, so bear with me a while while I sidetrack to give another piece of equipment I own some long overdue praise and publicity. Anyone who knows me, will know that I’m not the biggest fitness freak out there, but since I enjoy eating, I have to keep moderately active, so some time back I bought myself a rowing machine, but not just any rowing machine, I bought myself “The WaterRower” which, if you’ve never seen before, you should take 10 minutes to look at. It’s cool for a few reasons, firstly like any exercise, it helps to keep away coughs, sneezes and other diseases, keeps us healthy, lowers cholesterol, and all the other stuff people go on about, but we already know that. Rowing is cool because it takes a bunch of impact away from your joints that other exercises don’t, so it’s great without screwing your knees, etc. and exercises 84% of your body in one go. But the WaterRower takes the whole thing to another level for me, ya see the resistance method of this piece of kit is water, so while you’re exercising, you’re able to calm the mind too (unlike Concept C2 rowers which sound like a tread mill or something) with this wonderful “swooshing” noise every time you stroke. Additionally, for the home models they’re made of beautiful hardwood (I picked Cherry wood), look wonderful as a piece of furniture, they store upright if you wish to do so. You get free chlorine tablets to keep the water clean, and like any good piece of gym kit, you can hook your Polar HRM into it, to monitor heart rate on the on board computer if you so wish. What a fantastic piece of equipment, highly recommended to anyone!!
Apologies to the photographic crowd that follow this, but I needed to take a geeky sidetrack for this post. I’ve been helping a few friends with websites clean up the remnants of various crackers that have been by their website in the past. To be honest, the hack is quite unsophisticated but the results are quite impressive. I’m not going to go in to details here, but suffice to say that by exploiting an old hole (probably in XML RPC or similar) the abusers are adding various .php files which blend in with the applications surrounding it, files are often named in such a way that people that are less technical tend to be reluctant to delete them (messages.php, includes.php, time.php, date.php, etc). Again I’m not going to go into the details of what the files contain but they are quite short, just a few lines of code. Additionally there are .htaccess files that are planted for various redirect and rewrite services.
So to what end? Well basically these guys all run search pages with “clickthru” value links and drive traffic to the their sites by bouncing traffic thru your webpages. In other words; they will submit a page to google for example, the link they submit will be full of the most heavily searched terms (usually warez, porn and cracks) but because they can only submit their site to Google a single time, they have to use pages externally. So they compromise (break into illegally) servers and infect them. So the result that comes up in Google when someone searches for a porn phrase for instance will look like this http://www.yourwebsite.com/mambo/time.php/porn+search+here where that last part is the search the user put into Google, the first part is your website, and as mentioned earlier the time.php is an infected file placed on your website by the crackers. The infected file rewrites the URL and redirects it to their income generating website in the hope that someone clicks the links (which they often do).
Have any of these people been caught yet? I have no idea, but surely if they do at the very least it’s obtaining money by deception (fraud) in any country aside from any computer violation and misuse laws that may be in place.
There are ways to avoid this happening, mostly revolves around vigilance and being aware of the files in your website (be aware of new files recently added when you’ve not updated your site in a while). There are software programs like Tripwire, that can alert you when stuff like this happens, but are beyond the average user. A more detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this weblog, but if you’ve been cracked, your circumstances may differ greatly and any cracked server requires proper forensic examination to check if anything else has been compromised. The guys that do this, thrive on complacence, try to be aware of what’s happening on your website. Good Luck.
So everyone out there that knows me, knows that I’m totally obsessed with motorcycles. My current bike is great, but a couple of months ago, Yamaha announced their intention to release a new bike. I’ve always had a passion for the Yamaha V-Max, it’s very me! I’ve had about 4 of them over the last 15 years and have always been sad to see them go.
Imagine my happiness and joy when Yamaha announce a New V-Max. Not only has it been created in the style of the old one, but additionally the old one when it was released in 1985 was notable because it was about 150BHP, and was instantly famous. Well projected figures for the new one are rumoured to have an engine of a approximately 2000cc (vs. 1200cc of the old model) and approximately 200BHP (vs. 150BHP of the old model). Take a few minutes to look at the site I’ve linked to, it really is a thing of beauty. For those that don’t want to go to the (slow) website, check out the image I prepared below.
Firstly apologies for the looooong post, I’ll split it so it doesn’t take up space on the syndications (update: it would appear that some syndications have recognised the post split and others have not, apologies).
Various events of the last few weeks have led me to go and seek some advice from a “Mental Health Professional”, yes, I went and got my head shrunk. Now bear in mind, I come from a world, where dealing with problems and getting them out in the open is much like it was in the film Crocodile Dundee, you go to the pub, and tell your mates you problems, they then tell everyone else, and your problem’s out in the open, no more problem!!
So this is very much new ground for me, but the short version is, people have been becoming increasingly aware of my lack of empathy and total obliviousness (?) to others emotional states and needs. Turns out this is a kind of emotional detachment or dissociative disorder (think similar to mild autism) where basically all my choices and all my actions were based on objectivity (hence the name of my blog) and just about never allowed for emotion into the decsion making process unless it was fun and humour (for some reason I grok those two things).
This has become a problem for others around me, but one of the the hardest parts about accepting that I really had a problem is because, this is the way I’ve always been (according to my mum), so I have no benchmark to compare my current state of mind with. So off I trundled to the shrink, who is the one that informed me about my dissociative state, but happily informs me that, getting the emotions to come to the surface and putting me in touch with them is the easy part, apparently the hard part is for me to decide if I want to go through the process of opening the emotional floodgates. If you want to read on, click on “more” below
(more…)
Now I’m not the healthiest person that ever walked the earth, but nor am I the unhealthiest, I get to the gym when I remember, maybe 3 times a week then maybe I forget or have other stuff happening and don’t go for 2 or 3 weeks. So how great is it, when you find something that’s healthy and good and easy. For those of you outside the UK I apologise, I’m not sure if you have anythig similar, but we’re lucky enough to have the Innocent Drinks Company who are purveyors of the finest smoothies ever to me produced in reasonably large volumes.
So back on track, a drinks company is probably not grounds for a blog entry on its own, but when I happened across their Guest Smoothie it was simply the best Pineapple, Blueberry and Ginger smoothie I’d ever tasted, not to mention that each little 250ml bottle counts as 5 of your 5 portions of fruit and veg per day, because it’s all real good fruit juice, no concentrate and plenty of the good pulpy stuff in there! I’m not certian how often they change their guest drinks, so in case they change the guest smoothie 5 minutes after I write this I’ll include their published recipie below.
And that’s it… and does it ever taste good… and to paraphrase their website…
It’s not only tasty, it’s packed with blueberries, a more powerful source of antioxidants than broccoli, spinach or garlic
There ends my preaching for the day 
I’ve not blogged this before, so I thought I’d do so now. I know most people have various number crunching programs running on their computers in the background as a part of a larger distributed project (RC5 distributed.net, SETI@Home, etc). So I figured I’d raise awareness of one that I take part in, which I think is quite a cool and useful thing. There’s a distributed project called D2OL that was created for finding drug candidates for different viruses and diseases, it started out with targetting potential biohazard candidates with the impending threat of bioterrorism with things like Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola, etc. This was followed shortly after with candidates for various strains of SARS, and most recently this week they’ve added targets for the H5N1 strain of Avian Flu.
From their website: “D2OL, was first to use computational methods to deploy targets against Anthrax, Smallpox and Ebola, and now is first to have a credible SARS target (A target conserved between pig and human coronovirus, the suspected virus behind SARS).”
So that’s my soapbox done for the day, if you feel inclined and have nothing else using your idle CPU cycles, then give it a try, and you never know, you might be the one that finds a suitable cure candidate for some pretty nasty diseases. Head on over and take a look.
Quite sad that I seem to have been spending most of my waking hours working. I need to take a step back and gain a little perspective of what’s important. For those who are interested, yes my resolution is working out really well, watch this space for updates. Looks like I still found time to upgrade to WP 2.0.1 though 
My new years resolution, cheesy as it may seem is to sort out my diet and get more excercise. Someone very close to me just suffered a heart attack tonight, which really brings it home, especially when you take into account that this person was considerably fitter than I am currently. So I’ve set myself a goal to lose 70 pounds of fat in by the end of July. Putting it in writing in a weblog post, I’m expecting will help to affirm my goal.
I just read a story on a website with Joerg Schwarz about ethics in open source software. There are in my opinion, problems with the points put forward by Mr Schwarz is that he is mixing his concepts, which creates a contradiction in his argument. Firstly Mr Schwarz fervently advocates a true open market, with true free trade with comments like
Locke teaches that everybody deserves compensation for the fruit of labor, adequate to the value created by the labor. That applies to a farmer and a software developer alike. Compensation is not necessarily monetary.
and
The economical response to this would be that the market determines the price with supply and demand.
Which is a very refreshing viewpoint in these very altruistic times, however, he then goes on to muddy the waters with the altruistic dogma about ethics within the transaction between free software developer and the corporation / business.
A free and open market dictates that a trade or contract between two parties, is arrived at by mutual negotiation, where the trade is to the mutual benefit to both parties. To put this another way, the software is the result of the fruits of the developers labour, the developer in order to enable the mutually beneficial trade, adds a software licence which dictates the terms and conditions that the developer is prepared to trade by. The consumer of the software (in this case the business) by using the software agrees to abide by the terms of the software agreement. Thereby, a trade has taken place, in accordance with the software developers wishes and by mutual agreement between the parties. If either party breaks the terms of the contract (licence agreement) they liable under the terms of that mutual agreement.
It is fundamentally incorrect to apply the rules of free trade in a free exchange to the mutual agreement of both parties bound by a contract (software licence), then muddy the waters by claiming that, although the former is correct there are implied rules of ethics that the developer forgot to include in the licence agreement that, although unwritten, must be observed, interpreted and then adhered to.
If you have a situation, like Mr Schwarz outlined
“… Another example is Apple’s operating systems, which contain code released under BSD. BSD does not require derivatives to be distributed under BSD, but the spirit of sharing would require Apple to release the graphical user interface.”
then clearly the developer needs to write a clause in the “the contract” to take this “spirit of sharing” into account. What is less fair than the example outlined by Mr Schwarz, is any company (Microsoft or Open Source Developers) releasing the software under a licence (which is chosen by their own volition) then crying foul because, “we wanted some people to use it for free, but we didn’t mean it to be used by these people“.
Unfortunately the world is full of double edged swords, The constitution is a first class example which allows the same freedom of speech to flag burners, anti-American Muslim clerics and the average American Joe, with equal legitimacy. Just because we don’t like what they have to say, doesn’t mean we get to change the rules to suit our needs as we go.
If the Open Source developers want a different deal, sit down and write an appropriate licence with all of your terms and conditions laid out clearly for everyone to see. If you want the software to only be used by non-profits, charities and other non-profit organizations and individuals you need to write that into your licence, and release your software under the licence.
Implied meanings, and unspoken rules are the realm of the mystic, not the realm of logic, if you want it to be understood, then you have to communicate it, or face disappointment. No contract or licence is worth the paper it’s written on when based on the fluffy, unstable premise of “Do What I Mean, Not What I Say”
