Jul 02 2011
Being a linux and FLOSS fan has its advantages, not least the fact that most, if not all of the software I would want to use (and indeed, /all/ of the software that I actually do use) is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. And given the much smaller target …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/07/02/one-reason-i-dont-use-apple/
May 11 2011
but I just can’t resist it. The Cabinet Office has launched a trial version of a new central government portal called alpha.gov.uk (snappy title). This trial site is a taster for what the designers hope could be a “new, single UK Government website”. I cannot help but be amused by the fact that one of …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/05/11/i-know-i-shouldnt-do-this/
Mar 29 2011
Installing counterize to analyse trivia’s logs has been instructive. I now know that some of my most visited pages are consistently those of a “how-to” nature (in particular, those about postfix, dovecot and, strangely, reflashing the old BT home hub). In many ways this is satisfying since one of the objectives of this blog is …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/03/29/irony-is-not-dead/
Mar 27 2011
A few weeks ago I installed pflogsumm on my mail server in order to automate my mail log scanning. For some time I had been conscious that my mailer had been rejecting a lot of mail with “user unknown” but I had never really investigated that in any depth. Running pflogsumm over the logs on …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/03/27/from-russia-with-love/
Feb 01 2011
The UK Home Office launched a new crime statistics website today at www.police.uk. The site is supposed to show “Local crime and policing information for England and Wales”. I’m not entirely convinced of the merit of the site in the first place (and can see all sorts of potential objections arising in some of the …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/02/01/no-police-here/
Jan 29 2011
This site is probably even more pointless than most webcams, but it, and the site it was inspired by, amused me. Having found this, I just had to register a similarly pointless domain of my own. So now I am the proud owner of theinternetisoff.net Make it your home page. You know it makes sense. …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/29/is-my-computer-off/
Jan 27 2011
El Reg has a wonderful ROTW post here. One “Matt Kracht” lays into an article by Andrew Orlowski about P2P bitorrent users saying: “I hate… no, I *loathe* when bloggers try to move to online news sites. If there’s one thing that web 2.0 has done, it has fucked up journalism so bad that nobody …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/27/now-i-feel-bad-about-blogging/
Jan 26 2011
I came across a potential new entry to the “slug replacement” competition today in the shape of a 2GHz Sheeva Marvell based plug computer by Ionics called the Nimbus 2000 (all the company’s products seem to be named after cloud types – wonder why). In addition to that rather fast ARM CPU, this little beast …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/26/i-guess-they-do-it-differently-over-there/
Jan 24 2011
I have just added a couple of new plugins to this blog and tidied up some old cruft that I had been meaning to get around to for a while. One of the plugins I have added is a really rather good statistcs tool called Counterize II. It provides a very quick (and impressively comprehensive) …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/24/wordpress-setup/
Jan 23 2011
The Cory Doctorow article referenced at the end of the post below mentions URL shorteners as potentially dangerous because they completely obscure the actual URL you will be taken to if you click them. By way of experiment I thought I’d post one here just to see how often it is used.
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/23/click-here/
Jan 23 2011
I am normally pretty careful about my on-line security and privacy. I take a lot of care to ensure that my home network is nailed down tightly and all the clients and servers on it are also nailed down as well as I know how. I don’t use software which is susceptible to the majority …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/23/damn-i-think-i-got-hit-by-a-419er/
Jan 04 2011
This blog comes to you courtesy of those excellent free open source authors who have contributed to wordpress. Unfortunately, in common with all software, wordpress inevitably has some bugs. Worse, some of the those bugs can occasionally be sufficiently bad as to make the software vulnerable to remote exploitation by ne’er do wells and other …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/04/critical-security-update-to-wordpress/
Dec 31 2010
I have not posted anything new since October because I have been hobbled following an operation to my ankle. Perversely, this made sitting at my desk (and hence my keyboard) very uncomfortable because my leg would swell inside the plaster if I stayed in a seated position for more than a few minutes at a …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/12/31/a-personal-note/
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/10/09/google-opt-out-village/
Oct 09 2010
I have been exploring the InTrust Domain Names website I mentioned in the previous post. There are some absolutely astonishing prices quoted for some domains which do not immediately spring to mind as being particularly valuable. For example, the domain falldaron.com is quoted at $10000000.00. If you actually click on that domain name you are …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/10/09/maybe-i-should-sell/
Oct 09 2010
In the past couple of days I have received some amusing email spam. I own ten different domain names, mostly in the .net TLD. The spam emails in question all offered to sell me the domain “exnic.com” on the grounds that I already own “exnic.net” (not an unreasonable sales pitch). It turns out that this …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/10/09/domain-sales-pitch/
Sep 25 2010
I was skimming through a series of security related sites last week when I came across an article referring to someone described as something like “A Person, M.Inst.ISP, CISM, CISSP, MBCS, CITP, BSc, Director of etc…..” and I found myself wondering what that all actually meant. Yes, I know what the letters stand for, hell …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/09/25/professional-ability/
Sep 14 2010
I recently received an email from my old chum Chris Samuel. Chris emigrated to Australia several years ago, but we still correspond, if infrequently. In fact he sometimes comments here. But he is not good at email. This is what I received: On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 03:50:08 am you wrote: > Have a very …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/09/14/very-very-slow-electrons/
Sep 12 2010
I recently stumbled upon sig2dot, a gpg/pgp keyring graph generator. In fact this seems to have been around for some time, but I’d never come across it before. It can be used to generate a graph of all of the signature relationships in a GPG/PGP keyring, and, like other visualisation tools, this graphical image producing …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/09/12/a-graphical-web-of-trust/
Sep 04 2010
This has absolutely nothing to do with my usual topics but I make no apology for posting this because the artistry is stunningly beautiful. I was sent a link to Kseniya Simonova’s sand art by a correspondent on a mailing list I subscribe to. Apparently the artist is telling the story of a ukrainian family …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/09/04/kseniya-simonova/
Sep 04 2010
I’m just pro privacy. And google just happens to be one of the worst offendors when it comes to breaches of my privacy. El Reg yesterday ran an article pointing to the consumerwatchdog.org ad depicting Eric Schmidt as a “privacy pervert”. Deliciously, that ad is hosted on youtube. But consumerwatchdog have long campaigned about google’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/09/04/its-not-that-im-anti-google/
Aug 29 2010
Google’s chrome browser first appeared back in 2008, since when many commentators have sung its praises. Apparently it is “blindingly fast” (well, let’s face it firefox can be a tad slow, particularly if loaded down with a swathe of plugins) “clean”, and “simple”. Until recently I had not tried chrome (for some fairly obvious reasons) …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/08/29/phone-home/
Aug 27 2010
I had a couple of comments on my earlier post about autossh which suggested that I should look at alternative mechanisms for keeping my ssh tunnel up. Rob in particular suggested that setting “ServerAliveInterval” should work. Oddly I had tried this in the past whilst trying out various configuration options and I swear it didn’t …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/08/27/update-to-autossh-or-how-serveraliveinterval-makes-this-unnecessary/
Aug 02 2010
Some time ago I disabled my wp-recaptcha plugin because it had the unfortunate side effect of marking all comments as spam. I don’t have a particularly high comment rate, but the ones I do get, and which get past akismet, are usually OK. Apparently a flaw in version 2.9.6 surfaced when wp-recaptcha was used in …
Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/08/02/they-are-taking-over-the-entire-net/