#whitesmoke signals the #newpope: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio
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Category Archives: Computers
TFL Updates to your email
Work in London, Use public transport to get there?
If yes, then you probably want to keep uptodate with signal failures, suspensions and traffic problems. The best way to do this is on twitter using @TfLtravelalerts
and while you’re at work you don’t want to be checking it and some work places block twitter meaning you’d be on your phone.
There’s also this thing called the Olympics starting soon – the opening ceremony is on Friday and the main events begin on Monday (though it looks like there’s been some Women’s football on today to kick the first events off).
Everyone who’s used it knows London public transport is challenging at the best of times and can be a right pain when things go wrong. There have already been more people travelling, problems today, and its expected to get worse with over 1 million extra people travelling every day.
Anyway, got this working yesterday and it seems to work really well.
Step 1: Create a new twitter account for this purpose
Step 2: Login to the new account and Follow @Tfltravelalerts
Step 3: Link your twitter account to a tweetymail.com account (free to sign up and you get full access for the first month). You will need to sign up by giving it your twitter details, then add the email address you want the notifications to go to.
Step 4: Add a timeline alert – default is to email you after every 10 alerts in 1 email. Unless you put a filter on this is the minimum you can have per email. It works quite well as tfl tends to post alerts quite regularly including many not related to your journey.
The surprising truth about what motivates us
Been catching up on bestofyoutube.com and came across this gem
It attempts to explain why money is not the only thing that motivates professionals and how linux, apache have come to the dominate or excel in each of their areas despite being products made available for free created by and maintained entirely by volunteers.
Indian Traffic
Was browsing through Youtube and I found a video i saw about 5 years ago and thought i had to post it as it is brilliant. Plus it will mean i’ll be able to find it again:
Indian Traffic
I was told that it is probably filmed in Hyderabad, but it could be one of several Indian cities.
It looks like complete chaos yet there are no accidents.
There are no traffic lights at a major junction where cars are turning in from all directions, interspersed with pedestrians walking along a tram track and vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road and doing u-turns. Pedestrians are nearly hit, traffic is stop start – yet all is generally flowing. And that’s before you mention the hooting which someone says there are at least 70 in the 2 minute clip. Am sure there is a horse and cart featured either in this clip or a similar one. If you see it let me know.
Anyway, check it out – should be a couple of minutes of entertainment
Phone Hacking
The news of the moment in the UK is the News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal. With rumours that there are lists of 1000’s of celebrities, Government officials, criminals and victims who have had their phones hacked by journalists of the news of the world hysteria has hit the british press and the newspaper buckled under pressure and shut down.
Baffled by the reaction, I thought about the story, and suspect there is a fair amount of misunderstanding amongst the public. Especially when it comes to the question “What is Phone Hacking”. And the first thing to remember it is nothing like the underworld of computer hacking, virus writing, web page hijacking, or even phreaking to make free phone calls. No, what it is is simply playing off human lazyness and taking advantage of a functionality mobile phone networks introduced many years ago.
Almost every phone operator gives the option to check your mobile phone messages “remotely” ie from another phone when you do not have it with you. This is also the case for most modern answerphones for landlines.
For those who have not been following the stories, have a look on google news
For mobile phones it is simple:
1) You phone your mobile phone
2) Wait for the voicemail divert
3) Press the * key
4) Enter your PIN code
And your messages are read out as if you were accessing it from your own mobile phone.
The vast majority of users are (or until now) were unaware of this as they had no use for it and therefore would never go into their settings to change the PIN code.
Therefore, for most people the default will work – and this includes celebrities.
Clearly, you can’t initiate this plan if the person you are trying to get hold of answers the phone, so the ususal plan is to work in pairs where one person phones and if the person picks up the 2nd person immediately phones from another line and will immediately get through to voicemail. Meanwhile the original person phoning who got through to the person will give some excuse such as claim to be a sales person offering products that will be refused or that they have dialed an incorrect number opening the way for the other person who has got into the voicemail to listen through the messages saved, find out any numbers left by people who have left messages or even delete messages.
This BBC news site story has more info.
The guardian has a whole section of their website dedicated to it.
Out of curiosity I decided to try and hack my own phone having done a bit of googling to find the default pin codes.
The first problem i found was that I had actually disabled my voicemail which would explain why I hadn’t had any messages recently – not that i use it much. Next, having enabled it after 10 seconds of ringing I got through, followed the process only to find the default pins did not work, suggesting i had in fact changed the pin code at some point and have no idea what it is so good luck phone hackers getting into my voicemail!!
The Domesday Project
It’s been nearly 2 years since I last did any blogging – this has been largely due to a lack of time.
However, I’ve missed it and decided to get back into it.
So, I’ll begin with The Domesday Project:
This was begun between 1984 and 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book which for those not familiar was a book commissioned in 1086 by the then King of England, William I (More commonly known as William the Conqueror) in order to determine what land and property existed in the United Kingdom and who owned it. This was for the purposes of tax collection, but also served a useful piece of information from a social history perspective. While it is not fully clear how long the collection process took it is suggested that it took the best part of a year to collate this information into the book.
To celebrate the 900th anniversary the BBC asked schools across the country to create their own version and a snapshot in time named The Domesday Project. Being done by children and teachers they gave themselves 2 years to record the information. Created in association with Acorn Computers, all the data was entered electronically onto a purpose built computer system. Cutting edge for its time it was able to collect text, photos and videos but also would become the google street view of its time.
It’s biggest flaw was it was too cutting edge and the times weren’t ready for the technology.
The data was catalogued on a new storage medium – Laser Disc. Using a scsi controller, the player could be attached to a BBC Master Computer and when combined with a tracker ball (precursor to the modern trackball or trackpad). All in it cost the best part of £5000 which at the time was the price of a small family car. Therefore, sales were low and the project went into obscurity.
This week, The project hit the news as word came through that a part of the BBC had, 25 years on, managed to convert the data into a format that would be accessible to all for free on the web. The concern had come that not enough of the laser disc players existed and that the discs themselves had become corrupted because of a flaw in their design.
Several previous attempts had been made – firstly using emulation of the original BBC Master software on windows PC’s, then a version which did not require the emulation as the software had been re-written for windows PC’s. But finally, the ultimate which does not require any software be installed on the end user’s computer other than a web browser. The domesday1986 blog documents this while the Beebmaster Website shows the technology used to create/play the original discs.
The link for the successfully restored data can be found here:
Domesday reloaded
International Talk Like A Pirate Day
Today is possibly one of the most stupid but funny international days of the year:-
Talk like a Pirate day
The Official Website offers advice and discussion on how to make the most of the event.
The UK version yarr.org.uk has similar offering catering specifically for the UK population.
Not sure if i’ll be doing anything specific but may try and slip the odd “yarr me hearty” at the end of sentences.
The Real Millennium Bug
On one of my many trips around wikipedia I stumbled across a date that has been called the real millennium bug.
Contrary to belief, the computers which run the most important systems including most webservers and database systems run on a variant of Unix/Linux or Unix-like aka *Nix.
All these operating systems operate a time keeping mechanism that starts from 1st January 1970
The measure of this time keeping is that it counts in seconds from this.
Most versions installed are 32bit Operating Systems which means that the largest number in seconds that can be represented would occur at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038
This is the Year 2038 problem (or Y2K38 bug) and the result is that all these computers unless upgraded to a 64bit OS (or other patches applied) will have their calendar reset to 1st January 00:00 at 03:14:08 on 19th Jan 2038. 64 bit OS’s will last well into the future – 290 billion years. A less radical solution of assigning the size of the time character to unsigned 32 bits would extend the problem till the year 2106 but could cause other problems. Other suggestions are to reset the date that is counted from from 1970 to 2000 which would extend the problem by 30 years.
I’m sure a solution will be found, but given that these operating systems are not found as often in home computers (with the exception of linux and Mac OSX operating systems) it has not become as well known but am sure that it will hit the press at some point in the future.
WordPress 2.6.3
As usual I’ve been slack with upgrading my blog’s software, and it’s only been a few spammers signing up that has prompted me to upgrade things. And again, I’ve refreshed the ip2nation database & plugin to cater for any unusual countries or ip addresses. Things seem to be working, but as usual if you spot anything odd drop me a line and i can do some investigation.
The main reason for my post though is I’ve just installed an autotagger (I haven’t been tagging my posts in the past) and want to see whether it works.
With a bit of luck if I drop some keywords in it should add the relevant tags
Dizzee Rascal on Barack Obama’s Victory
As we all know now Barack Obama is going to be the first black US president, but I’m not going to talk about the in’s and out’s of the election or the merits of his victory.
Instead I give you
Dizzee Rascal on newsnight interviewed by Jeremy Paxman – the result is rather comical
Link for those who want to view it on youtube.com
(in the next section i’ve completely copied the transcript of the interview into chunks in case the link isn’t available in the future and to highlight certain parts. DR is Dizzee Rascal, JP is Jeremy Paxman)
The highlights of the interview are:
• When asked if the UK could have a black president it went as follows:
JP: … could you see this happening in Britain?
DR: Yeah. In time.
JP: You’re rather positive!
DR: Yeah, man. Why not, man? There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there? …
if you believe you can achieve, innit?
Radio One have been mocking this final line but at the same time it almost is something the “yoof” of today could take to heart.
• When asked on political parties he acknowledged they existed but little else:
JP: Dizzee Rascal, do you believe in political parties in Britain?
DR: Yeah, they exist. I believe in ’em … I don’t know if it makes a difference. But you know what I mean. It is what it is. Politicians … say what they say – you might get every now and again a genuine one, innit? But I think people, like, as a whole make the difference …
• When asked if he considered himself British, Paxman calls him “Mr Rascal”. Dizzee then comes out with a classic on who could run the country:
JP: Dizzee Rascal, Mr Rascal, do you feel yourself to be British?
DR: Of course I’m British, man! You know me! … what’s good. I think it don’t matter what colour you are, it matters what colour your heart is and your intentions. I think a black man, purple man, Martian man can run the country … as long as he does right by the people.
• And finally, Dizzee reckons he could run for PM and that Obama’s victory couldn’t of happened if he hadn’t embraced hip hop:
JP: Well why don’t you run for office?
DR: See, that’s a very good idea. I might have to do that one day. Dizzee Rascal for prime minister, yeah! Wassappenin’! Barack Obama embraced hip-hop, man. That’s the way he got through to kids. There was a more young vote ever. And it was through hip-hop!