james holden

Firewire DV Oddness

Happy Christmas everyone!
This morning while trying to grab some video from the camcorder over Firewire, I was getting the ‘Error: No DV’ message from dvgrab. It turns out that removing the eth1394 module fixed the problem – strange but true, so I thought I’d stick it here for future reference.

Belkin Doesn’t Encourage WiFi Security

I replace my flakey old D-Link wireless access point with a nice new Belkin 54g one this week. Now, I’ve noticed before that these ones are pretty popular. There’s certainly quite a few belkin54g APs in the general vicinity of my house (which makes me wonder who’s using who’s broadband, and if they even know!). [...]

Authenticated RSS

While hacking our problem tool at work, I thought it might be cool to set up an RSS feed for each problem so that you can be notified when comments are added onto it.
The major problem I hit was that the system uses cookie-based logins, so it would be a security hole to leave [...]

Nutcase’s Restraining Order on TV Celeb

This made me laugh. Some woman in New Mexico thinks David Letterman is using mind control techniques on her via her television:

Nestler’s application for a restraining order was accompanied by a six-page typed letter in which she said Letterman used code words, gestures and “eye expressions” to convey his desires for her.
She wrote that she [...]

New LUGRadio Episode

I should have reported earlier, but there’s a new episode of Jono Bacon and co.’s excellent Linux radio show, LUGRadio, out. It’s the Christmas special, and you can get it from the download page (use the torrent!).
The show features an interview with Justin Davies, in which he talks about social networks and buddyPing. This got [...]

Recruitment Morons

Some IT recruitment agencies are soooo dumb. I got an email from Jamie at PS Recruitment yesterday pushing a job with absolutely no relevance to me whatsoever. I doubt he’s in posession of anything beyond my email address, which makes him a spammer. When I sent back a polite enough, semi-humorous email pointing out that [...]

WYLUG Birthday Meal 2005

Last night was the 8th WYLUG annual birthday/Christmas meal, and good fun it was too. We met in the usual venue at the University of Leeds and had a couple of good talks from Jono Bacon and Wookie, who talked about LUGRadio and the embedded Debian project, Emdebian respectively.
I’m sorry to admit that I’ve not [...]