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.
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!). Every single one is unencrypted, and having seen the setup guide I can see why. The instructions in both the quickstart guide and the proper manual both just say:
Enabling the encryption isn’t mentioned, neither is changing the default admin password. You have to dig around deep in the back of the manual to find any mention of these, which is pretty poor considing the default Belkin admin username is admin with no password!
It’s been shown that having an open access point isn’t going to exonerate you if illegal activity is traced back to you, so why are some manufacturers shipping devices with no encouragement to use the encryption? Not all maufacturers seem to follow this trend though; 3Com enable encryption by default, and have a random admin password that’s provided via a sticker on each individual device.
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 it open. Then I realised that, because RSS is just XML over HTTP, standard HTTP authentication over SSL would be possible, and it turns out that some RSS readers do indeed support this.
Outside the intranet world, authenticated RSS could be used to provide customised content or alerting services.
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 began sending Letterman “thoughts of love” after his “Late Show” began in 1993, and that he responded in code words and gestures, asking her to come East.
She said he asked her to be his wife during a televised “teaser” for his show by saying, “Marry me, Oprah.” Her letter said Oprah was the first of many code names for her and that the coded vocabulary increased and changed with time.
Associated Press
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 me thinking about what I’d want from a social network. I’ve fiddled with a few social networks in the past but never really found any useful purpose. I don’t believe that the current generation of social networks integrate well enough with the ‘offline’ world, in particular their integration with mobile devices is pretty lame. Almost all mobile devices these days have a calendar function, and many support SyncML. One of the biggest problems with arranging social events is finding a mutually appropriate time for them to happen, so it makes sense to me to build a social network with a group calendaring system that can do this for you. Combining that with a photo upload service and multi-format messaging would be a real winner. Maybe it’s one for the project list next year.
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 he might do his research a little better, I got a load of abuse back! Now, that’s a bit beyond what I’d expect. I think I’ll ring them up for an apology.
On another note, I finally got round to making some progress on the LUG talk suggestion system. The idea is for people to be able to request and offer talks, and to allow the LUG organisers to judge how popular a talk topic might be. More details to follow.
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 got round to listening to any of the LUGRadio episodes until today, which is pretty lame considering I sit and code all day with headphones on, but I’ve just downloaded the last session and it’s pretty damn good. There’s not even been a nob gag yet :-)
After the talks, we all piled down to Brio for a nice meal, and then onto the Victoria for a couple of beers. Sadly, nobody took any photos this year which was a bit of a shame ‘cos it was a good night.
