This story is frightening if you use PayPal. There’s a long thread to go with the story so some useful information may come up. (I’m on dial-up, can’t afford to read through the whole lot!)
Category Archives: General
NZ – the source of your news?
It seems that when Americans want breaking news coverage they go east, all the way to New Zealand. (Of course it could be west as well, but run with it and humour me!)
When Janet Jackson revealed (almost) all, Internet traffic to some of New Zealand’s online newspapers increased rapidly, the majority of it coming from the USA!
Don’t suppose those newspapers would report on “I’m a celebrity..” or other UK/Irish goings on?
*grrr* more on hard disk failures
This timely /. article discusses a reason why several Fujitsu drives broke down in the last year. They used a different flame retardent compound in the controller chips! Doesn’t make the loss of my photos any easier to take however. 🙁
Taming OpenOffice.org
A visit from the FBI
A visit from the FBI – to a school to give a talk on security. Good entertaining read!
Well, it finally happened. Right before Christmas, I had a little visit from the FBI, writes SecurityFocus columnist Scott Granneman. That’s right: an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to see me. He had some things he wanted to talk about. He stayed a couple of hours, and then went on his way. Hopefully he got what he wanted. I know I did.
Let me explain. I teach technology classes at Washington University in St. Louis, a fact that I mentioned in a column from 22 October 2003 titled, “Joe Average User Is In Trouble”. In that column, I talked about the fact that most ordinary computer users have no idea about what security means. They don’t practice secure computing because they don’t understand what that means. After that column came out, I received a lot of email. One of those emails was from Dave Thomas, former chief of computer intrusion investigations at FBI headquarters, and current Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the St. Louis Division of the FBI.
Dave had this to say: “I have spent a considerable amount in the computer underground and have seen many ways in which clever individuals trick unsuspecting users. I don’t think most people have a clue just how bad things are.” He then offered to come speak to my students about his experiences.
Data Recovery from a Hard Disk
Some of you may remember my bad luck with hard disks during the summer. One was a Fujitsu drive that died hours after I plugged it in when I got home. I lost a month’s worth of photographs from Chicago and that was obviously upsetting. Of course, after the rest of what’s happened it’s small change in terms of the bad year that 2003 was for me!
Anyway, it’s 2004 and there’s a possible solution to the drive problem!
Here at work another Fujitsu HD died yesterday morning but this time I had more success recovering data from it. I asked on #linux, the ILUG IRC channel, and Christian suggested Parted, while Liam suggested using Gpart. Gpart is on the ILUG BBC and a quick search found this description of how to use it!
I can happily say that gpart worked perfectly! It detected the partition table and I was able to write it to the drive again. A quick reboot and I was able to copy off the important data! Other stuff can wait but gpart turned out to be a life saver here. 🙂
Of course, this is only usefui if your BIOS and Linux/*BSD can see your HD.
I have my fingers crossed that I can do the same on the HD at home. There’s a lot of photos I want to recover!
Cube – Open Source FPS for Windows and Linux
Cube – This looks like an interesting game. It’s got some pretty screenshots and the blurb makes it look appealing.
Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines.
I won’t pretend to know what all that means but I’ll give it a whirl over the weekend!
Here’s the linuxgames.com review that pointed me towards this game.
CD-R Failures, are labels safe?
Further to my previous post on this topic, Liam on #linux pointed me at this report.
I really need to store my backup DVD-Rs standing up and in a dark place instead of having the jewel cases lying on an old PC in my room..
Format C: on a Nokia 7650?
So I finally managed to get the “Nokia Suite” software working in Windows (it doesn’t seem to like an almost fully patched WinXP!) and I have my phone backed up over Bluetooth.
Now, how do I go about deleting 827 texts? I could go through them and pick out the ones from the ex but that would take too long, and by using p3nfs I hoped to do grep -r "ex's phone number" /mnt/psion/C:/Mail/| xargs rm -f but I don’t think p3nfs is stable enough to handle that much traffic. It certainly fell over when I tried to backup my phone using it. I’ll give it a go tomorrow, it might work! Anyway, deleting her number from my contacts is a lot easier! 🙂
If you know of any 7650 app for doing mass-deletes of text messages please leave a comment!
Update! Just figured out that I can “Mark All”, and I then delete the texts with a few clicks of the Option button. Sorted!
Mortgage vs Rent
Zimran has an interesting but brief analysis of the housing market in Boston. The linked article has more, including this nugget:
… shortly after 2010, housing prices in most currently hot markets are going to fall off a cliff, as boomers downsize.
I don’t expect that to happen here in Ireland at least. Has it happened already? What about the boomers of the 60s here in Ireland? They’re all living in bigger houses now!