• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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So, Apple have something big to launch today and apparently what ever it is will be fun. That rules out an Intel XServe and probably also an Intel PowerMac. I’ve been waiting for years for mac to do a tablet computer and considering their recent touch-screen patents it’s not entirely impossible that we will finally get an iTablet but I wouldn’t bank on it, I may find that fun but it’s probably not Steve’s idea of fun.

So, what DO I think Steve has up his sleave? Well I think it must almost certainly be media related so bearing that in mind my money is either on the TiVo like new MacMini I had expected at MacWorld in January or a new iPod dedicated to video with a large display and touch-screen controls.

Mind you I’m usually wrong so time will tell!

Tagged with: media event • Apple

If you manage a server or a network nmap is one of those tools that you’d just be lost without. However, remembering the syntax for all the cool stuff it can do is a right PITA. Hence this nice simple OS X GUI to nmap is a real time and energy saver.

I can’t stress enough that NMAP is a tool that must be used responsibly. If you go around randomly scanning random people it is only a matter of time till you get into trouble, remember, it is a crime to scan machines that are not yours!

You can download NmapFE OS X from here: http://faktory.org/m/software/nmap/

It’s not particularly fancy and doesn’t have many bells and whistles but it does it’s job excellently. It gives you all your options neatly laid out in the main dialoge and then a separate window for the results of each scan (you can run many at the same time). The app even has a sense of humor, click the "script kiddie" checkbox and watch the output go all 1337!

The screenshots below show the main window and a sample output window (with the sensitive data blacked out) showing the results of a scan on one of my servers.

Tagged with: NMAP • software • review • OS X

Des made some great points and linked to some other great blog entries on all the things that are wrong with PHP in his recent blog entry I hated php back when it was cool and I found myself agreeing with them all but I also have another gripe with PHP so I figured I may as well share mine too while the topic is hot on Planet MiNDS>.

Read more

Tagged with: PHP • open source

Yesterday was a sad day for NUI Maynooth as it was the last day that the great Brian Gormley would be counted as a member of staff of NUIM. Brian is off for a very important job in DIT and I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing him the very best.

His going away do was last night and I was glad to see so many staff and students from so many academic and service department there. Even the speeches were good and you could tell that it was more than just the standard platitudes, people were genuinely sorry to see Brian go. I think the president summed up how great a job Brian did as Director of Student Services when he informed us all that the college would be hiring two people to replace Brian. Personally I wonder will that be enough?!

Farewell Brian, Maynooth will miss you!

I generally don’t look twice at the shed-load of phising emails I get every day but one I got today caught my attention for being extra devious.

On a visual level it was nothing special, it had the Barklays logo and style etc down perfectly as is the norm, what got me about it was the content. Usually the emails pretend to be from the admins and ask you to log in to verify your details or you won’t be able to use your account. This one is different in that it tells you that some random address has been added to your account and gives you a link to un-do this change. I have a feeling this one will catch quite a few people out. As usual an inspection of the URL the link goes to gives the game away, it is not going to the Barkleys domain but to 160.red-217-125-59.staticip.rima-tde.net, which whois tells me is in Madrid. Howerver, they have again been devious because the location on that server is /.online/ibank.barclays.co.uk/ so if you lust look at the end of the URL you see barklays.co.uk which is again a devious twist. The criminals behind this one are thinking and I fear they will manage to defraud a lot of people.

Below is a screenshot of the email:

I thought I should share with the world the latest developments in my on-going struggle with Eircom. I got a call on Friday from DigiWeb telling me Eircom told them the problem was fixed. I was too skeptical to be optimistic so I asked the nice guy from DigiWeb to stay on the line while I tested the speed. Had it gone up from it’s painful ~400K, nope, it had gone DOWN to about 250K where it was most of the weekend and where it still is now.

Then, as if to really piss me off I got an email from DigiWeb today bragging about how all services have been upgraded and how I now have a 4MB line. Oh if only. I ran another speed test today, below is a commented version of the result.

So depressing.

Don’t you just hate it when politicians cheapen the genuine historic achievements of real heroes in the past to trump up their latest bit of bureaucracy. Well, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer took that to a new high (or low if you will) today when he compared a bunch of accountants looking for Al Queda money to the foundation of Computer Science by Allan Turing & Co. at Bletchly park in the early 1940s. Honestly, what an insult to the great legacy of the fathers of a discipline that has totally changed the world and arguably saved it from Fascism. Below is a quote from an AP article by Tariq Panja on the matter:

"British Treasury Chief Gordon Brown plans to assemble a team of
financial experts to end terrorism funding streams — the equivalent of
the intelligence experts who broke the Nazis’ Enigma Code during World
War II, his office said Friday."

In this country we are sadly forced to user Eircom’s shoddy infrstructure for our ADSL connections regardless of who our ISP is. This is BAD. A long time ago after many many days wasted trying to get Eircom to do a very very simple thing for me I vowed never to go near them again. Hence I got my broad band from DigiWeb and I like them, they are nice to you when you talk to them on the phone, they answer your questions, they treat you like a human being! The problem is that I am still tied to Eircom because the physical hardware delivering my ADSL is theirs and there is nothing I can do about that. On Saturday it will be three weeks since my broad band broke and today, for the first time, Eircom replied to the problem report DigiWeb lodged with them about my connection, and what did they say, effectively nothing "the problem is related to a parent issue that we are working on". No detail AT ALL about what the problem is, or, in fact, if they have even managed to figure that out themselves and also not even an estimate of when the problem will be fixed.

All this started when Eircom "upgraded" their ADSL services on Saturday the 20^th of January. There was a scheduled outage that day and when service resumed my 3MB ADSL line had turned into a 0.5MB ADSL line and still is. When I first lodged a call to DigiWeb about it I got the following reply:

---

Hi Bart,There has been speed issues on our network since the upgrade was completed.

We are aware of these issues and have been told that these issues should be resolved soon.

Unfortunately I do not have a definite timeframe on this yet.

Regards

---

That was on the 27^th of January, a full week had passed and still Eircom had no idea of how to fix the mess they had made because they were not giving out an estimated return time or ANY details on the problem.

It is now the 9^th of February and all I now know is that my problem is part of a bigger problem …. no shit … I knew that two weeks ago!

Last week I decided I had had enough of doing nothing and, on advice from DigiWeb, decided to take my issues straight to Eircom. BIG mistake. My blood-pressure suffered big time and I lost about an hour of my life that I will never get back to find out NOTHING, apart from what I already knew, that Eircom are incompetent and ignorant.

When I rang them and explained my problem the ignorant and rude people I had the misfortune of talking to had no actual idea who I was supposed to be put through to so they just put me through anywhere. To make matters worse I was transfered each time without being told that I WAS being transfered OR where I was being transfered to or WHY. After arriving in the same place a few times I got wise of this and started starting each conversation with "DON’T TRANSFER ME, LISTEN TO ME" but to no avail.

After being on to one number for at least 10 minutes and ending up in the same place a few times I was told I would have to hang up and ring a different number. I then got to start at the end of the queue all over again and then start a new game of "pass the customer". Again I ended up going round in circles but I now started each conversation with the next gormless fool I was put through by pointing out that I had just been transfered without warning or explanation and that I wanted to know where I ended up. This made it much easier to figure out I was going in circles!

At some points I was transfered into an automated system that I could not get out of that did a line test despite my asking it not to. There were about 4 line tests done like that before I got on to a human being again who then insisted on doing another one before he would speak to me!

After 45 minutes of sheer hell and utter and systematic incompetence all I could find out was that an engineer had been dispatched but that he hadn’t reported back. At this stage it had been TWO WEEKS since they told DigiWeb they were working on the problem yet they hadn’t a CLUE as to what was going on or why I was complaining!

At one stage on my travels through the hell of Eircom a woman who felt sorry for me transfered me to the actual people with the power to do something but they refused to talk to me because they did no deal with the public. They then sent me TO THE VERY VERY OUTSIDE and I had to start all over again.

Anyhow, after 45 minutes of this I had realized I was not going to get any more info so I then decided I wanted to complain strongly to a manager. I was told that to do this I would have to ring yet another number and join the queue again. I decided to go for it since I was well fired up at this stage. Did I get to speak to a manager, not a fucking chance, I was told there were no managers there because they had all gone home. I did get to complain to some pleb somewhere who had almost no English and seems to have been paid by Eircom to take abuse and say "I understand why you are upset and I care that you are upset", after 5 minutes of this pityful attempt at appearing to give a toss I gave up and hung up!

Conclusions:

What conclusions have I drawn from all this, well so far these:

• Eircom don’t have the technical ability to run the telecomuncations infrastructure for this country
• Eircom don’t give a DAMD about their customers because they KNOW you have no choice but to put up with their crap
• Eircom do NOT train their "support" staff near enough
• Eircom’s staff don’t even PRETEND to care about you or the problems you are experiencing with their "service"
• Comreg is useless because they have not put an end to this abuse ordinary people have no choice but to suffer
• There are countries in the Third World with better telecomunications infrastructure than Ireland.

Will I ever get my broad band back properly, who knows, stay tuned for updates!

We had an unexpected observing session at the Astro2 meeting today. As we went in to the excellent talk on Gravitational waves it was pelting with rain but when we came out later the sky had completely cleared and there wasn’t a cloud in sight so we all trudged up to the physics department observatory for a wonderful observing session.

We started out with a look at Saturn, first at 100X and then at 190X. The air was not very stable so close after a major weather system had passed by so although Saturn looked very crisp (and big) at 100X even 190X was starting to push the limits a bit. At 190X we could clearly see the cloud bands on Saturn, the shadow of the rings and in moments of good seeing the Cassini Division in the rings. Saturn looked a little nicer than usual today because the background was just peppered with loads of stars from the large open cluster M44 (the Beehive Cluster) which Saturn is currently moving through.

After Saturn we turned our attention to The Orion Nebula (M42). Because the over half full moon was very close to Orion I decided to go for as low a magnification as possible to give maximum stability, contrast and sharpness to our view. Even with the moon interfering the nebula still looked stunning at 62X with the LX200. The contrast was excellent and all four stars of the trapezium were easily separable. There was also a lot of detail visible in the nebula. All in all people seemed impressed with the view since there were lots of oooh’s and aaaah’s as people were looking.

Finally, after everyone had had a good look at M42 we moved on to the moon. We started at 62X so that people could see the whole disk at once and also get an idea of the scale of the Orion Nebula which they had just seen at the same magnification. We ended the session by allowing everyone a ‘moon walk’, i.e. I put in our highest eyepiece (6.4mm giving a magnification of 390X) and gave each person observing the key pad and let them scan the moon for a while.

All in all it turned out to be a great observing session probably made all the more enjoyable by the fact that none of us had expected the opportunity for observation to present it self tonight!

Tagged with: Saturn • Astro 2 • deep sky • planet • observation log • astronomy

When you see pictures of burning embassies and mad crowds it seems insane to think that all this is about a few drawings published in a Danish news paper a few months ago and now re-published in a few other news papers. Yes, the cartoons were disrespectful, yes they were initially published in a right-wing publication and probably designed to offend but honestly, a wee bit of perspective and tolerance would not go a miss. The cartoons were pulling the piss out of Muslims for being violent and militant …. way to prove the cartoon’s point guys!

This incident has now been blown up into a freedom of the press V religious respect issue. Personally, I think the cartoons were in bad taste and the fact that it is a real offense to Muslims to portray their God means that they should not have been published IMO. However, that is no reason to revert to violence and to take out your anger on an entire nation. Buring down embassies in response to a drawing does not seem proportional to me! Also, these cartoons were not published by the Danish Government so burning down their embassy is un-called for. Likewise, these images were not published by the Danish dairy company that is being targeted and had to lay off staff so they should not be punished for them.

The reaction in the middle east speaks volumes for the power of a few radical Imams to stirr up hatered. An entire nation is being targeted for the actions of a few cartoonists, if something this small can be blown up this much I think it’s fair to say there is a long way to go before there is peace in the middle east!

As I see it the initial cartoons were IMO a blow below the belt and not appropriate but the response is infinitely more inappropriate and I think the Muslim world has scored an own goal on this one. Yes, it is a minority of extremists doing the burning but it looks like a large enough group to me and the governments in the Islamic nations involved seem less than eager to protect people from these mobs. This response has re-enforced all the stereo-types being used by right-wing loonies in Europe to stir up anti-Muslim feeling and, in the eyes of many people, have prooved the cartoonist’s point.

As for this being a freedom of the press thing, I just don’t see it. Freedom of the press is about allowing the press to report events free from Government censorship, it’s not about insulting and belittling an entire religious group! These cartoons were designed to insult and belittle, not to relate a factual event.

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