November 18th, 2009 admin
Captcha If You Can
I understand what captchas are for, and why we need them, but they seem to be getting out of control. I recently visited a site which had the captcha displayed here.
For the record the first word wasn’t ’stirred’. I saw the option for an audio captcha and wondered how you pronounce ‘Ohehyahtah’. If that indeed was the second word. Too good to miss. I pressed the button and found that the audio captcha is just as bizzarrely impenetrable as the text. The mp3 file of it is here, and it reminded me strongly of an early David Lynch film]. Back to the text: after refreshing the words two or three times I was eventually able to get to the next stage.
The next stage involved typing a random string of letters into a box – approximately 200 characters. The web page did kindly suggest that I could cut and paste them into the box, which I did, but really, what this did was turn a quick attempt to give someone some feedback on their blog into a task akin to hacking into NASA.
Security shouldn’t be that hard. It should be as unobtrusive as possible. Roll on the next anti-bot paradigm.
Posted in General IT, Life, Security | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009 admin
I’ve learnt my lesson on this a few times: things break when you upgrade Ubuntu on laptops. I can understand why. There is a huge variety of hardware for laptops, particularly BIOSes, sound chips and wireless chips, and every manufacturer likes to tweak them a bit. The Linux kernel has the unenviable task of having to support ALL of them immediately, whereas in Windows the hardware component manufacturer supplies drivers which you have to install to get your machine working correctly.
Anyway, for example, last time I upgraded my two laptops from 8.10 to 9.04, a lot of things broke, and I was hurting for a long time. In fact one of the laptops never really got straight. This was irritating for me, but as I had another laptop to use for my main work, it wasn’t a major annoyance. But I can imagine if you only have one machine and the sound doesn’t work on it, for example, it would leave a nasty taste in your mouth.
So this time, I started with the Thinkpad R51e, which is my spare laptop. I have the /home directory mounted on a separate partition, which makes things really easy. Basically you just blow away the main OS partition, and then remount the your data partition at /home, preserving all your data. (OK its a little more complicated than that, but I’m not blogging about that right now). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT | No Comments »
October 24th, 2009 admin
 Knot the way to do it Now every so often I complain about my job. No, really. I do. But then something happens to make me realise how lucky I really am. And one of those moments happened just yesterday.
I’ll set the scene. Its just after two major typhoons have torn apart the Philippines. Its wet and rainy and the residual wind occasionally rattles the windows. I’m slogging away in front of my computer on a fairly mundane task, and having a bit of a hard time concentrating. I look out of the window. And I see some rope going past. Rope with a knot in it.
This particular rope doesn’t look very safe to me, but then again what do I know. I’m not a sailor, and this could be some kind of special frayed knot type thing which is actually very safe. Interested by now, I take a look out of the window.
Read the rest of this entry » |
Posted in Life, Philippines | No Comments »
October 3rd, 2009 admin
So I was working from home the other day, around mid-morning, when I heard a mighty crunch from outside. I looked out my window and was confronted with the scene to the left.
I snapped a picture, and watched as a crowd started to gather, and then after about 5 minutes, the driver emerged from the car, shaking his head. He made a great show of examining the lamppost and chatted happily with the assembled crowd.
Two things disturb me about this photo. The first is that I can’t figure out how he managed to crash. There was no traffic around. Traffic on that road only goes about 15km/h. The lamppost was clearly visible and easy to avoid. I can only conclude he lost control of the car, or suffered some kind of seizure.
The second thing is … the lampost is in the middle of the road! I’ve been looking at that for the past year and it never struck me as odd until now. I am clearly innured to this sort of general strangeness.
Anyway, the conclusion to this story is that a couple of hours later a policeman wandered by and took notes. Then a guy arrived with a tin of yellow paint and painted the base of the lamppost yellow. Apparently then, the guy just hadn’t seen it.
Posted in Life, Philippines | No Comments »
June 8th, 2009 admin
I’ve recently been using Dropbox. Its a free offsite backup service, which works with Windows, Linux and Mac and gives you 2Gb of space for free. You can pay for more if you need it. Here’s what I like about it:
- It just works. Drop your files into a folder and forget about it.
- You can join more than one computer to the same account and the files sync between both computers. eg one at work, one at home.
- If you’re away from you computer and you need a file, you can get it from the web interface. (But of course you’d only do this on computers you trust
- There are different levels of privacy. Private files are only seen by you. However you can share files with certain people, by supplying their email addresses. You also have Public files which can be downloaded by anyone at all with the given URL. Much more control than senduit.com for example.
- Photos put in the photo folder are instantly made into galleries. Neat.
- You can roll back to a previous version of a file if you make a mistake.
Having said all that, I wouldn’t trust super secret work or personal documents to it, but for keeping a backup of photos and non-sensitive personal docuements, it works a treat.
Also, there’s a referral program on at the moment, so if you sign up via the link below, you get an extra 250Mb of space. And so do I as well … go on … its free, and you’ll be glad you did.
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTI3NDkwMDk
Posted in General IT, Security | 2 Comments »
June 2nd, 2009 admin
Man this is the best kept secret in the entire telecoms industry … I’ve been trying to send email through PLDT’s SMTP servers as I’m a broadband customer of theirs, and my normal SMTP server wasn’t working. I needed to get an email out, and I was getting a little desperate.
So apparently the published SMTP servers don’t actually work. Yay! If you try looking on the PLDT website, where you might expect to see this kind of useful information … well just don’t bother. You get seasick pretty quickly from all the flash whoopiness, and the dead ends and 404 start to piss you off after a while. So then you do a few google searches and come up with a couple of published servers, which basically don’t work: smtp.info.com.ph and smtp.pldtdsl.net
So, eventually I cracked and went to the Customer Hotline. After re-phrasing my question several thousand times until I was understood, the answer was … smtpdsl4.pldtdsl.net , using port 587. Which actually works.
Port 587, yes of course, why didn’t I guess that one.
Posted in General IT, Philippines | 2 Comments »
May 4th, 2009 admin
Just came across this awesome tool which will let you format webpages in real time, and then output them to a printer.
Here’s the URL http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/
And here’s a link to this very page opened up in the site, so you can try it out.
Brilliant. Why didn’t I think of that …. Oh, and they’ve also got a ‘bookmarklet’ (great idea, terrible name) which you can drop onto your IE or Firefox toolbar which gives you quick access to the functionality of the site. Just click the button, and the page you’re currently browsing will open in the Printwhatyoulike website.
Posted in General IT | No Comments »
April 23rd, 2009 admin
Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for ‘banana’ and you get something like this:
http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a
Well what you’re effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,
http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana
and if they really want to know more about me, then they’re welcome to go digging through their logs.
OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there’s no reason why we can’t take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | No Comments »
February 23rd, 2009 admin
OK, it sounds simple, and it probably is if you’re sitting at your desktop with Gnome or KDE fired up. However if you’re looking on a server half way across the world, using the command line its not so easy.
There are a number of tools which are useful in finding out things about your filesystem. ls, du, df are three of them, but sometimes they just don’t give you the information you need. In my case I’m backing up a server to a remote location. The script was timing out becase I was trying to back up too many files at once, so I needed to find the number of files in each subdirectory.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | No Comments »
January 3rd, 2009 admin
At last. Its a lazy Saturday after New Year, and I just got around to fixing another one of the things which broke when I upgraded to Intrepid – the video camera. Actually I don’t really use it much, hence it got dropped to the back of the queue, but its nice to get things working again.
Here’s the relevant info: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | 1 Comment »
