Monday July 21, 2008

A day at home, a view of Brussels

I have been busy travelling the last couple of weeks and returned to my home office to do a pile of filing. You can see from my my del.icio.us feed some of the places I have been and also some stuff thats been on my desk waiting to be bookmarked or otherwise dealt with.

Over the weekend, I was looking at Firefox add-ons.

I was fortunate enough to stay at the Sofitel Europe in Brussels last week which was having a cheap week, or maybe day; it is close to my meeting's location, this is at the north end of the 'Place Jourdan', and the location of the finest chip shop in Bruxelles.

tags: food+drink bookmarks bruxelles

Thursday July 03, 2008

Zoo Station

I and some french colleagues caught the S-Bahn from Zoo Station to Fredriechstrasse Station, and took in the views of the Reichstag building and Bundekanzleramt.

We had a beer at Die Deponie nr 3, an exclellent and authentic beer shop (excellent service, thank you) then walked down to Potsdammer Platz via the Brandenburger Tor, the Tiergarten and the Monument to the Dead Jews.

tags: travel berlin railway  zoostation

Monday June 30, 2008

Back to Berlin

I am travelling to Berlin via London City airport for the first time. I am flying with Lufthansa. Its a longer journey to the airport than Heathrow but hopefully the airport experience is better and Lufthansa's flights to Berlin from Heathrow are somewhat limited. The overground journey is pretty OK. Taxi, Train and DLR, at least I am not driving. I leave at 6:20 am and arrive at City at 8:30 am. The queues are not well advertised; it seems you must use the automated check in machines so it may be best to do it online before you set out; Lufthansa have only two kiosks and today one was broken. The queue was longer than I'd hoped.

tags: culture travel lcy lufthansa london lifehack

Friday June 20, 2008

An motd in tcl for Windows XP

I bought an external disk from Amazon for my main home machine, which runs windows and have been moving various user's 'My Documents' folders onto the disk. It has a seperate power supply and switch so its quite easy to start the computer and forget the disk, so I have written a program to check and remind people. I have written it in tcl/tk, my main documentation is on my snipsnap, but its a jolly short program, quick to write and easy to install. Use [Read More] below to check out the code and/or download it.

tags: Technology windows programming startup

Tuesday June 17, 2008

The last leg

I returned on Sunday, and contrary to my twitter broadcast, Preveza airport was very efficient and friendly.

tags: Culture Greece travel delay

Sunday June 15, 2008

Sailing in the Ionian Sea

This holiday had been a long time ambition of mine in order to see Ithaca, the legendry home of Oddessyus from the sea. Actually I wanted to land there and explore, but for various reasons, this didn't happen, and at least I have an excuse to return.

I chartered the boat from Sunsail, as part of their Kalamos flotilla and flew from Gatwick to Preveza in North West of Greece. We arrived in the evening and had a meal in one of the local taverna's in Paleros, a nearby village which also has an ATM. Our route involved sailing from Vounaki to Port Atheni in Meganissi, then onto Kalmos via the north channel, out into the inland sea and back to Port Leone. We then sailed to one house bay and east of Ithaca north to return to Port Atheni. We then sailed around Meganissi to Spartkhori and then back to Vounaki. I prepared a google map...

I had one of my best beers ever at Port Atheni,

not because it was a better beer, but because Port Atheni is such a pretty place, the sun was shining and we'd had such a great day. The rest of the pictures are in my Ionian Sea set on http://www.flickr.com/, my planning page is on my snipsnap bliki's Greece page.

This article has been backdated to the publication date. It was posted on 20th June.

tags: Culture travel holiday sailing yachts yachting Greece sunsail ioniansea

Saturday June 07, 2008

In the path of Odysseus

I am packing for my holiday, I am off to Greece tomorrow, to sail in the Ionian Sea. I will have no access to the internet, hooray! You may catch me on Twitter as I shall have my phone with me. I thought about getting a Nokia N800, but havn't. So I'll have to wait 'till I get home to post my pictures and post about it.

Friday June 06, 2008

Video Conferencing for free

I was introduced to http://www.mebeam.com last year by colleagues in the US, and its a quite cool video conferencing feature. The lag in Europe is appalling, so I use the phone to host the voice channel. You can use whatever string you want to act as the meeting name, which you can enter on the home page, [ hover or click on the link above] or in your browser's URL entry box.

So I use IM and the phone to support the video channel. I was having some problems connecting up with some Mac using colleagues, so connected to Hans Joerg who is a bit of wiz with the Mac. I am on the left, and you can see the IM dialogue box.

and he explained that the configuration needs to be changed using the panel that is opened by pressing the 'settings' button on the bottom right hand side of one's own picture. Mac Users may default to 'DVD Video Class' and they require 'USB Video Class'. (The picture below was scrapped from my screen, and I am using a windows XP machine, which is why the text says something else.)

tags: Technology video web2.0 videoconferencing internet Mac howto

Laptop Diaries, onto the internet with 3G

My colleague at work Sean Harris, helped me configure my laptop and phone to use the phone's 3G capability to connect the internet. Sean was guided himself by this article at 'crackistan'. While that author writes about Mac OS, and I am using Windows XP, we both use sony erricson phones and vodafone as our service provider.

I really did this for times where I have no internet access, but as 'Bodoggy' points out, it may come in useful in airport lounges or other places where the wi-fi costs are outrageous, or their credit cards systems broken.

So the process is

1. Create a connection channel between the phone and laptop, and I used blutooth
2. Create a dial up agent for vodafone and select your new modem

The only tricky bit is that you don't use a phone number to connect to the internet, there is a special code instead.

To find out in more detail what I did, use the [Read More] button below. 

tags: technology laptop vodafone bluetooth modem 3G sonyericsson K610i

Wednesday June 04, 2008

Python bites

I wrote my first Python program over the weekend. I very foolishly ran out space in my root filesystem on my cobalt qube. This is v. stupid and had two causes.

• I have installed an application in the root disk volume. While this is not unusual, it has a database and its log files in the same file system. An error caused the log files to grow and burst the file system. [ So RFE the app dude, the install should offer locations for the database and logs.].
• The OS very sensibly mailed me quite a lot that I had a problem, but it mailed it to the administrator account on the qube and while I can access this mail account remotely, I didn't; I was busy.

So I decided to write a script that mailed me on my phone (via SMS) should this happen again. (I also need to move the data files and logs to sensible places).

I would normally do this in ksh, but the qube doesn't have this, so I started in bash. I quickly discovered that my version of bash doesn't have associative (or any) arrays. It does have the string handling facilities of the ksh, but I couldn't find them; I had forgotten the syntax.

    line="/root=OK"; state=${line##*=}; echo $state
    $ OK

actually works. NB I tried the arrays on my virtual box ubuntu 7 build, which I now use as a terminal host for the qube; I get them inside a re-sizable x-window. The arrays seem to work, but not associative arrays, so its another nail in the Qube's coffin; the Qube's bash has no arrays at all.

When I say I've written it, its not yet finished, but what I have done shows me that its a very powerful and economic language. Given that this sort of script, 90% of the code is string handling and enviromental discovery, with one command at the end of the script doing the work. I actually only use the UNIX 'df' utility and 'mail' program. I invoked the mail program via

    os.system('./despatchmail')

where 'despatchmail' is an external shell script and it means that I can publish the program without stating the destination e-mail addresses. It could also invoke mail directly if I choose. I provide the df reply via a pipe to the program. (I did this because a coding example was more easily available it could be done in a number of ways.)

I am particularly impressed with python's dictionary feature and created one to hold the previous state, one to hold the current state and one to hold the utilisations. I can then use the file system mount point name as the retrieval key for all three arrays. e.g.

   >>>states={};      # states is an empty dictionary
   >>>s="/root=OK";
   >>>states[s[:s.index('=')]]=s[s.index('=') + 1:]
     # assigns the state clause to the dictionary, the filesystem name is the index.
   >>>print states
   >>>{'/root': 'OK'}

and the real one looks like

    {'var': 'OK', 'home': 'OK', 'root': 'OK'}

and the utilisations from the df are held as

    {'var': 9, 'home': 38, 'root': 77}

N.B. The utilisation values are held as integers and its now easy enough to write a test such that if a directories utilisation is above a threshold, then set the status code to something else

    for keys in states.keys():
        if utilisations[keys] > threshold:
            states[keys]='ERROR'

the first line ensures the tests are performed for each value pair in the states dictionary object.

So I was pleased to find a decent problem to test the language out on. When I have finished it, I might publish it in full. It might be useful to others, and you might be able to point out where my COBOL trained brain is still using tricks I learned 25 years ago. I know the parser is very powerful, and hence a line of code can perform a number of function, which means that what I would expect to take several lines can usually be done in one.

tags: technology programming language python linux utility

Friday May 23, 2008

Outside the Box

I have just finished writing up my last two weeks work, and thought you might enjoy this video showing what might happen if a virtual world knew where you were looking.

It is called "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote", I have bookmarked it on del.icio.us and here in my bookmarks section.

tags: technology vr virtualreality

Thursday May 22, 2008

Discussing security and privacy in Italy

 CSI Piemonte, an italian public sector co-operative visited Sun yesterday to talk about today and tomorrow's Security with Alec Muffet and Dave Walker, and I had the honour of hosting and MC'ing the meeting.

While discussing data centre networks i.e the network inside the firewall and how to build the firewalls, a number of products and companies were discussed, these include CSE Piemonte themselves, Tripwire for intrusion detection, Zeus, traffic management, ActivIdentity, part of an SSO solution, Tier-3, leveraging Behavioural Intelligence, Sun's Access Manager, "Privacy on the Line" a book by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Endevours Technologies, Sun's Security Community's publications, Shibboleth, for single sign-on, and juniper.net/, looking at their virtual firewalls. Alec also spoke about some of the ideas he developed in his blog article Hankering For A World Without “Identity” or “Federation”. This latter conversation was very wide ranging and reviewed the significant differences between the UK and Italian data privacy laws, particularly in the field of medical data and records. The italian laws seem very citizen-centric, which is what we'd hope for in a democratic Republic. The CSI Piemonte people told us that

"The Italian Government is prohibited from asking for citizen's information twice"

which is really cool but it still has problems sharing it around the government between departments and bodies. In the UK, this is causing me problems with the Student Finance company at the moment. I'd like the Passport Agency and the Inland Revenue to pass my details on to them, so I don't have to collect all the stuff they ask for. I suppose that they can't ask the Inland Revenue because they want to know more than they do. Go figure.

I recorded these URL's as we discussed them on my del.icio.us feed in real time, i.e. as of this article's publication date, well, yesterday actually. (I suppose I should create a tag for the meeting, to ensure that all the URLs have a common and exclusive tag, but I havn't, and del.icio.us doesn't enable you to query a date range, which is why I repeat the list above, and I can't be bothered to write a script that displays how many days ago the meeting took place.)

I also think, or hope at least, that  this is an article, where the snap shots add value to the article. If you hover most of the links above, you get a preview of the web page. 

tags: Technology security politics privacy identity italy

Wednesday May 21, 2008

tweeting your plaze

Plazes now have a twitter feed for people to publish to. They contacted me, but I need to consider what I think about that. I have made promises to people about how I propose to use it. I hope that other Plazes followers wont be disappointed.

Monday May 12, 2008

We're all off to sunny Spain!

I am off to Barcelona to represent Sun at Gartner's Spring ITexpo in Barcelona. Given Barcelona's historic role as the centre of the world's ever largest Anarchist party, I wonder if the presentation "The future of Government is No Government" is knowledgeable irony, or ignorant co-incidence.

I remarked the other day that Terminal One at Heathrow is a much better place for BA having left it, however, they still use it for their Iberia ticket shares (as well as some other european ticket share flights.) So...hoorah, two hours late taking off, one hour late landing, hmm... don't tell me the airlines over estimate their journey times to allow them some leeway on the compulsory compensations they need to pay. We were told that the replacement co-pilot had been delayed arriving at the plane; there wern't enough buses. Meanwhile in Barcelona, despite the long walk to pick up my baggage, I was off the airport estate in 25 minutes, and checked into the hotel 15 minutes later.

Thursday May 01, 2008

Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

A month and a half ago, Sun & Innotek, the authors of Virtual Box, an open source desktop virtualisation solution announced that Sun was buying them Virtual Box is a free type II virtualisation solution permitting the configuration of a number of popular x86 operating systems to act as guests and hosts. I have just today configured a Linux VM running on my Windows XP Laptop, here's how it looks, when its not full screen.

I used Ubuntu 7.04 and this is how I did it. Firstly a friend cut me an ISO image on CD and I loaded it into the cd reader.

1. I then created a VM. This has hardware virtualisation enabled, I created a new .vdi file. This must be big enough, and defaults at 8Gb. This is a limit on the file size. It does not reserve this space at install time, however if you make it too small, the install fails. The boot device order is floppy, cdrom and then hard disk. The cdrom has to be enabled in the 'settings -> CD/DVD' panel. I also defined the VM as a host of a Linux 2.6 image.
2. I then started the VM using the virtual box control panel. This then boots a live cd of the cdrom, and I selected the 'Install' option. This then installs Ubuntu and offers you the opportunity to restart the system, i.e. the VM.
3. I then used the update manager to update the software. It downloads, works out dependencies and then installs the new software versions. At the end of this stage, I then rebooted the VM. This took some time, over an hour and half, but I was using a wireless connection to a not very quick BT broadband line.
4. At this point in time, it only offers 800x600 screen resolution, which is a bit pants, so, I used the VM window menu option, 'Devices -> Install Guest Additions'. This opened a nautilus window on the CD which exposes a script called "VBoxLinuxAdditions.run". I ran this from a terminal session command line in bash using root privilidge (see below). At this point, I then rebooted the VM again.
5. I then needed to check that the xorg.config was configured correctly. In order to amend it, one needs a root user shell. Its been a couple of years since I used a Linux, so I tried to 'su' to root, but it was having none of it. A quick google found me this article this article about default passwords for the ubuntu super user. So a quick 'sudo gnome-terminal' and we're away. This artilce at forums.virtualbox.org, about guest additions, and this article details the checks and changes required of xorg.conf to permit full screen mode on a larger screen. The Toshiba M5 I am using has 1400x1050. I only had to add the additional resolutions. The device name agreements worked and the virtual devices had been inserted.

I should also thank the Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, who posted an Ubuntu 7, install walkthrough, which while not difficult, helped me debug the initial install failure.

I have downloaded some backgrounds and installed them, but it seems as I shall not be trying to build dual or triple boot solutions again; I have also got opensolaris nevada and indiana VMs. I just wish it had all been installed on  a single partition. I can run whatever OS I want on the laptop now.

tags: Technology software operatingsystem virtualisation virtualization virtualbox linux ubuntu