Category Archives: General

Changes

I made a small change recently – I’ve moved from WordPress.com hosting to a self-hosted server.

The main reason for this is education – I want to learn more about e-commerce and running my own site, which is a bit difficult when WordPress.com places adsense ads on your site (and not on your behalf!). This way I get to keep any adsense revenue, although to be honest if it covers even the small costs of running this site I will eat my hat, shorts and tshirt.

An unfortunate side effect of this is that WordPress.com accounts can no longer comment and you need to manually enter details each time, so I expect comments will drop. But for those that do I appreciate the feedback!
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Quick analysis of a phishing attack

Twice in three days I have received emails purporting to be from ASB and ANZ Bank. Both are New Zealand banks, and the fact that I’ve received two of them clearly indicates that my email address is on a spam database somewhere and geographically tagged New Zealand. Easy enough – my .co.nz domain uses it as the registration address, and it has a New Zealand residential address on it.

I see these all the time, but the execution of this particular attack struck me as unusually slick however, hence the blog post.

The email

The ANZ email subject was “Please remove your Online Banking Limitation! Last warning!”, whereas the ASB email was titled “Online banking suspension warning!”. Both are clearly designed to panic the user into clicking the link and entering their banking details. The ANZ subject has a hint of ESOL and the grammar in the emails is sub-standard, I suspect the origin is a country where English is not the first language.
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The Search for an Android News Reader

Seriously you’d think this would be easy. FeedingIt on the N900 wasn’t amazing but it did the job and was totally free. I don’t think my requirements are unreasonable here:

  • RSS support – not just via Google Reader
  • Ethical developer – i.e. supports the app and doesn’t demand excessive permissions for advertising purposes
  • White text on black background (for better battery life on AMOLED)
  • A decent user interface (NewsRob is great)
  • Offline cache, configurable sync schedule – I don’t want it to update constantly during the day and chew my battery, just download articles twice daily before I jump on the tube.
  • A reasonable price (yes I am prepared to pay)

Seriously if anyone can find one that fits these criteria please enlighten me, because I sure can’t. The ones I’ve considered so far:

  • NewsRob
    • The current frontrunner. Ad-supported and paid versions, user interface is nice and clean. I’m currently using the ad-supported version (gasp), until I find another. The problems? No black background (discovered the pro version actually does have a night theme), sync is partially configurable but can’t set specific times, based on Google Reader.
  • Feedr
    • Looked perfect and was apparently one of the better ones, but is no longer updated. Rumour has it that the developer is also behind RssDemon…
  • RssDemon
    • From what I can gather from the reviews on the marketplace, the developer of this app prefers to release a new app so everyone has to buy it again rather than improve the original. The app demands location permissions which is totally unnecessary for a news reader, and according to one reviewer purchasing the elite license does not properly remove the ad components. Strike.
  • BlueRSS GR
    • Developer seemed to have a good thing going with BlueRSS then inexplicably threw all that away by removing the old version and starting again with a new “GR” version that is not getting good reviews. There is no option for a black interface, but I didn’t like it anyway – 3D icons very 1998. Absolutely zero reasons to use this over NewsRob.
  • eSobi
    • Poor reviews, expensive (free is only trial), bloated, too many permissions. Again, zero reasons to use this over NewsRob.

Yes I’m picky but this seriously should not be that hard. News reading on Android – fail.

N900 PR1.3 is a screamer

Just installed the OTA (over the air) update on my N900 and the difference in speed is actually user-perceptible. Animations are smoother, rotation happens much more quickly and I could swear applications are starting faster as well. Many people are reporting improved battery life too.

There are no new major features that I’ve noticed, so of PR1.2 was a feature release, PR1.3 is very much a fine-tuning release. And despite what the few whiners on the maemo forums might say – that is not a bad thing!

More at the Nokia conversations blog and pocketables.net.

Au Revoir Ubuntu, Bonjour Fedora

If you check the about page and previous posts you’ll note that I’ve been travelling the past few months. In fact I’ve just settled in London and started looking for a job.

There are several shortcomings on my CV that have made it difficult to get past the recruitment agents for a lot of the roles I am interested in. Firstly there’s the lack of big corporate experience – I worked as a technical consultant on a major corporate contract for close to 6 months but the majority of my experience (including almost all of my “BAU” experience) has come from the education sector. Secondly, there’s lack of experience on 100+ Linux server sites (unfortunately no schools are that big in New Zealand, and we don’t have the federated district IT model that many state schools operate in the US). Finally and perhaps most critically is the lack of production experience with Red Hat Linux.

My own personal Linux dabbling experience has come from Ubuntu and Debian Linux. At work it’s been Debian and SUSE. However the number of roles that mention these distributions in the UK is insignificant compared to the number that mention RedHat and CentOS (CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, basically Red Hat with all the branding stripped and separately maintained repositories). In New Zealand Red Hat is hardly an endangered species, but roles that mention it are similar in number to those that mention Debian, SUSE and even Ubuntu, so lack of experience with it is not really an issue.

In the UK however, it most certainly is an issue for recruiters searching for “Red Hat” in CV databases. So it is for this reason that I must farewell Ubuntu and switch to the red team – which if I am to take this seriously means adopting Fedora (presently Fedora 13) for my day to day computing.

I made the switch yesterday, and so far no problems. There is less hand-holding for sure, but I like how it doesn’t try to hide what’s happening under the hood. The flexible installer was also nice, if not as attractive as Ubuntu’s. I also like how Fedora ships software as the upstream maintainers intended – this strikes me as a more sustainable long term solution than having to backport distribution-specific patches every release, but at the same time it doesn’t have the “coherent vision” of Ubuntu, and there are some niceties in Lucid that I really appreciated such as the messaging notification area.

As a professional tool for software developers and Linux IT professionals, Fedora is a fine choice. For end-users and Linux enthusiasts who don’t have to use a specific distribution in their work, Ubuntu is generally an easier distribution to get in to. In fact I wouldn’t recommend Fedora for anyone other than Linux geeks because only the two most recent versions are supported. This means a forced upgrade every 12 months minimum. Ubuntu LTS releases on the other hand are supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 on the server. The previous 8.04 LTS release will still be supported on the desktop until April 2011. Install Lucid today and you will get security updates for it until April 2013.

Why not CentOS 5.5? Too old. Having been accustomed to the current versions of software shipped with Ubuntu it’s a bit hard to go back to Gnome 2.16! (Gnome 2.16 was released in September 2006 and was the version shipped with Ubuntu 6.10, Fedora 13 ships with the current stable 2.30 release).
As desktop distributions, CentOS and RHEL are simply too far behind to be competitive, except in large environments with legacy apps which require absolute stability of APIs. However modern applications are often browser based, so for any environment considering a desktop deployment of Linux that doesn’t depend on legacy desktop software, I’d be suggesting a very hard look at Ubuntu LTS.

Despite the title I won’t be abandoning Ubuntu entirely, in fact I play to keep tabs on each release (maybe even dual boot to test each one) but professional needs have dictated that I upskill in “the Red Hat way”. Let’s hope this has a happy ending!

I’m off…

… but unfortunately before finishing the series on setting up the Ubuntu home server. Realistically it is unlikely it will be finished until I setup another one, as the original is back in New Zealand and I’m en-route to the UK!

It should be more than enough to get most people started though, so it has certainly been a worthwhile exercise. For the parts that were finished, see An Ubuntu Home Server.

N900 PR 1.2 finally released

It’s about time.

I know it’s really sad to eagerly await a firmware update, but since this one fixes a lot of bugs, improves stability and adds Skype video calling, I think any eagerness is warranted.

The update was released over-the-air in the UK today and the worldwide release will follow tomorrow. But rather than wait I elected to do a clean flash.

First impressions? I’ve hardly had a chance to play with it, but it looks good so far. I don’t think it’ll be enough to stop me wishing I’d bought a Nexus One though.

Links

It’s here!





Currently updating the firmware to the latest version, I’ll be writing a review once I’ve had a good play and am familiar with the device.

Initial impression: awesome.

Of Bioshock 2 and DRM

This is a game I’ve been anticipating and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I was all ready to pull the trigger on a pre-order but the DRM has given me pause.

First there’s the whole Games for Windows Live (GFWL) thing. It annoyed the hell out of me in Batman Arkham Asylum, and I’m not particularly thrilled about it here. Had I known what GFWL was when I bought Arkham Asylum I might have thought twice. I know Steam is a similar concept, but somehow it’s more tolerable, although if you buy Bioshock 2 through Steam you have to put up with both!

The game is also protected by Securom, and has a 15 activation limit enforced by GFWL. With Bioshock 1 this caused issues, and later on I believe they removed the limit (although back then the limit was enforced by Securom).

If you preorder the game it will cost $90 NZD boxed or $63 NZD on Steam. With the Steam version you effectively have to handle two (no wait, three) DRM systems – GFWL, Steam and SecuROM! It really doesn’t get much more ridiculous than that.

Boycott this is not, but I think I might vote with my feet here, even if I am in the minority. Or I’ll just wait until they remove the DRM and drop the price like they did for the original Bioshock.

My opinion of Steam and GFWL can be summed up thusly:

Steam serves the publisher while throwing the customer a bone, and while you give up some rights you do gain some conveniences. It is also cheaper.

GFWL seems to be designed to serve only the publisher, and is little more than an annoyance for gamers.

At least the pirates won’t have to deal with this crap.

More info at Arstechnica, the Steampowered Forums and the 2k Games Forums.