Month: April 2007

Switching to Ubuntu on Desktop for real this time

The other day I was installing some new wireless points around the house. My very 1st generation Linksys 802.11b access point had pretty much had enough and needed to be put out of its pain. And the pocket Asus wireless point (smaller that a Airport express) wasn't really made for constant use.

Anyhow, I happen to flip the switch on the Belkin 10 way power supply under my desk. Off went the Desktop machine. Thought damm it, and switched the 10 way back on. Well Windows was screwed, so screwed that I had to reinstall it again. Only this time when I reinstalled it, it kept getting upset about the hardware and would restart its self.In the end I got so pissed off with the whole thing, that I threw the Windows CD across the room and went looking for my Ubuntu CD.

Within a few hours I had Ubuntu 6.10 dapper installed (had to do some data shifting with partition magic) and before you knew it all the applications I needed, thanks very much to Nat's guide to Ubuntu she sent me over Twitter. I had a few problems on the way including writing to NTFS partitions and getting Azureus to run correctly. However this evening I got all those working without too much work. Now I just need to clean things up, get Hamachi running and sort out the Samba shares.

So far, its all god…

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London XSL user group

Its been a long time coming but finally there is a London XSL user group starting. Its thankfully not run or setup by myself, instead Nic Ferrier and Otu Ekanem have taken it upon themselves to foster this user group.

We met at the Prince Regents Pub yesterday and there seemed to be agreement that a group meeting every month to discuss things happening in the XSL space outside of actual code was a good idea. No one wants to discuss the memory differences between using xsl:for-each in Xalan vs Saxon, so the group will centre around improving the image of XSL and helping people get into XSL in the first place.

It was reassuring to hear Thompson and BT were having the same issues hiring good XSL people as we are in the BBC. The fact is that most computer science university courses don't teach XSL and if they do its placed next to odd languages like Pascal (god I hope they don't still teach that) and Lisp for a couple of day.

Another interesting fact came out of the night, 2 out of the 6 of us came to XSL through a design background. Anyway expect to see more about the group at xslug.org

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Simply bad ebay scams

I've posted my old SPV M600  to ebay for the 4th ti now. Everytime I post it up, some scam artist tries to  con me out of my phone. Well I'm fed up of readying the phishing emails and so wanted to post them for others to read. So Ebay sent me this a while ago.

Dear Italic_dj

The results of the following listings have been cancelled due to bidding activity that took place without the account owner's authorisation:

160103815659 Orange SPV M600 + 2GB SD CARD Boxed and Used

We have temporarily suspended the bidding account and we are working with the account owner to prevent any additional unauthorised activity. Since the account owner did not initiate these bids, fees resulting from the listings in question have been credited to your account.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to automatically relist these items for you. Instead, to relist these items you will need to start from the beginning of the listing process, either through the Sell Your Item process or through your third party listing service. We know that this is an inconvenience and we apologise for the negative impact it may cause you. We are working on tools to allow you to relist your items without starting from the beginning, but they are not available at this time.

So the first email I got from the con-artist was this.

Hello, I am very sorry i have not been able to get back to you till now, i have taken such time because of the easter period. Just want to let you know that payment will be sent on monday or first thing on tuesday morning
Best Regards.
argentium149@verizonmail.com

Then this crafted email from the con-artist to look like it came from ebay

Dear Ian Forrester

Failure to do as we have indicated in this email will lead to your suspension on eBay due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the eBay community.

“Abusing eBay” of the eBay User Agreement states, in part:

“…we may limit, suspend, or terminate our service and user accounts, prohibit access to our website, remove hosted content, and take technical and legal steps to keep users off the Site if we think that they are creating problems, possible legal liabilities, or acting inconsistently with the letter or spirit of our policies.”

This email is to inform you that you can now proceed with the transaction between you and Chris Marshall (argentium149) the buyer of your ebay item 160103815659. The transaction was initially cancelled because we noticed that someone else accessed the account and some transactions where made with the account without the owner's concept, which was complained to us by the account owner. This has been resolved and now, we are at the point of completely restoring the account back to the owner. You are expected to send out the item tomorrow because payment has just been sent by the buyer through paypal, your payment is currently placed on HOLD by us. As soon as the buyer confirms to us that he has received the shipment details from you and that everything is ok, your payment will be credited into your paypal account. Failure to send out the item tomorrow will lead to your suspension on ebay. Make sure the item is sent out tomorrow and the shipment details sent to the buyer for confirmation.

Then the conformation email from the con-artist himself

Hello There,

Just want to let you know that i have resolved all problems with ebay and that i have just sent payment for the ebay item I have also added a extra amount of money so as to cover the shipping cost of the phone to my son. I bought the phone for my son as gift. This is address where the phone should be sent to.

Name :- Okwuchukwu Ugochi
Address :- 1 Ojo Street, Off Babalola Bus-Stop
City :- Mushin
State :- Lagos
Country :- Nigeria
Postal Code :- 23401

I have also attached a copy of the confirmation email that paypal sent to me confirming payment, they have asked me to contact you for the shipment details. I want the phone sent to my son via royalmail international signed for delivery(Recorded). Let me have the royalmail reference number when it has been sent so i can contact ebay and paypal to let them.

Regards.
Chris.

And just incase I wasn't certain a fake email from PayPal.com

You've Received Payment for an eBay item!

Dear Ian Forrester,

Chris Marshall just sent you a payment of £300.00 GBP for an eBay item.

Chris Marshall is a verified buyer.
Payment Details Buyer's User ID: argentium149.
Buyer: Chris Marshall
Amount: £250.00 GBP
Postage & Packing: £50.00 GBP
Postal Insurance: £00.00 GBP
Total Amount: £300.00 GBP

Item Information
eBay User ID: argentium149

Delivery Information
Address: Okwuchukwu Ugochi
1 ojo street,off Babalola Bustop
Mushin,Lagos
Nigeria
23401
Address Status:  Confirmed

Message:

This payment has been placed on Hold. We have asked the buyer to contact you for the shipment tracking/reference number, as soon as the buyer confirms to us that the item has been sent, your account will be credited immediately. This is the New Paypal antifraud rule, this is done in order to secure both buyers and sellers. The item should be sent out within 24 hours and the shipment details sent to the buyer.

So as you can see this is so obviously a con/scam. I didn't even need to look at the headers for the emails or check my Paypal account. The English was a mess in places, account details wrong and worst still it had all the hallmarks of a scam. That level of urgency, the tail for which to follow. I'm so fed up with scammer like this I think I might post them up here everytime to convine scammers that I'm serious about taking action.

You've been warned scammers!

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Apple TV hacks are making the box more attractive

Apple Store

Since Apple talked about the Apple TV or iTV I've been listening, but was deeply disappointed with the final product. When I was over in San Francisco I did pop into the Apple store to check out the Apple TV which I heard just launched recently. But at 299 dollars or 165 pounds I decided it was too much for essentially a iTunes extender.

That was before I came back to the UK, I started reading about the hacking which has been going on already. AppleTV hacks seems to be leading the way right now, and there certainly making the machine much more attractive to someone like me.

You can now play non-itunes videos via VLC, SSH, Apache, Asterisk and other services on the box. Joost is working on it (which even the Xbox couldn't do) and yeah a last a RSS reader.

The backdoor claim is a little worrying but actually think this is a repair script or something. Theres also lots of talk that the Apple TV isn't that powerful and can't play back 720p H.264 content let alone 1080p content. Now this may not sound like the end of the world, but actually for future proofing and remember Apple are selling this as a HD device. This could be bad news. I already own a couple of 1080p Xvids which simply won't play on my xbox right now but would play on a Xbox 360 and Playstation3.

So yeah, I'm considering the Apple TV for my replacement to the Xbox Media Centre if it can do most of the things XBMC can do. Such as stream straight from YouTube, connect to shoutcast, play all media, read from SMB and other file systems. Someone elses been thinking the same thing.

While in Columbus, we happened to pass through the Apple store, and I got my first look at the AppleTV. A slick piece of kit, to be sure, and one you'll be able to read all about at Ars Technica shortly, but not quite suited to my needs.  I want to be able to watch DivX files on my TV; it's the only way to keep up with TV from back home, and legally, too (thanks, Auntie Beeb!). Apple's beautiful little box can't help me out, but give my wife a used XBox, and 20 minutes later an XBMC media center is the solution to my needs.  Plus, it can stream BBC Radio 4 to boot! Sure, you can always open up and hack an AppleTV, but you do so at the cost of your warranty.  With secondhand hardware that's cheap, that's not a concern.

The arrival of our XBox 360 meant that our first XBox could be repurposed as the living-room media server. Now I don't need to keep plugging my PowerBook into the bedroom TV set, and Elle can pipe her music collection from her PC to her heart's content. It's not the sort of thing I'd suggest for my parents or anyone else of a technophobic nature, but if the AppleTV won't do what you want or if you prefer rolling your own, pop down to your local used video game emporium and see what's lurking in their stockroom. Apple TV certainly has its uses, but the original Xbox is easier to hack, cheaper, and has much more support from the hacking community right now than Apple TV. If you've not looked into XBMC, it's absolutely worth it. Depending on your needs, it may be a far superior option to Apple TV, or any of the other PC-to-TV devices out there today. 

Some people are looking at it slightly differently. Apple TV on Xbox anyone? And more here. Oh and theres a nice discussion about maybe porting XBMC to the mac.

 

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Still on Pacific Standard Time

Its 12:30pm GMT and I'm still awake after a night battling with my old laptop.

I made the mistake of selling my old laptop on ebay before going to America. I didn't clear anything off of it and had to get Dave and Sarah involved while I was away (thanks guys). But in the end, the buyer was happy to receive it today in completely working order. And honestly at 6am this morning I was going to call it quits and email the buyer to offer there money back.

But out of pure chance while looking for a decent Dos Boot image, I found this site which also has a version which includes Symantic Ghost client. I also finally tracked down a util which does bootable discs in Windows XP/2000, thanks to HP. Once I loaded the Recovery CD roms on to the hard drive and moved them to the right part using Partition Magic and a load of Dos commands (geez give me chmod over attrib anyday).

So now thats done and out the way, I'm going to spend the rest of my Easter Holiday with Sarah and writing my paper for Xtech which was due the day I came back from the states.

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Support ORG and Party

Party starts Wednesday 11th April from 6pm at Bar Kick. Straight from the ORG party site

A chance for ORG supporters to meet each other, chat to volunteers and staff and celebrate how far we’ve all come since ORG started. There’ll be 'public domain' DJs, remixed visuals and free culture goodie bags, as well as a special guest speaker to be announced.

Beneath all this revelry lies a hidden motive. We need you to bring a friend, colleague or family member who doesn't yet support ORG, but who you think would like to, if they knew more about our work. 

The party starts at 6pm on Wednesday 11 April at Bar Kick, E1, and lasts until 11pm. See you there!

I'll certainly be there and who knows might be a regular ORG supporter.

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Little Big Planet

I watched the demo of this recently and was wowed by the level of graphics and parciptation in and outside the game. Its on Playstation 3 only which is a shame but really shows off the power of the PS3 better that anything else I've seen to date. Theres also a level creator like you have never seen before and of course the levels are sharable. If they could make the PS3 a bit more affordable, that would be great. Right now, I'm still considering a Wii because its simply great to play and much more friendly to non-gamers.

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Going home after a busy few weeks

So yep after a very busy few weeks I'm going home to London. I have enjoyed myself in the west coast of America but its time to go home.

How was the Emerging technology conference? Well it was good and I got to meet lots of people who I've been reading or had heard of. The actual conference its self was good but I was expecting something even bigger and grander that what we got. Afterwards when Ben asked me that exact same question, we figured out that it wasn't as busy as it was in previous years. The main hall was over half full on the Tim Oreilly keynote, which happened on a Monday morning (more about that later). Now I have only heard Etech's talks on IT Conversations but they had always sounded like something everyone would want to go to. This is why I was shocked to find out the keynotes happen 7:30pm on Monday night. I was told by some people its so people can fly down after work and go the conference keynotes. This may also explain why there were no social events on Sunday night (Although, me, Tom and Noor did go out for dinner). This culture of work also seemed to extended towards leaving to early on Thursday, so to be back at work on Friday morning. Likewise I was surprised there was no real end to the conference. In the timetable it said – Closing get together between 3:50pm – 4:30pm but besides the odd flavored popcorn and sweets there was just people wondering about outside the main rooms. A couple of us went to Frys electrical shop in north San Diego then came back for a dinner with Cory, Danah and others in some Thai restaurant just off the gaslamp district. So yeah, no real big finale or end talk, oh well.

Now although I may sound quite negative about the whole thing, I'm not. Actually I had a really good time and went to some cracking keynotes and sessions. As you can see before, I tried to live blog most of them but alas I'm not very good at that. So I'll direct you to the ones I rated and other peoples write ups. Monday

  • Monday
  • ETech Opening Salvos
  • The O'Reilly Radar
    New presentation from Tim Oreilly and it was well worth going to.
  • Secrets of Mental Math
    This was such a fun session and there was lots learned about calculating maths quicker
  • Tuesday
  • Amazon Web Services: Building a “Web-Scale Computing” Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today's Business
    Heard pretty much the same thing at the future of webapps. Now if they got Jeff Bezo to do it that would be great
  • Creating Alternate Realities
    this talk was awesome, All about crossmedia games, stiring up real life and alternative reality gaming I wanted to talk to Jane afterwards but never got the chance.
  • Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain? How a New Theory of Neocortex Will Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines
    This seemed like a good session but it was tons of detail in a very short period of time.
  • Making Offline Web Applications a Reality
    Vendor Pitch but reasonable enough to watch. Those Zimki guys have got it down
  • Successful Open Communities on the Internet
    Good balanced presentation using Wikipedia and Wikia as examples through-out
  • No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral
    Tom Loosemore was on fire with this one. Cory felt Toms box distracted from the real matter at hand and some people didn't quite see what all the fuss was about. But generally Toms Box is a box which uses Digital Broadcast TV to fill up a box which automaticlly joins a torrent network and shares with neighbours. Great idea and would love to see it working.
  • Birds of a Feather Sessions ATOM Publishing, Microformats and Digital Mixing
    As you can guess I was involved in the last one and although not many people turned up, the right people turned up and thats what made it a good chat. I need to do more in this area in the future I think.
  • Wednesday
  • The Coming Age of Magic
    I walked in late on this one, so didn't do much note taking, but honestly this was another one of those awesome sessions which you would only get at somewhere like Etech. 
  • Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life
    Like the one before, awesome. Stopped typing up notes and just listened for most of this. Never heard Danah live and she lived up to expectations. Although I would have loved to have had a european and asian point of view on the same thing.
  • The Core of Fun
    A lot of people I spoke to didn't like this one, but I did enjoy it although yes it was a little short on examples compared to the previous two.
  • Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!
    Chad did a good job showing how much fun it can be to be in a large company. Hackday was talked about, but Chad didn't mention or announce the first European Hackday which is a joint adventure between the BBC and Yahoo!
  • Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication
    Only stayed for half of this, but it seemed to centre around the reasons for Craft magazine and some of the projects in Craft.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Magic
    Interesting up till he started doing some magic. 
  • Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web
    This was good but the guys didn't show off pipes that well because of the lack of internet connectivity. They showed a canned demo video which worked but wasn't as good. The after talk of how it was built was interesting but like I said afterwards. This is the most interesting stuff Yahoo's been doing for years, they need to make it sound like it. More energy wouldn't have gone a miss. I did in the end meet all the 5 guys working on Pipes and I did suggest they should use Yahoo Widgets to extend Yahoo pipes on to the desktop. I was very surprised to find they had never thought about it.
  • Emerging Technologies from IBM Almaden Research Center–Koala & Spintronics
    I was late for this one but Koala is a macro recorder for your actions online in a browser. This means you can play back logins, actions, etc. Its all saved in text files and can be modified independently of the Firefox extentsion. When I saw this I thought wow, combined with Pipes, you could do some amazing things.
  • Make Fest
    A mini makers festivial, good fun but a little small for 2hours of its allocated time. Plus I really wanted to play werewolf.
  • Werewolf
    Finally werewolf and its actually on the schedule so the turn out is huge. The first game I play is something like 25 people in a circle and there were about 3 different circles or games to start off with. The first game I get killed off quickly because I'm one of the most experienced people in that game which is fine because they were playing reveal, which is fine if your all starting out as newbies but is ever so boring and frustrating. The 2nd game is much better as a couple of us move to a new circle/game. Danah is our moderator and shes pretty good except she plays the game differently in regards to voting. She seems to pick the first person who pointed the finger and works her way around in a clockwards motion watching for voting hands. I'm not convinced about this because like in the way we play it in London. If everyone votes at once, people tend to wacth for the most dominating people of the game to vote and decide to go with them or against them. This is also a good chance to look for werewolf type play or the undecided villagers. Yes I'm saying this is a great chance to get a idea of whats going on in the game.
    Anyway without going into details the games were pretty good and by the 5th game it was getting close to 1:30am. We did play till 2am in the end. I think somewhere along the 3rd game we hooked up with Heaverscent who had some disagreement with Cal in the previous game. She certainly brought some spark to the games following.
  • Thursday
  • From Pixels to Plastic
    Good talk from Matt Webb, well worth listening although I've seen and heard a lot of it before.
  • Apollo : Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop
    I didn't like this one not because of the presentation but because it was more like a tutorial that keynote. I was also dying to ask some questions but didn't get a chance. Oh that was a consistent problem across most of the keynotes. Not much a chance to ask questions straight after the keynote.
  • Body Hacking
    I was in two minds to watch this or not. Not because I'm screamish of body modifications but I am terrified of needles and metal stuck in the skin. I did record this session, and it was well worth going to. Specially the bit about that drug which can help you stay alert after 72hours. Crazy!
  • Sonic Body Pong
    I thought they were going to do a live demo of this but it wasn't to be. So yes it was cool but it would have been better with a demo.
  • Closing Get-together
    I have already talked about this in some detail above.

In reflection I had a whale of a time but I was expecting even bigger. I did also get a chance to interview Tim Oreilly with Chris Valance for BBC Backstage.

My hotel I know was better and that the Hyatt or W. Simply because I heard the complaints from different people. Imagine paying 300 dollars a night for a hotel and then they charged 10 dollars a day for broadband access. Sorry but thats taking the piss in my book. The Bristol was a nice modern hotel with art deco styling, nice large rooms and free wired and wireless access in every room. Its once of the best hotels I've ever been in.

Something very strange also happened near the end of the conference.

I was walking up to the W hotel with some American guys after werewolf (my hotel the Bristol wasn't far off the W). And one of the guys commented that I'm quite different from the rest of the London guys. I asked what he meant and he and couple others started talking about the London Mafia. I was very interested in what these people meant. And it seemed to break down into how a group of London people tended to hang out together a lot. I won't mention names but I don't really see any harm in it, however I do worry about being automaticlly tied to such things. Yes I'm always proud to say I'm from London but I'm also on a learning about places like San Francisco. Talking of which…

San Francisco was something else. I met many people including the guys from  Citizen Agency, Ruby Red Labs, Adaptive Path, Technorati, The Obvious and Creative Commons. I also went to a couple of events including the SwapSF and SuperHappyVlogHouse which were both very cool. Thanks to Ben and Sofia for making me feel at home. Tara and Chris were also very friendly and we had a really good meal at there house on Tuesday. The obvious guys gave me a Tshirt in return for a backstage one and Citizen agency already have plans to hang the backstage tshirt in the tolilet next to all the others (check out the photos). Cheers to Photomatt and his girlfriend for driving us home late from the vloghouse too. The south park area is certainly a mecca for internet related startups with a good 30 or so in a 2 block radius of that small park. Its a bit like Clerkenwell Green (and funny enough about the same size).

I like San Francisco but not as much as I like Minneapolis. The bums on the streets can be ignored but its reminds you every time of the massive divide. I also saw lots of the same divide in race which I've spotted in the mid west. Different races mixing only with there own, not really mixing outside of there race. I know it sounds negative but I just notice this type of stuff a lot and I see it a lot in America where space is abundant. On a lighter note I did go up to the Bay Bridge and check out the Golden Gate Bridge. I would have liked to have hired a scooter so I could drive across them both but thats the way it goes. Oh talking of which, it was good to see a range of motorbilkes and scooters on the streets. I even spotted a Burgman 400 and Tmax 500. No Silverwings though… I'm sure it would be great fun to drive in California, next time I'll make sure I sort that out beforehand. San Francisco certainly has character but theres something deep rooted underneath which I don't really like that much. Maybe its the race thing or maybe its simply a class thing. When I was outside the Soma area, I got a better feel for how most live.

So all in all it was fun and I did enjoy my time away, but geez its good to be going home.

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Getting a late night taxi in San Francisco is simply a nightmare


Click To Play

The other night I spent 45mins plus trying to flag down a taxi on mission street. There were tons of taxis and lots had there lights on to say their for hire, but would they stop for me? Hell no!

So in the end I walked back to the hotel at 2am. Now although 10 blocks doesn't sound a lot. Bear in mind its 2am, I don't know San Francisco at all and I had only flew in that day. Its like someone saying you should walk from Chancery Lane to Aldgate. It maybe not be far but it can be scary at least, specially if you don't know the area. I have tried to map out a google map of how far I had to go to escape the wilds of San Francisco.

The footage above is taken yesterday (monday 2nd April) when I tried to film myself flagging down taxis in the South of the market area of San Francisco. This time I get a taxi within 5mins.

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