teh bigbro blog(tm)
Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
02 2005

Sat, 26 Feb 2005

Today's pointer to the winderful world of the internetweb...

http://www.veryfunnydownloads.com/tech-support/

A collection of recordings of tech support calls. Some are mildly amusing; some beggar belief.

Surely one of the most annoying things in the world must be when you upgrade a machine, only to discover that it is now as unstable as a thing that doesn't even know which end of a horse is which, much less have the ability to provide accomodation for anything of the equine genus. To add insult to injury, upon unracking that machine and taking the cover off, running memtest on the 'dodgy' RAM results in NO ERRORS! wah!
Nexus is back up again, after a futile unracking and re-racking and running memtest on it overnight with no errors. I don't mind fixing machines - but it does irk me when they pretend to be broken just to get attention...
posted at: 19:37 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Yeah - I now realise that engineers really should not be allowed out in public, or at the very least where any drink is involved... (Pictures taken with a Nokia 9500 camera - please forgive the not-too-great quality)

Fri, 25 Feb 2005

Today's collection of motley links...

http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~adsjr1/news/custody.html

It's on the internet, so it must be true... yerrrrrr... Including tasteful snipe at the England rugby team ;-) (Amusing link now sadly deceased)

http://j-walkblog.com/blog/docs/platform.htm

Stared at this for 5 minutes working out where the patterns repeat... and then had little men dancing around in my head for the next hour. Cool though ;-)

http://nick.hates-software.com/2004/11/21/c49890e4.html

An oldie, but a goodie... for those of us who use Apple products on an occasional (or more) basis.

Thu, 24 Feb 2005

Some links I looked at and found worthy of maintaining in some form of list from the day that was today...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/community/columns/security/essays/10imlaws.mspx

microsoft does security for dummies :-) It's a bit (read: a LOT) MS centric, but for anyone looking for a list of basic security tenets to illustrate a point to someone not versed in the day-to-day fare of computer security, it's a decent article, with some good illustrations of the underlying points.

http://planetilug.draiocht.net

Aggregation of lots of blogs from the ILUG membership and beyond.

http://www.jwz.org/images/1118807_a751d65ba5.jpg

Yes! Dear!

There has been some snow here over the last few days. Today seems to be the heaviest continuous snow where I live, though I might be just imagining it since it's built up on the snow that's fallen over the last couple of days.

Wed, 23 Feb 2005

I've written up Egan's Polka, Niamh's Polka and Sean South - I have been busy ;-)
You can grab the sheet music here:

• Egan's Polka (Finale Notepad 2005a format)
• Egan's Polka (PDF Format)
• Niamh's Polka (Finale Notepad 2005a format)
• Niamh's Polka (PDF Format)
• Sean South (Finale Notepad 2005a format)
• Sean South (PDF Format)

Some technical yet mildly interesting links from the day that was today...

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-crypto-hashes.html

Steve Friedl's Unixwiz.net Tech Tips - An Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hashes

http://www.omgaudio.com/

Some blokes have made some interesting (and even mildly useful) plugins that do various different types of audio mangling. Nice.

http://everquest2.station.sony.com/pizza/

Yes! Ghey-mers! No longer do you have to leave your virtual universe and go off-line long enough to pick up the phone - you can simply get a delicious slice of lard delivered to you with a mere '/pizza' command. Begs the question as to what companies will be paying to add commands to other MMOLRPGs in the near future; and how long can society as we know it survive?

Tue, 22 Feb 2005

Multimedia
• Make the system stereo, rather than mono.
• Add a standard 3.5mm headphone socket.
• Add Ogg Vorbis playback (wish list :-) )
Stability
• Allow firmware upgrades by the user
• Provide a hardware based key-combination escape to fully reset the system.
• Allow the PDA part to be turned off completely.
Usability
• Consider a slightly faster processor?
• Consider allowing addition of icons to the default desktop, not just notes and groups. (This may be possible, but I've not found out how yet.)
• Put the T9 dictionary back for front panel text message sending.
• Allow b/t headset connections to be accepted (and b/t to be enabled) without having to open the front panel.
• Can I have either a permanently visible, or easily visible (without unlocking) signal strength meter and battery meter on the front display, please?

Some funny, useful and entertaining links from the day that was today...

http://kerneltrap.org/node/4751

A cunning use of genetic algorithms for optimising scheduling in the Linux kernel. Given that machines have longer and longer uptimes and are dealing with widely varying task loads over time, I think this is definitely a viable way forward.

http://planeta.terra.com.br/informatica/paulobarreto/WhirlpoolPage.html

Some details on the Whirlpool hash function. Now that collisions have been found in MD5, and more recently in SHA-0 and SHA-1, some suggest that we should be looking towards this Whirlpool function for future digital hashing requirements.

I'm still swaying hugely from really liking this phone / PDA to hating it's silly lack of simple features, instability and defiance of logic in places. Today I managed to get e-mail working, which is very nice. Support for IMAPS and SMTP Auth - everything I need to manage e-mail from within the big scary internet. But this resulted in my Web Browser being broken. Insert here the many hours of fun I had resetting / rebooting / removing the battery from this piece of crud to try and make it work again. Why do they make the back cover so difficult to remove when the software is so unstable that it's a daily requirement (so far, for me) to do so?
I never did figure out why it broke (Repeated claim that some other application had the required resource in use. Program: Web, Error: KERN-EXEC-3, Stale lock file maybe?) I ended up formatting the phone completely. This can be done (for a Nokia 9500) by removing the battery, replacing it and holding down [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [F]. After a few seconds, a message requesting confirmation to format the device is offered. This wipes the phone memory completely - so back up to the MMC beforehand or be prepared to lose data.
Second tidbit! When the phone is reset, it locks the MMC card with the first 8 characters of the remote lock-out password, if you've set one. (The first 8 characters of the text message you send to it to lock it.) Rebooting the phone yields a most unhelpful 'Password' prompt - but some poking on Google solved that problem for me. Rumours abound that it's in some part of the manual that I've not read yet.
Now, all I need to do is transfer all my data to the phone again.
posted at: 00:46 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 21 Feb 2005

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/lawsuits.html
posted at: 12:11 | path: /lotd | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 19 Feb 2005

This entry written using PuTTY from my new Nokia 9500. I've finally given up trying to maintain seperate stores of contact information, calendar information and all the other bits and pieces of data I carry with me on a daily basis. So far I've been very pleased with the phone, and I've only had to remove the battery once, due to a bizarre complete hang on installing Acrobat Reader. Connection to my WiFi LAN was mostly painless, though the interface (properly) exposes 40 and 104-bit key lengths, rather than the typical 128-bit exposed by most interfaces... More entries as I get to grips with the 9500 and more used to its trials and foibles.
posted at: 23:48 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Some funny, useful and entertaining links from the day that was today...

http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/linuxbeat3.htm

The proper way to set up a Linux box that even your grandmother can use.

http://niall.frogstomp.com/nonado-hug-stats

Cry...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/chav_burglar/

An uncommon use of common technology. Amused me at least ;-)

Thu, 17 Feb 2005

I've written up Dawning of the Day - just the notes at the moment. I'll add some chords and interpretation notes at a later stage as time permits. You can get the sheet music here:

• Dawning of the Day (Finale Notepad 2005a format)
• Dawning of the Day (PDF Format)

Mon, 14 Feb 2005

...well, it's not the beginning, as such - but a beginning, I guess. I've finally crumbled to the apparently indisputable requirement that anyone who works with technology must have a blog. One of the main reasons for doing this is to create some kind of learning resource for Traditional Irish music tunes and playing techniques - but I'll also use the opportunity to play with RSS, so beware of breakages.
posted at: 09:06 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 13 Feb 2005

I'm finally learning the whistle - properly. Sinead is a fine player (of flute and whistles) and I decided that if I was going to bug her to teach me some of her techniques and tricks that I would make time to practice. In order to catch up with my target of one tune per week, She started me with 5! wah! Tunes so far are:

• Dawning of the Day (D) [March]
• Sean South (G) [March]
• Sweeney's Polka (D) / (E) [Polka]
• Egan's Polka (D) [Polka]
• Niamh's Polka (G) / (A) [Polka]

copyright © 2005-2011, Gareth Eason