David Morris - brassedoff.net

On Saturday, Mrs Woolforbrains and I went to the IWA National Festival near Wolverhampton. It’s the first time either of us have ever visited one of the big canal-related national festivals, and I think I can state unequivocally that we were both impressed by the event and the organisation. Hundreds of boats, thousands of visitors, hundreds of exhibitors and although it had the potential to be a mud-bath of Glastonbury proportions, some judicious use of bark chippings and trackways courtesy of the WRG avoided a major mess.

Doing what I do for a day job brings me in to contact with many non-native English speakers (apart from the Americans!) who fortunately speak English much better than I do their language. We were very worried therefore when one of our German colleagues confided that he would be completely naked unless we could get his Blackberry password sorted out. Was this some sort of protest? “Get my Blackberry password sorted or I’m going to parade naked through the streets of my German home town and embarrass you with the pictures an media coverage”?

There were several tense moments in the office until one of the guys realised that what we had on our hands was in fact an example of phonetic spelling. Instead of saying ‘naked’ how you say it, think of the ‘a’ as in ‘at’ rather than as in ‘hay’ and you’ll see what he meant.

In these days of rising energy prices, someone’s tried to put some science behind the cost of making a cuppa. As someone who drinks a  lot of tea, this clearly is very important to me!

Read this posting for more details

That pretty much sums up how I felt this morning when I found out that the Seth Ellis web site had been hacked. Like most things, I suppose ultimately it was my own fault. I left the php scripts writable by the web server so I could update them via the Joomla portal interface, and then I wasn’t running the latest version of the software, the absolute latest version of which may of may not have fixed the vulnerability that I reckon I got exploted by.

Of course, it’s left me feeling upset and guilty, but as I suspect is usual with these things, I’m angry with myself for, as an IT professional, letting this thing happen, and mad at the dirty little scumbags that spend all their time going around looking for and infecting systems in the first place.

Before anyone asks the obvious, yes, I’ve got backups. I replicate the whole of the web server tree to another location every night. The hack happened, as dictade by the Law of Sod, just before the replication,  so, yes, I replicated the screwed up site.

What have I learned from this?

1. I need better backups- probably a two or three generation backup like we sue at work and I insist on for all our production environments

2. I need to make sure I don’t leave any vulnerable files writable by anything (including me)

3. I need to shift off my servers to a machine I don’t use for domestic purposes; either that or find a way of locking them down to a chrooted environment.

I’ve tracked down the bit of software that insisted on PHP safe_mode being turned off. I won’t be running gallery2 for a while which is a pity. Joomla doesn’t  need safe_mode off, neither does Wordpress and those are the two important applications for me at the moment. Gallery2 is nice, but it’s not nice enough for me to have to run a compromisable server.

We look upon our treatment of old computers (WEEE waste) as environmentally friendly in that we make a special effort to collect them all up in a single location and send them to an approved source for recycling… or so we hope. I really hope that our old gear doesn’t end up at this dump in Ghana. It’s frightening that changing the designation of this kit to reusable second hand goods seems to get around any export issues, especially when we try to ensure that the gear when we’ve done with it is unusable, especially the hard drives (after all, we wouldn’t want any data to be recovered). Perhaps a phone call to our recyclers will be in order on Monday morning to check up on the route old kit takes. We have a duty of care (in my opinion) to make sure we aren’t indirectly dumping it in a third world country for kids to pick their way over, polluting their drinking water and their seas.

We’ve had a bit of downtime on the home server over the last couple of days. The power supply gave up the ghost on Friday morning at 4am (I know this because the Phidget LCD panel froze when the machine died). I managed to get the server back up minus one of the disc drives, but it was on a knife edge. eBuyer and Citylink duly obliged with a shiny new 650 watt Antec TruePower Trio PSU this morning, and balance has once again been restored to the local blogosphere.

I love free software. I use free software at home and at work. I was delighted to be able to save hours of work today with two bits of free software.  Read on to find out how.

We had several new machines delivered today for a department at work. Rather nice machines, all with Windows XP (we have no plans to roll out Vista just yet). As they were all identical, it seemed a pity that we had to set each one up individually, but the last time we tried to ghost a machine, it failed dismally, so my tech-squad were reluctant to try again.

I convinced them that it should work, so best foot forward, I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla and  installed it on a USB memory stick. 30 minutes later, we’d managed to put an image of one of the new machines on to a Windows server. The acid test was whether or not it would restore and work, and sure enough, five minutes later, we still had a working machine. One of my guys then installed all the other stuff needed on the machine (Acrobat reader, Office, VNC, SMS etc) and we re-cloned it. It took roughly two hours to set up the base software on the machine, so if all went to plan, we’d save hours of time.

The first three machines restored without a hitch. The problem started with the fourth when it decided that the SATA hard disc wasn’t SDA, it was going to be SDB instead. (Clonezilla uses a Linux [Debian] base to save and restore partitions hence the naming convention). No idea why it came up with this, but it effectively stopped us restoring to those machines. Ever optimistic, I unplugged the SATA DVD on the machines that were giving us the problem and the restore worked fine. Once restored, we plugged the DVD drive back in, booted Windows and everything was fine. We had just set up seven machines in an afternoon - something which, if not multi-tasking, would have taken a couple of days. I don’t know if the naming was specific to the machines we were setting up (Dell Optiplex 755’s), but if anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment.

The second result for me today was bringing an idea Ihas last night whilst cycling home. Producing nicely formatted output, especially PDFs is an issue for us. We use Java for our in-house desktop applications, and make a lot of use of Bruno Lowagie’s excellent iText library. Creating forms from scratch is laborious and time consuming, not to mention it needs a lot of boring code. The idea that I had was to use Acrobat forms to create placeholders for the variable text, creating PDF templates for documents. Someone may read this and say “of course, that’s obvious, I’m surprised you weren’t already doing that”, and do you know, 55 lines of proof-of-concept code later, that’s exactly what I was saying to myself as well. I was so annoyed that I hadn’t spotted that little gem months ago. It would have saved so much buggering about. Needless to say, I don’t think we’ll be creating any PDFs from scratch any more. It’s going to make a huge difference for our document production at work and could easily save a fortune.

What is black?
Burnt toast is black
Coloured like the black tarmac

What is white?
A white cat is white
With limelight eyesight

What is pink?
A soft drink is pink
Next to the skating rink

What is green?
A leaf is green
Fluttering down to a bowling green

What is blue?
Glue is blue
Left upon the marble statue

What is yellow?
A song is yellow
Its melody played upon a cello

What is red?
Cherrys are red
Off the tree they fall on the head

What is violet?
A highlighter is violet
On the table in the twilight

What is orange?
What oranges are orange
Just orange

By Daniel morris, aged 8.

I decided to take the plung and have a go at writing a Wordpress theme for a new venture Mrs Woolforbrains is working on. I can do the PHP (backend scripting code), but I’m not a designer. However, with the playing about I’ve done recently with the Kiveton 2009 web site, I realised that CSS had come a long way from being an easy way to change a few colours on a page, so perhaps it was time to trawl around a few web sites and see what I could come up with.

So far, it’s not brilliant, but it’s not finished yet. I started with a completely clean sheet, a new theme in a  new subdirectory. I’ve had to create all the graphics from scratch as well.. not many so far, but there are more to do. I fancy having rounded ends on the post headings and I haven’t given much though yet to the sidebars. It’s going to be a bit on the minimalist side, but it’s a start in the right direction.

Cycling home from work a couple of nights ago, I was struck (not literally) by the number of buses. There used to be the old adage of buses being pack animals? Well it was a bit like that at Darnall on Wednesday evening.

Let me set the scene. There are two major bus companies plying their trade in Sheffield - First Group and Stagecoach. I don’t quite know how it works, not being a bussy person generally (my public transport tends to be tram or train), but they both run services on the 52 route which in t’olden days used to run from Woodhouse to Crookes. These days there seems to be an unlimited number of variations on that, but I digress…

Anyway, there we are, at darnall and it’s instant traffic jam. No less than four, yes shouting for the hard of reading,FOUR 52 service buses at Darnall, all trying to get the best spot to get passengers on board. Two First single deckers and the same number from Stagecoach. What I’ve observed in the past is that when you get this type of scenario, the two companies’ drivers seem to indulge in a turf war: “They’re MY passengers”. “No they’re not, they’re mine and I’m going to block you from getting to the bus stop first”. What happens next is that there’s an almighty melee of buses and scant regard is paid to any other road users.

“Sorry, was that a cyclist I nearly knocked off his bike? Not to worry, at least I’ll get to the next bus stop before that stinky {insert name of rival company} driver”.

The best plan is to stay well away from the pack animals.

Why the reference to the Iron Lady? Once upon a time, Sheffield used to have an efficient bus system until the previous Conservative government deregulated the buses and opened them up to private competition. Cue two companies…