David Morris – brassedoff.net

It’s nice to see that sometimes other IT have problems with searching:

(You’ll need to view the full image to see what I mean)

One the nice features of living where we do is the maze of gennels that provide easy pedestrian access through large parts of the estate. We’re also on the edge of the estate as well, and no more than 10 minutes walk from open countryside with lots of fields and trails to explore. This is even more fun now we’ve got a dog. He might be short in the leg department (he does have the correct number, it’s just that they’re not very long), but he seems to enjoy a good walk. So, pooch (Pebble) made some noises about wanting to go out for a walk yesterday evening around 6pm, and I was happy to oblige.

We ended up coming up a back lane on the edge of estate with houses on one side and hedgerow and fields on the other. The only problem is that at the top of this lane there are some stables and people regularly walk and ride their mighty steeds up here. Consequently, the path gets more than its fair share of horse poo. Pebble seems to find this fasciniating. He seems to have a fascination for anything that’s come out of the back end of an animal; cat, dog, horse…

So, I had him on a short lead and we ended up slaloming our way up the path, avoiding the scattered piles of assorted sh*t. Horses are a bigger problem ‘cos they, err, produce bigger piles and easily take up half the width of the path, but they seem to coordinate their droppings so they drop on alternate sides of the path.

I must be getting old. We had one of these doing the process control on the mill at Brinsworth where I worked after I graduated, and until about six years ago, we had one driving some analytical equipment where I’m working now. The thing that gets me is the disc size and capacity.

There’s yet another data loss making the news. This time, someone related to the West Midlands Police force has lost a memory stick and the Home Secretary has been informed about the loss.

Whilst I can accept that memory sticks will get lost; after all, they’re usually transported in a pocket and probably pulled out with keys or cash, there’s no excuse for not encrypting the data stored on them.

Truecrypt is a free bit of software and takes less than 10 minutes to set up and install on a memory stick.

I’ve been using it for several months on my memory stick. There’s nothing particularly sensitive on my stick, but if I’m going to initially ask then demand that our users use this type of software, I need to lead by example.

Last week, I recruited four guinea pigs for the software as we start to widen the trial. After sitting with each of them for 15 minutes (most of which was taken waiting for the memory stick to format), they all went away happy that using the encryption tool was nothing more than a 30 second process every time you insert your memory stick into your PC.

C’mon people. Get real. It’s free software. It doesn’t stop you losing the things, but makes it unlikely to impossible that anyone finding a memory stick is going to be able to recover the data without knowledge of the passphrase.

It also has other users. You could create a ’secure’ area on your exitsing hard drive for storage of particularly sensitive information (bank details etc). I’m not sure what the implications would be of doing that on a work computer though. Hmmm. One to think about there!

Oh, if, dear reader, you’re already a Truecrypt convert, I note that version 6 is Vista-compatible. The only thing I’d caution against is that the encryption technologies used may be illegal in some countries.

This was a letter to the Managing Director of First Group South Yorkshire…

10 September 2008

Dear Mr Hamilton,

Yesterday evening, I was, as I have done for the last 10 years, cycling home from work between Attercliffe and Ballifield. At Handsworth, near the Methodist Church, I was carved up badly by one of your buses as he pulled in to a bus stop, a manoeuvre which necessitated me pulling out sharply into the traffic stream on the stretch of dual carriageway in order to maintain my progress. Perhaps I should point out at this point that I wear a bright yellow jacket and have regulation lights on the bike which were on at the time.

As I then had suspicions about the driver in question (call it a cyclists sixth sense if you want), I maintained the advised position on the road rather than tucking in to the kerb which I normally do to avoid impeding the flow of traffic any more than necessary.

As I descended Handsworth Hill at around 25mph (I have a speedometer on my bike), your driver was on the wrong side of the road as we approached Ballifield Drive attempting to pass me, despite me clearly signalling right, arm fully extended at right angles to my body. At this point, your driver was also making rude and abusive gestures to me which must have been visible to passengers on board.

When he stopped at the next stop, I completed my manoeuvre, being close to my destination, and challenged him from across the road. I was, needless to say, both angry and extremely shaken up by this time. More rude and abusive gestures followed from your driver and we went our separate ways.

All this happened around 18:40 yesterday (9^th September). If I had been able to contact anyone in your organisation last night, I would have probably vented off in an unappealing manner. As it is, in the cold light of day, I still feel angry, and in fact have gone to work in the car today.

I’m sure you agree with me that this sort of conduct from a so-called professional bus driver is not the sort of behaviour the general public would expect to see and showed a marked lack of respect for other road users. This at a time when anecdotally there are more cyclists on the road as the price of fuel causes many people to look to alternatives to the car.

I look forward to hearing your comments regarding this event.

(For the record, it was, I believe, the 52 bus, vehicle number [possibly] 60695, driver by a white young-ish male, very short to skinhead hair cut).

Regards,

XBox 360, Microsoft USB wireless adapter. Everything working last weekend. Now: IP address failed, clueless at the moment as to what’s causing it.

The XBox is associating withe th wireless network. I can see that on the access point (although I don’t see the IP address of the XBox). The Xbox has a static IP address of 192.168.199.26 and my router (a Cisco 877) has static port mapping for the necessary ports and the IP address of the XBox  because the 877 doens’t support uPnP.

So, everything looks good. There are no IP conflicts on the network (I can’t ping 192.168.199.26 from another device on my LAN), so why does the XBox keep giving me “IP address failed”? What’s left to check?

Wireless association : check

Correct static IP address : check

Correct gateway : check

Correct subnet mask : check

Correct DNS : check

I’ll freely admit to being a bit stumped at the moment. The only thing that’s changed on the LAN is my new NAS, and that’s just got the one IP address of 192.168.199.7, and if there were a conflict, I’d see it, but I can connect to the NAS OK and I’ve checked that there isn’t a second IP address lurking around on the interface.

It’s probably something blindly obvious, but I’m damned if I can see it, and I’ve been hacking around with this for around three hours trying to get it working. Ive even gone back to “Factory default conditions” on the network settings and started again.

Any suggestions welcomed…