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09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

It’s a fairly hot number – decimalists may prefer 13256278887989457651018865901401704640

Actually it’s really old news, but I’ve not had a takedown notice for a while… Of course, if I do get a takedown notice similar to the ones that have been issued, then it’ll contain the URL of this page, which incidentally is http://pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk/blog/2007/05/22/09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0/
and that of course, has the number in it, so I can reasonably post about it as it’s the title of a web page that was taken down.

The genie has been out of the bottle for a while now. When will these people realise that we want to be able to use things that we pay for in ways that they haven’t thought of yet. We don’t like DRM, because it stops us from using Macs and Linux boxes, not to mention my old Amigas. Their bully boy tactics just irritate the savvy punters, and are they not usually the early adopters – the ones that pay the premiums to prove the new tech before the prices come down to consumer level?

There’s some rather nice designs for shirts with it on at Cafe Press

And don’t forget to get your very own number at Freedom to tinker

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Gatso and bikes

This story really made me chuckle a little today.
v sign biker take by gatso
Basically a guy on a bike had been regularly passing a speed camera above the posted limit, but it was one of those cameras that face the front of the vehicle. Because motorbikes don’t have number plates on the front, this guy thought that he was safe, and at one point even felt cool enough to flick the ‘V’s at the camera while doing 105mph.

This annoyed the local Bedfordshire constabulary, to the extent that they identified the model of the bike with the assistance of BMW, then trawled the DVLA registration database to find out that there were only three of that model of bike locally in the area. (A reasonable assumption from the repeat offences)

They then proceeded to look at each of those and identified Philip Coffey by his leathers and the extra headlights that he had added to the bike.

He was given a years ban from driving for the 10 offences, was let off the 72 penalty points given the ban, and was fined £900 and ordered to pay £600 costs. Of course, as he made his crust by driving buses, he’s lost that job as well.

Now I do consider myself lucky to live in a county where there are no fixed cameras – we have mobile units, but they’re in published locations, and pretty sensible ones if you ask me, well except for the one at Southgate junction, which usually has stationary traffic at any times when I’m going through it. We also have some of the best biking roads in the country, but then most people already know that as attested by the 300+ bikes on the prom every weekend during the summer.

Mind you, auntie beeb has been scaremongering again with her typical tabloid reporting on Week In Week Out this week. They appear to enjoy finding the most extreme, irresponsible arseholes and promoting their antics on television, giving a very distorted view of the biking community.

They also appeared to present a picture which indicates that the number of fatalities was on the increase over a number of years, yet BikeSafe Dyfed-Powys indicates a reduction in fatalities over a number of years.

And one last thing that has been annoying me for a while now:
Birdbox or fake gatso.
(Apologies for the rubbish photo)
It has been vandalised, but it keeps reappearing. Apparently it’s a birdbox…come on – what self respecting bird is going to nest in that thing, that close to the road.

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Mac dying? – It lives!

After a few weeks of instability on the PowerBook, I got pretty fed up with rebooting it so often. I know – Macs don’t need rebooting – they’re really reliable – all that guff.

Well I’d pretty much diagnosed the problem being with the hard drive, it was fairly obvious that the Mac would crash when certain files were accessed, and I’d been getting pretty paranoid about doing backups so if it did die completely, I could resurrect my data.

Today I bit the bullet and bought a new 120GB hard disk, and spent a hour disassembling the PowerBook, and installing the new drive, then had all the fun of re-installing MacOS, and migrating all my old apps and settings over.

Oh well, at least it’s done now, and I’ve got twice as much drive space as I had before.

Oh, and hard drives really shouldn’t rattle when you rock them from side to side. :-S

I also managed to straighten out the bent piece of case that kept popping out the power plug, so it should charge better now.

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Cisco phones

For more information on how to set up the Cisco VOIP phones on an Asterisk server, and a hint or two on where to find the firmwares have a look at Adi’s World who points you at the right 6.3 firmware file to search for – this file will upgrade directly from a version 3 firmware phone, where the version 8 firmware fails.

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Fellow of the FSFEurope

I finally got round to joining the Free Software Foundation Europe today, so I’ve got a new email address.
If you think that it’s going on here, then I’m afraid not, what with the amount of spam this blog already receives.

I’m looking forward to getting my OpenPGP card through the post, and getting it interface with the Mac.

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VOIP Cisco 7940

Well, my Cisco 7940 IP phone arrived yeaterday, and I spent a while poking around on the web trying to upgrade it to SIP firmware to work with the asterisk exchange.

It arrived with me with version 3 SCCP firmware, and I had downloaded the Version 8 SIP firmware from the Cisco site – it’s available there for free, you just have to get it from an anonymous ftp server.

It appears though that you cannot do a single stage upgrade from version 3 to version 8, and that I was pretty stuck unless I could find an intermediate firmware – a version 6 sounded like the best bet. Now I don’t have a Cisco support contract for this – I believe from what I was reading that it’s not very expensive for one of these phones, but still, it goes against my better judgement. A little bit more poking around in various places, and I found voip-info.org a really useful source of information about voip of all sorts.

So I eventually managed to follow some of the instructions I found there, and got the phone upgraded to SIP version 6, then I had to get it integrated with the rest off the network.

I’ve already got a couple of PAP2’s hooked into an asterisk exchange, so I was already pretty familiar with that end of things, and it just needed me to add an entry for each line on the phone.

Then comes the fun bit, customising the graphics and services menu with xml served off a local web server, so now I’ve got tux on my 7940, and I’m writing some scripts for the web server to output XML for the phone.

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iCal web publishing

iCal is a great application, but there are some things about it that bug me.

Apple really want you to pay money for their .mac service, and as such if you want to publish your calendars, it’s either that or set up WebDAV. Now I run my own server, and I could probably install WebDAV, but I’m really not that inclined to, so I decided to use a more portable way to publish my iCal files on the web server, and do it automatically in the background.

I was chatting with James today about the solution that I use that pushes the calendar from this laptop, which I regard as the “master” up to the web server, which runs PHP iCalendar. Of course, I use iSync to synchronise with my mobile phone, and I can make appointments on the phone and they will be imported into iCal at next sync, then to be pushed up onto the web at the next update.

But how to send the file to the web server? Personally I love ssh and especially when I have public key authentication set up properly so I don’t need to type my passwords, so I thought that it would seem sensible to use scp to push the files – I already have a hole in the university firewall for ssh into the box, so it will work from anywhere in the world, even without using VPN to connect to the University network.

So I dusted off my slightly rusty Perl skills and started lookiing at the files that iCal produces. I should probably explain that I used Sunbird for a while, but it was just too buggy to be used as a day-to-day application, so I switched to iCal.

So I now have a perl script which runs from my crontab every 15 minutes, and finds the title of the iCal file from inside the file, because iCal uses a unique name for each file, which is not very user friendly. It then compares each file title with a list of calendars to upload to the server and uses scp to copy the file onto the web server.

It’s currently pretty messy, still has a load of commented out debug code, and really needs a tidy up and a little more intelligence adding, but it works, and works well.

You can’t just copy this into a directory and run it – you really have to understand Perl to be able to customise it for your own use, but please feel free to use it as a starting point for your own development, and if you find it useful, please drop me a line.

You can find the perl program file, and my example data file in this directory.

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LED Badges again

It’s visit day tomorrow, and I’ll be wearing my LED Badge.

I just had a comment on my last post from Brian, who would like a look at my source code, so I’ve put it in a directory for you all to download.

It’s a couple of java source files, which I have packaged into a jar file for you to download – there’s no compiled code in there only the source, I’ve only used the jar file to preserve the directory structure.

Anyway, it uses the serial comms libraries from rxtx.org, so you’ll have to download those, and install the runtime libraries in the correct place for your platform, but the program is in java, so change the serial port name in the code, compile it and run it.

Again, it’s not the prettiest of code at this point, but it serves the purpose at the moment, and when I get the time, I’ll try to improve and enhance the code.

Enjoy – you can download the code here: LED Badge java program code.

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TomTom again

Erk!

I turned the TomTom back on in navigation mode this morning, and it had lost all my preferences – including the pairing to the hands free kit.

I’m back to using the Garmin for wardriving until the blutooth gps stuff is a little better sorted – at least I’ve got that option for now, and at least I can use the naviagation at the same time.

It seemed too good to be true when it was as easy as it first appeared.

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TomTom as a Bluetooth GPS

I was chatting with Steve Kingston earlier today, and it came up that he had managed to hack his TomTom Go to deliver NMEA GPS data through bluetooth to his Mac laptop. I’ve currently got 2 GPS receivers in the car – one in the TomTom for directions, and the second wired to a serial port on the laptop for when I’m wardriving and doing other GPS related stuff on the laptop.

I was only thinking the other day how much nicer it would be to be able to connect to the TomTom through bluetooth, 1. it would get rid of a gadget in the car, and 2. it would get rid of the cable connection to the laptop.

So I took a look at Steve’s post and Roberto Piola’s site and managed to get it working. The only gripe I have is that when you use the TomTom in Bluetooth GPS mode, you lose all the route finding functionality – basically you just get a black screen with a few status lines. You can’t have everything at once, and I’ll take a look at some of the scripts and see if it’s possible to run this in the background while the navigation continues. Oh, and the fact that you have to hard-reset to get out of the application – just leaves a little to be desired.