xset

Tidying Up IM

// November 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal, Tech

There was an interesting post on Lifehacker yesterday outlining the steps that can be taken to migrate away from an old email address. It was recommended that you use your own hosted domain to ensure that future mail can be managed in a single place.

Well I’m in the process of doing something similar with my IM accounts. In all honesty, I only really have a single account that’s active but it is attached to an email address I simply don’t use for anything any more.

As such, if you have me on MSN then please remove the existing account and replace it with robert@xset.co.uk which is a perfectly valid and working Passport account in its own right.

For those of you not big on the MSN route you can also add robert@xset.co.uk to your GoogleTalk lists and Jabber will be coming along shortly.

Seam Carving to resize images

// October 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

Seam Carving is an image resizing technique that Jeremy originally pointed out to me … whilst on the phone … walking … through the rain … to the pub … funny what you remember eh?

When J and I discussed it, Seam Carving was available as a GIMP plugin which meant installing GIMP.

Well now there’s a whole Seam Carving GUI available to make the job that much easier (not that it was that hard in GIMP) so get it out there and carve baby CARVE!

Sans Interwebs – update

// October 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal, Tech

Well it may not be the ideal but it looks like we might be back online rather sooner than planned thanks to the Wifi offered by the hotel complex.

Whilst it’s still a short term fix it will do for basic browsing and email at home. I still need to find a solution to the bigger issue but I’m sure I can get that sorted.

Hopefully we’ll have the bridge connected on Thursday so we shall see what happens

Time to start encrypting email again!

// October 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

You gotta love this. In the midst of a fiscal crisis and during the one time in our history when data protection and privacy are considered hot topics of the age GCHQ (who may or may not be based in Cheltenham and may or may not listen in on every phone call made in the UK mainland) are already in possession of 1 beeelion pounds with the possibility of a further 11 beeelion pounds to ensure that the boys in blue (and the men in black) will have surveillance access to every single email and web page that passes through the UK.

Personally I’m fine with this… if only because, if I have anything to transmit over the internet that I want to keep away from MI5 / MI6 eyes I encrypt it … heavily.

On an unrelated note, coming up shortly – a guide to using GPG to encrypt your email and secure your privacy for no cost at all

(hat tip – This is Gloucestershire)

I miss Twitter SMS Alerts

// September 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

I can understand why they’ve been switched off (must have been costing them a fortune) but at the same time, I feel like I’ve lost a level of integration with what was my second most prolific online comms channel after this blog.

Truthfully, unless something is jumping up and down at me daily (e.g. this Blog is set as my homepage so I know when it’s been weeks since my last update) then it’s very likely to be forgotten about for weeks at a time. Such is the state with Twitter. Surely they could look at email alerting which would solve the problem in the short term.

What I really need is something similar to the Facebook app for the Blackberry which could keep me updated on Twitter activity via categorized email alerts…

Parallel Processing in PHP

// September 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

Sorry guys – an actual tech post so those of you who don’t want to can read the previous post and dig through Daisy Owl’s archives until I’m done. For the rest of you? Read on…

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Another day another Blackberry

// August 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

I’m a blackberry user – I make no apologies for it. I’m not a Crackberry Head and fairly frequently use the Phone Only setting or even turn it off completely but, as it stands, I am a blackberry user. I’m also a tech head and am very, very demanding of my phones. They have to do an awful lot of heavy lifting and they have to do it well, fast and generally keep my happy. I mean look at the history? I spent an entire weekend getting a phone to sync via bluetooth.

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Choosing a CMS Part 3 – Wordpress

// August 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

Wordpress (in this example Wordpress >= 2.5) is now well known as the number 1 hosted and self installable blog platform in the world. Based on PHP and MySQL (a trend you’ll see continuing as we move through the other apps) the Wordpress application is solid, moderately fast and reasonably customisable.

I’m not the first to write about the possibility of using Wordpress as a CMS, A quick Google will return a couple of hundred tutorials which will walk you through the finer points of customising this platform and creating your site.

Rather than look at specific implementations, let’s consider the features the Wordpress offers that make it suitable for managing an entire site:

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Lock down your PC

// August 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

A quick one for all those who are wondering where they can get free security software for their PCs:

30+ Free Security, Encryption Firewall and Antivirus Apps for Windows

My recomendations?

Antivirus – AVG 8 (but disable the link scanner)

Firewall – Zone Alarm

Encryption – Truecrypt

Digital Signing and Encryption – GnuPG

Although you know what my ultimate recomendation would be right?

I think I won the storage competition.

// August 8th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

A certain Mr Baker and I had (some time ago) a bit of friendly competiton running to see who could amass the most disk storage. I think I just won as it’s not very often you see this much free disk space on a laptop:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              28G  6.9G   22G  25% /
varrun                2.0G  204K  2.0G   1% /var/run
varlock               2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /var/lock
udev                  2.0G  120K  2.0G   1% /dev
devshm                2.0G  624K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   2.0G   44M  1.9G   3% /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1              95M   69M   26M  73% /boot
/dev/sdb2              87G   11G   77G  12% /media/disk
/dev/sdb1             146G   89G   50G  64% /media/passport_
/dev/sdc1              75G   52G   23G  70% /media/ROB'S IPOD
/dev/sdd1              21T  5.1M   21T   1% /media/iscsitest

And for those who like there bytes to be bytes:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             29285564   7232512  22053052  25% /
varrun                 2028576       204   2028372   1% /var/run
varlock                2028576         0   2028576   0% /var/lock
udev                   2028576       120   2028456   1% /dev
devshm                 2028576       624   2027952   1% /dev/shm
lrm                    2028576     45040   1983536   3% /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1                96312     69704     26608  73% /boot
/dev/sdb2             90554320  10791040  79763280  12% /media/disk
/dev/sdb1            152387268  92597084  52110316  64% /media/passport_
/dev/sdc1             77915440  54512064  23403376  70% /media/ROB'S IPOD
/dev/sdd1            21484243840      5152 21484238688   1% /media/iscsitest

This amazing large number comes from one of our new SAN boxes. To put it in context, 21TB (Terrabytes) is enough to store the entire human memory of 14 people, the contents of 3,072 DVD quality movies or 4,404,019 MP3 files.

Oh and Greg? Just in case you think you might be able to come close bear in mind the following:

• This is one of 2 units we have available providing a total of 42TB
• Each unit has only been partitioned to 60%
• Each unit has 30% drive capacity still available

All in all, that’s a lot of pron