Aidan Delaney’s weblog

I remember walking into an unnamed Dublin start-up about five years ago. They specialised in web-development. I think everyone did back then. They thought they were going to conquer the world because they had developed a text entry box for web forms that had a similar interface to MS Word (more like WordPad). It seems the internet has come a long way since then.

Their URL is now invalid; they must have gone out of business. But they had millions in startup capital. Where is that investment capital today? Is it obvious today that a single shitty product won’t sustain a company? Actually the more I think about it the more Free Software makes sense. It’s presumably easier to start a services company than it is to sell software.

I really wonder what I’ll be doing after my PhD.

I met Matthew Garrett, one of the dasher authors, at Guadec 2003. He seemed like a nice bloke and explained the dasher design and philosophy to me. I’ve been casting my eye over it now and then to see how it is going. I fired up the version that is shipped with Gnome 2.8 and created some (very) random text. I’d be interested to here if anyone can get somthing intelligible from a random session with dasher. Here’s what I got:

Kills.’ TeancWtlanek I’Whrase the two stream. Marm variouser!” Call’s. The Vish and she had always get on plunder galiatch texactly somtf Kixmidicus. Start’s Peophermythhy,’ things must be the coscillation,

I have been doing a little portscanning on my local network. It’s my home network so no-one is going to complain. Unfortunatly it looks as if BT leave the telnet port open on their Voyager 200 series router with an admin user called “admin” and admin password set to a totally insecure “admin”. I had already changed my admin password, but I used the IOS (or it seems to be IOS) interface to change the default admin username.

Given all the security concerns on the interweb lately why do they leave an insecure port open with a trivial username and password? I’m really thinking about dumping them and going with a company that has a clue. Their sales staff have lied to me, their technical support staff are MS Word monkies who know where the control panel is and it seems that their product designers now do stupid things with telnet. BT suck.

FYI: It seems that this router has firmware from www.askey.com, in fact it seems to be a BT branded version of their RTA230 which has plenty of ways of foobaring it if you know the admin password. For exmple the HTTP firmware replacement feature could be abused to upload trojaned firmware to the router.

I’m testing the gnome-blog applet that should let me add posts to my blog without using the web interface. It seems that WordPress uses the Blogger API.

I’m supposed to be recovering from my operation last Thursday week, but am feeling no bad effects at the moment. With this in mind I decided to have a go at hacking the MiNDS storage stuff to integrate it with our new look website. It was supposed to be a 10 minute job before I relaxed for the rest of the day….(cue threatening music)

Needless to say, it wasn’t. The development environement on MiNDS> was ravaged by the recent decision by sleeperservice (one of the machines) to assassinate it’s NIC. So polarbear (the other machine) is hosting all MiNDS> services, including login. Polarbear runs PHP5 on Apache 2 which was (I think) the root of my problems. The code was working on my laptop (PHP4) and on sleeperservice (also PHP4) but forgot to work in the PHP5 environment. Luckily, Vish had formatted the sleeperservice harddrive (for some unknown reason) and I had “upgraded” my laptop to PHP5. This meant that I could happily spend the rest of the day banging my head against a retarded bug whilst being further confounded by SSH connections dropping like flies and emacs sessions experiencing severe latency.

I’m going to restart work on my PhD tomorrow because (a) I’m well enough to, and (b) coz I don’t have to use a MiNDS> server. Needless to say we’ll all put in the next week getting the box up to scratch for new members.

I’ve been very quite recently. The reason for this is that I’ve been donating bone marrow. It all started about a month and a half ago when I got back from Spain. The Irish Blood Trasnfusion Service (IBTS) notified me that I was a match to donate marrow for some poor sod who needed it. I said I’d do it, which started about a month of “counciling”. Essentially I was told all the bad things that might happen to me if I donated marrow.

It wasn’t easy to decide to finally go through with the donation, especially because I was putting my fiancee out by not being in England with her for a few weeks. She’s been totally supportive though, so have my family and friends. I did the donation last Thursday.

They called me into hospital last Wednesday in order to fast and prepare for the operation on Thursday morning. During the operation they had to stick approx 600 needles into my ass bone, but I was under general anestethic. The operation went spectacularly well, I awoke on Thursday about noon and my ass felt a bit stiff from the bandaging.

They sent me home on Friday. I slept and ate and slept untill about Monday, when I got really bored. I came into college to abuse the bandwidth for a while on Tuesday and I’m here again today. I’ve not had to take any pain killers at all, which is also surprising. That’s not coz I’m some sadistic individual but because I’ve felt no pain from the operation at all.

So today I’m going to fix up my blog a bit, download X.org 6.8 and figure out how to do transparent coolness with it. I’m then going to go home and wait for Gnome 2.8 to be released, which I’ll download on Friday (hospital check-up tomorrow). I’m taking it easy for the next week so I won’t be online and stuff.