(Friday 11th February 2005)Recently, during a discussion in #adsl, I discovered my Speedtouch 510 router config file had allow rules that enabled the vendor to bypass the firewall, and by inference, gain access to my PC. Although hardly a security risk, I see no good reason why marge.dslshop.co.uk [217.196.1.140] should have added these lines:
rule create chain=source index=3 dst=217.196.1.140 action=accept
rule create chain=sink index=3 src=217.196.1.140 action=accept
I also wonder why AOL, who modify the router config anyway, don't inform customers of this, or delete these rules. I've since taken those lines out. Ironically, the discussion over whether or not a software firewall increased protection alongside the hardware router, was somewhat pointless in view of the fact that I inadvertently sent demon my master screenname password along with the ini file for him to assess any security loopholes!
Been a crazy busy week at work, leaving little time for anything else. Had my Access exam on Monday - the dissipation of all the related stress afterwards was wonderful! It won't last .... soon I'll have the tension associated with knowing the results are imminent.
(Thursday 3rd February 2005)An account of our trip to Oxford.
(Wednesday 2nd February 2005)Back from a thoroughly enjoyable trip to Oxford, I decided to write a few paragraphs about it, as separate articles have been sadly lacking in this blog for some time (and it postpones having to archive another index page). I re-read the story of my trip down to Oxford in October 2003 and was struck by how ironic the last paragraph now sounds .... I have added an edit.
(Thursday 27th January 2005)And today is another anniversary. It brings back memories of standing in Etal Lane waiting in turn to be dealt with. As I stood watching a 15 year old joyrider and a drunk in front of me, I couldn't help thinking "what am I doing here?!" I remember whispering to DC Gray, "do you think people might just assume I work here?"
(Wednesday 26th January 2005)Looking forward to a weekend in Oxford, celebrating my wedding anniversary. I'm making the most of these last few months Louise is at the university, and I know I'll miss the frequent trips down when she finishes her course in the summer. To add a bit of extra luxury to the weekend, we've booked a room at the Holiday Inn. We've stayed there on a couple of other occasions, but this might be the last time, as the price doubles during the summer months. Roll on Friday!
I've got plenty to look forward to though. Starting a new job next month, then Uncle Noel's 90th birthday celebrations in March, which will be a real blast from the past. Cheam was somewhere I enjoyed staying during the year I lived in London and it'll be strange to visit again some 16 years later!
(Wednesday 19th January 2005)HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY EMILY! It's a strange feeling, seeing your youngest child reach "adulthood". I remember when even the days until she started school seemed interminable - I wouldn't have believed it possible that in the blink of an eye, all four would be over 18. As with starting school, it's a little bit like the end of an era, and much more so when it's almost certainly your last child. Still, there are compensations - doing what I want and not having to worry about childcare is the biggest bonus.
(Monday 17th January 2005)Just to put the record straight after the flurry of comments in the guestbook, MustHaveThatGadget from their comment, are refunding the cost in full. I'm sure further measures will not be necessary.
(Thursday 13th January 2005)When I said that my new GPS was an exercise in frustration I wasn't kidding. It turns out that this model from Cobra will not work in the UK. So what are MustHaveThatGadget doing, selling it in the UK? Worse, they don't give any indication that it is totally unfit for its purpose. Anyone thinking of buying a GPS, I would strongly recommend you go along to a local walking shop where there is usually someone available to offer support and advice, and customer care if anything goes wrong. My GPS has now been sent back, hopefully for a trouble free refund. Admittedly Cobra themselves offered to upgrade my model at no extra cost, to one which would work in the UK, but this would still have involved expensive postage charges and I'd probably have ended up with an all singing, all dancing GPS with features I don't need.
(Wednesday 5th January 2005)So the fake sites have gone - thanks to Paul at SEVENtwentyfour.com for letting me know! New PC is, I hope, finally up and running and I now must get on with some well overdue Access work in preparation for the exam at the end of this month. Spent a pleasant afternoon achieving nothing very much with Michael in an attempt to overclock the processor - seems it will take a 30 mhz increase using the Administrator profile, but mine just won't have it. In the course of all this, I managed to download what might well be the most lame program I have yet seen. Supposedly a hardware monitor from Biostar, it is absolutely useless, producing nothing more than a lame duck walking across the screen having hatched from an egg (yes really!). Also added a nice photo of Lucy and Emily to the photopage.
(Thursday 30th December)Yes, it is interesting to note that the fake sites are still running - makes me wonder whether informing PayPal and Ebay did any good at all. Tomorrow should see the new PC built and Windows reinstalled over the weekend and my old PC given to Rosie with a new install of XP for her too.
Ebuyer haven't improved at all since the days of MisterX and Ebuyerdotcon. They've made a huge mistake over the price of some dual layer DVDs which a lot of people are taking advantage of. Not me! Apparently I already have an account so I can't register a new one. Entering details to be reminded of my login should have been a simple matter, not the utter farce it's turned out to be. EBUYER - I KNOW MY NAME, POSTCODE AND PHONE NUMBER STOP TELLING ME THE DETAILS ARE INCORRECT!!!
(Monday 27th December)Thanks for the guestbook message Yves! I will give Gremlins a try. It isn't worth using my old PC for a non Microsoft OS as I have plans to give it to Rosie, rescuing the hard drives and replacing them with hers. Apart from the graphics card, it's a big improvement on her current computer. My laptop runs mandrake (and XP), for now that will have to do. And no, the new PC isn't built yet, I'm still waiting for most of the parts to arrive. The major pain is going to be reinstalling Windows, although it'll give me a chance to test my new slipstreamed install of SP2.
The new photo was taken from yesterday's walk in the Cheviots with Anne, Rosie and Louise, you can view the full size picture and another one here.
Several new "toys" I got for christmas have been nothing but an exercise in frustration! The GPS seems incapable of displaying the location in a way that anyone can understand .... changing the settings so that lat/long are now grid references hasn't made it any more helpful, since the GR bear no relation to the actual map. It is so much easier to use a map and compass! Anyone could learn to navigate in a tenth of the time it would take them to get anything useful out of this so called navigational aid. Apart from anything else, it is just too cold to stand around wondering how a route between two waymarks is meant to be followed when it's just a line on the screen.
When I get sick of the GPS, I can turn to that equally useless piece of equipment, the memory stick. KeySafe, which told me it had failed to create a privacy zone, seems to have done so after all and now I can't see or access half the memory, as it's not recognising any of the passwords I thought I might have used. Current best suggestion is to send it back to the supplier as faulty.
(Thursday 23rd December)I'm beginning to hope I might have got away with 3 points on my license and a £60 fine, having received only one letter from the police, and that was some time ago. Even though I would have expected two separate letters, I would have thought they would both have arrived within 10 days of each other, at the outside, for two offences on the same day (same hour).
Did a firmware upgrade for the router because I was sick of having no logs! Some brief DNS problems afterwards - Demon, you are truly brilliant!
Got two scam emails today, one purporting to come from Ebay, the other from PayPal. How do people fall for these things? The web address where you were urged to input contact details clearly wasn't Ebay/PayPal, nor was it any secure site. PayPal did come up with a "domain name mismatch" in Firefox, which would have been warning enough. The other give away is the email address these were sent to. Obviously harvested from somewhere, this is not an address I would register on any site like Ebay or PayPal, (a pretty useful benefit of a domain with up to 100 addresses available to use).
All the stuff I need for my new computer is now ordered - in fact the RAM is bought and is sitting in this PC for the time being. I might as well have 1 gig, although the 400mhz is wasted on a processor limited to a 266 FSB. Never mind, soon have my SFF up and running, especially as they arrive semi-assembled, which will make a pleasant change.
(Saturday 18th December)This time next week it'll be halfway through Xmas day, what a horrible thought! I hate all the hype that surrounds christmas, people panicking over how many shopping days are left etc. Last year, I think I did all my xmas shopping in one evening, only a few days before the day itself. Combined with ordering as much as possible online, it really wasn't a big problem.
Louise is now home for a while, which is nice. We had a similar panic to last year however, when she discovered she was once again without any form of offical ID, and a flight to catch to Swansea on the 27th December. After a lot of cursing Air Wales and their "idiotic" rules ("it's only an internal flight, you don't need photo ID for the coach and I could just as easily blow up a bus as a plane!") she contacted them to find fortunately, they would accept her NUS card.
As well as the DVD-RW, I've now got a new digital camera and a GPS to play with. Like most gadgets these days, the GPS and camera have arrived with offputting, lengthy instructions. Rather ironically, the GPS took a long time getting here, having got lost en route. I hope it's a bit better at finding the way when I use it for walking!
(Wednesday 15th December)My new DVD-RW and digital camera have arrived, which is nice. Early christmas presents, but I might as well start using them. The DVD RW is temporarily fitted in my PC, which looks a bit strange as it's black and really meant as part of the planned upgrade - and as I don't have any blank DVDs it's not even a lot of use! I seem to be coming in for a lot of stick regarding these speeding fines if the guestbook is anything to go by. However, I still maintain these "safety enforcement vans" are deliberately placed to catch people where they would have to brake in an unnatural manner to avoid going over 30mph, ie wide open, empty downhill sections of road. That doesn't excuse being caught going uphill in the other direction I suppose.
(Friday 10th December)YAY! 2mb now! Amusing to see that the official email from AOL notifying me of this came through to the spam folder on that account (their own filtering rules!)
Phew .... finally finished all the corrections pointed out by Paul at SEVENtwentyfour. Many, many thanks for this, while the majority of the links had simply moved, I had some glaring errors. As well as this, Firefox is nowhere near as forgiving when it comes to shoddy code and I had some amendments to make in this respect. Overall, I'm very pleased with this excellent service and the prompt response I got whenever I contacted them. It has been a useful (if time consuming) exercise. I have learned that while links might add interest to a page, there is a payback in terms of maintenance.
Had my last evening class tonight before the xmas break, and spent a riveting evening creating SQL Union queries in Access :/
(Saturday 4th December)Finally got round to archiving yet another page. Good to hear from Yves again, and yes, I have been using Firefox now for some time. As you rightly state, it is an ideal alternative to the security issues which have plagued Internet Explorer since its integration into Microsoft's OS's, as that ensured more than 90% of people would use it and make it an ideal target.
I've upgraded to 2mb, which ought to be activated in a few days. One thing leads to another, and I'm already planning a new computer and will ask people for the less expensive components for xmas presents, ie the DVD-RW, which I can also use temporarily in this PC. I thought someone might have bought the new RAM, till I realised that 1 gig DDR 400mhz RAM was going to set me back £104!
I tried AOL's "perk" of McAffee AV software, available free to members, hoping it might be a solution to my Zone Alarm Issues. However, McAffee seems to have killed the network, so I'm ditching it. Thanks AOL! That was really helpful, even more helpful that I couldn't reach any of your technical advisors to complain. It wasn't even enough to disable it, I had to completely uninstall.
Such a lot of expense looming up ... I want this new PC, and I need a decent digital camera. I have quite a bit to pay back over xmas, as well as presents to buy. I'm hoping I can put my speeding fines off as long as possible. I also need to top up Emily's savings account so she has as much as the others did when she reaches 18. And her IT teacher is trying to organise a school trip to the home of Google which is California!
(Sunday 27th November)Back from a weekend in Leeds, and I have a Powerpoint exam to look forward to on Wednesday. Although there's plenty going on, I don't seem to have enough spare time to write articles or do anything with the website, other than keep the blog up to date. Just finished installing Sun's Java software on the two desktop PCs and ditching Microsoft's JVM (with its dubious sandboxing) in a continued quest to make browsing the net a safer activity.
(Tuesday 22nd November)I love getting emails (and guestbook comments) out of the blue! Today I had an email from Rob at SEVENtwentyfour, pointing out an error with one of the links on the Oxford page. His explanation: "As recommended by the Robot Guidelines, this email is to explain our robot's visit to your site, and to let you know about one of the problems we found. We don't store or publish the content of your pages, but rather use the link information to update our map of the World Wide Web."
I don't have a problem with that .... it's extremely useful to have errors pointed out.
To read more archive weblogs, click here which will take you to the previous archive, which in turn contains a link to the one before that.