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barnskiblog

Barney's blog. Just a load of old shite really.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

I like to use Firefox as my browser on almost every OS except OS X (where I use Safari/Camino/Firefox). I also steer clear of IE as much as possible as it's less secure, too tied into the O/S and I hate the way it breeds non-compliance on the web (but that's a rant for another day).
Anyway, there's a problem with security even if you use Firefox, which is that of client-side scripting. Listen to Steve Gibson peoples; this is dangerous, especially if you're unfortunate enough to use Windows (which I still have to do at work sometimes).
IE does have a redeeming feature here, in that it supports security zones. You can use these to set the default security level of all sites such that they can't run client-side scripts, and then explicitly allow the sites you trust. This is a nice feature (but not anywhere near nice enough to lure me back to IE, even if it does have tabbed browsing in v7).
Anyway, there is now a Firefox plug-in that prevents client-side scripts running unless you explicitly allow a site to do so, and it's called noscript. I am now running this on my Winblows XP laptop and it seems to work great. I've yet to try it on other O/S's, but I probably will do so soon.......

Update: I've installed this on both OS X and Linux now, and it works fine on those platforms too. I'm not quite sure why I'd want to do the javascript blocking on OS X or Linux at this point, as neither of them are anywhere near as exposed as Windows is in terms of security risks, but as a general principle, more secure is better....... ;)

Monday, August 28, 2006

Apple - Get a Mac. 3 new TV Ads - "Accident", "Angle/Devil" and "Trust Mac" :)

read more | digg story


One for the geeks:
Sometimes, after a friend/family type person has been convinced to throw out their crappy old Windows9x PC and get a Mac at last, they come back to me with the old "Could I still use my old PC for something? - I don't want to throw it away" question. Or sometimes I get asked "is there a cheap way that I could have somewhere to store files/data?".
I have two solutions that I like to roll out here; one is to buy an external USB2/Firewire disk, and the other (lower-cost) answer is to use that crappy old PC as a home network server. The home network server would, of course, run Linux as it's rock-solid stable, reliable, and most of these types of users are too scared by command lines to do anything to harm their own server (as opposed to using Windows as a home server, which is invariably infested with crap within a few weeks).
One of the troubles with Linux (and I'm happy to accept that there are some, still) is that Webmin is about the only interface that is even remotely friendly for a non-techie to use to administer their home file server, and installing and configuring Linux (even a pared-down install) and Samba and configuring webmin takes an evening of my time.
Now, I'm not saying that I'd move away from Linux at home - I like the flexibility too much, but for a quick and dirty pure file server on old PC hardware, I have recently been very impressed with the BSD-based freeNAS. The install is a bit bumpy, so granny can't do it herself yet, but it is lightweight and fast and supports the whole gamut of network protocols (including SMB, FTP, NFS, SSH and AFP) and is administered purely via a web browser. Furthermore, you can run the O/S from a USB key and use multiple internal disks for software RAID storage.
It will require further investigation before I'd trust it enough to recommend whole-heartedly (how does it deal with failed disks? how can we back it up? if the O/S dies can we get our data back from the storage disks easily?, etc), but from the 10-minute play I had with it, it looks good. :)

Friday, August 25, 2006

Found myself with a few periods of waiting for stuff to happen at work today, with nothing but a web browser to entertain me :)
So, I am looking forward to some movies; Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny and also the Borat movie. But, being a big kid, I was properly laughing at the trailer for Jackass: Number 2. Those boys are never right.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Just read about Pandora, which is an online music service. The difference is that Pandora creates a profile for you and then uses that to make up a personalised web radio stream, based on your musical taste and preferences. It's populated with over half a million songs from unsigned artists and indie labels, and is free (although Non-US residents must enter an America zip code during the registration process to get it to work.)
There's no application - it works from a browser (also the site is slick), and the BBC have an article on it here.

Friday, August 18, 2006
No link, no nuthin, and I know it's not new; it just made me laugh :)



In a prepared statement to the press BA went on to express "pity" for stranded passengers, but urged all customers seeking refunds to "quit their jibba-jabba".

Monday, August 07, 2006

Holy crap! - it's official; VMware for Mac OS X is coming........ the above is on the VMware home page as of this morning.
This is big news for my colleagues and me, as we will finally be able to make the transition to OS X full time (yeah, I know about Parallels, but we have already invested quite a bit of effort in creating VMware images for the work we do).
Also, perhaps the timing of the announcement might be significant with the Apple WWDC keynote today?

digg story


The Vader Sessions.
Genius. :)

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Kevin Rose (creator of digg, host of diggnation and a some time hero of mine) has launched a new personal podcast named Enjoius (link is to iTunes feed). The domain enjoi.us has also been registered, but at the time of posting just redirects to his blog.
Episode 1 is available via iTunes - I have yet to listen to it, and there's little information available, but it looks to be a kind of podcast scratchpad or something. Could be interesting, anyways........

Update: I just listened to ep. 1 and it was recorded March 14th. Seeing as it's now August, this is not really news!
Sorry.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Elephants Dream is the first Open Movie.
What does that mean? Well, it's a short CGI film and was developed purely using Open Source software (mainly blender), primarily to raise awareness about, but also to prove and to improve the tools used to make it (more here). Also, in the true spirit of Open Source and Free Software, it's freely available for you to watch.
I haven't seen it yet, but it's on its way down..... :)


I run a home server (hey, I'm a geek), and I use an old PC for the task. It's doing a sterling job, but it's big and noisy and hot, so I got to thinking about how I could improve things. I really want something small and cool and quiet with an Intel processor, so a Mac Mini would be ideal, but they're kind of pricey for something that will be a glorified file server.
Whilst looking about for an alternative, I recently stumbled across Mini Koobox, which is an interesting product. Koobox sell Linux PC's with Linspire pre-installed, and the Mini Koobox is a small-footprint machine with a Celeron-M or Pentium-M CPU. The price seems OK, too. That said, it's just not a Mac Mini ;)

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Sheeez - a month since my last post. That's pretty poor; I'll try harder from now on ;)
Anyway, check out the GP2X, which is a handheld console-type device that runs Linux. It does all the usual PSP-style stuff, but with Open Source goodness. If you're a hardcore gamer (I'm not) then it's maybe not for you, as the latest titles are not developed for the GP2X platform, but if you have any other interest, I'd say it's worth a look.