tensixtyone

This morning I had the wondrous privilege of travelling on the packed commuter service from Widnes to Birchwood. This service has a bad record, for a commuter service you would expect that it would have the correct number of carriages, this service demands at least four but it regularly turns up with just two, causing everyone to try and ram in.

At Warrington station we had a “complainer” as I call them, cursing and swearing about the train company and how he doesn’t like to be cramed into small places. The guy did have a point, and I’ve often said similar things. The issue I had was this guy’s persistence that it was his right to get on the train and he proceeded to swear at the first person who responded with “no room”.

We arrived at Birchwood station, a First Transpennie station, we were greeted by ticket inspectors, several people complained about the train and the general tone we were greated with was “Oh, East Midlands? Not our company”. Privatisation has really done nothing for the network except split up the “blame” to different companies who don’t give a damn. On our line, the City Line from Liverpool to Manchester, we have 3 operators. Northern Rail, First Transpennie, and East Midlands. Northern operate the local services stopping at all stations and also own the “minor” stations, First Transpennie operate a single service through this line own the bigger stations (Warrington, Birchwood). So investment and ownership is very split, and so is the responsibility.

I suspect with British Rail, we would have a worse overall service but at least the responsibility is centralised, if the trains failed it was their fault. The goverment belived that privatisation would bring new investment into the service, instead local services have stagnated while money earning routes, such as the West Coast Mainline see massive investment.

It’s past the point of saving, lets just hope the goverment notices and works something out.

In the North-West, we have many local mailing lists the “geek” type seem to revolve around, one of the biggest is Geekup, and others like Free Software Manchester, ManLUG, LivLUG exist for the local FOSS enthusiasts to discuss their interests.

Each list have their own ethos, and the regular group of users set the tone, in terms of Geekup, the list is full of entrepreneurs or “Web 2.0″ gurus. Most of the Geekup discussions revolves around Web Development or business issues. Manchester Free Software, on the other hand, discusses free software, its usage, and hot topics in the world.

Sometimes, these two lists collide.

I make reference to a mention of a Geekup School, A area or plan to educate people in the Geekup area and a chance of the entrepreneurs on the list to possibly use it to further their business. Recently this was cross posted onto the Manchester Free Software list in which Dave Page replied explaining about the existing Zion Centre and its current project to allow access to pool computers.

This response was interpreted as Dave wanting to “further free software”.

… and this is my point.

At Liverpool LUG, we had a member of Geekup turn up who was obviously trying to network for his business, most of his discussions started with the line of “Well, in my business…”. I can understand that Geekup fosters commercial interest, but with LUGs and Free Software groups, I think we just don’t care.

If we had the similar standpoint, then the separate lists wouldn’t exist in the first place. Taking a assumption that everyone will agree with your standpoint if you cross to another list is wrong, and again, if you assume everyone on a Free Software list is a Stallman wannabe, then your also very wrong.

Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service. – The Guardian

I never knew how true my previous statement would be, while i’m a little late posting a follow-up I have to comment on the media’s perspective of the “technically-able” internet users. It seems if something is hidden in plain sight and discovered by the masses it will be classed as hacking no matter how idiotic it is. The media should change it’s perspective and chastise the BBC for their inepitude.

Of course, it’s easier to blame a bunch of people with no legal department…

With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”. You can now download programs from BBC iPlayer without DRM in a well encoded MP4 format. How? Easy.

First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:

javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()

Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download

The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.

Let me take you back, back to September 2003. I was working for Halton Borough Council as a phone jocky. I made a few posts which got me into some trouble. At the time I removed them from my site and I’ve never been able to extract them back out… until now.

Heres a prime example of the skills of the councillors running the Halton area… Be warned this may not be sutable viewing for computer literate people…

People reading this obviously wont appreciate the font layout and size he used…lets just say size 24 font, on 1280×1024 thats just a little excessive.

And also…

“THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH FOR THIS VERY THRILLING E MAIL KM ps its made my DAY

A councillor demonstrating that sarcasim really is the lowest form of wit.

I’d been mulling over getting a N95 for a few weeks, and I was quite hyped up with moving to a intelligent handset (compaired my Nokia 3 Series mobile). To cut a long story short, I didn’t get the handset but Jo got it for me on Orange. I’m 6 days into my usage of the N95, so I feel now is a good time to air some initial views.

First of all, lets start on the obvious. The N95 is Nokia’s convergence product combining 3G, Wifi, and GPS with the Series60 3rd Edition (SymbianOS 9.1) software. The N95 has been a hit with few due to the ever crowded market place (HTC smartphones, iPhone) and a few minor issues. Nokia have recently addressed the major concerns with the launch of the N95-3 which has 8gb on-board storage, better battery, and larger screen, but it could be a little late with the impending arrival of the iPhone in europe. I’ve got the N95-1 version of the phone which was the main release version for the UK.

First boot, the phone showed the traditional “holding hands” Nokia branding, date/time setup, then dropped into the front screen. For the last year or so I’ve been using a HTC Wizard running Windows Mobile and have had to deal with a fair share of awful interface design from the hands of 3rd party developers, but the only way I could describe the front screen that came with the current firmware is a abomination. Orange had decided, in it’s infinite wisdom, to replace the plain and simple Series60 front screen with a menu driven nightmare that chews RAM and makes the whole phone sluggish. I had to get rid of it. I jumped into the familiar menus and tried in vain to remove the horrid front screen, it seems orange don’t want you to remove it.

I might as well admit, I’ve voided my warranty already, in fact, I voided it on the same day. Theres a few details available on-line to change your product ID to a generic Nokia one, then using the official Nokia Software Update to re-flash the phone with a nice generic firmware. This worked a treat. It might just be my opinions, but the Orange menu was just too much of a hindrance on the phone, enough to warrant trying to get rid of it as fast as I could. This is a carrier issue, not really what everyone would experience with the phone.

Bar the misfortune of the Orange menu, the interface is slick and easy to use. The menus for the phone are a tad over-complicated but you soon get used to the location of the commonly used functions. So, i’m keeping it, flashy menus and features win me over. The battery life could do with some improvement, and hopefully Nokia will release the improved battery for N95-1 edition handsets, but I guess only time will tell.

In another news of an unrelated nature, I’ve finally got my arse in gear and decided to get back on the GTD horse. My recent exploits with Gmail and various other Google Apps have spurred me on, my success in organising my mail and rss feeds means I can spend more time on actual stuff…

I’ve previously mentioned Tracks as my central repository for all things GTD related, but the other day I bumped into What’s Next?, which is a boiled down version of Tracks that supports the pure basics of GTD. Running on Rails and SQLite its nice and portable, but I’ve slapped it onto my hosting box at home to avoid the hassle of Ruby instances on a USB drive. Really, I can’t comment on the usage of this new app, but i’m sure i’ll have more details in a few weeks.

In the past I’ve mentioned about how insecure Windows is, generally I try and avoid it for any end users wherever possible. Today I spotted a article on Digg regarding the new Samsung printer drivers, and its got me wondering now, is it actually Windows that’s insecure or the developers who can’t be bothered developing correctly for the platform?

Usually, vendor provided drivers for Linux aren’t the best, and are only used in dire circumstances that a free driver hasn’t been wrote, Samsung’s April 2007 now contain a disturbing “setup” script that essentially gives setuid privileges to XSANE, OpenOffice and possibly a few other applications.

Take a look a this script on linuxfr.org

Without seeing the suwrap script I can’t be sure what it’s actually doing, but I assume its modifying the lib path with the specific Samsung drivers, the initial setup script is just punching massive holes in the security of linux, users would be able to edit /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow with these permissions.

So, are all Windows issues down to the OS?

No POP3 support, I mean, come on guys! Your IMAP backend is based on Courier, you can’t claim that you dont have a compatible POP3 service. Migrating 6,000 emails over to a Textdrive mail account then to Gmail via POP is a pain in the arse.

I just spotted a post by Nik Butler on Pownce saying that CUPS (a widely used printing system for *BSD, Linux and OSX) has been bought by Apple, no licenses will be affected and it’ll remain GPL2, but for how long?

I wonder how exactly Apple can buy this project, It seems that the Dev has been hired by Apple and he’s handed over the rights to Apple. So with Apple at the helm what can we expect? Personally, while i’m not anti-apple, I do feel that theres something to worry about here. With Apple being in control of the copyright it may be relicensed under the Apple opensource license or worse, close sourced.