in gravyland

A bit quiet here…

Oh and if it seems a little quiet here, check out my Presence Labs blog. That is where all the technical stuff is going these days,…

And also the ValuesHacker podcast blog for values/ethics/future stuff.

Presence Labs

On February 14th, I registered a new business name for a new organisation, Presence Labs, to operate under the umbrella of our existing Barking Owl and carry into the UK sometime soon.

Presence Labs is my new business focussed on Internet presences of all kinds, and particularly building tools to enable websites for the read/write web, blogs, RSS, tagging, social software, user generated content and all that stuff we tend to lump together under that (dare I say it) Web 2.0 word. Let’s call it next generation online presence or something.
And, of course, a new business needs a new blog and domain and website:

presencelabs.com

So, step over there for a look, if you please.

New Stuff

I’m working on some new AJAX-driven interactive web stuff. AJAX is a hype-driven idea that we can make web pages interactive and asynchronous so visitors don’t have to spend all their time waiting for pages to reload.

It is a cool idea. But there is an “As Usual” here. As Usual, it works great for simple things. To make things fast and snappy and with rounded corners is a lot harder and will involve lots of JavaScript with the usual cross-browser issues.

That said, it is fun and enjoyable to work with. And it is very refreshing to break out of the one-thing-per-page idea.

Want to know more? Start at the Wikipedia entry for Ajax (programming).

For my development, I’m using Python on the server, using the Myghty template framework and the Myghty Ajax Toolkit.

Scary Powerbook upgrade

My poor old (12″ Al) Powerbook was suffering. The hard disk was getting slower and slower, but only showing the occasional disk error. This all started while we were away travelling, so I picked up a pocket-sized firewire drive and got a bit serious about backing things up.

So, I’ve suffered with a slow, occasionally stopping, laptop for a while. I finally bit the bullet last week and ordered a new hard drive. Now, this is not really stuff for the faint-hearted. To change the hard disk in this one, you have to remove about 30 screws from all sides of the laptop and pop keys off the keyboard and disconnect this and that. You want to know what you are doing.

But as usual the internet provides: pbfixit.com has detailed guides to help you through assembly and disassembly of your computer and has things like a screw guide you can print out to carefully place the screws on as you remove them. For the hard disk change I was doing, it was about 11 pages of instructions with pictures.

Everything went smoothly, except for removing one cable connector leading to the power on-off switch. Carefully trying to separate the plug from socket pulled the socket off the motherboard inside the laptop. (Honest, I was being really gentle :-) Gulp. A bit of fine soldering work put the socket back on and the on-off switch still works.

All is back to normal now. I chose a Western Digital WD600VE drive, a 60GByte one. Works nice. Seems quiet and cool. And fast.

[Update 20/12/2005: Oh, dear me. Yesterday saw a few more disk I/O errors show up in the system log, and then ended up with an unbootable system. I ran DiskWarrior and recovered a bunch of binaries from /usr/bin, some config files from /etc, and some startup .plist files from /private/etc/mach_init.d. I put them all back in the right places and could boot again. I ran another backup of my home dir and all has been ok since. Will this problem come back? Time will tell. Gulp.]

The Art of Deception

I’m tidying up my books today. I had this huge pile of books by the bed and they ended up in a box while we were away. So, now I’m sorting through the box.

Kevin Mitnick’s book The Art of Deception is all about Social Engineering — human ways of beating security systems and getting access to things you aren’t supposed to. The book is intriguing as it decribes a series of cons, a series of techniques for getting access and information that you aren’t supposed to get by convincing people to give it to you, or setting up the circumstances around the call or request so people just trust you.

The idea is not to use these techniques to go and con people, but to get an awareness of what is possible and how easy it can be to break security when there is somebody you can call up and convince them to give you the password or something

People implementing any sort of IT systems need to read this. Typically we build IT security without considering the human element much. And people who are interested in cons and tricks will enjoy the descriptions of the techniques involved and the stories.

don’t press the big red button

LiveJournal had a power outage. Looks like somebody hit the big red button in the data centre and everything stopped. It took a while to bring things back up again.

Then Brad Fitpatrick wrote a detailed explanation of what happened, and I find it interesting for two reasons:

• Firstly as an example of business blogging where telling your customers what really happened and how you will fix it gives visibility and comfort. See some of the comments below the post.
• Secondly as a lesson on how best attempts to make systems redundant often ends up not working. They had put some good energy into building a distributed system that would support failure of one part, but when the whole lot got turned off at once, it was difficult to get it all started again.

Link via BusinessLogs