Cricalix.Net

Playing with Zooomr hosting…

pict7391-01 Hosted on Zooomr

Preparing for liftoff Hosted on Zooomr

Early morning launch Hosted on Zooomr

Well, after weeks of problems trying to login to my Zooomr account, it looks like Kris has got TypeKey logins working again - which means I can start using Zooomr again!  The latest feature from Kris is portals - a way to use what appears to be Javascript and DHTML to do area selection on an existing image, and ‘portal’ through to another image.  When you view a portal-enabled image, and mouse over the indicated portal area, you can click on the portal area to get the next photo.  A nifty way to link a series of images, either in a straight path, or branching paths.

Submitted to the Daily Telegraph (for the Sunday edition) and the Times, maybe one of them will publish it:

Sir,

It is with a macabre amusement that I have watched the reporting surrounding the alleged plot to bomb planes flying out of this country. Surely if one was of evil bent, and wished to cause economic and mental chaos, leaking news to the Western intelligence agencies of an impending strike against aircraft is the perfect psychological operation in a post-9/11 world?

Consider that the ensuing panicked response from our esteemed government has had a large financial impact on business directly and indirectly related to airline transport, and has caused members of the public pure grief while trying to travel. I submit that the attacks may or may not have been real, but that the psychological operation against our government and ourselves was, and is, real - and was a resounding success.

So, a friend of mine at a US .edu site drops me a line via IM - some clueless admin just did chmod -R 700 /etc in the name of ‘hardening’ it. Apparently the fact that anyone could read /etc/passwd upset him, and he thought that mode 700 on /etc was a good idea. This promptly broke the box, as quite a few things rely on being able to read /etc, and after all, /etc/passwd doesn’t actually have passwords any more on a modern Linux system.

A quick bit of thought, and checking of my sort-of-close CentOS 4 box, and I was able to supply him with the basic commands to at least fix /etc, passwd, shadow and the whole init scripts area. This still left the fixing of all of /etc, and the first method I came up with was to execute ls -lR | awk ‘{ printf(”%s %s\n”, $1 $9); }’ on a good box, and the bad box, and feed the output to diff. This involves lots of human work though, and that’s bad.

Punted it to a workmate, who suggested find -ls, which works, but prints out the file mode in text, not octal (and to be fair, the initial ls was like that too). This prompted me to delve into the man page for the GNU variant of find, and resulted in

for i in `find /etc -printf "%m,%h/%f\n"` ; do
  P=`echo $i | awk -F, '{print $1}'`;
  F=`echo $i | awk -F, '{print $2}'`;
  echo "chmod $P $F";
done


That could be run on the good box, piped to a file and copied to the bad box to recover the full set of permissions on /etc.

That clueless admin? He’s had his privileges revoked, and will probably get a right chewing out.

I originally had a different post here today regarding a neat way I found to reboot my router.  Having investigated it further, I’ve yanked the post, and contacted the vendor of the router, as the ‘neat way’ is actually a fairly serious flaw.  Here’s hoping they respond with a firmware update.

I do believe those who know me know that I’m slightly sane. Or maybe that’s slightly insane. Either way, I think I’ve proved the point even further with my walk home today and on Friday - meandering along going squee! at random intervals, in every voice I could do.

I can almost picture Totoro doing a deep, rumbly squee. Meep.

For those who don’t have a clue what I mean… “Squee can be an exclamation, or interjection, of excited happiness or surprise, especially when referring to fangirls, or be a squeal of glee over something incredibly cute.” - all links to Wikipedia.

Work paid a bonus this month, and I decided to finally get myself a portable photo wallet for when I’m at events like RIAT, without Mum’s jukebox to offload on to. I’ve been eyeing up things like the Epson P-2000 and P-4000, as well as various HD based MP3 players, trying to find a device that made me happy (the requirements were large capacity, card reader and optionally display of the photos). While browsing Warehouse Express a few days ago, I came across the Smartdisk Digital Photobank - a 20 or 40 GB hard drive mated to multiple card readers, a battery and a USB 2 connector - at a decent price of £99 plus shipping (which was under 4 quid for next day).

So, what’s in the box?

• Photobank
• Two power adapters, one for the UK market, one for the EU market.
• Lightweight, 80 cm, braided USB cable.
• Carrying case
• Manual in 6 languages - 11 pages per language

The unit weighs about 270g, and measures 11.5 cm by 7.5 cm by 2 cm. It’s not quite pocket sized, but would fit in a jacket pocket quite easily, and possibly larger pockets found on some pairs of slacks or shorts. Based on the weight, I’ll be keeping it in the back or top pocket of my Lowepro Slingshot bag. It came partially charged, and powered up completely in about 4 seconds. The screen powers up first displaying the battery state and then the hard drive spins up to determine the free capacity.

After a minute of inactivity (the manual claims 30 seconds), the unit powers down, which should lend towards a longer battery life. The power switch is slightly raised above the casing, so being in a bag with knobbly bits might continually power it up and down. Unfortunately, the carrying case only has a stiff back, and soft fabric sides, so even in the casing the switch can be activated.