archived blog - booyaa dot org » default http://archive.booyaa.org an archive blog about booyaa, photography, gardening, running and technology Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:18:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 en hourly 1 the end of an era… http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/27/the-end-of-an-era/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/27/the-end-of-an-era/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:18:37 +0000 booyaa http://archive.booyaa.org/?p=521 i hereby declare this wordpress blog archived. fear not a blog will return in the new year. maybe. Do not fear my protectionist approach to copyright.

for now please visit: archive.booyaa.org

]]> http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/27/the-end-of-an-era/feed/ 0 Shared Items – December 27, 2009 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/27/shared-items-december-27-2009/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/27/shared-items-december-27-2009/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:10:31 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/2009/12/27/shared-items-december-27-2009/
  • Merry Christmas Eve: Evernote for iPhone gets a major update

    • December 24, 2009

  • Using RAMDisk to Speed Build Times

    • December 22, 2009

  • Feature: How to obtain and install an SSL/TLS certificate, for free

    • December 21, 2009

  • VIDEO PROTOTYPING | A cost-effective and timely approach to application demonstrations.

    • December 21, 2009

  • Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app

    • December 21, 2009

  • A truly marvellous proof of a transaction

    • April 6, 2009 ]]> http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/27/shared-items-december-27-2009/feed/ 0 Shared Items – December 20, 2009 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/20/shared-items-december-20-2009/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/20/shared-items-december-20-2009/#comments Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:07:35 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/2009/12/20/shared-items-december-20-2009/

  • Using Google Apps? 5 Ways to Avoid Getting Hacked

    • December 18, 2009

  • Gwilym’s disloyalty card

    • December 18, 2009

  • Google Browser Size

    • December 17, 2009

  • Browser Size: a tool to see how others view your website (Bruno Bowden/The Official Google Blog)

    • December 17, 2009

  • PastryKit: An iPhone Webdev Library from … Apple

    • December 16, 2009

  • GCSE statistics in your area by race, sex and income: why are poor white boys falling behind?

    • December 15, 2009

  • Google, Twitter, WordPress amp; Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

    • December 14, 2009

  • Data Underload #1

    • December 14, 2009

  • P2P Sharing Being Blocked Around the World, Where Next?

    • December 14, 2009 – my prediction is that p2p will go to the cloud and the top tier isps won’t touch it. how does riaa/mpaa et all plan on stopping this?

  • Performance of data URIs

    • December 13, 2009 – it’s probably just me, but surely the unwhelming results are because http runs on tcp? which is only going to start cranking up when the amount of data is large and constant. the sum speed of smaller files is going to poorer because of the stop/start overhead. ]]> http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/20/shared-items-december-20-2009/feed/ 0 Shared Items – December 13, 2009 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/13/shared-items-december-13-2009/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/13/shared-items-december-13-2009/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 06:12:15 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/2009/12/13/shared-items-december-13-2009/

  • Afternoon Thread: Best Visualization of 2009?

    • December 10, 2009

  • Psion PDAs Resurrected?

    • December 10, 2009

  • Airlock Locks, Unlocks Your Mac by iPhone

    • December 10, 2009

  • MPs expenses: those property flipping members of parliament

    • December 10, 2009

  • US and UK open up government data

    • December 10, 2009

  • How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare

    • December 9, 2009

  • Google Groups Joins Google Apps in Battle for the Enterprise

    • December 9, 2009

  • The design of an iPhone application

    • December 8, 2009

  • The Geography of AIDS Around the World

    • December 7, 2009

  • Relax Japanese-style with Yoritsuki

    • December 6, 2009

  • Problem Comparison: Tiger Woods vs. Jay-Z

    • December 6, 2009

  • The iPhone is Bad at Keeping Secrets

    • December 5, 2009 ]]> http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/13/shared-items-december-13-2009/feed/ 0 Shared Items – December 6, 2009 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/06/shared-items-december-6-2009/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/06/shared-items-december-6-2009/#comments Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:02:27 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/2009/12/06/shared-items-december-6-2009/

  • Jim Collins and the “stop doing” list

    • December 3, 2009

  • Restricted tinypy to C++ compiler

    • December 1, 2009

  • Google Analytics unblocks the Web w/ Async support

    • December 2, 2009 – this is huge!

  • New App Lets You Solve Sudoku Puzzles With the iPhone Camera

    • November 30, 2009

  • Automated PowerPoint Generation, or Making a quot;Slide Factoryquot;

    • December 1, 2009 – this could be very cool or evil or both.

  • Google Experimenting With Social Calendar Previews

    • December 1, 2009 – had this feature since lotus notes 5!

  • Sun Releases VirtualBox 3.1, Adds Teleportation Feature

    • December 1, 2009 – vm teleportation – is this a a statement of intent by sun (or is oracle calling the shots?) to take vmware infrastructure solutions?

  • Review: The Isle of 8-Bit Treasures

    • December 1, 2009 – what is all the fuss about nethack and rogue clones? I hate these games, they’re too damn hard!

  • 7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell For Phishing Scams

    • December 1, 2009 – avoiding pwnage on the twitterstream

  • Facebook Photos Coming Back To Haunt Users In Surprising Ways

    • December 1, 2009

  • Local UK Newspaper Chain Tries A Paywall

    • December 1, 2009 – wanna bet you’ll still get ads when you get on the otherside of the paywall?

  • Unified Communications: Saved by the Cloud?

    • December 1, 2009 – woah! who deadpooled unified comms?

  • The Psychology of Being Scammed

    • December 1, 2009 – principles 2,4,5,6 – pretty much make up all modern phishing schemes

  • The Psychology of Being Scammed

    • November 30, 2009

  • Bit.ly Gets Smart on Twitter’s Pervasive Malware

    • November 30, 2009 ]]> http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/12/06/shared-items-december-6-2009/feed/ 0 Shared Items – November 29, 2009 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/11/29/shared-items-november-29-2009/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/11/29/shared-items-november-29-2009/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:00:50 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/2009/11/29/shared-items-november-29-2009/

  • ARM Aka Apple Rejected Me Is The New ‘fmylife’ For iPhone Developers (Alexander Vaughn/App Advice)

    • November 28, 2009

  • ReelDirector can spiff up your holiday iPhone videos

    • November 27, 2009

  • Sharing iPlayer data

    • November 27, 2009

  • Version Control Application for your iPhone

    • November 27, 2009

  • Pie Guy: A web game for the iPhone

    • November 26, 2009

  • Inside BlackBerry Now on Twitter!

    • November 27, 2009

  • Black Friday 2009 App Store Sale Extravaganza

    • November 27, 2009

  • Leaked 9/11 Text Messages

    • November 26, 2009

  • Cherry picking is the enemy of soul

    • November 23, 2009

  • News Corp. – If You de-Index Will They Still Come? (Bill Tancer/Hitwise Intelligence)

    • November 24, 2009

  • Microsoft Tries To Silence Revelation Of Bing Cashback Flaws; Leads To Revelation Of Other Problems

    • November 24, 2009

  • Major FAIL: Steering Wheel Laptop Stand

    • November 25, 2009

  • Ommwriter: Be Alone with Your Thoughts

    • November 25, 2009

  • Could You Prove That The Government Was Watching You Illegally?

    • November 25, 2009

  • Switch between .m and .h file in VI

    • November 24, 2009

  • Five Tips for Producing a Demo Video for Your iPhone App

    • November 23, 2009

  • DNA database: which police force takes the most samples?

    • November 24, 2009

  • How to Fight in City of Eternals!

    • November 24, 2009

  • NGiNX HTTP Push Module

    • November 19, 2009

  • App Store devs get “edge”-y as a reaction to trademark threats

    • November 13, 2009 ]]> http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/11/29/shared-items-november-29-2009/feed/ 0 diy booyaa dot org: week 1 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/05/17/diy-booyaa-dot-org-week-1/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/05/17/diy-booyaa-dot-org-week-1/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 20:39:18 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/?p=510 week 1 – 13/5-17/5 Do not fear my protectionist approach to copyright.

    rainbow of wheelbarrows

    earlier this week we bought a virtual private server (vps) with 34sp.com with the view of moving me and lou’s domains to it (our friends have been kindly hosting both). i thought it would be a good idea to keep a log of how we did it. now, normally this would be a very boring log, but almost immediately after firing up the vps i was shocked by how quickly the hackers started calling around. so instead of this log being used to track software installs, it will have a security twist to it.

    in an impossibly perfect world, you’d stick a static content webserver in the dmz i.e. no cgi and push updates from production to it. but this ain’t, and i need to keep all my eggs in the one basket! so i’m going to try my best to keep the script kiddies out and make it worthless for the more seasoned hackers to do any poking around. seriously dudes, there won’t be financial or customer data on this server, it’s just a blog site!

    so far i’ve achieved the following:

    • lock down ssh:
      • disable root login (requires a non-root account to be used instead)
      • disable password auth (pub key only)
      • enable denyhost (becareful not to lock yourself out!)
      • move off port 22 (security through obscurity, but will stop most script kiddies)
    • lock down mysql:
      • listen only locally (don’t switch to local socket files because tunneling a mysql connection won’t work)
    • security auditing:
      • run scripts against secure and lastb logs (looking for suspect logins)
      • run chkrootkit nightly (checking for rootkit, would’ve its support bins were in a read-only environment so my rootkit doesn’t get patched by an anti-rootkit-script)
    ]]>     http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/05/17/diy-booyaa-dot-org-week-1/feed/ 0     allotment updatery: watcha growing in your propagator boo? http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/29/allotment-updatery-watcha-growing-in-your-propagator-boo/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/29/allotment-updatery-watcha-growing-in-your-propagator-boo/#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:40:58 +0000 booyaabooyaabooyaa http://booyaa.org/?p=507 today we started to sow our first veg seeds, this meant dusting off the heated propagator. unfortunately our new place doesn’t have many places to start seeds off, in fact the only space we have is in front of the french doors. so provided we don’t get too blotto’d whilst dining al fresco (which won’t be a while) the seedlings will be safe. Do not fear my protectionist approach to copyright.

    so back to the propagator..

    mad props to mah seedz

    from top to bottom: 3 x trays of parmex carrots, 1 x ’sweet chocolate’ sweet pepper, 1x ‘orange banana’ toms, 1 x ’serpette amelioree d’auvergne’ climbing pea and 1 x ‘n. napia’ pointy red sweet pepper.

    we’ve had very poor luck with carrots so far, although having read a few blogs i think it’s safe to say we’re not alone. this time around we’ve went for the rounder ball-like variety. this is mostly because it would seem that the soil you need, to avoid getting forked carrots, has to be super fine soil, that has been sifted through a spider’s web, whilst saying a prayer to the angry carrot god TORRAC. the other seeds are having their second chance, as they either didn’t grow or didn’t ripen in time for harvest. further more after graduating from seedling to plants, the toms and peppers are being grown in the mini greenhouse so we can get a better crop. last year we found that the poor summer combined with the allotments windy disposition gave a small crop. although, but before i entirely blame it all on the elements, i should point out i didn’t stake out the plants or keep them to four trusses.

    we’ve also started this years flowers:

    flower candidates 2009

    left is blue lagoon (verbena x hybrida) and right is night phlox (zaluzianskya capensis).

    lou also planted some bulbs (daffs?) in the garden, it’d be great if they end up flowering, but failing that they’re ready for next year :) it’s been very chilly outside, i do wonder what it will do the veg this year. it’d be great if we had a longer summer to make up, so fingers crossed!

    ]]>     http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/29/allotment-updatery-watcha-growing-in-your-propagator-boo/feed/ 0     shelter’s vertical rush: a race to the top of tower 42 http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/22/shelters-vertical-rush-a-race-to-the-top-of-tower-42/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/22/shelters-vertical-rush-a-race-to-the-top-of-tower-42/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:22:04 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/?p=506 Vertical Rush: A race to the top of Tower 42 last wednesday me and two mates ran to the top of tower 42 (nee old natwest building), all 920 steps. despite repeatedly running up the 122 steps that make up the measley 6 floors of my work place, nothing prepared me for this event. Do not fear my protectionist approach to copyright.

    by the time i reached halfway point i had to start walking (this was after i had set a good pace). i had the odd occasional bursts of energy flying past people, but by the end, my legs had become like lead and i was gasping for air.

    i’m normally used to an 25-60 minute type running event and finding my rhythm. i had no such luxury in this event where the winning time is sub 5 minutes.

    and in 8 minutes and 11 seconds it was all over. i had hoped for a sub 10 minute finish so i consider this a result. i tried to avoid dragging myself the stairs using the bannister, but having seen footage of the winner i now know this is acceptable in the sport of stair climbing! i was top 45% of the category which is a nice percentage to be in.

    i was doubly pleased because i ended up raising over 200 pounds for shelter (they asked race entrants to raise at least 150 pounds). thank you to all my wonderful sponsors, you helped me stay true to my training and stopped me from giving up when it started to hurt a lot. did i meant it hurt a lot?

    crazy event. mad props to alison for making the mistake of telling me about the event!

    ]]>     http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/22/shelters-vertical-rush-a-race-to-the-top-of-tower-42/feed/ 0     allotment updatery: tatertastic! http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/22/allotment-updatery-tatertastic/ http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/22/allotment-updatery-tatertastic/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:59:10 +0000 booyaa http://booyaa.org/?p=504 Taters (Earlies) our earlies went in today, much to the surprise of plotber malcolm. he said he would wait until the risk of frost was completely gone. he also said i should have fleece at the ready to protect tender shoots should the frost come. with this advice in hand i decided against planting the main crop this weekend. Do not fear my protectionist approach to copyright.

    i ended up keeping some of the fleece (well actually wasn’t real fleece, more like that weed suppressing membrane) on two rows to warm the ground and force faster growth.

    this time around we picked really obscure varieties, made further obscure because shozu failed to upload the photo above, which had the descriptions. so from memory and left to right we have: gypsy mixed with highland burgundy, skerry, salad blue, shetland black, gypsy mixed with highland burgundy and finally dunbar rover.

    aren’t they great names? the taters are heritage varieties which can go from blue and purple insides, to black skins with blue rings in white flesh. we’ve had the shetland black before and really enjoyed them.

    since my plan for main crops was postponed, i decided to prune the rasps. hopefully i wasn’t too harsh. i made a half arsed attempt to weed the area around them, but it needs more work.

    there’s still so much to do and we’ve not made a start on any seedlings. but hey, i guess when you stick food in the grow, you’re technically in growing season eh?

    ]]>     http://archive.booyaa.org/2009/03/22/allotment-updatery-tatertastic/feed/ 0