… and neither is Anglo Irish Bank, read more here and here. While Gavin will probably not be successful in the long run. Given that it is in the taxpayers “interest”, the government created one institution, and it is the taxpayer has paid to keep another from closing shop; it is annoying that the taxpayer has no visibilty as to how either organisation is being run. It is almost insulting. I wonder would a highly visible facebook campaign ala the campaign to keep 24 hour cover with the Waterford based Coast Guard Helicopter bear any fruit in this case? Good luck with your enquiries Gavin.
Category Archives: General
Botnets and Ham Radio
This is a very funny post from Jeff, KE9V.
Dmetry and Olaf walked into a dimly lit tavern and selected a booth far in the back where they could not be easily overhead. Dmetry was a hulking 300 lbs man who had muscled his way into the lower echelons of leadership in the Russian mafia but he was most interested in disappearing a very wealthy man as soon as possible.
It goes on..
“This application includes a Trojan horse; it will offload itself from the primary application upon installation, and play hide and seek with any anti-virus measures that may have been installed” Olaf said as a perverted grin spread across his face. “Then when we are ready, we will have at our disposal 100,000 networked computers that will do our bidding whenever the signal is given”.
Dmetry wasn’t easily convinced. “But why, why should these people be willing to install this botnet?”
Olaf replied, “They have no idea what they are doing. Urmil has written an application for radio amateurs, maybe you’ve heard of these radio ‘hams’, no? They love to play with their computers and their radios but they know little about the technology behind it all. This new application will be software that permits their computers to communicate via HF radio, they are crazy for free software and shiny new baubles to play with.”
“We will tell them that this software is for a new mode of communication and it will spread like wildfire in their community. They will never be the wiser…”
So funny, but it isn’t all that big a leap to see it actually happening. Very funny, thanks Jeff.
(Of course I use fldigi, build it from source, and keep an eye on what stuff is actually leaving my machine as much as possible.)
Cool USB Device Charger
From Jameco Electronics
Adjust your watch..
The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.
JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second). More.
Also, as a result of the earthquake, there is a lot of activity on Amateur Radio frequencies of 7050, 7060, 7088, 7095. As there is a contest next weekend, please listen carefully before using these frequencies. More.
Duct (and other) Tape — in space.
Reasons why you should always carry a roll when heading into space, and how useful it truly is. Great read.
Vices can be good for you…
I haven’t read the book (to my shame), but here is the post from Jeff, KE9V that explains my title.
IEEE – Hams in Haiti
27 January 2010—Two weeks after a magnitude 7.3 earthquake devastated Haiti, amateur radio operators are hard at work there connecting rescuers within the country and to the outside world. But they are switching gears from rescue mode to recovery mode as aid workers set up camp and distribute food, water, medical supplies, and other aid to survivors. more
Speeding fines
I travel one of three different routes into work every day. i tend to follow one most of the time that brings me onto the Waterford City outer ring road. Now, given that I’m not exactly the slowest driver on the road, and have been known to do the odd doughnut myself, I’m astonished at the speed many many cars overtake me at. If there was ever a speed trap, they’d be done for (and I would probably get a telling off).
Imagine my surprise over the last few days, with the icy threat of mashing their car off a roundabout or off someone elses vehicle, that I’ve been overtaken by precisely 1 driver in the last 3 or 4 days of driving into work.
So my disturbing conclusion is that the speeding fine and penalty points are of little interest to habitual speeders, and that the fine should be increased substantially (think of the price of replacing a panel or wheel or maybe a front bumper).
Now, what can we do with the folks that just drive too slow and hog the white line?
Hope
Wow, time sure is flying by December 31st already. Let me see, things of note. Cormac is building a Millenium Falcon (very cool). Scott has released his new Weather Station, the ADS-WS1. I finally got my head around ALSA’s dsnoop plugin on Linux, which is very handy when trying to stream and record from the same device.
I’ve spent the last two days pulling as many of my MP3’s off a dying drive as possible while playing with an AOR AR5000 that Santa brought me (good man Santa!).
Hope-1 was launched on 14th December. This is a big deal as it is (to my knowledge) the first Amateur Satellite launched from China.
See you in 2010.
Netopia Cayman PSU Fault?
There was I, browsing away, minding my own business on Friday evening, when all of sudden my Netopia Cayman lost sync. I tried rebooting it a few times but no joy. On reboot, it would respond to a few pings and then stop. I rang Eircom Saturday morning and after going through all the questions, eventually, they said they would have a replacement router out to me by Tuesday at the latest.
I asked a friend of mine if he had a spare router, which he did, but he suggested that I first try replacing the PSU, as he had a router display similiar symptoms previously and it turned out to be the PSU.
Turns out, that the PSU is where the fault lies. I plugged the router into the shack power supply and all is well again (As an aside, I now know that it uses 0.3Amps at 14.0Volts).