Ian's blog

I am on the plane flying back to washington DC. I had an interesting trip. I not sure I could live in London in the summer. This is second trip I have in June and both times I have suffered from a running nose and itchy eyes. This time I took some allergy pills which took the edge off the the sore eyes and the sneezing.
I made a minor mistake this morning. I didn’t check the beard trimmer. I started trimming and heard it cutting deeper than normal. It was set at 2 rather than the normal 4. So you just have to keep going. I left the mustache the rest is a fuzzy face.
I am flying British Airways. I got bumped up to club class. which is one set bellow the bed seats. I also got the first row so lots of leg room again. club class means a laptop connector, not that I have the converter cable, wider seats, and foot rest al-la lazy boy style.
I was really disappointed in the meal. If I wasn’t going to be on the flight for 7 hours I wouldn’t have eaten it. The label said spinach risotto which on the surface sounds good but they coated it in the most revolting cheese ever. Food has to be really bad for me to consider not eating it and this was really bad. I will be sticking to the asian veggie meal in the future. For flights Iceland air still beats the rest but they annoyed me last time by charging for sodas.
The gig ethernet card came in and the machine came online. I held my breath a little waiting the 5 or 6 seconds before the screen came to life. The Finisar tap also came in which I was a bit miffed about. I had brought one from the US since they tend to take a long time to show up. I was hoping it wouldn’t show up so I wouldn’t have to take it back to the US.
I really need to get a roller bag. Its funny I when I travel I have a Nike back pack that I have had since I was in secondary school. It survived university and almost 8 years in the US. The other bag I use is a blue soft ralth loran bag that is almost as old as the nike bag. I am always striving to travel lighter but when I pack in a laptop, ipod, camera and a set of smarter clothes suddenly the ways a lot.
I have confirmed my dislike for london heathrow. They didn’t post the gate till about a hour before the flight, then we had to get a bus to the plane. Once on we waited for about an hour before finally leaving. They blamed a combination of 50 missing passengers and some more cargo.
while waiting for the gate to be posted I had a beer with a recruiter. She was looking for someone to do pre-sales consulting for either CA or Nettergity. I gave her my card and promised to send on my resume. I don’t know if it would be something I would consider but I am always curious what is out there.
I caught up with the daily source code and am now listening to some Sarah. I can’t help but feel excited and jealous about what he is doing. I look at the security software market and I don’t get very excited. I haven’t seen anything that make me go woah. We have some IDS, some IPS, Virus software but nothing out they that I think will protect the a company from being hacked.
After dealing with zero day viruses over the last couple months I think there has to be a better way to deal with the problem than signature based solutions. There are things like Cisco’s Okina solution but I am not convinced it will do any better. The reality is as long as users are allowed to download and run untrusted executables no system will be free from threats.
On of my biggest fears is the targeted attacks. this is where someone writes a custom piece of bad software. Lets say we target company A. I know have a dozen email addresses in the company. I email a link to them pretending it is something funny. One user clicks on it. This then installs a search program and maps out company sending back the information. I find something interesting maybe a credit card system or some confidential information. I send in a custom program to collect it. If you have a large enough company what are the chances of this being discovered until it is to late?

Nope found an earlier one
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.fan.douglas-adams/browse_frm/thread/ab96c368104c461e/3e285a6a4d6ea599?q=ianm@castle.ed.ac.uk&rnum=24&hl=en#3e285a6a4d6ea599

Could this be my first usenet posting?

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.tv.red-dwarf/browse_frm/thread/27eccbb6e97c7ca2/0e4edf91718dee25?q=ism@dcs.ed.ac.uk&rnum=25&hl=en#0e4edf91718dee25

closely followed by

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.fan.douglas-adams/browse_frm/thread/19993ad7de5d290c/cc867d10f88ff528?q=ism@dcs.ed.ac.uk&rnum=24&hl=en#cc867d10f88ff528

In scotland. For future note the tube at oxford circus doesn’t open till 5:30am and the first train doesn’t for another 15 minutes after that. I made my 7am flight to glasgow, with a about 20 minutes to spare. The British Midlands flight was uneventful. I didn’t fly over the Campsie hills so I wasn’t able to spot any land marks.
I am about 90% complete in London. Still waiting on the new Gig ethernet card. That should be there on monday. The webfiltering is up and running, the Sensor box is online and monitoring.
I am going to be in dundee tomorrow then back to london and sunday night then fly to DC on monday night.

Made it to london. The flight was at 8am so that meant I had to get up at 4:45 to make the 20 mins drive plus the 2 hour check in. I didn’t get upgraded but I did score emergency exit row seats. I think the funiest thing about the flight was watching people try and work out how to open the doors to the toilets *evil grin*. It was interesting to note that the same people seemed to go to the toilet at least 3 or 4 times during the flight. The BA 777’s don’t have laptop power in the cheap seats but having the choice of 8 movies to watch made up for it.
I am working close to covent garden and staying close to the oxford street. So far work has been interesting the dead server turned out to be a bad network card that would stop the server booting. I have the web filter box setup with an IP I need to look at the settings tomorrow, the sensor box is online as well sans a networking card. I need to hook everything into the network but I can’t test anything till the old offices network goes dead on Friday night.
I still plan on trying to get to scotland on the weekend but I think I am going to be here late on Friday night.

Fucking viruses. Can you tell I am pissed. This is another AOL IM virus that hit our network. I think it is only 2 machines and 1 with a confirmed infection. I have been working on this since 4:30 and I am still not finished.
From reports from users I was able to get a copy of the file. which was on the C:\sp.exe. It also had a batch file called a.bat. I ran it on a lab machine and confirmed that it starts a process called iPODusb.exe, writes some junk to the registry to make it start. changes from proxy settings. I then submit the file to McAfee get an extra.dat, test it, test it again with a larger group. Set all desktops to pull the extra.dat. Force the infected machine to scan it’s self. I am now waiting on a bindview report coming back that looks for these files on all computers. So far it has found 2 hits which is why I think it only attempted to infect 2 machines. So 4 hours of my life wasted just because someone clicked on a link in IM.

Dran, I lost my uk cellphone number and the money that was on the phone. Oh well. guess I need to get a new sim card when I get to the UK

I have a nutty cat running round the house. I don’t know why but she is seeking a lot of attention.

So much for this being a work on the house day. I decided to look into the publishing my calendar on website with out having to buy a dot mac account. This was easier than I thought. I got my webserver set to allow webdav to a specific directory. I have the authentication tied into the same password set as web mail. I hit publish and it works. Now all I need is for HY to publish her calendar and we might have a chance of keeping up with what the other person is planning.

This blows you can’t subscribe to a calendar that is on an https site
see

http://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/blog/blosxom.cgi/labor/technology/schooltool/313.html

for more details.

I have a packet of Milk Chocolate hob nobs, a laptop, a 3.5 inch USB drive enclosure with my old failing 2.5 laptop hard disk enclosure in it sitting open on my desk. So it is safe to say I am having a geek day.

I worked on updating my resume this morning. I will post it on my imacdonald.co.uk website at somepoint. I am listening to WAMU.

My trip to the post office to get my mail was one of those times where I should taken my bike. A trip that should have taken 15 minutes took me close to 30 mins because they have closed off a lane at the end of Pratt and President.

I discovered this week that my quicken file didn’t copy over correctly to my file server. It seems they do something funny with the file. When I copied it back after swapping out the hard disk the file wouldn’t open. I didn’t know this but the .qdfm isn’t really a file it is a folder with lots of files contained in it. I was able to create a new file then copy data bits to this new file but the stocks were missing and all the account transfers were pointing to the wrong accounts. Which is why I bought a USB drive enclosure and 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch IDE convert able. The disk seems to be working so I am copying everything off just incase I find other files in the future that have the same problem.

Tomorrow is going to be a work on the house day. I need to patch the whole in the living room ceiling from repairing the leaking shower.