garan's blog

Whoosh! There goes 2010.. Bring on 2011 I'm ready for you!!!

Submitted by garan on Sun, 01/02/2011 - 11:54

My blog is still here! With the upturn in Facebook and Twitter over the last 12 months I've not posted much as I guess l've become a bit of a FB'aholic and am fascinated by it from a professional point of view. The introduction of AJAX powered chat in a browser has seen a lot of my friends contacting me via FB chat and the private message system provides more personal messages than I get through email. From a cynical standpoint, FB is potentially very sinister as they've got too big but the same could have been said about Google a few years ago but their star has waned slightly. Twitter was also meant to take over the World but within my group of friends it's been eclipsed by FB too. It's going to be interesting to see what comes next and in the meantime I'm very interested in L7 firewall appliances... Getting geeky now so I'll move on!

2010 brought us the iPad.. No surprise that I have one and I'm sat in Starbucks typing this on it. I'm trying hard to justify having an iPad. It's a gorgeous piece of kit but I think I could have happily managed without it, using a combination of my smart phone and my laptop. I don't need a middle device. The iPad is useful in the office on my own 3G connection though. Sometimes there's something I'd like to do on my own kit and my own net connection but feel once again that it's overkill.

I mentioned smart phones. This year I've been rocking an iPhone 3GS as my main phone and have had a few different work phones. A Vodafone 360 handset was the least useful during an eat my own dogfood phase. No surprises that Vodafone have stopped developing their own handsets. I had a HTC Desire - that was a highlight. The functionality and feature set is much richer than the iPhone but it doesn't have the same polished user experience as the iPhone. I did like the portable wifi hotspot feature though; something I'd consider jail breaking my iPhone for.. My latest work phone is an iPhone 4. Nice upgrade to the 3GS. Finally a camera flash! The battery life is better and the screen is good but it's not worth paying for an upgrade. I'm eligible for an upgrade at the moment but that would reset the timer on my 24 month contract. No thanks! The future is SIM free, maybe Google Nexus S shaped and powered by giffgaff.

2010 saw me finally get rid of the Beemer. I'm running around in a Golf and whilst it's nice with a hefty punch and gokart handing I miss the comfort of the old girl, especially on long motorway runs. I also miss getting the back end out around roundabouts plus VW traction control doesn't understand that I want lift off oversteer!

I've still got the R3. Thinking about an upgrade but will have to see how finances are looking when Spring approaches. I know what I'd like but it depends what sort of part-ex I can get for the yellow beast.

So 2011... What will it bring? I dunno! But I do know that I'm in charge and I'm going to make it a good one! Please join me for the ride!!

The King is dead... Long live the King!

Submitted by garan on Tue, 07/20/2010 - 09:47

Today marks the end of an era. My 11 year relationship with my 528i is finally over after almost 150,000 miles together. It's got to the point where it's starting to cost money; it needs a service, some new tyres and a few other bits and pieces. Plus I need a car I can rely on for the 70odd mile round trip daily commute.

It's been emotional!

Quidco in-store cashback

Submitted by garan on Mon, 05/10/2010 - 06:12

Been a while since I posted anything on here. It's been a mixture of not having much to say and twittering instead.

Back to the subject.

I came across Quidco's In-store Cashback product on the weekend. You register your credit or debit card details (which the page assures me is stored sncrypted) and when you use your credit card in an affiliated store you automagically get cash back. Here's some examples:

  1. Little Chef - 4.5% - like I needed an excuse for an Olympic Breakfast at Popham!
  2. Halfords - 4.5% - missed that when I bought a £120 car battery last month :(
  3. The Green King Group - 4.5% - that's two of the four pubs in the village covered!

More ADSL

Submitted by garan on Wed, 11/25/2009 - 17:40

Fingers crossed my broadband should switch over tomorrow. In the meantime I've been looking at alternative providers for my Dad. He lives about 3 miles from the exchange and his line tests indicate a maximum speed of about 7Mb on ADSL2+. Found a deal with Be that's half price for the first 12 months on their budget, upto 8Mb service:

https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/halfprice

Worth a try..

ADSL change

Submitted by garan on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 14:58

After putting up with a couple of weeks of poor ADSL throughput, along with the rest of Entanet's customers following the introduction of their new 'better for 90% of the people' traffic shaping system, I've voted with my feet and signed up with http://fast.co.uk/. Five day turnaround expected..

Creating a pem key

Submitted by garan on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 14:03

I've been looking at methods for secure IMAP connectivity using courier-imap. I need a certificate along with a full set of parent root certificates. I've already got all of these along with the private key in a java keystore that I use for authenticating Tomcat/Catalina hosts. So instead of creating the pem file I needed from scratch I looked around for methods of exporting what I already had.

After some trial and error I came across

http://sourceforge.net/projects/portecle/

It provides a Java based GUI that I pointed at my keystore file, provided the password and up it all came. I was able to export the private key as a .pem with all of the tiers of authority in single text file. Perfect.

To get the pem working using courier-imap I created a sym link to imapd.pem. in the courier-imap shared directory. Restarted the courier-imap service and away we go.

If you want to test an imap certificate try:
# openssl s_client -connect hostname:993

(Port 993 is the standard IMAP over SSL port)

Drag queens floor thugs in Swansea street fight

Submitted by garan on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 08:40

"..two cross-dressers who are believed to have been cage fighters on a night out."

Only in Swansea!!

http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/southwalesnews/Drag-queen-floors-thugs...

Thanks to Mr Porter for pointing this out.

I've bought a fridge

Submitted by garan on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 20:32

I ordered a fridge last night from Tesco. It's a Whirpool ARC900 under counter fridge to go in the pantry in the kitchen.

Quidco tracked my purchase so that should get me 3% back. I also used about a hundred quid's worth of Tesco Clubcard vouchers so it didn't work out too expensive.

Tags and blogrolls

Submitted by garan on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 20:51

I've exported the tags and vocab from the old site and imported them into here, getting the tagadelic cloud on the right hand side of the page.

I've also created a blogroll by creating a new blogroll cck type and views for displaying them.

mutt corruption under screen in putty

Submitted by garan on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 10:55

For as long as I can remember I've used Mutt in an ssh session as my favourite mail client. It's quick, fast and accessible from anywhere that I can get a shell session. I've always had a problem with the display when I'm running under GNU Screen in that the display corrupts when spurious characters appear in subject lines. I've experimented with different term settings but to no avail. I think that I've now cracked it thanks to this article:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2007-December/048059.html

I've been trying to fix the issue on the command line. Instead I should have been looking at the outer shell; setting the character set translation to UTF8 in putty has made everything look beautiful. Thanks Steven Haigh netwiz at crc.id.au!

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