It looks like Apple have added a new baby to the iPod lineup….

iPod Nano

I saw a video of steve jobs pulling the iPod out of the change pocket in his jeans…. Man, that thing’s tiny.

At the same time Apple have updated iTunes to 5.0, I’ll try it out tonight and add my thoughts to this post later.

And for those who like the “My phone does everything….” mindset, we have the …

Motorola Rokr

I must say the Nano is tempting, I already have the 15Gb iPod but a tiny 4Gb jobby would be nice

With those six simple words I started a journey into darkness and despair that lasted two days.

I was at home last week to spend some time bonding with squeaker ( see “Squeaker in Da House” and “It’s a boy….” ) and helping Viv cope with “the boys”.

I had taken a netgear box home to test our wireless product and noticed that it seemed to have lost wireless connectivity on Monday, I tried power cycling the netgear but it refused to connect to the wireless network.

Hmmm I said to myself, the firmware on my ADSL modem/router/access point is quite old, I wonder if there is an update?? As it turns out, YES there was, I applied it and everything look fine except that I could no longer connect to the internet!!!!

Bugger, now what do I do?? I didn’t have the previous firmware as the router came with it, and no way to get to the internet.

I tried everything I could think of, even tried downloading the firmware onto my mobile phone…. No luck.

In the end I hijacked my mothers dialup account using my iMacs internal modem, I downloaded all the firmware versions I could find and tried every one of them….. No luck.

My ISP Exetel, who am I very happy with in general, have no after hours support so I couldn’t ask them to check it for me, in the end I gave up, set the ADSL modem into “Bridge Mode” and setup a dedicated firewall machine to do the firewall/NAT functionality that my modem seems to have forgotten how to do.

I’m now running IPCop and all seems well so far. I have at least as much ( if not more ) functionality with this setup in terms of firewall/NAT, unfortunately I have lost my wireless access point as it doesn’t work in bridge mode.

I could try and debug this with Netcomm and Exetel, BUT I’m never at home during business hours and I can live without the wireless for now at least.

So, boys and girls, sometimes updating firmware when you don’t need to can be bad…

No, this isn’t a safe sex message.

Last friday 2005-07-08, I tried to send an email out about our family’s “Secret Santa” draw. Imagine my surprise when one of the receipients bounced my message back with the following explaination.

XXXXXXXXX@team.telstra.com: host
mailbo.vtcif.telstra.com.au[202.12.144.19] said: 554 Service unavailable;
Client host [220.233.25.199] blocked using sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org;
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=220.233.25.199 (in reply to RCPT TO
command)

( Recipient name sanitised for their protection )

So, I proceeded to check the URL listed above and found that I was listed for sending spam??? WTF!!!

I found out that I was in fact listed on 3 separate sites and that the cause seemed to be that a host with my IP address ( which is static ) had been caught sending spam.

incidentally a few days earlier I had changed my antivirus software on my one and only windows box to AVG from Grisoft and discovered a Trojan called Boxed.3.am, apparently this charming piece of code hijacks your box and turns it into a spambot.

Now, my network at home is protected by

• Hardware NAT appliance
• Virus scanning by my mail server
• Antivirus software on my Windows box

the Windows box in question uses Thunderbird and Firefox to avoid the dangers of Outlook and IE.

My wife, the primary user of the box has heard ( and heeded ) my “Don’t open attachments” and “Don’t download programs” warnings.

Even with all these precautions, we’ve still been hit.

How are the “Joe Sixpack” users supposed to keep their machines Virus and Trojan free??

According to the article 12 Minutes to PC infection an unpatched machine connected to the internet has a 50% chance of being compromised in the first 12 minutes……

Scary thought.

For the folks at home

1. Use a firewall, preferably a dedicated device or machine
2. Use antivirus and spyware tools
3. Don’t use Outlook and IE
4. Don’t open attachments (unless you REALLY have to)

Lately I’ve been getting three or four emails a day claiming to be from administrator, webmaster, postmaster, admin etc from my domain (which I administer) saying that my account is invalid or some nonsense, in all cases they contain an attachment that I’m sure has a virus or trojan in it, so BE CAREFUL !!!

Oh, my, God….

There have been OSX on Intel rumours since the very first release of OSX, but that’s all they were, until now!!!!

I’ve been offline for the last 5 days as my wife has been sick in Hospital and I’ve had to look after the wee lad, I got to work today and surfed to my usual nerd news sites and what do I find????

Apple are switching to the Intel line of processors starting next year, they have a preview of Tiger that runs on a Pentium 4 and have released a new version of XCode ( the Apple development tools ) that produces binaries that will run on OSX on PPC or x86.

Have a look at the following links for more info

Mac Rumors

The Register

MacNNM

Apple Developer Site

From what I’ve seen the plan for Apple is to just replace the CPUs in their products with x86 chips, but once they start down that path there is always room to sell OSX86 ( my term not theirs ) as a box set just like Windows…

As a matter of interest, Leopard ( the next OSX version, which will run on PPC and x86 ) is due for release at the same time as Microsoft ships Longhorn…..

Let the speculation begin.

Maybe I need a new section devoted to IceTV with two posts in two days.

The article below isn’t specifically about us but there is a reasonable piece about us in the middle of it.

Welcome to the war – The Edge

Here’s to the coming of the new Ice Age

Continuing from my posting about the Financial Review article on IceTV here is a review from Choice Magazine

Electronic TV program guide

For those who may feel that the review is less than stellar, remember, we are the only players in the market and it’s early days yet.

Windows 3.11 didn’t exactly set the world on fire but M$ now has US$30bn in the bank so who knows what the future holds.

As most of you would know, I work for IceTV as a software engineer.

We have only recently opened our doors to the public and we’re popping up in various media publications, there was an article about our hardware PVR the Topfield TF5000PVRt the review is fairly positive although the reviewer was really unhappy about the way that TV stations often allow programs to run over time so you miss the end if you record it.

Of course it is possible to manually pad your recordings by simply hitting the record button twice instead of once in the guide screen ( which will pop up the timer dialog where you can easily adjust the starting time and duration ) or you can use the feature we are currently testing which will automatically extend the recordings if there are no other timers that would conflict with it.

Subscribers to our service will have this feature very soon and I think it will improve their experience immensely.

For those who don’t get the financial review, here is the article.

AFR Article

It’s amazing how important those three little words can be….

On wednesday I was about to start on some major changes to the app I’m working on so I thought I had better make sure all my source was checked into our source control system. Seems like a good idea don’t you think?

Well, we have recently rebuilt our development machine and its IP address had changed so I checked the latest source from the new machine and manually merged my source into that directory, again I believe a reasonable thing to do.

Feeling good about myself and wanting to keep my working directory tidy I deleted the source directory that I had my code in, safe in the knowledge that it was all in our source repository…. [b]or was it[/b]??

In my enthusiasm I had forgotten that I had added two new files to my source directory and had not copied them into source control, these two files represented nearly three days work by the way.

“Why don’t you just get them out of the Recycle Bin?” I hear you say….

Why?

Because I used the “Shift Delete” method to remove the folder and this by-passes the Recycle Bin.

“Why don’t you use an Undelete utility to get them back?”

Because my friends, I discovered my mistake at the end of the day and the deletion was done at the beginning, and unfortunately it would appear that the two crucial files were overwritten at some point during the intervening time….

The only option was to write the code again, which I did, luckily it only set me back half a day, but it is a painful leason I have learned……

I’ll leave you with this thought.

When it says “Are you sure?” make sure you are before you hit OK.

I lost several hours troubleshooting a particularly bizarre problem.

I’m currently developing a “simple” admin interface for our customer database here at IceTV and I found that certain pages would fail to load for no adequately explained reason.

I spent hours scowering logs, debuging our in-house Template engine, all to no avail.

The only things I noticed were

1) That the pages that failed to load had one thing in common, they contained some Javascript

and

2) That aditional javascript code was appearing in those pages, the extra code consisted of two blocks of Javascript, one at the top of the page and the other at the bottom of the pages, here they are…..

Top of page

function SymError()
{
  return true;
}

window.onerror = SymError;

var SymRealWinOpen = window.open;

function SymWinOpen(url, name, attributes)
{
  return (new Object());
}

window.open = SymWinOpen;

Bottom of page

var SymRealOnLoad;
var SymRealOnUnload;

function SymOnUnload()
{
  window.open = SymWinOpen;
  if(SymRealOnUnload != null)
     SymRealOnUnload();
}

function SymOnLoad()
{
  if(SymRealOnLoad != null)
     SymRealOnLoad();
  window.open = SymRealWinOpen;
  SymRealOnUnload = window.onunload;
  window.onunload = SymOnUnload;
}

SymRealOnLoad = window.onload;
window.onload = SymOnLoad;

It turns out that Norton Internet Security that came pre-installed on our machines is configured by default to do “Ad Blocking” and it does this by adding its own Javascript code to the downloaded pages (see above).

Unfortunately, for whatever reason it sometimes returns an empty page instead of the requested page, hence my problems.

Disabling the “Ad Blocking” functionality seems to have solved the problem.

It seems that a lot of the security tools around today intercept internet traffic, it may not be obvious so be warned!!!!

How cool is this… A Mac mini and iPod dock built into a car… Sweet….

TunerTricks ? Blog Archive ? GTi – MacMini

It seems that the guy who did the mod does these kind of things for a living so it’s not the usual “Too much time on their hands” scenario.