donder.co.uk

Thanks to my girlfriend feeling sorry for me, a small army of good friends was put together on my behalf and I was instructed they would help move my shed, which has been sat in a flat packed pile at the wrong end of the allotment site for about 6 weeks now. We decended on the allotment and carried the shed to the plot at the other end of the site, panel by panel, after which I bought everyone lunch at the local pub. The shed is now sat on my plot next to the area where it will be built, with the base in place.

I even had time to do a bit of weeding and to pick the last marrows which I later gave to people at work.

The free shed has so far costed £40 to pickup. About £20 to dispose of the discovered asbestos roof and about £30 for getting it all into place. I still need to get a roof but otherwise I think I’m all set. I’m quite looking forward to having somewhere to put the tools and occasionally hide from the rain. Now it’s moved I also don’t feel quilty when I visit the site since the question that I always felt was about to be asked was always “when are you going to move that shed of yours?”.

I’m looking forward to the coming winter, when I can do a bit of digging and clear all the weeds out as they die off.

With winter coming up I took a look to see if I could leave my home pc running and doing something useful while also heating up the house a little. We have a very small house and it’s got electric heaters anyway – a computer is just a slightly noisier electric heater that also happens to do other useful things.

I took a look at the folding@home site which folds proteins in order to research cures for various diseases. The client runs on your computer and just number crunches all day.

To cut a long story short I’ve dug out various rejected/returned bits of hardware and am going to build them up. Cambridge Universityhave a folding team so naturally I’ll be looking to try and get the existing Oxford teamscore above theirs (nothing like a bit of competition for a good cause). The research is for Stanford but we’re all on this planet together – I’m not too bothered how the credit is given out for research that provides cures. Especially with the opportunity to beat Cambridge at something no matter how small.

So far we’ve gone from the top 35,000 teams to (as of tonight) 10,998 out of 166,827 teams in the past fortnight. I think it’s going to take about 45 days to overtake Cambridge.

The hardware I’m building up should help a lot. The client runs very fast on graphics cards. These are normally used for games but due to their architecture are also quite useful for certain scientific computational problems. I’ve managed to find a second hand motherboard that can take 4 graphics cards, plus a cheap but multi-core cpu and 4 graphics cards that have all been opened and then returned to the factory for one reason or another (“It’s too big for my case!” etc). All in the machine should cost less than a modern netbook, use up about 400watts and pump out about 15k points of computation for the folding project/day.

That’s not a massive number but it’s cheap and a lot of performance for the watts used. It should keep the house warm for the winter too.

So I’m afraid it all went a bit wrong.

It was going ok, I was planting stuff in the raised beds I’d built and slowly reclaiming the plot, but then it got busy at work and I didn’t go to the plot for about a month. When I got back the weeds were gigantic which was pretty disheartening.

Luckily my girlfriend attacked the plot and got the weeds under control. She also grew a great wildflower spot and a herb area. I’ve just purchased more disk space from my web provider so I’ll upload the photos of all our veg we grew – I think we earned back the money from the plot on the courgettes alone.

For about a month or two we had an unstoppable supply of potatoes, runner beans, broad beans and courgettes. We had hardly any slugs but the tomatoes died of blight before we got anything from them.

We were offered a shed from another allotment site for free if we took it away. I paid for a man with a van and got it to our site but then immediately got reported because the roof was made from asbestos and so had to be removed. I bought some builders polythene and duct tape and double wrapped/sealed all the asbestos before getting a friend to help transport it to the local council disposal site.

Currently the rest of the shed is sat flatpacked at the entrance to the allotment while I try to get a group of people to help move it to my plot since each section is too heavy and large for me to move myself.

It was a good summer but I’m a bit fed up with the shed incident and a bit overwhelmed with the weeds on the plot which is further away now that we’ve moved house. I think I’d originally been expecting the allotment to be populated by friendly old blokes drinking tea in sheds but that’s not the case. Although it’s been fun I’ve not felt like part of a community and it’s now quite far away and feeling like a liability.

Family members: this is a geek post that you might want to ignore.

So my workplace provided me with a hp tablet when I started. It’s been pretty amazing but the choice of Windows XP tablet edition or Vista wasn’t terribly inspiring. (I did try Linux and I use it on my workstation but on a tablet it just wasn’t all that polished.)

So after hearing that the new Windows 7 release candidate was more responsive than XP or Vista I figured I’d give a try. I thought I’d write about it here in case it helps someone.

So I got the RC1 64 bit candidate from Microsofts site. I’m aware I might be making things harder for myself with the 64bit version but hey, I wanted to give it a try.

After the install has finished, just check for updates and the recommended updates section will include a fair few drivers. After a reboot I then had 4 unknown devices still needing drivers.

I had all the xp/vista drivers for the 2710 downloaded from HPs site already so I used winrar to unpack all the contents from the install files into one directory, then asked windows to update the drivers for each unknown device, pointing it at the big directory of files. This fixed one of the devices.

For the fingerprint reader, you can get a beta driver for Windows 7 64bit at Authentecs websitewhich is the manufacturer of the fingerprint reader of the 2710. The new driver and interface is great and quite polished compared to the original shipped version.

I would recommend you don’t install the hp protect suite or the buttons software, at least on the 64 bit version. Installing the protect suite just wont work and the buttons software will make the screen rotation work but make the mute light toggle every 15 seconds or so.

I haven’t found a solution for the screen rotation yet but I can use ctrl-x in the meantime to bring up the mobility interface and toggle the rotation. It still only rotates in 2 directions instead of all 4, I believe there’s a complex fix for this so I’ll come back to it another day.

Other oddities are that when the sound is muted, if I shutdown then I get the dialogue that the system is waiting for explorer, with the subtext stating that it’s attempting to play the shutdown sound. As part of the shutdown process the computer appears to then turn off the mute, the sound plays the dialogue disappears and then the system shuts down. Normally the system copes fine with sound from an application and the mute on… it just wouldn’t be audible.

Software

I installed Artrage on it, which I’ve the paid/full version of as it’s cheap and a beautiful little program that keeps loved ones entertained and out of your hair for entire evenings at a time.

I’ve put a trial of Autodesks Sketchbook Pro on from Autodesks website in order to try out, but it’s about £90 and I’m not a great artist so I suspect I wont purchase the full version at the end of the trial.

I guess I’ll have to put Onenote on as Agilix seem to have abandoned gobinder (and the Franklin Covey packaged version of the same program). In fact they abandoned it some time ago, just after I paid for the full product (ho hum). The old Gobinder binary struggles on vista with various bugs, and under Windows 7 in caries a known issues warning if you attempt to install it.

I had a play with the built in speech recognition but I’m undecided on it. It was fine in a quiet office environment but not when demonstrating to others.

The handwriting recognition seems better, I’ll try and use it in anger over the next week.

I wont bore you with the more minor details, but essentially the release candidate works, and does so to a better standard than their current full products.

This month the entire family sent me their seeds, and all the seeds seem to need planting in April. This was a bit awkward as April was really busy in terms of visiting people or needing to do other tasks away from the allotment, yet I really needed to recover more of the plot to make beds and to regularly water the new plants.

Towards the end of the month I realised my seedbed had some quite reasonable looking radishes in it, but they needed seperating out, so about 30 were moved to locations around the plot. At this point there were then 3 days of sun and mose of the plants I moved look pretty dead. I’ve been watering them a lot this past few days so I’m hoping they’ll recover.

The potatos are coming out of the ground and starting to look bigger than the weeds. The garlic and runner baens are about 2-3 inches high and the chives are having a great time. The grass I’ve sown on some of the pathways is looking great.

I’ve planed more lettuce, onions, carrots, peans and beans.

I’ve got between 1/4 and 1/5 of the allotment left to reclaim from the wilderness. I’m hoping in May that the plants will become big enough that a lot of the weeding isn’t needed.

Only just got back today but the photos are all up at:

http://donder.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2863

Will write more later, but figured people would be more interested in the photos.

Right well, march seems to have flown by, I didn’t think the digging would end but it all seems to come together laster Saturday.

Photos are up at: http://donder.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2828

So I’ve planted
* Radishes and plain leafed parsley in one raised bed
* Lots of blight-resistant potatoes of 3 different species.
* Garlic cloves from my sister
* Chives which grew all by themselves and that I transplanted
* Broad beans

And as seeds I’ve started growing:
* spinach – Giant Viroflay
* courgettes – Zucchini

I’ve finished moving all the earth for all but one raised bed. I’ve dug down the level of the ground in the path areas by about a foot to get enough earth. I’ve used lots of log offcuts to make the borders around the raised beds where I’d run out of wood. I’ve put down some wildflower meadow mix grass seeds on the path areas although I don’t think it’ll grow – it’s just to hard and compact – I should find a way to get some turf. The raised beds are all now at the height that they’d be above the flood the allotment experienced in February if it were to occur again to the same level.

I’ve been doing a little research on forest gardens, I’d quite like to plant some dwarf trees but I know the allotment managers are a bit twitchy about the growing number of trees on the plots. I’ll send an email tonight to test the water, but I’ll only be allowed dwarf trees rather than the monster apple trees I remember from Gloucester.

In all it’s gone quite well, I’m probably ready to attack the second half of the allotment in April but I’ll need to find wood for raised beds, which I’m hoping to do without spending money.

February was determined to stop me from achieving anything.

First was the snow, then later it melted and the water table rose until my plot was submerged. The raised beds were a couple of inches out of the water but I didn’t have enough earth in them. Oh well it’s a start. At least I know roughly how high the floods are now and it didn’t damage anything.

I’ve planted radishes and courgettes in one raised bed on the 24th. I’ve put some cheap plastic over the bed to try and keep the rain off but the plastic isn’t very strong. I’ve moved about 7 wheelbarrows of earth this month while working on the other beds but the weeds are now starting to grow and will be coming to life long before I have any paths or the majority of the beds finished.

Occasionally relations ask what I do for a living. I describe it as looking after the connections between the different units of the university.

In reality I spend a lot of time re-writing old perl scripts that write configurations for services or display web pages to give other teams better information on what’s going on. I rewrite old scripts to make sure attackers can’t misues the web interfaces, modify data in databases or modify files on the file servers. I write new scripts to give visualisation of firewall and mail server configurations. I investigate users queries on mail delivery issues, or manually respond to a large incoming spam attack. If I have time I work on my weak areas that the rest of the team are very good on – cisco switches, large network topography and configuration.

Today was a good day for staying calm and responding to issues professionally but a bad day for the university. Phishing attacks against the university are fairly common – emails coming in to the users pretending to be an it support department, asking the user to send their username and password to an email address. They’re quite obvious frauds but out of 30,000 users there’s always a few that fall for them. Once an account details are known, the account is used either to send out spam advertising a product or to send out more phishing emails targeting other universities or similar. There might be multiple phishing attacks going on at once from different sources.

On this occasion one got through, and the users reply got back to the attackers.

The attacker managed to get about 30,000 spam emails out from an account on the main university mail server, which is the worst incident I’ve seen in the 1.5 years I’ve been in the network support team. Spamcop reports are reliable. When a spamcop report comes in, as the team that looks after the central mail relay, we pay attention, and as soon as the first report came in we notified the other teams. The users account password was reset and the remote attackers web session kicked off. On the mail relays the senders address was blocked to prevent the backlog getting out and then all backed up emails from the account were rejected back to the internal compromised account.

Then the diplomacy starts. I add a brief writeup of what’s occurred to the spamcop report and then mark the spam ’spam outbreak stopped’. Individual yahoo users reported the spam to us, and I sent back polite individual replies as we do want them to report these again in the future. We’ve an AOL feedback loop that I’ve been dealing with for the past month, entirely made up of false positives until today. We’ve had hundreds of AOL junk mail reports as a result. One person sends in an abusive message to the whois contacts for the university in capitals, stating that the spamcop status is false, but the timestamps on his example place his spam before the first spamcop report; I send him a polite message with full disclosure of what’s happened.

During this time the various teams are thinking of how to stop these attacks in the future. We see which addresses logged in to the compromised accounts, whether these addresses logged in to any other accounts, whether anyone else replied to the attack the original user fell victim to… we’ve a few extra tricks but anyone who has a team looking after a mail server relay will recognise the normal steps. I ended up staying late to talk to another team about more prevention methods.

The attack raises some interesting issues. There were some unexpected correlations between various attacks in an information field that I didn’t expect to have had any information of use and that I found by accident. It’s just speculation but I think it might be possible to write an application that can produce almost a family tree type image of the various attacks to show how they are related. The only problem is lack of staff time, which is a shame as the spammers have much more time to dedicate to their attacks.

The day end felt satisfying in that we’d been able to respond as quickly as possible and the detective work and log analysis is motivating, pitting you against the attacker. But the disheartening aspect was that so much spam had got out from the university, that the university user had given up their details to such an obvious fake email, and that all the spam prevention and mail server reputation work over the recent time period had been undone.

Thanks to a visit to Orinoco, the community centre project which sells second hand gardening tools I now have loads more tools, which only cost £5. The only downside was mild humiliation when the stagecoach bus driver wouldn’t let me on with the tools (all the ends were wrapped up in hessian), luckily the next bus driver from another company was fine.

Pat kindly sent me a whole load of left over seeds, which covered most of the things I wanted to grow. mum sent me some books and magazines, and I’ve some library books to take back.

I did some work taking apart a disused plot for the allotment association, and was told I could keep the things I removed, so I now have a wood/chickenwire gate and a raised bed wooden rectange.

I’ve laid out the raised bed already and have been filling it with any soil that’s left over as I’m clearing the site.

I ‘ve started lifting the black plastic that covers most of the site. There’s a lot of earth on top of it so I’ve had to keep clearing the earth as I’ve rolled the plastic back. My aim is to lift the whole peice of black plastic and then use it to cover the rear half of the allotment. I’ll use some of the log piles and stumps to create raised beds on the area that’s uncovered, although I realise it’s better for the wildlife if the log piles are left together.

I can’t do a lot of digging at the moment because the rest of the allotment isn’t as well dug as the very first part, and the earth is frozen quite solid. I’m going to use the undiggable time to try and remove weeds, construct raised beds, plan the layout and ensure I’ve got the correct tools, in workign order (and assist with community work).

My costs so far are:

• £5 for overgrown plot for 3 months ( I joined at a awkward time).
• £25 for azada, handle and bus fare
• £8.60 for sickle, border fork, log hoe, hand trowel, hand fork, shovel, chopping axe
• £7.00 for remaining seeds
• £3.50 for 100 wooden plant name tags
• £1.50 for 4 iron wedges to fix the azada handle

I’d like to sort out a compost bin/heap, a sieve, a border spade and maybe some manure or similar.

Community wise I’ve some fenceposts to pull out on a derelict plot and a fairly small treestump to dislodge. I’ve already taken out one treestump and removed two fenceposts.

Noone has said anything but the allotment rules say I need to have a sign with the plot number on it so I’ve been tring to look for a suitable stake and placard.

My neighbouring plot owners also need access to the well, which I think I’ve broken the bucket handle for. Noone is going to complain at the moment as watering plants from the well with freeze them solid at the moment but I need to repair the bucket fairly soon. I was going to make a path for the two adjacent plot owners to get to the well, and thought baout using the gate between the plots rather than at the front of it.

I met Sam who owns the plot next to me today, who offered to let me keep my tools in his shed, but I didn’t want to impose having only just met Sam. Some weird part of me would have felt guilty each time I went on to his plot to get the tools.

The tools that were best and when:

1. The azada for smashing up brambles, taking chunks out of everything, turning over soil and making the shallow ditches and piled tops of the initial rasied beds. It was also useful today as a grip and level to pull the stakes vertically out of the ground (imagine the end of the blade digging in to the fence post and the handle levering on the edge of the hole around the fence post).
2. The grass rake I found on the site, for being great at pulling chunks of brambles across the site, picking vegetation out of the raised beds and just being a great ‘claw’
3. The axe from orinoco I shardpened with a grinding stone and cut straight through the lateral roots on the tree stump I was tring to remove, it’s brilliant.
4. The small border fork I got from orinoco never bends and has been great for digging the holes in order to remove the fenceposts
5. The shovel from orinoco was great for building the raised bed today.
6. Hammer with claw, for all those rusty nails sticking out of old lumps of wood.

Next weekend I’ll work on moving the plastic covering to the other half of the site and if there’s still time after this I’ll construct more raised beds, although I may not have enough soil to do many.