BT Home Hub 2.0 Privicy Invasion

If you are currently using BT as your ISP and you have the misfortune of using a BT Home Hub 2.0 do be aware that this device has a potential security flaw allowing BT to update/change firmware settings on it without your consent.

This gives BT the potential to track your internet usage from inside your own network, even seeing the network that passes inside of your own LAN.

If you have implicit trust in BT as a highly ethical company that never does anything wrong (infringing GPL, RIPA breaches) then you should carry on using you're Home Hub, if not.. be afraid...

source http://community.bt.com/t5/BB-in-Home/Why-have-BT-put-a-backdoor-in-the-8-1-H-J-firmware-that-allows/td-p/620

change linux process priority with nice and renice

Process priorities are set between 20 (lowest) and -19 (highest)

To launch a task with a priority of 5 try:
mike@mikebox:~$ sudo nice task 5

If you're laptop is overehating and kacpi_notify is stealing all your CPU power polling the CPU temperature you can use renice to change priority of a running process (pid 20) to priority 5
mike@mikebox:~$ sudo renice 5 -p 20

renice Usage:
renice [-n] priority [-p|--pid] pid [... pid]
renice [-n] priority -g|--pgrp pgrp [... pgrp]
renice [-n] priority -u|--user user [... user]
renice -h | --help
renice -v | --version

nice Usage: nice [OPTION] [COMMAND [ARG]...]
Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling.
With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Nicenesses range from
-20 (most favourable scheduling) to 19 (least favourable).

-n, --adjustment=N add integer N to the niceness (default 10)
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit

Ubuntu 9.10 screen flashing and keyboard unresponsive

If Ubuntu 9.10 boots up to a flashing screen and unresponsive keyboard chances are your xwindows configuration isn't working - you can check this by running /etc/init.d/gdm stop (you should have a nice non-flashing shell)

for some reason dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg didn't work for but simply deleting /etc/X11/xorg.conf did - all should be fine after a reboot

Ubuntu alsa-utils sound Issues

Alsa-Utils sound in Ubuntu 8+ is buggy as hell and always seems to die on me When the sound goes all crackly and

m@m:~$ /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

doesn't work; try

m@m:~$ /etc/init.d/alsa-utils reset

other params are:
{start [CARD]|stop [CARD]|restart [CARD]|reset [CARD]}

PHP Hash Maker - MD5, SHA1 etc

The Hash maker is a quick and easy way to either make hashes and use them directly or try to work out what your lost password was

I find it quite useful to be able to generate hashes for passwords directly for the purposes of resetting passwords directly in a database

dbPHP - Object Relational Mapping for PHP

• dbPHP is a lightweight framework allowing object relational mapping between (at present) mySQL and PHP.  
• dbphp project home
• dbphp twitter
• Google Code Home
• SourceForge Code Home
• dbphp manual
•  

• Object relational mapping is the process of creating a structural relationship between the classes/data objects used in the logic layer and the database itself.   
•  
• One of the most successfully implemented exampled of an object relational/persistence frame work in the world of open source software is Seam with Hibernate. Seam is a framework for Java that allows one to run a generation script against a database and return an entire class frame work mirroring the structure of the database.  
•  
• It allows for information to be directly loaded from the database into memory, view/altered/removed, and these changes saved without the user ever having to interact directly with the database through structured query language.  
•  
• dbPHP is not designed to be commercial - if you want a hardcore resilient server with tons of functionality then you would never even consider PHP. what dbPHP aims to do is speed up the development times of quick and dirty PHP.  
•  
• PHP allows users to develop code in incredibly shoddy ways with no regard for performance or re-usability and dbPHP tries to steer the developer towards a more structured object-oriented style of development. 
•  
•  
• Existing Frameworks 
•  
• Zend Framework 
• WACT 
• Prado 
• ZooP Framework 
• eZ Components 
• CodeIgniter 
•  
• CakePHP* 
• Symfony Project* 
• Seagull Framework* 
• PHP on TRAX* 
•  
• My research has lead me to believe that only 4 of the existing main frameworks have object relational mapping capability *. 
•  
• Object Relational Mapping 
• The importance of object relational mapping in scalable designs is clear. Maintaining a cross-platform relationship between data structures underpins many concepts which form the future of the internet - using an ORM Java example, a table can be taken from a database, loaded into memory and then directly output in XML - allowing for easy transfer of information retaining all of the semantic meaning using an open and widely available transport standard. 
•  
• Lightweight. 
• The lightweight element of dbPHP is the key to its strength. PHP is free, it runs on cheap nasty hosting and it can provide a reasonable degree of functionality in relation the the manipulation and display of data for the web. dbPHP requires no installation other than being present in a directory. It is a series of classes that can be extended allowing child classes to map their internal structure to database objects and inheriting a number of useful SQL commands such as update, delete, findAll. 
•  
• PHP Limitations
• PHP has severe memory and performance limitations when it comes to handling large amounts of data or highly recursive tasks (default time out is set to 30 secs). It also has no ability to run threads and the only time it ever bothers to execute anything is if someone or something requests a page be served up. Global variables are seriously dodgy as you never really know what has access to them meaning that whenever you are requesting something from memory you have no way of knowing who set it, what's in it or if it will change.
• PHP will quite happily work in a similar way to a well laid out java class model with private variables and get/set functions if one spends the time to do this.
•  
• Creative context.
• When you want to make a project on the web, unless you love code, you don't really want to be spending half your time reinventing the wheel and rewriting code for boring banal stuff like update databases or other such stuff. Taking this to the extreme you can make all your projects in word press and totally abstract yourself from the process - if however your project involves some low-level elements, you're doing something clever with data, you want to incorporate a piece of flash that requires the storage of persisted data or you want to create a custom photo gallery of your own design - you probably want to focus on your own project and program logic. What dbphp does is allow you to treat your database and table as another area of memory and store and retrieve without extra hassle.
•  
• framework comparison chart 
• http://www.phpit.net/demo/framework%20comparison/chart.php 

RSS Feed

Information Evil? - Extending the Panopticon

• Foucault argues that the bureaucratic systems that regulate society extend the Panopticon of subtle social control deep into the inner most reaches of our psyche. (Foucault, 1975)
•  
• The basis for this need to control and organise society finds its roots in the concepts of ownership and possession, the ability to accrue and control wealth and assets above and beyond that of others, and to then retain that control.
•  
• The ideologies upon which modern Capitalism are based were first manifested in the Protestant work ethic. Himanen (2001) . This enshrined work and social compliance as the cornerstones of a godly life. At its heart lay the all seeing, omnipresent eyes of God inspecting his flock as they deified themselves through good honest labour, working daily for their place in heaven. Work became an end in itself, no longer based on productivity but rather hours spent in toil. It enslaved the working classes into a life of holy drudgery with the promise of eternal salvation if they complied.
•  
• The church acted as an intermediary with the great omnipotent power of God and thus held sway over the lives of many whilst underpinning governments and bureaucratic institutions.
•  
• As rational thought and the development of technology have gradually slain the myth of an omnipresent God, governments and those with an interest in social control have sought to fill the void with less celestial threats.
•  
• Whilst bureaucracies have never had religious ideology at their core they do rely on principles of behavioural modification with the threat of social, legal and religious consequences.
•  
• New technologies enable bureaucratic systems to micromanage themselves and grow on an unprecedented scale whilst also allowing them to extend the limits of surveillance in support of their goals of social conformity, cost cutting and efficiency.
•  
• In order to accept the control of faceless bureaucracies utilising surveillance as a tool for the furtherance of freedom and justice it is necessary to view the state as a benevolent god-like body that can be trusted with the interests of all and which has an inherent sense of right and wrong with which all of the population agree. It is also necessary to think of the ‘criminal element’ of society as separate social strata which must be controlled and exemplified as a failure to conform.
•  
• This dissertation aims to investigate how technology has aided the growth of bureaucratic systems in developing their internal structures whilst extending the effectiveness of the surveillance systems that underpin their powerbase, in contrast with the initial ethics and ideals that contributed to the development of the information technology revolution using London as a microcosm of a contemporary capitalism ruled by bureaucracy, extending its power through surveillance.
•  
• Progressive development of computer systems has lead to an almost invaluable status within society, underpinning most of the daily routine of modern society. Vehicle engine management, financial systems, and the formulation of corporate and governmental policy are all examples based on computer models and analysis of data.
•  
• Has all of this allowed modern technology in the form of organised information storage and computerised electronic surveillance replaced religion as a method of social control?
•  

Information Evil - Full Text

MySQL full indexed text search - just like a real database!!

• As of My Sql 3.something you can now add text indexes to your columns and do full text searches with relevance ranking! text indexes are fantastic and allow more efficient searching and categorisation of text. The relevance ranking feature is rather good too and gives you a much better idea of how your search performed. 
•  
• Issues to note are, this example uses relevance ranking as the criteria for returning results, if you take that condition out you will return every result in the database with a relevance score of 0. 
•  
• The default MySQL settings do not bother to index search terms of less than 4 characters therefore searching for anything less will bring back no results. This can be altered by setting "set ft_min_word_len =1" in your mysql config. This will result in a performance hit.  
•  
• Text indexes in large data sets can be quite processor intensive so you might also consider limiting your result set. 
•  
• ALTER TABLE `database`.`table_name` 
• ENGINE = MyISAM; 
•  
• ALTER TABLE table_name 
• MODIFY column_name TEXT; 
•  
• ALTER TABLE table_name 
• ADD FULLTEXT(column_name); 
•  
• SELECT *, 
• MATCH(column_name) 
• AGAINST ('search term') 
• AS score 
• FROM table_name 
• HAVING score > 0 
• ORDER BY score DESC;

PHP Colour Changing Background Algorithm

This returns the average colour of an image in PHP using GD libraries and then, assuming you ahve no sense of design, you could use this to set the background colour of a page. This code can be slotted directly into the ImageHandler class also on this site

1.    public function getAverageColour(){ 
2.       $colours = array('red'=>0,'green'=>0,'blue'=>0); 
3.       $count = 0; 
4.       $rgbstring = null; 
5.        
6.       for ($i=0;$iimage);$i++){ 
7.          for ($j=0;$jimage);$j++){ 
8.             $rgb = imagecolorat($this->image, $i, $j); 
9.             $ici = imagecolorsforindex($this->image, $rgb); 
10.             //print_r($ici); 
11.             foreach($colours as $key => $value){ 
12.                $colours[$key] = $colours[$key] + $ici[$key]; 
13.             } 
14.          $count++; 
15.          } 
16.       } 
17.       foreach($colours as $key => $value){ 
18.                $colours[$key] = dechex(intval($colours[$key] / $count)); 
19.                $rgbstring = $rgbstring . sprintf("%02s", $colours[$key]); 
20.             } 
21.       return $rgbstring;    
22.    }