The Musings of Chris Samuel

I’m considering putting some advertising onto the site using Google for older posts, using the “No Adverts for Friends” plugin which doesn’t display adverts to people who have commented, referred from various social bookmarking sites or on posts that are less than a month old.

But before I do that I’d like to hear readers views about whether or not they like the idea!

(Also remember that if you do leave feedback then you won’t see any adverts if I do put them up. )

Basically I’m hoping to use any income from this to help fund the virtual machine that hosts this site, along with Auties.org (a website promoting the abilities of people on the Autism spectrum).

Update 1: Just to clarify, Auties.org will NOT have any paid advertising on it! Just this blog..

Update 2: Russell Coker left a supportive post on his blog in response to this.

So Melbourne is investigating an electronic tag based ticketing system for public transport called Myki (presumably meant to be pronounced My Key and not mickey), and in an interesting coincidence Bruce Schneier reports a successful attack against a Dutch ticketing system that’s about to be deployed:

The first reported attack was designed by two students at the University of Amsterdam, Pieter Siekerman and Maurits van der Schee. They analyzed the single-use ticket and showed its vulnerabilities in a report. They also showed how a used single-use card could be given eternal life by resetting it to its original “unused” state.

The second attack is a reverse engineering of the crypto algorithm through a physical attack on the circuitry which will be a jumping off point for further attacks, I guess.

I wonder how long it’ll take for the Melbourne system to be similarly compromised ?

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) is looking for a Linux systems administrator to join our systems team working on grid computing.

• Help build a grid across Australia!
• Relaxed work environment.
• Melbourne CBD fringe, easy access to trains and tram.
• Salary around $55-60K+ (package contingent on experience)
• Fixed term contract - 12 months.
• Closing Date: 2nd August 2007

Reporting to the ICI Operations Manager, you will be working primarily in a Linux systems administrator role with Grid toolkits such as Globus and VDT. You will be involved in a National Project to provide Grid Based Computing available across Australia. The ability to work with and support our end users (typically scientific researchers and software developers) is very important in this role. Some national and international travel will be involved.

So if you think that it sounds interesting then please and go read the job advert on the VPAC website, or at least tell a friend!

Dear Lazyweb,

I was commenting on a blog by Alec about social media and conferences and looking at the LCA 2007 programme for the first time (as I couldn’t go this year) and spotted this on the research track..

Panel Session by Chris Samuel & Gernot Heiser

Now given that this Chris Samuel couldn’t go to LCA does anyone know who that was ?

In response to a blog from Alec I left the following comment, which is really a “dear lazyweb” question..

Err.. I might be missing something here, but..

What’s the point of twitter ?

AFAICS all you get is out of date information about what someone claimed to be doing some hours, days or weeks ago.

Sorry if I’m being dense..

Dear Lazyweb,

Just been playing with SmartMonTools under Linux to monitor the attributes of my SATA drives (something I’d not bothered to do since upgrading from my old Adaptec SCSI RAID system) and found that it was alerting me about:

Device: /dev/sda, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 190 Unknown_Attribute.

A lot of digging around found nothing (except other people wondering what it was), until I stumbled upon a page about the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3300622AS at Cropel S.M.A.R.T. hard drive monitoring which says:

190 Airflow temperature

Aha! Now smartctl -a /dev/sda -d ata tells me:

190 Unknown_Attribute 0x0022 040 040 045 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 74024484924

Now given that I’m unwilling to believe that the air temperature of my drive is really 74 billion Celsius (three orders of magnitude hotter than the corona of the Sun) there’s got to be something else going on here..

So - does anyone out there have any good ideas ?