Richard Hooker Close-Up

Well, I have been playing around with my new toy a little and the results are in my Flickr Photostream. I hope someone enjoy's them.

UPS restored my faith in europewide package transport ...

Well, my camera arrived this morning. The first couple test shots were actually very good (Example 1 and Example 2). I give it easily 5 stars! More to come soon.

RepRap Challenge 1 cancelled because of lazyness

I really do not know what is wrong with me. I think the whole December and Christmas and winter does not suit me. My productivity is so low that I'm ashamed of it. Anyhow, I did order myself a Christmas present yesterday early morning. I've been looking for semi-decent dslr cameras for ages and then I saw Vincent Laforet's Reverie. I'm not that rich but HD video creating possibilities attract me so I went for the budget option this time. Before I get lot's of comments on how stupid I have been I'll warn you that I'm not looking for something professional.



Kodak EasyShare Z1012 IS has been praised by the online community for being the cheap option for a semi-decent camera and HD video creating device. Sure, it has trouble with video quality in low light conditions but never mind that. I thought it would be good to take some holiday pictures and maybe even create a HD videolog of some sort.

I really hope they will deliver it before Christmas so this magical time will be also recorded and saved for later use. And then maybe with a little christmas miracle i'll finaly start the challenge 1. Only time will tell.

RepRap challenge 1

Well, i decided to be the snob from the city and buy the kits so i thought it would be fast and easy. WRONG! Funny how people do something until it excites them and then leave it standing around for some time.

So I did put the frame together and started on the electronics but this was like a month ago and since then nothing has happened. So I decided I'll force myself doing something this weekend ... I keep my fingers crossed and hope that the main stuff gets done. Then I should clean up the table and take some pictures too ... proud moments:)

Shame on me!

Well, I have to admit one of my recent guilty pleasures: 2 of the recent Britney songs are kinda good. One of them is the brand new single "Womanizer" and the other one is the bit older single "Piece of me". Oh and she looks much better as a brunette, I do not understand the blond looks of her at all ... Britney, Go brunette and make me happy!

RepRap

So I'm bored ... a little, I decided to build a RepRap for personal use. I will keep you posted on how it's going anyway.

Anyone interested in what a RepRap is visit http://www.reprap.org/

Runescape alternative

Well, I know lots of kiddies playing runescape or any other 3d virtual mmorpg. There is a FLOSS alternative, try worldforge @ www.worldforge.org. There are lots of servers to connect to and lots of fun playing. Oh and still waiting for Chrome to be ported to linux.

Google has some news: Google Chrome is out!

Well, first of all, Google Chrome is out and I'm one passionate use (at least on my laptop). I totally love the simplicity of it and the speed also. Now if they only would do a linux version of it, then the world would be perfect.

Phillips SNU5600 ubuntu and linux

Lately I've been getting some traffic because of these keywords from the topic and i presume people are having the same problems that I had with Ubuntu 7.04 and the SNU5600. Anyhow, there is a problem in the kernel so this wireless usb adapter is not supported, the easiest solution is to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 or even better, the 8.04. I spent a good day figuring out what to do until I decided to go the easy way.

oh and as many of the visitors come from the Italian Google, I've used the Google translate page to put this into Italian:

Ultimamente sono stato sempre il traffico perché alcune di queste parole chiave da l'argomento e presumo persone stanno avendo gli stessi problemi che ho avuto con Ubuntu 7,04 e il SNU5600. In ogni caso, c'è un problema nel kernel per cui questo adattatore USB wireless non è supportato, la soluzione più semplice è quello di effettuare l'aggiornamento a 7,10 Ubuntu o meglio ancora, il 8,04. Ho trascorso una buona giornata per capire cosa fare fino a quando ho deciso di andare in modo facile.

oh e come molti dei visitatori provengono dal italiano di Google, ho usato la pagina di Google Translate a mettere questo in italiano

on this day ...

... Eritrea declared its independence and gained international recognition 15 years ago


oh and yesterday 10 years ago the Good Friday Agreement is accepted in a referendum in Northern Ireland with 75% voting yes.

Unbelivable Stupidity

So this BBC article tells us:

Microsoft has joined forces with the developers of the "$100 laptop" to make Windows available on the machines. The move was prompted by countries which demanded the operating system before placing an order.

This is another successful brainwash by "The Evil Company" and I'm waiting for the FOSS community's response to this.

Ignorance is Bliss

I think my neighbour wants to tell me something, he's been knocking and hammering on the wall all evening.

Hit me baby one more time - NOT

These days there are too many stupid talent competitions. Starting off with Simon Cowells empire every single of those competitions should be just scrapped from TV. Or, there should be other kind of talent contests. Within the last 10 years I've seen people with lots of talent in programming, art, design, photography ... not only a beautyful body with a pretty face who barely can sing and then use multi-million pound hardware/software to edit the stuff to be nice to listen to.

I might aswell ...

I decided to try out the domain buy/sell business ... so here I am with my first domain for sale: bestbargaincars.com. So if anyone is interested, the domain is on sale through sedo.

Random ideas on how to improve "selling internet"

In the UK almost all service providers have limits on the amount of data downloaded by the client. In most cases you would have to pay extra if the limit has been breached. Anyway, I came up with a brilliant idea. How about if the ISP-s would sell internet access by GigaByte (GB) rather then time period?

Hereby, if anyone does not use this method yet (except the mobile broadband providers), I declare this idea as mine and no-one should be using it without my permission. Anyway, the idea is simple, no Monthly Contracts but you pay per GB used. Now, many people will complain: "oh, this does not set limits to the bills", well, it does! Simply, this kind of internet service can be provided only on a certain bandwidth and the maximum amount payable can be calculated easily. Sure, you can pay monthly but the idea is to separate both type of users, the ones that only use couple MB per day or the people like me, who download/upload full linux distros and certain other software (while developing) on a daily basis. Sure, you should be able to select the speed for downloading separately (might end up with bigger bills).

Anyway, these days it seems, that big broadband companies and ISP-s are earning billions by using the stupidity of the "average" people by offering them services they never use to the full extent. Anyway, I'm fairly sure, if all people owning a bradband or cable connection would use the service to the limits, the service providers would go simply bankrupt. Why? Simply, because they offer their services relying on people, who don't know anything about the systems and terms and fall for the "bigger is better" fantasy, that exists in this industry.

Another interesting read on this topic is here: BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer

Hereby, I started a new venture by providing Internet to my neighbors. We share the costs and have our own private network set up.

Geek Celebrations ...

Big day for Ubuntu as the new release is due today. I did pre-order some cd-s already so everything should be fine ... but still ... exiting ...

On the other hand, I'm gonna try out gOS within the next week or so.

Happy Birthday

Yeah, Happy B-Day Carmen Electra and Jasmin Wagner (Blümchen) :)

I will help you with your decisions

So we had a little problem on the irc channel, someone needed to flip a coin. "Flash" offered nicely the idea of making a script ... so i made one ...

Flip a coin

coded in tcl, it is a Unix/Linux shell script. Make sure you have the permissions to execute it. Future plans in development: I might add all different coins (heads or tails might be not represented on all coins) and also a GUI would be nice. Still, this is my first proper open source development. Enjoy.

Thanks for the attention

Time for coffee

The ideal espresso (according to the Instituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano) is a 25ml beverage extracted from around 7g of finely ground coffee, using water at a temperature of 88C, passing through the grains at a pressure of 9 bar. See, dead easy. It should be thick-textured, having emulsified many of the oils, retain most of the volatile aromas and flavours of the bean and be capped with a thick colloidal foam layer - "crema" - reddish, creamy and flecked. Each one of those factors is minutely variable, potentially causing thinness, bitterness, under- or overextraction or - the ultimate humiliation - a thin or patchy crema.

more info here: Tim Hayward on pursuit of perfect home espresso

My head hurts

I've been thinking about a formula for my current project all night. Basically it's a simple way of organizing websites internal links. Many of you know that when you create websites you might have many vars to have proper usability. Now, my idea is to make a simple unpredictable formula similar to tinyurl. The idea is that a website url ending file.php?action=asd&id=1&user=username will be ending like file.php?ihgt54i

The idea is not to use any tables, so this method could be used for many things. If anyone has a solution, mail me, please!

forget the pimping and love Firefox 3

So I decided to start swapping things. You probably have heard of the paper clip to a house deal in so and so many swaps. Ah well, i decided to start doing it as well. So i put this Nissan Micra I have on a website :) I will have to take some pictures but else go and offer me anything in the same or higher value.

so go and have a look: here.

Anyhow, my goal would be to get a really nice yacht, possibly a multihull so i could enjoy being free :) But this is not all. I also would like a house in a coastal region (either Tacoma near seattle, US or Torbay area in Devon). For this matter i'll find something else to swap:) Sure I will keep things posted here.

In a complete other matter now! Firefox 3 Beta 4 is out! And I really like it. I really really do. Now, with KDE4 and Firefox 3 coming out, this definitely marks a new era in UNIX/Linux like systems. It has been made more and more user-friendly and more and more in a way so newbies can have a go. I personally have used Linux for almost 10 years now and learned about it in the really early stages with Redhat 5 for example. Compared to then, things have been made more and more easier so almost everyone can manage a Linux desktop.

J

Time to Pimp my ride!

Well, the thing is, i got a nice Nissan Micra for free from a nice lad and i thought this is the best opportunity to keep the busines including the car at a low cost. So I need your help world! Help me to pimp my ride.

Here's the deal: I need about £500 to get the car road legal. I will pay for the insurance but i need help to get the car on the road. In return I will put ads (with whatever you want) on the car. For every £1 of your support you'll get 1 square cm add space on the car. I will also send you a printable certificate through email confirming the donation and givin the guarantee that the ads will be on the car for a minimum of 6 months.

Hereby, this is not a money making scheme. I will not use the money otherwise. All the money will go towards the car. I will personally use the car for 6 months and then will give it away free of charge to someone who needs it more then I do. I accept paypal payments to jaan@vibedb.com towards the project. Thanks for your attention, more information and pictures coming soon!

ahti-Phorm petition

Please, if you are a resident in the UK, sign up.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/

Last month there were some new about Phorm buying userdata from ISP-s.

t will not be "injecting" anything into your internet connection, as some commenters on our previous stories have suggested. Phorm's Open Internet Exchange (OIX) is an online advertising broker service that, just like DoubleClick, matches advertisers with publishers. For both these parties, the closer the match the better: advertisers reach the people they're most interested in, who are more likely to click on the ad, which means the publisher will get more money.

For users who don't opt out, the way the system works is much more clear (see "Active mode" slide). Hit a link in your browser and the HTTP request will be intercepted by the ACE and rerouted to Phorm's Anonymiser. Having hijacked the request, the Anonymiser can then set a tracking cookie, which it keeps hold of.

Without a response, the browser resubmits its request for the web page you want to visit. It is again rerouted to Phorm, but only as far as the F5 hardware, which bounces it on to the website you originally wanted, but also sends a copy of the request to Phorm's profiler kit.

The website reruns the content you want, which is again intercepted by the ACE. A copy of the page contents is sent to the Profiler, this time with the cookie in tow. If the publisher of the page is a member of the OIX, keywords in the page can be used to target ads. Finally the page is served up on your screen, and if everything is worked correctly, the browser and the user should be none the wiser.

This is just wrong and has to be stopped!

More information: here

BBC has a new website ...

... and i like it. The new design does the site really good. It's more easier to use and lot more frendly to the eye. Keep it up!

J

How to describe democracy in UK

I don't know how it works in Estonia but over here we have a parliamentary democracy. The word parliament comes from the French verb Parlez - to talk. And that what happens - they talk about democracy - thats all. They never
implement it.

We get a limited set of candidates to vote for. Anyone trying to be independent gets a £10,000 fine for interfering with the status quo. To run for parliament you have to be a long standing member of a political group who's ideas are already laid out in a thing called the manifesto just in case you thought freedom of thought was part of a democracy.

In case of any outbreaks of independent (democratic) thought once elected we have a system of whips who can stop any MP's career in its tracks and so keep them under control. And if that fails the 'free press' (owned and managed by big business) will be called in to destroy them.

Whomever gets elected is then advised by a thing called the lobby which is a way for business or other wealthy organisations to get their point of view into government - in a democracy it would be one person one vote so business would have no business in government. But that would reduce corruption and so is not in the parliamentarians interest.

To come back to software the lobby is there to ensure that business makes a profit from government. Anyone with any technical knowledge is sidelined so that the government can be bribed - sorry advised - by those with the loudest voice - ie those with the largest amount of money to spend or gain. Its of little interest to the government to follow the cheapest route as the press and the courts will be used to ensure that it becomes a lot more expensive. And as there is more money to be gained by repeatedly selling software that doesn't work than allowing a twelve year old to write a fully functioning CMR system in an afternoon that will work for eternity then the former solution is, of course, the one thats taken.

So remember a parliamentary democracy talks about democracy and doesn't implement it. Its an oxymoron - like 'free market economy' - markets were invented to gain control of the economy and prevent it being free!

Thanks Tom :)

Blogshares scavenger thingie

Well, here we go so this is my answer/post to the BlogShares scavenger contest. I chose the simpsons theme. All images have been foung through google so I havent edited any of them.

1. A man in a kilt either outdoors or at a workplace.


Yeah!

2. A plane in the process of landing.


Ok, it is on the ground but still driving, hope this counts :)

3. SubWolf surrounded by women.


First, find SubWolf, then count the women in the image :)

4. Dave's mom in combat boots.


Well, as Marge is wearing trousers we could imagine that she's wearing combat boots

5. Two people knitting towards each other on the same project.

Sadly no image, did not find anyone knitting

6. Ducks in a waterscape scene. (bonus for most ducks).


Got the waterscape and the ducks are in the foam ... really ...

7. Someone surrounded by coffee cups.

Well, it is hard to fund someone surrounded by coffee cups :(

8. A pink elephant.


Feel free to tune your monitor to get the elephant pink ... for some reasons almoast all screens are not calibrated correctly ....

9. A woman holding a Newcastle (it's a brand of beer).


All three of them are holding a bottle but because of the ad campaign for duff, they could not show the bottles

10. Larger than life animal sculpture (extra points for ridiculous size / subject).


a bear is good enough

11. Someone asleep at their terminal.


Homer :)

12. An ass with a hat on it.



Well, as let's bend the rules, a little, top one has the hat, bottom ona got the ass :)

13. A hot air balloon in flight.


enlarge and see it yourself ... moes :)

14. A cell phone logged into B$.


I'm sure he's buying shares on B$

15. A wild animal (cannot be at a conventional zoo).


Patty and selma in the back as a dragon is a good example of a wild animal :)


Still, some images missing, if i can, i'll update


ooh ooh ooh, an the flag: the australian one then (simpsons version)

Linux on iPhone

This would be really interesting if someone would actually manage to do it

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-linux/

sadly no code yet ... but I keep my hopes up :)

J

I'm a tab maniac

Well yes, I admit it ... anyway, there is a really good firefox add-on available called Taboo. The idea is to save tabs for later use, sort of like a bookmark thingie but even better.

If you keep tons of tabs open because you want to continue reading them later, Taboo is for you. Taboo lets you save a page for later (taking a screenshot, and using the Session Saver code to remember scroll location and form fields).

Enjoy!
J

Got it working in a little unusual way

Well, here we go. I was fed up with trying almost everything so i downloaded kubuntu 7.10, burned it on a disk and this seems to work. My only guess would be the newer kernel supports this piece of crap. Ah well, i wan anyway going to upgrade to gutsy and now i do have a spare live cd :) How all i have to do is get everything installed again and get my stuff working ... Sadly this might take some time (a week or so).

J

Damn it you Philips! SNU5600 and Ubuntu, Mandrake, Debian!

Anyway, my hdd on my home computer gave up and sadly all my data got lost. So the last 4 days i've been trying to get my computer working again. My USB Wireless adapter (Philips SNU5600) is just not made for linux. I can't figure out how did it work the last time. It must be the massive amounts of updates that resulted it to work without any driver installations. Sadly, it's a pain in the arse to have a dual boot system and switching after every download.

Another comment to this matter would be the problem that debian net-install does not support usblan at all, at least i could not figure out how. The old Mandrake 10 has a too old kernel so it suggests my wlan device is a scanner. Sad.

Anyway, if i find a way, i'll definitely write about it.

J

KDE 4.0

Well, the reason to upgrade my distro was purely KDE 4.0. Now, if you haven't tried it before, you should! You really should! There are couple really nice features. Yeah, desktop widgets are so MacOs and and stuff but still really nice to use them. Ctrl+F12 opens a view far all widgets. The menu (KickOff) is more user-friendly than any of them I've seen/used before. The menu button also covers left-bottom corner of the screen. Try Ctrl+F8 and view all desktops.

Anyway, I haven't found out all the good features yet. But I'll try :)
Thumbs up!

J

Updating fro "Feisty" to "Gutsy"

Well, 796 packages to be upgraded :) poor me.

J

You might be in trouble

39%

Kindo and familytrees

The Estonian media has lately promoted the Kindo service especially because the Skype's boys investment company has invested in it. Throughout the time I have been trying several family tree applications and I have to admit, this one is the best so far.

Investigating your own family tree is interesting. Sure, I would like to know, which famous person I'm related to. But, the main goal for me is to get to know more about my grand parents and grand grand parents. The roots are deep and it is interesting to know whose genes you have. One person can't do all the work by it's own so Kindo allows other users/relatives to be added. This gives a really good opportunity to collect more information and sort of unifies the family.

So, try it out yourself and create your family tree. Who knows, we might be related :)
J

Blogshares and ideas

I used to play Blogshares (B$) a long time ago and now I'm getting into it again. Well, B$ is a virtual stock market for blogs. Every blog is handled as a company and has a share price. It is a little different from the normal share market as the way to make money there is easier.

They have a contest going on at the moment where they are asking help. They want active users to tell them what is good and what is not in answering 2 different questions: When you start your blogshares day, what is the first page you load? and If the homepage had modules that you could select, what kind of data / information would you want in them?

I do understand, that the site is old and needs updates. They have added new and nice features and repaired/updated the new code, but the visuals are still the same they used to be years ago. Every time I log in, I check my value and rank (pride) and then start trading. Of course it would be really nice to get all the stats right on the first page or even as a module on every page. Secondly I would give a fortune (virtually) to someone to create a filtering module. Why not be able to filter out blogs in a certain price range with available shares and information about increasing or decreasing. Yes, i do understand, it will make the game more easier and give riches to the ones who are rich. But, the idea behind this is simply to be in logged in at the right time and have enough free actions. So the idea is to limit the actions (buying shares found by this method and even searches).

They also brought up an example of iGoogle. A little list of modules/gadgets I use daily: Gmail, Google trends, bookmarks, couple feeds and several special searches. All the same features could be also included in B$. In addition I wouldn't mind to have a ideas needed gadget. Could come handy :)

Anyway, I'm gonna go and dream about my billions now.
J

Ubuntu and Copy Protected DVDs

Well, I had this problem over a month ago and now someone else had a similar problem. Anyway, this is the post from my Estonian blog:

I'm normally not watching rented DVDs. There just is no need for that, but this weekend I decided to rent out Seinfeld's Series 1-3. Coming home, getting my self to have a nice bit of laughter I found out, the DVDs do not work. Well, for future reference all you need to do is following:

1. Get your sources list updated with the medibuntu source:
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ feisty free non-free
#deb-src http://packages.medibuntu.org/ feisty free non-free
Change the "Feisty" depending on your distro.

2. Install Libdvdcss2 package
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

BE WARNED! Medibuntu source does include some non-free software packages. Just read always the licence conditions.

J

Virtual host management software

Every server owner/admin would like to have a simple and easy to use server management software. Everyone knows Plesk as it's widely used and seems to be one of the most popular commercial versions of server/virtual host managers. Last 2 days I've been trying ISPconfig, a open source virtual hosting control panel. And I'm impressed. A little at least.

With every good software, you will not have any issues with the install. With this one, I spent 12 hours of time drinking coffee and praying. Running Debian on my server I'm used to get everything through aptitude. Yes, I know, No real "root" uses any fancy automated installation systems and compiles everything step by step from the source. But, this junk has so many dependencies that a .deb would be more than welcome. From their website I found my distro being supported and got a list of requirements:

* Operating System: Linux (Kernel 2.4 or later with glibc6)
* Apache Webserver version 1.3.12 or later / 2.0.40 or later
* Sendmail or Postfix
* Procmail
* Quota Package
* ProFTP as standalone version or vsftpd as inetd/xinetd/standalone version
* Php 4.0.5 or newer as Apache module
* MySQL data base
* a POP3/IMAP daemon that supports either the traditional Unix-Mailbox format (e.g. gnu-pop3d, qpopper, ipop3d, popa3d or vm-pop3d) or the Maildir format (e.g. Courier-Imap)
* OpenSSL and mod_ssl for the creation of SSL virtual hosts
* BIND8 / BIND9
* iptables or ipchains

This is easy, right? Sure: You also need to install spamassassin, gcc, g++, Net::DNS (a perl module) and so on. But OK, why not do some boring waiting. So i did. After 12 hours and several findings of missing software packets/libs I got it working. Now to the surprise: It actually works. A bad mash-up of code, ugly interface and too complicated logic but it works. Investigating how it works, I found that it seems to be messy. But it works :)

More about it later as I'm going to try to build a light easy implement version of it.

J

Apache2 Virtual hosts

Now many people have complained about the error NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts or similar to that while rebooting apache. Here's a tip: Look for the line "NameVirtualHost *:80" in your virtualhosts files. Mainly if there is more than 1 of it there, this error message is given. This can easily happen if virtualhost files are kept separately for every domain :)

J

Supersize VS Superskinny

OMG OMG OMG, but she's hot! Amy Jo, if you read this, don't be mad :)

Microsoft's idiot proof packaging

In the local LUG mailing list we had a surprising post:

Initially heard about this via DaringFireball... apparently literally
EVERYTHING about Vista is designed to be unintuitive, including the
retail box!!

Direct from Microsoft's very own website-
Windows Help and How-To:
"Opening the Windows Vista box"

J

Stupid business ideas

If you are deaf and watch TV, you either have subtitles switch on or the TV program has sign language cover. Now this is normal in today's equal opportunities society. But this is new to my knowledge. The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office has published a British Sign Language video translation of the passport and visa page. Why? OK, I do not know if British sign language is the same sign language used in other countries (basically remove deaf peoples language barrier) but for British citizens this service is useless. I would understand a audio version for blind people. Anyway, I also had a look on the providing company's website and they offer sign language books. Why? Do they really think that these people can't read?

FCO website
SignStream

J

KDE goes cross-platform with Windows, Mac OS X support

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.

well, I'm speechless ... finally I can play Kmahjongg now on my parents Microsoft Windows driven PC.

Link

J

Wireless USB Adapter, Linux and Windows

Here's a post from my personal blog. All the other posts there are in Estonian so I decided to copy it here also.

OK, I have to admit that I'm not a great windows user. Well, I don't use it at all. Anyway, I had to buy a new Wireless USB Adapter and the first thing I do is read the instructions. According to them, I have to go through certain procedures to get this little piece of magic to work under windows:
1. Insert installation CD
2. Choose a Language
3. Select a product
4. Agree software licence
5. Connect the adapter when being instructed to do so
6. Wait for confirmation of install

On linux:
1. Plug the damn thing into the USB socket and start work! Easy!

I'm still wondering why so many IT companies promote MS software ...

And to this theme a little humor about Windows CeMeNT. Enjoy!

J

New design

Well, got bored so I made my personal blogs design to blogger compatible xml and updated the design. Enjoy

J

Wednesday morning pleasures

Finding out, that the no mails have been received since last night and the /var mount is full is a awful thing. Anyway, these days the amount of spam received is huge. Over night we received 10 000 spam mails. Nice. Spamassassin has now something to do for today (finally). It will be sent to anti-spam school :)

J

Doing big things and saving a lot of money

Yes, this topic has been discussed over and over and over again and it has been proven that with small money, brilliant minds and a good idea you will achieve a lot. Examples of becoming big are out there, just read Google's success story. Anyway, reading other blogs of interest I found this:



A few minds can achieve a lot!

J

OpenID and the future

OpenID is a brilliant idea. Google tried it with their own login system but I'm fairly sure even them will go over to OpenID sometime in the future. The reason I'm writing about this is simple. I'm going to try it out. I certainly am going to try the method out with our new (still secret) service. All kind of identifications should be using this method (save time, energy, hassle).

The Register even reports that Yahoo! is going to use OpenID and so will Blogger. Oh well, good luck anyway.

Another interesting thing about logins and authentication came to mind with an ID Card. Yes, I do have one so I've already changed my computers main login system (only ID Card based on graphical systems, SSH allows username and passwords) and done some digital signing on-line and stuff. I only wonder if I can use it to login to Google or any other service one day. Time will tell.

J

PS! Future remark: program the ID Card authentication add-on for OpenID

Update!! Ok, the Estonian ID Card or eID is already linked to OpenId, nice!

SSH and firewalls

Today's dilemma was caused by SSH and my firewall settings. As I use a shared connection, I do not have any access to the router and firewall settings. But still, I need to connect to my home LAN by using SSH and our firewall does not allow incoming SSH connections but allows outgoing ones.

There might be a few methods to solve this, but I've been using mainly reverse tunnels. Warning! This use of SSH may impose a security risk to the site in question, or be a security policy violation!

As usual, I will go the easy way and just point to the answer: HowTo