Mike’s Blog

As I already mentioned in the last post, there were a number of very nice presentation at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin over the past days.
Here is another great one. If you are interested in enterprise network security this one is a must. I can guarantee that you will learn more then one thing while watching this, and it is actually rather funny at the same time. Brilliant.

Fabian Yamaguchi is the speaker, and he is an excellent speaker. Some might remember him from the presentation he did last year about TCP based Denial of Service attacks.
During this years presentation, nicely called “cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/fuckups“, he tells you the story of an attack by making use of so far undisclosed but subtle bugs.

And again, for the ease of viewing, I have added a (low quality) Flash version of the presentation below, but you can of course also download the video at the 26c3 website. Enjoy.

UPDATE: A good quality MP4 version is now also available for download on the 26C3 website. Download it here.

UPDATE: A good quality MP4 version of teh video is now also available for download on the 26C3 website. Download it here.

The BBC has finally released HD streaming and downloads of some of their programs. The quality is pretty amazing, but the requirements towards your Broadband connection, and as important, zou computer are rather impressive and will certainly be an issue for a lot of the users these days.

To quote Anthony Rose:

It should be noted that glitch-free HD playback requires a fairly recent computer with a decent graphics card – older computers won’t be able to handle the CPU-intensive decompression & rendering and may drop frames, leading to jerky playback. To get the best HD experience always play back in full-screen mode, and if you don’t have enough bandwidth to stream try downloading instead.

The HD content is delivered in form of an h.264 stream/file with a bitrate of 3200kbps for the video and 192kbps for the audio track.The video resolution is 1280×720!

Anthony doesn’t forget to add a warning for people who are using a braodband connection with a moderate bandwidth cap:

For users on bandwidth-capped internet connections or who otherwise might want to override the adaptive bitrate system and use only our lowest bandwidth (500Kbps) stream, we’ve provided an option to do so (right).

The BBC also added a nice and simple diagnostics page, allowing users to check their bandwidth.

The results can be seen below:

BBC diagnostics - click the image to see in n full resolution

Let the fun begin….

Go over to backbone-news.com for further details….

Do you want to save yourself some time? Instead of watching the whole 90 minutes of Steve Jobs Keynote at this weeks MacWorld, have a look at what Mahalo Daily did with it. All the facts in 60 seconds

As a lot of the rumours over the past weeks indicated, Apple did realease a new Macbook at MacWorld this week.
I was really looking forward to it, and was actually ready in buying one, since I am actually looking for a small size factor portable.

On a first view, the MacBook Air (MBA) is really fascinating and exciting! The design is just wonderful, it is incredibly thin, great keyboard, innovative touchpad (using multitouch gestures) and so on…

But unfortunately, it all ends there. Let me explain why I am currently clearly not convinced in buying one:

• No Ethernet port
  Yes, I could probably live with out it. I have wireless at my place, even the printer is using Wifi, so no real issue there, and I could probably get used to it. Although I am not convinced that the speed of wireless will be good enough to really enjoy everything. Transferring large files will be a nightmare.
  Providing an optional USB dongle to add an Ethernet port is also not convincing, for two reasons: It is only a 10/100 port, and will use up one USB port, which leads directly to the next issue.
• It only has ONE single USB port!
  What a disappointment! Even more for a portable device I want to have the flexibility of being able to connect more then a single external device to it, without having to use a USB hub each time.
• Poor graphics card performance.
  The MBA “only” has an integrated graphics chip. CLearly not good enough for a high end (look at the price) ultra portable.
• Build-in Battery
  The battery is build-in and can not be relaced by teh end-user. Not really a suprise, but not a good choice in my eyes. Especially with my past experiences with MacBook batteries. Just thinking about the fact that I would have to send my MBA to Apple to get the Battery replace is driving me crazy.
• No Firewire port
  I use my current MacBook Pro on a regular basis to capture videos from my Digital camera, which need the Firewire port.

So where does that leave me? I still like the look and feel of the MBA. A really desirable little beast! But I think for now at least, I am too disappointed by teh above mentionned issues to convince myself and buy it.
The guys at Gizmodo have created a nice comparison showing the alternatives. And one device really shines in that list. It is the Dell XPS M1330. Slightly cheaper, same screen estate, slightly thicker and heavier. Shorter battery life, but replaceable battery. And it goes on: Faster Processor, better graphics, faster and larger (and future proof) SATA HDD, more memory, firewire port, ethernet ports….

And to be honest, it is looking also surprisingly good! Yes, it doesn’t have the “Wow-effect” off the MBA, but still. And if you want to, you can also get it with a Solid State Harddrive up to 64GB, same as the MBA.
CNET did a short video review of it , which shows mainly focuses on the design, giving you a good idea of it.
Where does that leave me? I guess, I really haven’t made up my mind yet. I will do a Hand-on comparison of both devices the coming weekend in the shops here in London, which will hopefully help me to take the right decision.

I am a happy user of an unlocked iPhone since mid last year. I own one since they came out in the us during late summer. Since at the time, I was unable to buy the iPhone here in the UK, my only option was to use an unlocked US phone. The method to unlock it I use is the TurboSim method.

It worked perfectly fine until yesterday, when I started to see problems. The phone reports that there is no Sim card installed in the phone. A reboot of the phone solves the problem, but only for a few minutes. You can see the signal disappear several times for a few seconds, just before it reports that there is no Sim card installed again. Removing/reinstalling the Sim/TurboSim cards also has the same effect.

After searching around in different forums, it is becoming more and more certain that the problem is actually not the iPhone or the TurboSIM card, but it seems to be somehow caused by a change on the t-Mobile network. Why do I think that? All of the users reporting the problem are also using T-Mobile. Too much of a coincidence. As one of the users mentions, the problem does seem to have started occurring over the past days, at different “start” times for different users, which could indicate that T-Mobile is actually performing some kind of update on their network which is causing the TurboSim to fail.

I remember that I saw a very similar problem when I was travelling in Europe. Depending on which network I was roaming, I would loose the signal and the phone would report the same “noSim card” error message. I thought at the time that it was just me throwing around the phone too much, causing bad contact between the TurboSIM, the real SIM and the actual phone connectors, but now, I kind of think that it might have been the same problem that we are now experiencing on T-Mobile UK.

Here are some links to forums posts of people reporting the same issue:

bladox.com (TurboSim manufacturers Website Forum)

MacRumours

Update: As mysteriously as the problem started, it has disappeared again. My iPhone is working fine again. Unfortunately that also means that i still have no real idea what caused the problem, although I still expect it to be caused by some change on the T-Mobile network.

Those of us who are “old” enough to have been part of the Internet bubble a few years back are most certainly recognizing a lot of the signs of another bubble…as such the only question is: When will the crash follow?

The below video is a rather funny approach to explain the current situation. Have fun.

Created by Matt Hempey (http://www.richterscales.com)

I went to the Apple Store in London (Regent Street Store) tonight after work to pick up my copy of the new OS as soon as it became available..and also maybe to get a free T-shirt.

The store closed at 16h00, I guess mainly to allow them to upgrade all of the machines at display in the store to Leopard. I arrived in front of the store at 17h15, and I was expecting to see some people standing in the queue already. Well, yes, that was definitely the case..the queue went already around the whole block!

After having some fun in the queue, especially answering to all those people who passed by asking what we are queuing for, I finally made it into the store at around 18h15. The store was obviously already filled with people, but it was still easy to get my copy of MAC OSX from one of the many apple employees with they hand-held devices, allowing quick and easy credit card sales.

Every single Computer in the store was of course running Leopard already! In the theatre area, one could assist a basic introduction to the new features. But all in all, the most amazing experience was the number of people in the store taking pictures, filming etc…I guess YouTube, Flickr and many blogs will be filled with pictures and Videos covering this.

Well, here is my part…

And yes, I got a free T-shirt..actually even two.

Halo3 has been finally released on the Xbox360. Halo and Halo2 were the best selling games so far on the Xbox platform, and Halo3 is expected to do the same!

Although I am not really a gamer, I have to say that Halo 3 is a nice piece of software. So far I have only tried the single player modes, and it is really nice. The graphics look nice and clean, gameplay is fun and the soundtrack is simply amazing!

Anyway, the guys over at LoadingReadRun have done a video “looking back” at how Halo has changed the world. Fun stuff.

One of the features missing on the iPhone is GPS. I was used to have it on the Nokia N95, and although I didn’t use it very often, it came in handy a few times. Well, the iPhone has Assisted GPS since today. Well, sort of.

When checking for new application within the installer, I noticed a new app called Navizon GPS. I have to say it is rather cool. Navizon calls its Virtual GPS service “Peer-to-Peer Wireless Positioning”. It is based on a database which is populated by users of the Navizon software on mobile phones with a real GPS receiver included. The geo-coded information is then combined with the information received from the cellular network and WIFI networks. This combined information is then available for users of the system without a GPS receiver included in their phone.

It will in most case never be as precise as real  GPS, or even the A-GPS on the N95, but it still allows you to locate yor position in a certain area, as long as the area is covered by users with GPS equipped phones in the past.

In my case, the location found by my iPhone was a few hundred meters away from my home here in London. Still very sweet!!!