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Hacked
One of my gmail accounts was hacked late last night by someone on a mobile device in Brazil. I only know this because I tried to login to use Google Reader and had to go through a few hoops to regain access to my accounts because they reported suspicious activity. I think I must have tried to gain access soon after the access from Brazil, based on the login record. The first thing I saw once I got into my gmail account was a couple of undeliverable messages from an online pharmacy that supposedly came from me. It appears that exactly two emails were sent and both returned because both are closed. I followed instructions given at the gmail website for this scenario and it seems like my account is now secure again.
In related news, I had to do a reinstallation of Windows today, only a few months after the previous one. I’d been having some trouble with my computer which seems to have escalated about the time I had some trouble with some memory, although that might just be coincidence. I’m now in the process of reinstalling programs as I need them, which is a real hassle. Also, trying to get my Outlooks set up properly took a lot more work than I expected. But I did manage to get rid of a couple of problems from my old data file so that Outlook works better now than it has in a long time.
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Anniversary
This week marks the second anniverary of the purplelorikeet.id.au domain. I had thought about switching to a .net but decided to keep it an .id.au for now. By extension, the second anniversary of the blog also falls this week. New posts are soon to follow, including a follow up post to the one on board games from a few months ago.
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Internet censorship plans continue
I’m trying to put myself into letter writing mode right now. Stephen Conroy is continuing his quest to censor the Internet here in Australia. His little trial was “successful” so he is tabling the proposal in parliament in April (or March, depending on which news source I read). I still believe it’s unlikely his proposal will ever pass but this is an issue I won’t risk waiting to see what happens. What makes me most furious is that the government is trying to sneak this through and is giving the public the most limited consultation on it. If ever there was an issue that would motivate me to attend a rally, this is it.
This leaves me in quite a quandary about any upcoming federal election. The Liberal party is currently being led by a climate-change denier and the Labour government that has been quite disappointing. If only the Greens party would gain enough power…
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More about iPod Touch
I forgot to post a couple other things last time. That’s what I get for trying to write so late at night.
I also use Tweetdeck to catch up on my Twitter feeds. Although I don’t post much, I do find reading some of the tweets quite entertaining. Tweetdeck is organised nicely on the iPod Touch so that I can move quickly from one column to the next.
I added a nice converter program when I got this but when I installed Windows 7 , installed iTunes within that OS and tried to sync everything, I lost it. I only just remembered this today so will have to search for it again. Very useful for converting to and from metric and it also included a currency converter that updates regularly.
The calendar function (included with the device) seems far easier to use than on my old pda and it looks far nicer too.
There are a couple applications included that I don’t want and I haven’t worked out if and how I can remove them. One is the stock application which is useless for me since I don’t have any interest in that area. There’s also the YouTube application, which I most likely won’t be using although I can live with it. I’ll have to do some research to see what can be done.
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Moon walk
It dawned on me a few weeks ago that the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and the moon walk was coming up. I hadn’t really heard anything in the media mentioning it at the time so I’m not quite sure what triggered the thought. At the time my main thought was, “Wow!”
In the weeks since, I’ve thought about it more and noticed the media was drawing attention to it. On the 16th I was watching and reading about the launch of that mission. It became quite clear that while this was a momentous world event, it was also something of a milestone in my life. I was only four in 1969 and it’s quite possible this is my earliest memory now. I would be lying if I said I remember it clearly but I do remember the night. Our family, like many around the world, was in front of the television that night. We watched events as they took place on tv and we also went out into our backyard to look at the moon.
I think that is what stands out for me that night…looking at the moon and realising that there were humans from earth walking there. I do have a strong memory of the sense of wonder on that night. This was really the first major event of my life. Sure, there were plenty of major world events occurring in the late sixties. But this was the first that my four year old self was able to grasp in any way. Even to my 44 year old self, it’s pretty astounding.
My thoughts have wandered over the past few days to the continuing sense of wonder about the space program through my early years. At school, we would learn about NASA and its space program pretty much yearly right through my primary school years. I used to know quite a bit of detail about those early American spaceships. In the reading book I had one year was a speculative sort of story or article about a base on the moon. I think there were predictions of having some sort of settlement there by the turn of the century. There was a sort of romaticism about it for those of us growing up at the time. In our family, it was my younger brother who was especially enamored of all things related to space.
Obviously NASA’s space program didn’t continue in that direction and before we knew it, space shuttles were the choice craft for space flight. I probably remember far more detail of the launch of the first space shuttle but I can’t say it captivated me in the same way. Any time an Apollo mission was launched, the nation and the world watched. But aside from the first few space shuttle missions (and those that have gone horribly wrong), they are so commonplace today as to garner only brief mention, if any, in the news these days.
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Maybe there is hope for me
I discovered a few days ago there was going to be a rare occurrence of a transit of Titan across Saturn last night. Locally it started around 8:30 so our plans were to set up the telescope to watch from around that time. Unfortunately the skies weren’t at all clear when the time neared so we opted not to waste our time. Instead the Scientist and I watched the episode of Good News Week we had recorded Monday night before he had to be off to bed.
Our washing machine was finally returned yesterday and I finally had some clean clothes to hang out and did so after the Scientist had gone to sleep. I had a dilemma when I realised the skies had cleared considerably because I have never made use of the telescope on my own and our expert was in bed. I decided to have a go and take the telescope out. It’s a pretty big contraption but I managed to shuffle my way out with it with little ado, aside from scraping my foot on the bricks outside.
Although I’ve watched the Scientist set everything up before, I felt completely clueless once I got out there. I did, of course, know enough to take off the big cover to the reflector but then I was a bit stumped. But wait, the barrel was turned the wrong way and the scope and lens holder were rendered rather useless on the underside. First thing was to turn it around and so I accomplished my second act of bravery with expensive equipment for the night. (Of course this morning I realised that I didn’t need to turn it over but to turn the platform and flip it the opposite direction so the effort wasn’t needed. Bad brain!) The lenses were all in their holders along the side of the Dobsonian mount but how to get one onto the contraption? I thought more about this and remembered to remove the caps from the finder scope which was a bit of a start. Of course I really didn’t know where to find Saturn in the night sky. I had a general idea of where we’d seen it before and remembered it being bright enough to be distinguished from some other objects in the sky. I came inside to start up Stellarium on the computer and Lego Lover soon joined me outside in our search of the skies.
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New IP address
This morning our isp gave us a brand new, shiny IP address to replace the useless old one. We know now how useless it was because everything is loading more quicky. Happily, I can now access my messageboards at speeds I’d forgotten existed in the past.
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500 Internal server error
I visit a particular messageboard quite regularly and I’m one of the moderators. Around the middle of the year I started having regular slowdowns on accessing the website. I would get through but it usually took a while. At the end of last month, the server went down and the web hosting company moved the website to a different server. Since that time, I’ve not been able to access the website at all. At first I thought the site was down but after two days I contacted the owner directly just to check. Turns out I am alone in the problem as far as users of the website are concerned.
Since then I’ve had what I call an expert team working on it to find out the problem. This has involved the Scientist, the owner of the website and her husband, my isp, the webhosting company, a co-worker of the Scientist, and members of a big broadband forum here in Australia. I can get through via an anonymous proxy but not with our isp proxy and not without a proxy. There are others in our area with our isp who have the same problem so it’s looking as though it’s a blacklisted ip address problem.
Meanwhile, I am accessing the site via the anonymous proxy and it’s a pain due to all the pop up ads which seem to by-pass the blocker. It also seems to cause problems for posting on the forum so I’m not too pleased but I can at least access it from home. Fortunately, there are several moderators and we hardly do anything anyway so my absence hasn’t been an issue.
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Linux
I’ve been having a go at figuring out Linux recently and have, to date, installed three different packages. Fedora didn’t work, but Kubuntu and MEPIS both seem to be alright. I like MEPIS better because it’s geared towards more towards a novice user. I’m running them all within Virtual Box (which allows me to run them without creating new partitions and everything that accompanies it).
So far, I feel like an alien using the systems but have figured out a few things. I tried to install Flock but apparently there’s not an easy way to do that in Linux. I’m debating whether to make the effort of going into the shell now or to just use Firefox or Konqueror. I’m not very thrilled with the way Linux seems to keep all the packages on the system, ready for installation. Most of them will never be used and I think we should be able to delete them entirely. If there’s a way to do this, I haven’t found it but will keep looking.
So far, I haven’t found anything that would entice me to use Linux as a bootable system on a machine. But I will keep experimenting and see if I change my mind after I am more experienced.
Blogged with the Flock Browser -
Bugging me
I’m still a novice at working with this website stuff but I have become a bit more cluey over the last couple months. Now that I have slightly more of an idea of what I am doing, I have figured out my mistake when I installed WordPress. I intended it to be in the subdomain blogs with a directory of tmi instead of /blogs/tmi and whatever.
Although I have no plans to change blogging software, I’ve been playing around with Movable Type, mostly to see if I could do an installation on my own. I tried this quite a while back and was confused so put it aside until recently. I set up a different subdomain and installed the latest Movable Type and it works just fine. It’s quite a sense of accomplishment. I am especially satisfied that it’s done properly so that it appears under its subdomain. I don’t know if I will create any permanent blogs with Movable Type, but I like the look of the interface and it seems easier to use than the Typepad one for some reason. Perhaps Typepad is using an older version of Movable Type.
To get back to this blog…I am itching to fix the subdomain problem here because it is bugging me and I know that I can do it properly. At least I think I can.
Update: Have redone the blog more satisfactorily under the subdomain at this new url. The old will be deleted in a few weeks.
Blogged with the Flock Browser