The Havers Of Rob Sharp

Being the lifestream of a Scottish geek living and working in Sydney.

Facebook nearly gets network-level privacy right

With all the recent furore around Facebook privacy, I've been looking at various online services I use, and seeing how well they support SSL. Twitter is probably the winner here, as they send everything over https once you modify the URL. I did however read that their SSL certificate may be insecure due to using the md5 signing method. More on twitter later

Facebook start off well. You can jump over to https easily, and they have a nicely signed ceritificate. Sadly, that's where the fun ends. All links on the page are absolute, and lead straight back to http land. As a user, I'm confused by the warnings, and would have a false sense of security without knowledge of having moved from https to http. Still, I'll keep my fingers crossed they fix that particular schoolboy error soon.

UPDATE: Someone else is having similar thoughts, as the EFF have just launched the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension. However, I still believe that Facebook need to fix their link strategy.

Now, if only we can get a Chrome extension to do the same thing!

Wireless on the ASUS EEE 1000HE with Fedora 13

Another NB for me in the future. For whatever reason, unlike Ubuntu Lucid, Fedora 13 doesn't work with the Ralink RT2860 card in the ASUS 1000HE out of the box. Actually, it does, but it doesn't work with WPA2, which makes it useless for me. The fix is to install the official Ralink drivers, of which you can get via rpmfusion.

Every online guide I read made the install sound so simple:

sudo yum install rt2860. 

For me, this didn't work.

For whatever reason, I have a -PAE kernel installed (determine from uname -r), which means that in addition to yum install rt2860, you must also bring across the -PAE modules:

sudo yum install kmod-rt2860-PAE.i686

Then, you can enable your wireless with Fn-F2, and off you go!

Installing Fedora 13 via USB boot disk

After many attempts to get Fedora 13 onto my Asus EEE 1005HE netbook, I finally cracked it. This is something of a note bene for me, but hopefully it'll help someone else too. For the search spiders, the error you will see will be "installer has tried to mount image #1". Sadly, the live cd kept failing on install, even though it was checksum verified to be a valid download.

  1. Grab the DVD image from Fedora
  2. Use the Live CD Creator to build an image from the ISO.
  3. As you've only got a 4Gb drive, delete the RPM and Repo directories, as the installer seems to ignore them anyway.
  4. Copy over the Fedora 13 DVD ISO to the root of the drive.
  5. Boot from USB, and install Fedora goodness!

Giving Valve Games That Special Apple Touch

"I have heard rumors that the release versions of Valve’s ports for Mac will include some subtle but important changes to make sure users of Apple computers don’t keel over from fatal levels of unfamiliarity."

"In Half-Life 2, instead of picking ammo off the filthy ground like a common Windows user, you must go to an immaculate white Ammo Store where twentysomethings with fauxhawks will sell you immaculate white bullets, provided you haven’t been murdered by an immaculate white Manhack."

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

1984

got a lovely birthday cupcake from my colleagues at @ratecity. Thanks guys!

Official #geekdad birthday present!

Lovely gradient to this mornings sunrise

On the harbour #sydney #sunset