Looks like 100 very lucky people have just had the ultimate in high speed internet access installed at their place in Paris.

Here I was thinking 10Mbit would be nice on ADSL2 - these people have a 2.5Gbit link installed.
The line serves digital TV (presumably High-def, since they’ve got the bandwidth), video on demand, video conferencing, and phone services apart from regular internet access - so they probably won’t be able to max out the link. (Oh noes! I can’t max BOTH Gbit network cards out when I’ve got 10 TVs running different VoD streams)

From the article, France Télécom are in a similar regulatory situation as Telstra - they own the copper network, but are required to provide access to competitors at a reasonable price.

However, France Télécom are taking a different approach to Telstra.

Instead of going with Fibre to the Node, it looks like they’re planning to deploy Fibre to the Premises.

Sure, this is only a trial (100 homes initially, but there’s about 100KM of fibre laid throughout Paris) , and the economies of scale are vastly different.

The vastly improved bandwidth (ADSL2 or VHDSL at 3-30Mbit vs Fibre at 100Mbit-3Gbit) allows for a much greater range of services to be provided over a single link.

There is, ofcourse the problem of the backhaul bandwidth for all of that - but there are ways to overcome that.

As an example: In the TV/Video space, pre delivering VoD content to multiple distributed nodes, and using Multicast to push live content out would help.

Since there’s a fairly large upstream capacity (1.2Gbit), it wouldn’t be unreasonable to deploy “Media Boxes” to homes (think a PvR), which would deliver content to neighbouring services (no user intervention allowed/required) if the local node is busy/unavailable.

Would you, honestly, say no to having a quiet little box sitting in your home (attached to your TV and Fbire) that let you get Video on Demand, live TV in high def, super-fast wireless internet access (802.11n, anyone?), and phone calls.

It just happens that when you told the TV you wanted to watch the latest Stargate episode, it streamed a copy down from the main media server, and from anyone else who was watching it. And tomorrow, when Jim next door watches the same episode - he gets some of it from you, and some of it from other people in the local area who watched it recently - and he doesn’t even know it. (It just works)

Uhh… so this is kinda going on a bit of a ramble.

I’ve had this handy language reference in my bookmarks for ages - it’s a good place to quickly lookup how to say various things in many languages.
Great for that instant comeback to annoying salespeople. (”What part of Bu shi zhe yang don’t you understand?”)

My favorite bits however are from “Do you speak english?“:

English (America, Australia, UK) Do you speak English?
English [Strine dialect] (Australia) Jew speak Strine?
English [Texan] (Texas United States) Do ya speak English?

You may not know this, but work kindly paid for a MSDN subscription for me - this effectively gives me access to all the Windows Vista betas.

I had played around with previous betas of Vista, but never actually installed it properly (it always ran inside a VMWare / VPC session).

I decided to give it a shot, and rather than risking my entire PC - got a USB HDD (a tiny little 320GB unit) to run Vista from, so I could switch back to XP any time I needed to by simply pulling the cable.

Apparently, Vista won’t boot if it’s system drive is a removable device.

Now, that was a whole lot of wasted effort.

Hrm… get an internal SATA HDD? No… I shouldn’t…

Just saw this brief review of Coke Blak at slashfood.

The roadside services throughout europe (well, France, Switzerland and Italy, atleast) had this stuff in little cans all over the place.

From memory - someone did try it, much to their regret. To be honest - regular coke is bad enough, why mix it with anything else? Lemon, Lime, Vanilla, Cherry… even Clear coke, afaik

While I’m at it… I think someone deserves a round of applause for making a Stargate out of cupcakes. (The finishing touch would have been a pile of blue jelly [Jello, for americans] for the ka-woosh)

Avast!
If ye didn’t be knowin, Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up fairly soon — have you made plans fer lootin’ and pillaging?

- Will “Frosty Smythe” Hughes.

This article - How to restore a hacked Linux server is being dugg quite a lot.

Anyone who does this is being (to put it mildly) silly.

You want reasons? OK, I’ll give you reasons. Infact, I only need one reason: You can never trust what the operating system is doing, or is reporting.

But I’ll just run a comparison between the files and known good copies
Nope - if the OS is compromised, then it could simply be redirecting access requests to a copy of the real files.

…then I’ll check that it’s not running any services/etc that it shouldn’t
Who’s to say that the OS won’t simply hide that it’s running more

I’ll just leave it online while I copy all my data. I’ll even set up iptables rules to block all access except to/from the machine I’m backing it up to.
Same thing — you can’t trust that the machine isn’t still reporting*/recording sensitive information (or simply corrupting your precious data).

* = OK, so if you are running ethereal or something from another machine, then you can see all the traffic… without this, there’s no guarantees.

But they don’t have any backups! (or they want to recover some data which hadnt been backed up yet)
Pull the drive and swap it out for a new one. (Even expensive drives are still cheaper than a second lot of call-out fees and down-time)

If worst comes to worst, and the data is compromised/corrupted you might need to send the drive off to a data recovery lab.

Alternatively (but only as a fall-back option) back it all up before formatting the drive. Note: DONT use the compromised machine to access the data, while it’s still running the compromised OS.

But we don’t have another drive to copy it all over to
If this is for a company, they’ll have atleast one other machine, hijack it for a while to use as data storage until you can burn it to DVD or similar.

But I don’t have physical access to the machine because it’s co-located/hosted in a remote datacentre
Contact your datacentre, explain the situation, ask them what it’ll cost to have them pull the drive and put in a new one.

If you are being paid to do a system restore for a client, you should never ever allow the machine to keep running after a compromise. Ever.

Very good (not so little) article written by Eric Raymond and Rick Moen about How to ask questions the smart way.

It’s aimed at people asking questions about software, but really it could apply to anything which has a good deal of information available online (and that list is rapidly shrinking).

What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).

On a side note… anyone remember using the Oasis Library system back in the late 80s, early 90s? The default lookup account was “luser” at
one of the schools I went to. It supposedly stood for “Library User” — but it does make me wonder

Looks like my web host has been having a few issues with one of the servers they host a database of mine on (specificly, the one that runs this blog and the gallery) - so the site has been unavailable and giving some weird error messages (Why can’t the site deliver up the last copy from cache? C’mon WP-Cache people!)

So, Two interesting articles I’ve found today…

First up is a coding/database article asking why
databases can’t automaticly create indexes.

This is an idea which I’ve always kind of had in the back of my mind when creating indexes, but never sat down and thought about (tbh, I don’t maintain big databases, so it’s not of critical importance for my current line of work).

It appears its not quite as simple you might think, and there could be some nasty repercussions if this automatic optimiser were allowed to go run rampant through your database.

There should be automaticly functionality in the DBMS though, to enable you to get 80 or 90% of the hard work done immediately, when you’re designing your queries/views/sp’s.
Thought provoking, certainly!

The second article I havn’t read fully yet, but it seems quite good - A Beginners Guide to Manual Photography (i.e: how to use your camera without it set to fully automatic).
It gives good coverage of the basics of what the various major items in a camera do, and how it will impact upon the end result. They give good picture examples of what Apeture, Shutter Speed, and ISO do.

Most of this stuff I know well enough to use the camera… but it’s still useful to know for some.

I’d just like to ask everyone to take a moment to thank Microsoft for removing the remote synchronisation option from Activesync 4.x and Windows Mobile 5.

Oh, wait… I forgot my <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags… whoops.

Apparently this bit of functionality was removed at the behest of big corporations, who are/were of the opinion that it was a security risk (yet Bluetooth is still allowed?).

Instead of doing something sensible, like say adding a Group Policy setting in Windows. Microsoft took the easy option of just nuking the entire bit of functionality.

So, instead of being able to walk around the house and have podcasts and email automaticly synced every few minutes, I have to go and put my PDA into its cradle to sync.

It also means I can’t sync while travelling, which is also a tad annoying.

Other things I now can’t do are use Skype on my PDA and switch between docked and undocked mode during calls (since it disables the wireless when docked) — which makes it a little difficult to use it as a VoIP phone.

I got this from digg a while before I went on holidays, and it’s been sitting on my Links toolbar for a while.
Seriously, go look at these pictures of a Rainbow in a Stormy Sky.

Those of you who’re either agoraphobic or claustrophobic, shouldn’t look at these next lot of images from NASA.
Some of these photos from the latest mission* (STS-121) are excellent (I’m resisting the obvious joke here).

- Flight Day 5
- Flight Day 7
- Flight Day 9

* = Or “horrific waste of money that could otherwise be spent on feeding/clothing/educating the poor”, depending upon your point of view.