In my younger years I was something of an arcade junkie. Being, as I was, at the bleeding edge of home computer technology (my borther bought a Sinclair ZX81 when they were released), games were pretty thin, and usually low quality.

Arcade games however, were cool, in colour, with comparatively high resolution graphics. Probably the most exciting moment of my childhood was going to the Computer and Video Game show in London with a group of friends.

Now Asteroids was one of the games I played. It was highly addictive, and yet comparatively simplistic.

Apologies to regular readers for my tardiness today.

The reason is very simple - I discovered this morning that one of my websites had been cracked.

Doing some more digging, I eventually discovered that the server had been modified so that pages would now display an embedded IFRAME which in turn would lead users to a site called toolbardollars.biz.

This, in turn, is designed to distribute a couple of exploits (documented well here) intended to let people get hold of your machine.

I'm still investigating, but I have a suspicion that there may be another new spam method on the block.

There seem to be a proliferation of sites that now allow pretty much anybody to submit 'articles' for publication. The sites make money by presumably getting page views and advertising clicks. On one site I've seen recently one 'author' has written about 10 articles, all on the same day, all published on the same day. The articles are short - less than a page - and the content is less than accurate or useful. It is, however, all related to web hosting.

However, the author does include a convenient link to his own hosting company.

It is tax month here in the UK. It is the nastier of the two tax months for those people who have to do their tax through 'self-assessment' - i.e. the endless form-filling required to declare all of your different assets and income.
 
Up until last year I did all of my accounts in Quicken. Intuit have an interesting approach to their software here in UK. They only support Quicken under Windows - even though Quicken on Mac OS X is popular (and in fact supplied as standard with most new Macs). Having consistently brought out products for a few years with an interesting array of features (some of which simply did not work), they suddenly announced in January last year (yes, tax month) that they would be dropping support for their Quicken XG software in the UK within (from memory) about a month. Support would go on for a bit longer.

There is a lot of misunderstanding around the term Free Software (and FOSS) and how that relates to the need for the companies that support free software projects to survive in a largely commercial world. In particular, many developers are unwilling to release their code as open source because they see the release of that code as losing control over a valuable commodity, which could have a monetary value.

Today there are lots of products that provide free software, but do so while also having a valid commercial model.  This enables them to charge for pre-packaged versions of the software, support and other, chargeable, components while still actually supporting the software on a free (i.e. open source) software model.

For the last 24 hours I've had connectivity issues through my ADSL connection to the Internet.

The reason for this is currently not clear (it has been fine for months), but I am unfortunte enough to be right on the borderline of the acceptable distance for 512Kbps, at over 6km from the exchange.

Ironically, I'm not that far from the center of a major town, just a couple of miles, but the distance to the exchange is much further.

This is a problem, not just currently for me, but also in the long term if we expect more and more people to be connected to the Internet and if we expect people to use their Internet connections for more than just web browsing. VoIP is an obvious part of this. Companies - even British Telecom (the main phone, and physical cable company in the UK) are promoting VoIP, but that isn't going to work without an Internet connection.

I don't go anywhere without a Knoppix CD because it is so useful to be able to boot up Linux when there is some sort of problem with a Windows machine and perform some maintenance.

It can fix drives, reorganize partitions, even virus check your machine.

There's a convenient guide to Computer First Aid with Knoppix if you want to see the sort of things that can be achieved.

Knoppix should certainly be part of an administrators toolkit, and the above is a good guide to why Knoppix can be so handy.

Just occasionally on the Internet you come across something that makes you think 'What hasn't anybody thought about it before?'

Today, it is Hitachi's page on dying hard drive sounds.

Yes, you read that right, a page devoted to the sounds that hard drives make before they finally die for good. Good engineers can tell when their machinery is going wrong by listening for it - good IT administrators can do the same. With this page, they now have a way of identifying what the problem is with a hard drive based on it's sound.

Eclipse, the Java development environment that also supports developing in other languages like C and, of course, Perl also has a Ruby plug-in available so that you can develop in the ground breaking Ruby language.
 
If are you not familiar with Ruby it is a (comparatively) new language probably most widely known for the Ruby on Rails web development environment. If you want to know more, I recommend the excellent Programming Ruby book, which I recently reviewed for FSM.