Most recent blog entries

A big grocery store chain in Germany offers a fingerprint system for easy payment in some of its stores. You register your fingerprint and instead of using cash or your credit card you indentify by pressing one of your fingers on a fingerprint-reader which matches it to the previously registered one

Earlier this week a german TV magazine showed with help of the CCC how easy it is to trick the system with a fingerprint copied from a cup or glass. That's not surprising. It has been shown numerous times in the past how easy it is to crack most of these systems.

Most astonishing was the answer from the grocery store chain. They don't see any need to act on this finding. The system is approved for use in united states government agencies and is being used by about 200 million persons. The manufacturer of the system claimed that his system is the most...

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After my vacation is over and my evenings and weekends are fully booked my hoster finished setting up the root server for Swyx Forum. Setting up DotNetNuke (incl. database) is up to me, but this will take some time now

Actually there was a reason why I ordered the server one week before my two-weeks vacation...

Anyway, there is a light at the end of the tunnel now

Yesterday I found myself in a time machine boosting me back in time into the year 1991. It was the year where I had to do my 12 month military service at the german navy. I was sonar operator on a so called mine hunter. We searched see mines (ground mines) by using sonar and then used a small remote controlled submarine to dop a bomb directly beside the mine to simply destroy it. In 1990 Sadam Hussein invaded Kuwait and dropped hundreds of mines into the persian gulf as a barrier to make sure no military vessel or oil tanker was able to approach Kuwait. A number of NATO countries as also germany sent their mine seachers / hunters down into the gulf to get rid of these mines. During this time I was stationed on the MHC Koblenz (M1071). So, that was the time where a saw quite a lot from the world ;-) A few years after my military service the german navy replaced to old mine hunter fleet we were stationed on by new high-tech vessels.

One of the ships (MHC Weilheim (M1077))  was handed over...

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Today I had an interesting morning. Out local university holds monthly lectures called "Modern Physics for everybody". It's for everybody [sic!], i.e. you do not need a physics degree to follow. Today's lecture was about H2O, water. Seems like a rather boring topic, but it was the opposite. The lecturer was the head of the computational chemistry group which uses computer simulations to study structure and dynamics of liquid molecules. He showed some nice visualizations of their simulations. He could only scratch the surface of the topic, of course, but it was fascinating, nevertheless

After that there was a chance to visit DELTA, the Centre for Synchrotron Radiation and to get a look at their electron accelerator. "The plaything of the Physics department's Dean" as it had been jokingly called during the lecture  (The dean made the introduction to the lecture and was there when his "plaything"...

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Randall has just started his new project Swyx WebCDR.

It is a web based CDR (Call Detail Record) tool. Please take a look onto the project pages for more details.

The current version is written in PHP (Apache Webserver) but we are also looking to provide an ASP (Microsoft IIS Webserver) version. So, if your are willing to help on this, feel free to join the team !

At last the first step to take swyx-forum to the next level is completed. During the last months the site has become a huge success. A lot of Swyx users and entusiasts have visited the community and quite a lot have registered and used the forum as well.

So after establishing itself as *the* independent place on the Net for Swyx resources, we want to step up and take it to the next level. So what will the next level be? We want to extend the site with a review section. At the moment we will use the Wiki, and the first review is published now. It takes some time to write a good review, and since all of us have full time jobs and none of us is reporters, we have to test and try the format a little bit.

Anyway, we are quite confident that reviews in general and Swyx related reviews will make the site an even greater resource for Swyx related information.

So, if you have the possibility, please feel free to write your own tech-review and post it in the Wiki. We will also very much welcome any...

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Today heise reports that Apple's newest MacOS version "Leopard" contains a security hole which had already been fixed over a year ago in an older MacOS version.

First the firewall with holes big as barn doors, now this. Apple says they take security seriously. But it does not look like they're following a defined, stringent secure development process.

It will be interesting to see how Apple will react in the next months and compare that with Microsoft's reaction to the same problem a few years ago.

Ok, Morten has promised that I will write about my norwegian experiances, so here they are. At least in terms of "having a traditional norwegian dinner".

Friday night we went out to a quite nice fish restaurant in the newly build shopping and restaurant area Aker Brygge in down town Oslo, directly at the harbour. The name of the restaurant was "Lofoten" which clearly indicated that we were not going to get some nice english style steak (if you don't know about the Lofoten you should read about them here).

As I already promised weeks before to give taditional food a try the waiter didn't provided me with a menu. In fact most of us (we were nine people at all) skipped the part with the menu, except Morten and his wife, the other Morten and Thomas. The fact that both Mortens as real norwegians were not going for the traditional fish should have worried me... Well, to be honest, it did, at least a little bit.

As a starter we got something that is called "rakefisk". Stop, that's not true...

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I missed my friday blog entry, but since Tom wrote his from the office next to mine I made that count for the both of us

As Tom has reffered to already he is on a visit in Oslo, so we have been working closely for the last couple of days. Tom is our official Hitchhiker, so we just had to add some entries into his Guide. I guess he will write about it later, if he is not too traumatized.

The entries will be rakefisk, lutefisk and multekrem... These are all traditional Norwegian dishes, and Tom had the oppurtunity to try these, and I can tell you that they are not 'mostly harmless'. If you ever been to Norway, you might have tasted the brown cheese that we are so proud of. If we can do that with cheese, just imagine what we can do to fish

I must be honest to you, Tom tried it and that makes him quite brave, I live here and never tasted it. That food is the reason it just took a second for the Norwegians to welcome pizza and hamburgers when we discovered that they existed.

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The weekend is close and therefore it's time for something to smile about

Being David Copperfield isn't that difficult as it seems. Everyone can do such magic things. You, me, eveyone !!!

See for yourself !

I missed it in cinema, but viewed it on DVD today: "The Last King Of Scotland", the movie which got Forest Whitaker an academy award for best actor. He was impressive in "Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai" (1999, Jim Jarmush). But his representation of Idi Amin in "The Last King Of Scotland" is just amazing. Now I'm a little disappointed that I didn't see it on the big movie screen.

Over the last two weeks the down times of Swyx Forum have increased as you might have noticed. Unfortunately it always takes some time to get it up and running again as I do not have direct remote access to the machine to restart the webserver by my own but instead need to ask my hoster to do so.

The reason for these downtimes is, that the web framework Swyx Forum is using (DotNetNuke) is somewhat unstable in virtual environments, which is in fact a problem of asp.net, the web layer of Windows itself. After updating to the new forum version the downtimes have increased dramatically. Obviously this version touches unstable functions of DotNetNuke / asp.net more often than the old one.

But, good new is, HELP IS ON THE WAY !

Swyx Forum will definately move to it's own server machine which brings two major advantages:

more stable environment direct remote access for me and Morten (to be able to react faster on any kind of problem) Further advantages will be of course

...

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