I secured my first consultancy gig on Monday, developing a web-app for a local business; the end-product is to be deployed onto a standard *nix hosting account, so it’s going to be an adventure in PHP and MySQL from here on in. Since my first meeting with the client I started collating all the various bits and pieces of PHP I’ve written over the past couple of years with the intention of producing some form of crude framework which would allow me to develop sites quicker and easier.

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I’ve been having great fun with tunneling connections through SSH lately and today it dawned on me that I could close another hole in my firewall by connecting to my Jabber server via a tunnel. In the past, when I’ve been working remotely, I’ve made changes to my firewall by connecting to my public-facing machine; from there to my desktop machine through a DMZ-pinhole and once a presence has been established within the “green zone” browsing to the routers web-interface with lynx.

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Towards the end of last year I started rereading large portions of Stuart McRobert’s Beyond Brawn and seeing how I’d begun training in the mornings and consequently had less time to do so I decided to experiment with a more abbreviated routine. Here’s how my routine stands as of today: Monday: Squats Neutral Grip Chin-ups Single Leg Dumbbell Calf Raises Tuesday: Swimming Wednesday: Barbell Bench Press Bent-Over Barbell Rows Weighted Crunches Thursday: Swimming Friday: Stiff-Legged Deadlifts Parallel Bar Dips Dumbbell Shrugs When I was planning this routine I hadn’t had a break from weight training for a few months and I could feel that a rest would be in my best interests: I was starting to feel tired more often, progress had slowed and I knew from past experiences with over-training that if I kept pushing it I would only regress.

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Over the past bunch of days I’ve been back into web-development land and seeing as I was staring at code for prolonged periods I decided I might as well “enhance" this site a bit too. I started with tweaking the frontpage: I rearranged things a bit and instead of displaying my latest blog entry in its entirety I now have excerpts from the previous 4 entries. I initially tried using the built-in the_excerpt() WordPress template tag to achieve this but I wasn’t too fussed with the result and after some brief searching I found a plugin called the-exceprt-reloaded which seems to do the job better.

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I was reading this article on Wikipedia this morning and something didn’t seem quite right. See if you can spot it in this screenshot: I had been up from early morning and thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I read it and re-read it and still the words remained, I can’t say I was shocked but I certainly was surprised. My next thought was “hehe, who can I show this to?

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I read a thread over on linuxquestions.org recently about server “hardening" and got thinking about my own security measures and the lack there of. Here’s an example of the content of /var/log/auth on the machine this site is hosted on: Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: Invalid user test from 203.242.160.193 Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: error: Could not get shadow information for NOUSER Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: Failed password for invalid user test from 203.

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A couple of weekends ago I decided to reconstruct the system I use for downloading from Usenet: I had been using a Debian machine which I had setup back when I was still trying to get into using Linux on my desktop and as such it was massively over-powered for the task at hand, namely, leeching files from binary newsgroups and making them available via a network share. What follows is a tidied up version of the notes I made as I went along.

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Coffee time came around this morning at 11am just like it always does, but when I got to the kitchen there was no sign of the usual paraphernalia. I was placed in a moral dilemma: do I selfishly get busy with the 1 mug french press or dive into the catering-sized drum of Nescafe Original Blend? Thankfully, before I had to make my mind up, the green light was given for the purchase of some new equipment, so Phil and myself picked up some funds from petty cash and hit the Argos around the corner.

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I’m just getting started in the development of my next application: a management system for the Agency’s various resources. The intention of this program is to allow members of staff to book laptops, projectors and so on and to see at a glance what is already booked, when for and by whom. Not since my days of 210CSC218 and the calamity that was my undergraduate dissertation have I done any serious planning or documentation for anything I’ve implemented to date, but for some reason the mood took me this morning and I found myself brushing up on UML and printing off a reference to remind me of the different symbols involved.

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I’ve just committed vdaExtensions 1.1 to SVN: I had had enough of stressing out about minor aspects of the user interface and just went for it and published the application. Only to discover that ClickOnce wasn’t working on the target desktops, doh! The problem was with the assemblies for the ReportViewer class. I have SQL Server 2005 Express installed on my machine and so had no problems with the app getting access to the appropriate libraries at runtime, but it didn’t look like the .

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