Rollapaluza

         imported      Cycling · Me · londonfgss · Rollapaluza

I went to go and do some roller racing earlier this week, at a pub called the Horseshoe in Clerkenwell. The Rollapaluza guys were being filmed, and running a free-for-all race. First time on the rollers, I managed 23.48s, which turned out (once a couple of people had disappeared) to be good enough to get me to the quarter finals. clefty from LondonFGSS took a few photos, so I figured I’d post them here:

Bread Recipes

         imported      Food

I’ve been experimenting with home-baked bread of late, and have been trying some recipes that haven’t worked out so well. So, now I’ve found a good recipe, I figured I’d put it somewhere that I can find it.



Simple Wholemeal Loaf

500g wholemeal bread flour
7g sachet dried yeast
1.5 tsp salt
175 ml tepid milk
175 ml tepid water
  1. Mix together the flour, yeast and salt, and add the milk and water. Mix to form a soft dough, adding a little more water if it seems too dry.
  2. Lightly flour a surface, and turn the dough out onto it. Knead for ~10 minutes until the dough is smooth, and elastic.
  3. Grease a loaf tin (well!), and pop the dough into it. Cover with a tea-towel, or greased clingfilm, and leave aside for 1-1.5hrs to rise.
  4. Brush with milk, and dust with flour, then bake in an oven at 220 degrees C, for ~15 minutes until pale golden. Leave to cool.
I found that it worked out pretty well, and wasn't too heavy!

A Sad Day

         imported      ISP · LINX

At lunchtime today I was told via IRC/e-mail that Chris Orme, of Datahop passed away after a flight back from a peering conference in Florida. I’ve worked with Chris in the past, and despite having some differences of opinion, found him to be a great guy to work with. We had a disagreement about some contractual matters, and Chris was man enough to apologise to me in person at the LONAP 10th Birthday event. I was happy that we’d resolved our differences, and we exchanged contact details again. I was looking forward to working with him in the future.

This blog post doesn’t really have much relevance to anyone else, other than to say that my thoughts are with Chris’ family, and his girlfriend, Nat. I’m hoping that someone can suggest a cause that Chris cared about, so that donations can be made in his memory.

Rest in peace, Chris.

ic.ac.uk fetchmailrc Settings

         imported      ic.ac.uk · Tech

Imperial College are currently implementing changes so that you need to access either POP3 or IMAP with SSL enabled, I figured since they didn’t list Fetchmail in their new site, then I’d post my configuration (.fetchmailrc) here in case anyone else uses it:

poll icex.imperial.ac.uk 
    proto pop3 
    user "USERNAME" 
    password "PASSWORD" 
    is "LOCALADDRESS" here 
    ssl 
    sslfingerprint "7D:E8:74:1F:E8:B1:E6:15:A6:0C:02:2B:BA:89:BE:4D"

Enjoy.

Commuting Bike Stolen

         imported      Cycling · Crime

My Pinnacle Mean Streak 2.0 was stolen today from outside my flat (Pigott Street, E14). It’s a black, rigid mountain bike. The wheels are 26", WTB rims, Shimano hubs. The groupset is Deore, and it’s got mechanical disc brakes.

I locked it to a lamp post with a steel D-lock whilst I went upstairs, since my bike was greasy, and needed cleaning. It was nicked in the hour between 19:30 and 20:30.

The frame number is 1K26102739. If anyone sees it around, I’d really appreciate it if you could let me know via e-mail.

A Social Experiment

         imported      Me

Let’s see how many people read the rubbish I post here.

I have 40cm less hair.

Update:

Django

         imported      Code · Tech · Geek · Work

Since I’ve got a few moments, and I’ve decided to actually write down some rants rather than deciding that I can’t be bothered to - I’m going to use some space to single the praises of Django.

I’ve been using Django for a couple of years now - since around the autumn of 2005, and as such, feel that I’ve got a pretty good grasp of how the framework works. I haven’t really hacked around that much with the innards of Django (although I did propose a patch), however, what I really like about this framework isn’t particularly the internals, but just the whole philosophy that there seems to be in terms of building a web application.

crontab hacks

         imported      Tech · Geek 

30 23 28-31 * * [ "`date +%m`" != "`date +%m --date=tomorrow`" ] && /Users/rjs/bin/monthEnd.py 2>&1 >/dev/null

Pretty handy for running on the last day of the month - and should work on Linux.

RFID Presentation

         imported      ic.ac.uk · Tech · Geek · RFID

For anyone interested, the slides for my RFID presentation are here.

RFID Basics!

         imported      ic.ac.uk · Tech · Geek · RFID

So, at the moment, I’m writing a presentation about the operation and the security implications of RFID. During the course of the random searches around the internet, I’ve found that there’s a lot of really, really cool work going with respect to RFID. Even more great than the output on the subject is who is studying it. Lots of really cool observations are coming out of the open source friendly community - some of the best presentations on the subject are from presentations at CCC. Along with projects like OpenPCD, this output is pretty cool!

However, that’s not really the point of this post. During the course of reading around, I’ve found that whilst there’s a lot of information around - there’s also a lot of FUD that surrounds that information. My presentation is trying to give people (with some physics background) a simple idea of what RFID is, and particularly how it works. Given that I’ve already done a quick summary of how RFID works, I figured I’d blog about it, so that I can add to the mush of material that you just can’t reference online.

I’ll discuss a high frequency system - since cards such as MIFARE (which e.g. Oyster uses) work at around 13.56MHz. The RFID system consists of two elements - the reader, and the tag. Tags come in a number shapes - active, passive, and semi-passive. Really, it’s the passive tags that I’m interested in. The image below shows the anatomy of a (simple) passive tag. It’s composed of an antenna - running around the card, an IC, and a substrate that they’re both attached to.