The prattlings of Steve Crook

Woe is me! I thought I was too experienced to get caught in a simple Internet scam but I fell for this one, hook, line and sinker.

Kyle (my stepson) reported this morning that his Xbox360 was scratching disks. As the games he plays cost around £45 each, this seemed a serious issue and so I did some investigating. It appears that he’s far from alone, XBox360’s have a well documented history of scratching disks. I decided the solution was to get some software that would enable me to backup his games. More Google searching led me to www.gamecopypro.com which seemed to be a well linked and recommended solution for copying video games. The $29.99 price tag was also quite appealing and so I bought it though Paypal.

As with many software purchases, I received an email within a few minutes thanking me for subscribing. The unusual thing though, no link for downloading the software. After some bemused clicks around the members area it quickly became apparent that I’d been scammed. There is no such thing as GameCopyPro, it consists of nothing but vague info on how to backup games disks.

After yet more Google searches I soon learned that I was not the first to be tricked by this outfit; there are loads of references to angry people who lost their money just like me. The reason GameCopyPro seems to rate so well on reviews is their Affiliate Programme. Every referral to their website that results in a sale earns the referrer 75% of the sale. Neat trick!

I’ve now launched a dispute through Paypal to try and recover my money on the grounds that the product I bought doesn’t actually exist. According to Paypal, my dispute is forwarded to ClickBank who presumably provide payment services for GameCopyPro. I’ll update this blog entry if there’s any progress.

Update 9th Nov 2008
Score one for Paypal and another for Clickbank. Seems that the dispute process actually does work and my entire charge was refunded. Based on this episode I’ll be considerably more disposed to use Paypal for payments in the future. Now if only GameCopyPro’s website would be forced to close for being the nasty scam it is, all would be well.

A few incidents yesterday got me thinking about the law and farming. Somehow the farming community seems to be a law completely unto itself, exempt from the rules that apply to other folk.

Sunday was the annual sponsored walk supporting Teenage Cancer Trust. It was a lovely day on Dartmoor but for me was slightly tainted by being forced to keep my dog on a lead for 10 miles because of grazing sheep. Why are farmers allowed to keep sheep in our National Parks whilst being paid to keep their own fields dormant? It’s mad!

On the same day, whilst walking up the old Princetown railway line, a young child on a Quad-bike passed us at a ridiculous speed. How on Earth is a quad-bike allowed on a cycle trial? Because the law exempts farming vehicles and their users from restrictions that apply to other drivers.

Lastly, on the same day newspapers report this article of a dog being shot. Not for worrying sheep, but cows. This was a boxer dog not a man eating tiger, geez! The police response to this, “A police spokesman said there were no independent witnesses and, as it was deemed a civil matter rather than a criminal offence, there would be no further police action.”. What a load of bollocks. Seems that like the ban on hunting with hounds, the police put cases like this in the “too difficult” tray.

My music collection is complicated, I rip my CD’s on a Linux server, FTP them to a Windows server. Manipulate ID tags and filenames using various means, then FTP them back again in order to play them through my Squeezebox. This recently caused me grief when I used an incorrect umask on a massive transfer, resulting in incorrect file permissions on directories and files.

Using recursive chmod to correct this is tricky as file and subdirectory permissions need to be different, in my case, 644 for files and 755 for directories. These two commands solve the problem:

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Yet another number that’s been calling my mobile on a daily basis over the last couple of weeks. This one belongs to Phones 4U, a company in the UK mobile phone industry which firmly believes in the hard sell ethos. At the moment they aren’t going to sell me anything because despite calling me many times I’ve yet to hear a voice on the other end, they just hang up.

I think I was with Phones 4U when I first took out a Vodafone contract, many years back. In 2003 Vodafone thought better of that arrangement and dealt with me directly instead. Needless to say I got a much better deal from then on. Looking at their website now it’s pretty obvious they are still unable to offer Vodafone. Score one for Vodafone for not being associated with their nasty hard-sell tactics.

Phones4U was owned by high-profile, corporate tough-guy John Caudwell. He sold them in 2005 and I’m not sure who owns them now. Don’t really care either, I just wish they’d stop calling me!

Having recently cleaned out all my comment spam from Gallery2, I’ve been wondering how it got there in the first place. In order for non-authenticated users to leave a comment, they must first answer a Captcha. Having tested it’s working correctly, I’m forced to conclude that somebody has a bot that can successfully read and reply to the Gallery2 Captchas.

As of this time, I can’t find any information on replacing the Captcha images with other versions. Obviously if all Gallery2 users have identical Captchas then it’s well worth the spammers time and effort to automatically handle them. There are after all only 10 possible digits. If anyone has info on replacing the stock captcha set with others, I’d be pleased to hear about it.

I store all my photos in Gallery2 with a PostgreSQL database back-end. It works well in most respects but fails miserably when it comes to managing Comments. Whilst it’s possible to delete them, it can only be done one at a time; a painfully slow process when there can be tens of thousands of spam comments. This little PostgreSQL script can take the pain out of it:-

SELECT g_id INTO TEMPORARY tmptable FROM g2_comment WHERE
g_host='189.59.236.131' or
g_host='159.148.82.3' or
g_comment like '%http:%' or
g_comment like '%url=%';

DELETE FROM g2_entity WHERE g_id IN (SELECT g_id FROM tmptable);
DELETE FROM g2_childentity WHERE g_id IN (SELECT g_id FROM tmptable);
DELETE FROM g2_comment WHERE g_id IN (SELECT g_id FROM tmptable);
DROP TABLE tmptable;

This should only be treated as an example but it provides a good foundation to work from. Bulk comments often come from common IP Addresses so the g_host entries can be used to handle that without too much pain. The g_comment fields match comments that contain http or url entries. As none of my good comments contain links, these are my ultimate Spam comment killers.

A few years ago I bought a cordless drill/screwdriver from Focus, a big UK DIY chain. It’s a 24v model CCHD24 made by a company called Champion and it’s served me very well. Now the battery is failing to retain a charge and I want to replace it. The problem is that I can’t find a reference to it anywhere on the Internet, it’s as if the damn thing never existed!

Besides having a model number of CCHD24 (the CCHD presumably being Champion Cordless Hammer Drill), it has another reference of SKU484817. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s succeeded in getting a replacement battery for one of these.

I can’t believe it’s four years ago that I went to What The Hack at Liempde in Holland. Now it’s almost time to dust off the rucksack and check out the tent in preparation for Hacking At Random.

Anyone fancy tagging along? It’s fun, honest!

This is the number that shows up on my caller display when Monument try to get in touch with Lou. My issue is that they try and contact her every couple of hours, every day and seemingly take no notice of me telling them she’s at work.

Are there phones available that enable me to block certain numbers? If such phones exist then one is going on my shopping list. Monument will have the honour of being the first name on it.

Update - 14th Aug 2008
Since writing that article, not a single day has passed without at least one call from Monument. I mean, how much harassment can these people legally throw at me?

I’d love to see a lot more names on this Government petition. Why on earth should motorcycles be exempt from tax relief for non-polluting vehicles?

In summary:

Changes to the law mean cars emitting less than 100g of CO2 per kilometre travelled would be exempt from paying Vehicle Excise Duty (road tax), while motorcycles are still required to pay.

For the younger generation, the title of this is based on an old series of advertisements for British Rail, their slogan was, “This is the age of the train”. Thought I’d better clear that one up. :)

Fuel prices being what they are at the moment and the associated costs of actually owning a car in the first place, the bus would seem like a great alternative for local transport. I’d like to dispense with one of our two cars so this morning set about investigating a season ticket for getting our two kids to work and/or college.

Our local bus services are provided by First Group which sours the milk a little before I start. These are the guys that run First Great Western trains. My experiences of this service are comprised of consistantly late trains and a parking ticket. I’ll try to remain subjective and not let my previous experiences impair my judgement.

First issue of the day is location. I can’t use a Plymouth season ticket because we live outside the boundaries of Plymouth. A Devon card covers Devon and a Cornwall card covers Cornwall, but neither of them is suitable for travelling the 15 miles between my home in Cornwall and Plymouth in Devon. Fortunately there is a South-West card that covers Devon and Cornwall.

The FirstDay South-West Ticket costs £6.60 which is not only very expensive for such a short daily journey, it’s also useless, not being valid before 0845. To overcome this I need a Peek South-West Ticket at £7.30. Clearly the daily ticket is a waste of time, the annual cost of travel (based on travelling 5 days a week for 46 weeks a year) would be £1,679. If my partner Lou and her two eldest kids did this every day we would have an annual bill of £5,037. Clearly not a practical option compared with using a clapped-out old car.

Next on the agenda is a Devon and Cornwall FirstWeek Ticket. This one weighs in at £31 per week which based on my 46 weeks per year calculation works out at £1,426 per person or £4,278 for my three people. Score another for the high-poluting, road-congesting and clapped-out car.

Perhaps these options appear a little biased, why would I elect for a daily or weekly ticket when I’m looking at travel over the period of a year? Well the reason is that First Group don’t appear to offer any ticket options longer than a week that cover the 15 mile journey from St Mellion to Plymouth. Perhaps I’d best enquire, perhaps their website isn’t comprehensive. I sent them a message using their enquiries service.

Hello,
I’m looking to buy a season ticket for travel between St Mellion and Plymouth using the 76A service. Please can you advise me of the most cost effective yearly tickets for travel on this route at peek times?
Many thanks,
Steve

Now I’ll just have to wait for an answer.

Update - 24th July (Next Day)
I received a helpful reply from First today.

Dear Mr Crook

Thank you for contacting First Devon & Cornwall regarding the fares for annual passes for the service 76a.

Unfortunately we do not do a yearly pass from Cornwall but there is a monthly pass at the cost of £86.00 that you would be able to use to come into Plymouth to your destination and return but would not be able to use it on any other service in the Plymouth boundary.

I hope this information is useful.

Yours sincerely

[Name Scrubbed]
Customer Service Advisor

Okay, so there is a missing option on First’s website, an £86 monthly pass. Assuming I need travel in all 12 months of the year, that’s £1,032 per year, per person. I guess this makes the bus a feasible option where only a single person can use it as an alternative to car transport. Using my example of three people, the bus would cost them £3096. This really doesn’t strike me as a viable alternative. In an age where the roads are far too congested and petrol prices are rocketing, it’s a pity there isn’t a better carrot being dangled to encourage people to use bus transport. It’s never going to be as convenient for people as going door-to-door in their own car so that carrot needs to be big and juicy. Today’s season ticket carrot is small and tasteless.

I’m not usually one to rate my ISP on bandwidth performance, there are other more significant factors for me, such as tolerance of the trivial abuse complaints against users of my services. Today however I am rather concerned that my 8192/832kb/s Nildram service is running miserably slowly. According to www.speedtest.net I’m getting about 432/640kb/s. Yes that’s correct, more upstream than downstream bandwidth on an Asynchronous connection.

I’ll check this again over the next few days and maybe it’ll prove to be a blip. If not then I will be forced to assume I’ve become a victim of the Tiscali buyout of Pipex. This will of course mean a changing of ISP as a matter of principle. I don’t like Tiscali, they are a cheap and nasty provider who try and appeal to the public with lost of bells and whistles.

Update 28th July 2008
Performed another speed test today at 1628 on a Monday afternoon. Results: 379/675kb/s. Seems my downstream result is now consistently bad. I wonder if any other Nildram / Pipex customers are seeing the same thing?

Whilst idling through some old blog entries, I paid a visit to the website of my old friends Layered Technologies. It seems that since kicking me off their network for running a Tor server (that they explicitly granted me permission to run) they have revised their Acceptable Use Policy to include this:

TOR and Anonymous Routers or Routing Protocols

If an alleged or actual violation of this AUP is believed, at the sole discretion of Layered Technologies and Fast Servers, to have occurred on, to, from, or through the Services, Servers, or IP Addresses provided to you by Layered Technologies and Fast Servers on which TOR or an anonymous router or routing protocol exists, the alleged or actual violation of this AUP shall be deemed to have occurred whether verifiable evidence exists or not and Layered Technologies and Fast Servers shall enforce this AUP at the sole discretion of Layered Technologies and Fast Servers.

Once you manage to get through their grammatical minefield, I think it says that they will kick you out if you run any kind of service that prevents you from passing the blame on to somebody else. I wonder if they added this little clause as a result of my incident. Perhaps they don’t like the fact that my Blog article shows up on Google search results for Layered Technologies.

I know from consulting whocallsme.com that this number belongs to Littlewoods Direct. My partner Lou has an account with them that probably spends the better part of its life in the red. This being the case, they are (in my opinion) perfectly entitled to try and contact her.

So having explained who they are and that I accept them calling our number, why am I doing yet another rant? Well it’s because I’ve just received their third call of the day that goes dead when I answer it. This seems to be a recent call-centre phenomena; keep each operator as busy as possible by dialling more numbers than there are operators. Once all the operators are busy, just ignore the phones that are left ringing. This is a pretty unscrupulous way to run a service so of course there’s no mention of it anywhere on Littlewoods Terms and Conditions as it might give the punters second thoughts about subscribing. Then again, nobody looks at Terms and Conditions, it’s just legal mumbo jumbo required for the litigation society in which we live.

By the way, if anyone did bother to read those Terms and Conditions, they may be surprised at just how wide an audience they’re distributing their personal information to. Littlewoods Direct are a part of Shop Direct Group Financial Services (SDGFS). Needless to say, this is one of those gigantic conglomerates that swallows up companies for breakfast. When you give information or permissions to Littlewoods, you give it to all the members of that group.

OFCOM offer some information on these calls, referring to them as “Silent Calls”. According to this page, abandoned calls must not exceed 3% of the calls made. Also the calls must not be silent, a short message should be relayed explaining who called and why it was abandoned. Failure to comply with these regulations could result in a fine of up to £50k. That should cover Lou’s outstanding bill with them!

Jamie Baillie, the first abuser of Usenet I’ve come across who is so obsessed that he’s capable of getting entire news services terminated. At the moment I’m receiving a string of complaints on a daily basis, not about my News service but rather because I have a peer with another Usenet service, AIOE.

Peering is the basis on which Usenet actually functions. Articles propagate their way from server to server forming a giant mesh that ensures each server contains all the posted content. Administrators tend to be a proud bunch and are nearly always happy to accept peering requests from other services, it helps to improve the overall quality of service. The communications between administrators is polite and constructive regardless of whether the service is free or professional. In short it’s a loose-knit group of companies and individuals taking pride in what they do.

Then there’s Jamie Baillie. Jamie is such a prolific abuser of Usenet that he has entire websites dedicated to his activities, (Here, here and here to quote a few examples). Jamie frequents the news.admin.net-abuse Usenet groups and appears to have personal vendettas with virtually every other regular poster to those groups. He’s reactions to postings about him are so extreme that “Lamie Bashing” has become a form of international sport where poking ridicule results in tirades of vitriolic insults from Jamie.

AIOE is a not for profit service, free for anyone to use for Usenet posting. Unfortunately this freedom means that people can use it to say nasty things about Jamie. His tolerance for this is undoubtedly the lowest I’ve encountered in my years of running Usenet services. I’ve had people rant at me and demand action but Jamie is the first person ever who demands I take action against another provider just because I peer with them. It doesn’t stop there. Jamie’s not content with telling me that I mustn’t peer with AIOE, he’s also sending his abuse complaints to my upstream providers. So far this has had no impact whatsoever but who knows what might happen with the volume of complaints he’s sending out. Fortunately there is so much evidence of Jamie’s activities on the Web that it’s easy to supply references to upstream providers who are the recipients of his rants. For now I’ll just have to keep fielding their requests for information relating to Jamie’s abuse complaints and see how things pan out.

Yesterday (30th June) I used one of those nasty ATM machines that charges a fee to withdraw my own money. I don’t like the concept but sometimes the convenience outweighs the charge. What I didn’t realise until now is what happens when they go wrong.

The charge on the machine in question is static (£1.75) regardless of how much is withdrawn. Based on this I attempted to withdraw £100 (+ £1.75 charge). After the usual questions I accepted the charge and the machine began to issue my money but only got so far as £30 before grinding to a halt with an “Out Of Service” message. Despite this message it managed to spit out a receipt stating I had withdrawn £100.

Luckily for me, the pub this happened in is a local of mine and I know the staff very well. One of them had even watched the machine fail. They immediately contacted the company who supply the machine and this where things started to go wrong.

The company in question is:
Note Machine
Elvicta Estates
Crickhowell,
Powys
NP8 1DF

(Needless to say, there’s no information whatsoever on their website as to what happens when the machines screw up, it’s just pages of promotional sales blurb.)

It seems that despite having charged me for the complete withdrawal plus their own service charge, these people take no responsibility for refunding my missing £70. I have to contact my own bank and request an ATM Discrepancy Form, get it signed by the pub and then fax it off to them. Rather a lot of trouble on my behalf when the fault is entirely theirs. I’ve requested the form (in writing) from my bank today. This is one of those occasions when doing anything verbally is probably a mistake. I’ll update this Blog entry as things progress.

After years of being irritated by Mutt threading my messages by Subject and then sorting those threads by oldest message in them, I finally took the time to figure out how to get it doing what I want. As is often the case with Mutt all this info was widely available, it was just scattered or lost in huge examples of muttrc files.

set strict_threads # Don’t thread messages by Subject
set sort=threads # Sort messages into threads
set sort_aux=last-date-received # Order threads by most recent message

In a recent blog article I used Wordpress to embed images into a posting. This was very simple to do but there is a drawback: The image embedded within the post is identical in size and resolution to the one viewed if the image hyperlink is clicked. This makes the post and initial webpage very bulky to view.

I could solve this by copying the images to a PC with a GUI, manipulating them to create thumbnails and then copying them back again, not exactly a slick process. My solution is to use ImageMagick tools.

Convert JPEG to PNG
convert image.jpg image.png

Resize by percentage
convert image.png -resize 50% newimage.png

Resize to fixed size
convert image.png -resize 240×240 newimage.png
The above command does not change the image ratio, it just best-fits the existing ratio within the boundaries of the box defined by -resize.

Rotate by 90 degress
convert image.png -rotate 90 newimage.png
To rotate 90 degrees anti-clockwise use -rotate -90.

Since moving into the village of St Mellion, almost two years ago, I’ve walked our dogs, Ollie and Murphy two or three times every day in some local fields. Sadly (for me) today is likely to be the last time as the fields will be mostly gone by tomorrow. The land has been purchased by St Mellion Golf Club and will be used to extend one of their courses.

The above photo shows an already widened gateway between two of the fields with the earth movers and diggers poised to start ripping up the hedges and dry-stone walls between them. It seems especially sad at this time of year with all the trees and bushes blossoming on them.

These two photos show an innocuous looking stake in the ground. Presumably these are surveyors marks for where the boundaries of the new golf holes will run.

This hedge separates two of the fields we’re losing. I guess it will be completely demolished but not sure yet. I’ll take my camera over again later when work has finished for the day and try to get some more pictures.

A big orange digger viewed through a soon to disappear gateway.

Two aerial views of the three condemned fields sandwiched between St Mellion village and the Golf Course.

Update - Five hours later…….

Hard to believe that the grass has completely gone in the space of one afternoon. All that’s left is mud, the innocuous stake in the ground and some Keep Out signs.

Update - Next day

Work finished at about 1830 yesterday and this is the scene next day at 1300. Both bulldozers now seem to be shaping the huge piles of soil they’ve scraped up. Can you tell what it is yet? I can’t. Amazing how many of my pictures have Ollie’s tail in them.

Update - 2008-June-04
The hedges had a stay of execution for a week due to heavy rain making the fields too wet for the heavy machinery. Today their time ran out.

Update - 2008-July-08
Work seems to have slowed down a lot over the last few weeks. Probably because the finishing touches are more time consuming but far less evident than moving huge volumes of earth. The sandy patch at the bottom right is a new green. To the far left of it is the following tee area although it’s not particularly discernible in this picture.

Update - 2008-September-25
Bad weather and cows in fields have kept me away from my photo spot for a couple of months but in that time very little took place due to the awful summer weather. However in the last week the sun has shone and work has been frenetic.

Some years back I blogged about encrypted filesystems. That info is still valid but times have moved on and there are other, better ways now.

I can’t take any credit for this info, it all comes from the blog of Lars Strand. My thanks to him for taking the trouble to make it public. I’m just putting it on my own blog because it’s of such value and enables me to extract just the elements I require.

Encrypting Swap

Add this to /etc/crypttab:
cryptoswap /dev/hda2 /dev/urandom cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256,size=256,hash=sha256,swap

And this it /etc/fstab:
/dev/mapper/cryptoswap swap swap sw 0 0

That’s it! Much simpler than the old methods that involved editing swap init scripts.

Create an Encrypted Filesystem
cryptsetup -c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 -y -s 256 luksFormat /dev/md8
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md8 crypt
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypt

Add this to /etc/crypttab:-
crypt /dev/md8 noauto luks