Well if everybody has the skills and the will to write proper macro’s there is not so much of a problem. However hitting the record macro button and save whatever comes out is not a good practice in my humble opinion. But that happens a lot. These macros are nothing more than a very restrictive set of actions that can be repeated. A proper macro is more like a clever solid routine that eases everybody’s life a little.

In my role of IT coordinator for the process guys, most of the problems with these tools are directed to me to solve. The largest amount of questions is about “where can I find this or that function on this annoying toolbar?” –This annoying toolbar- is called the ‘ribbon’ by MS, but that is not something I am going to tell them, nobody is interested in these facts anyway.

Yesterday I was faced with a problem of macro hacking kind. Subject of the problem was a tool for calculating pipe line heat loss with the use of a nice loop that was iterating until it came up with the desired values. The results were shown in a tabulated form and in Excel 2003 it was working flawlessly for years.

However there was a page showing the data in a chart, which in itself is not a problem, but MS decided to radically change the way charts work. The underlying macro tried to set the ranges for the axes, but these settings were not accessible anymore. In this case using another template and rewriting the code or simply disabling the buggy code was enough to solve this problem.

However during installation a couple of annoyances came across. For example it does not come with a desktop environment. Since I am used to work on a desktop most of the time and do text based commands on a terminal window, I wanted some graphical eye candy in front of me. And because I normally rely heavily on the web to find out about problems, Firefox had to be available all the time.

So I decided to start using Ubuntu Desktop Edition. The main difference between these editions is that the server is dedicated for communication over the network and its kernel is configured most optimally for server tasks. The desktop edition is best configured for having users working on it all the time. Maybe later on I will change to Server Edition back, but for now I am happily using the desktop.

My fist hurdle after installation was to configure software RAID-5, because I wanted reliable file storage. A RAID is an array of disks which is configured to operate as one disk. Depending on chosen scheme the choice can be made between reliability, storage capacity or disk speed. RAID-5 is combining most of this by providing secure data storage (one disk can break and be replaced without losing data), improving read write speed and minimum storage capacity loss.

For this purpose I bought four 1.5TB disks and one 320GB disk. On the smaller disk I installed the operating system, so the storage would be on dedicated disks. This is reliable because if the disk containing the OS fails, the array is still intact. If the array fails, the operating system can recreate the array. One back draw of RAID-5 is that always one disk is redundant, so my total storage will be 4.5TB, or in real GiB it will be around 4000GiB.

First I tried to create the array using Palimpsest Disk Utility but this was giving me more headache than help. It was running the array when I wanted it to stop and vice versa for example. So I was looking for a good solution and came across mdadm, which is an administrator program for multiple devices.

Mdadm is controlled via the terminal or via a configuration file. After some studying I decided to create a nice config file and it ran without a problem. Now I have the nice task to copy and sort all documents and music files gathered in the past years.

My goal is to create an overall map with puns on places that I visited. Sort of ego-wall travel style.

To be continued, for now the result can be seen on travel.

Imagine every house to have its own power generator in the basement. No power outages because the power plant went down. Tribes in Africa that have lived close to nature for ages can have access to electronic devices, mobile phones, internet and irrigation without having to rely on a power grid that will never reach their village.

This all sounds too good to be true, isn’t it? Of course, sometimes a company makes a big hit by introducing a new device that is renewing, trend-setting, innovative and world changing. But not this one I am afraid.

First of all, the technology they advertise is as old as combustion engines. Bloom Energy has been selling fuel cell devices for years and it is unlikely they have found ‘something’ that is such a change that it will be as revolutionary as they let you believe.

Secondly the main disadvantage for this box is price, fuel cell technology is there for years, a lot of electronic machines run on it, but it is way too expensive for household purposes. So developing countries are not in range at all.

Finally it claims to be environmentally friendly and promises to run on a range of fuels. This might be possible because fuel cell technology is not bound to one type of process or one fuel source. The main question here is how clean has the fuel to be before it enters the device, since refining to a high purity is a major setback for the price and environmental friendliness of a fuel source.

Don’t get me wrong; fuel cell tech can be the next step in our energy consuming world, but still a lot of hurdles have to be taken and the world normally doesn’t change in one day or year. A lot of logistic problems have to be solved, the price of the devices has to come down and real clean fuel production techniques are required before fuel cells will become mainstream.

So this promising story sounds to me like the next opportunistic player in the field of ‘green’ as there are more companies exploiting this buzz of the day to enhance the sale of their products.

This requirement brought me to rethink something that hit me recently, the RockYou.com hack. It happened in December 2009 by a very simple technique, but the impact was disastrous. Over 32 million user account details were aquired and brought into the public. Later on Imperva issued an analysis of the passwords in use and the outcome was shocking.

The most used password is 123456 and the runner up 12345. Both passwords are extremely easy to crack with a brute force attack. Looking further down the lists its all too obvious. None of these words don’t appear in a dictionairy or are in a hackers common password list already.

This brings the message back to me, as I had to come up with a smart password that was hard to crack but easy to remember. And there the paradox is born. The best password is hard to remember and easy to remember at the same time. As soon as a combination is easy to remember, the characters are related to each other. And because we can only easy remember stuff we already know, we naturally choose a combination that is already existent. And easy to crack as well.

To counterfight this effect, there are some guidelines, some of them based on human behaviour facts, some on cryptographical facts. To get myself a good strong password, I decided to practice a little bit on some random words that popped up in my head, and type them down to feel how easy they were to type.

I ended up with a nice word, Dwarfest, and started making a sentence out of it. This brought me to “I am Dwarfest” Well this is not a strong password at all, so I replaced some characters and tested them here, here and in gmail’s password change field for strength. Now it looked like “1 am Dw@rf3st” this is not a password that is easy to break, because it has the following features:

• Length 13 characters
• Mix of Uppercase and lowercase letters
• use of symbols
• use of numbers
• numbers and symbols used inside the word

Time to change my password, everything went ok, then the system asked me to relogin in order for the password to become effective. And there the problems started; while changing the password no alert was given on the use of spaces in passwords, but aperantly Windows doesn’t like them. So I wasn’t able to login anymore, had to ask the administrator to reset and was back at the start again. Out of frustration I made up one of the easiest passwords possible and that’s what I am using now.

The Windows XP filesystem is NTFS, which uses a table with all information about the files on the disk. If this table gets corrupted, Windows is not able to properly read the files anymore, but the files themselves are mostly still intact. There are some programs that ignore the table and look on the disk itself for the files.

Ubuntu has these programs in its software repository so I installed the required software with Synaptic which went easy. I tried Foremost and Scalpel, both read the disk entirely and check on header information. Foremost was originally developed by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and The Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research , later it has been opened to the general public.

A header is the first few bytes of a file which are unique for that file type. With this knowledge at hand a lot of great things are possible. Foremost and Scalpel are having a list of known header information and are checking each block on the hard disk for these header bytes. When some file is found, it is copied to a specified location and a log entry is written.

It turned out that a lot of files were still on this hard disk, but not the ones I was looking for… Panic was creepig in, but then I realized that there was another hard disk, which I believed had died totally a long time ago. When connected it mounted nicely and Ubuntu was showing the disk contents without a problem. There I found the long lost stuff (holiday pictures) and my day was saved. After all I did not need to play forensic detective, but I gathered some nice knowledge for the future.

Click chemistry is about synthesis of rather complex molecules in small steps. The main purpose is to quickly examine the pool of drug candiates. Drug testing nowadays is done by creating a molecule and testing its effects on living creatures. By ruling out all non-active substances new drugs are found.

Based on a set of criteria which are based on natural environment properties, the pool of drug candidates is drastically lowered. This will hopefully speed up the discovery of new drugs. Only question remains is what to do when all substances are tested…

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/chemistry/chemical-synthesis/technology-spotlights/click.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_chemistry

http://curlyarrow.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-click-chemistry.html

The HTC TYTN is running Windows Mobile, some old version and the Nexus One runs on Android 2.1. As I am lazy by nature, I was looking for ways to automate this process.

One problem was that I only could use Ubuntu as a midlle man and I was not sure syncing the TYTN was possible. Luckily there is a program that is able to do this available for Ubuntu; Synce.

To do this follow these steps:

• Some easy steps to get synchronizing working (with Evolution) can be found in this tutorial.
• Next step is to save all contact information as a v-Card from Evolution.
• Then import this v-Card into Gmail do not forget to make a separate group to load the contacts into.
• Finally cleanup the contacts (mine were stored in the form Last Name, First Name for example)
• If you want to ease the cleanup, export the contacts again, but now in CSV format, which can be opened using OpenOffice.org Calc (Great free spreadsheet program!) and do the actions there. After cleanup and save, import into Gmail again.
• Gmail and Android will synchronize automatically

Easy as that. I could have done the cleanup operation on the v-Card file as well, but was too eager to get the contacts in Gmail.

Last week I bought a Philips 42″ LCD TV. It is capable of showing Full HD content. Taken into account my ever growing collection of Full HD movies, and the growing use of Blue-Ray, we will be fully up to standards for the next years.

However my nature does not allow the purchace of a TV alone. There has to be more intelligence in such a step to be fully satisfactory. Therefore I planned to buy the components for a HTPC and fileserver along with the TV. Plans are to connect them together to get a full media network at home where every device shares its content with the others.

As always this turned out to be a quite ambitious plan, but it can be done. Others did it before me isn’t it?

The chosen software on the systems will be Linux based because I planned to ban purchased software as much as possible in my home situation. For the HTPC Mythbuntu is the chosen OS, for the Server it will be Ubuntu Server Edition and MythTV backend installed later on. I am planning to install Ubuntu on my living room PC as well, but have to be carefull not to annoy the other family members.

In the future I will keep you updated on the progress.