Today I started to rewrite my website in HTML5 to see what it was like, and was so exited by the result that I put the new HTML5 version of the site live after only a few hours!

If you are trying to view (possibly unsuccessfully) this site with an older web browser (or any version of Internet Explorer), please upgrade to the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari

For any web developers who haven’t yet looked at HTML 5 and CSS 3, do so soon, because it makes a lot of things easier, better, cleaner and brighter! Did I mention easier? Better?

On Friday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an Internet censorship protest site had been set up under the banner ‘Stephen Conroy: Minister for Fascism‘ and was ironically registered under the very name of the Australian Communications Minister responsible for trying to mandate the compulsory filtering scheme in federal law, stephenconroy.com.au. Within hours of the story being published, auDA, the Australian Domain Name Authority, had shut down the site, giving the owners only 3 hours to respond to a request to justify their eligibility for the domain. Normally auDA would allow several days to weeks for this process. An appeal to request an extension was denied, with no reason given. The site was quickly moved to a US domain, stephen-conroy.com in order to stay active while the dispute with auDA is resolved.

Petr Horava, a physicist at the University of California in Berkeley, has a new theory about gravity and spacetime. At high energies, it actually snips any ties between space and time, yet at low energies devolves to equivalence with the theory of General Relativity, which binds them together. The theory is gaining popularity with physicists because it fits some observations better than Einstein’s or Newton’s solutions. It better predicts the movement of the planets (in an idealized case) and has a potential to create the illusion of dark matter. Another physicist calculated that under Horava Gravity, our universe would experience not a Big Bang but a Big Bounce — and the new theory reproduces the ripples from such an event in a way that matches measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

You simply MUST watch this 10/GUI video! I want one now!

While there seems to be a lot of information around explaining how to migrate an existing disk image to VirtualBox from both Xen and VMWare, I couldn’t find a single article explaining how to migrate away from VirtualBox. After a lot a google searches (most revealing an obsolete program called “vditool”) and reading quite a lot of documentation I found the VBoxManage clonehd command which allows you to convert a VDI disk image into a RAW disk image that is able to be used by Xen. To save everyone else the time, the syntax is:

VBoxManage clonehd image1.vdi image1.raw —format RAW

The unspoken truth about managing geeks

• IT wants to help me.
• I should keep an open mind.
• IT is not my personal tech adviser, nor is my work computer my personal computer.
• IT people have lives and other interests.

“Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn’t directly related to the work. The amount of respect an IT pro pays someone is a measure of how tolerable that person is when it comes to getting things done, including the elegance and practicality of his solutions and suggestions. IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.”

Video game systems are computers designed for a very specific purpose. What can support techs learn from Sony’s PS3 service process?

It turns out that one of my Aussie expat mates Chris is off to Greece on Friday to play cricket for Turkey. Pretty freaky. You can follow their exploits on their tour diary blog. Good luck guys!

Harald Welte, has written on his blog about operating an Open Source GSM network at the recent HAR2009 conference. Photographs and a description and of the setup, run under license of the Dutch regulatory authority, are provided; essentially the setup consisted of a pair of BTS’ (Base Transceiver Stations) running at 100mW transmit power each and tied to a tree. In turn these provided access to the Base Station Controller (BSC), in this case a Linux server in a tent running OpenBSC. The system authenticated users with a token sent via SMS; in total 391 users subscribed to the service and were able to use their phones as if they were on any other network. Independent researchers are increasingly examining GSM networks and equipment, Welte’s work proves that GSM is in the realm of the hackers now and that this realm of mobile networking could be set for a few surprises in the future.

I just discovered Pyrit which takes a step ahead in attacking WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, the protocols that protect today’s public WIFI-airspace.

Pyrit‘s implementation allows to create massive databases, pre-computing part of the WPA/WPA2-PSK authentication phase in a space-time-tradeoff. The performance gain for real-world-attacks is in the range of three orders of magnitude which urges for re-consideration of the protocol’s security. Exploiting the computational power of Many-Core- and other platforms through ATI-Stream, Nvidia CUDA, OpenCL and VIA Padlock, it is currently by far the most powerful attack against one of the world’s most used security-protocols.

I continue to be amazed by the widely varied uses that these hardware graphics accelerators can be put to!