Paul McCormack’s Web Site

Damn, those folks at Google Street View are fast!  Less than 2 hours after I found and published a photo of their drivers nose hair, they have removed the image (see link in previous post).  Luckily, I have a screen shot of the original.  Is that breaching privacy laws?!?

Click on the picture on the left to view the full screen shot.  I’ve had to reduce the quality of the image as my bandwidth is getting hammered since being linked from the Sydney Morning Herald web site.

Google Street View has just been launched in Australia.  I was having a look around this morning for interesting views and I found this when looking our our favourite Fish and Chips restaurant at Patonga.

Looks like the driver / photographer forgot to disable the camera before he climbed onto the car to fiddle with it!  I wonder if he has any concerns about privacy!

Update: Google have removed the image from Google Street View, but I have uploaded it in another post here.

I use Firefox as my browser of choice for all of the usual reasons - security, stability, extendibility …

I recently had a problem with one of my favourite add-ons after I deleted and recreated my profile.  Foxmarks is a great utility that allows you to synchronise your bookmarks across multiple Firefox installations (study, laptop, work etc).

I use Foxmarks to sync with my WebDAV server over HTTPS.  The problem was that when I deleted my profile and tried to set up Foxmarks, I was getting “Unknown Error 8179″ when I tried to sync.  Google wasn’t helping either (hence I thought that I should post something).

The error was caused because I was using self-signed SSL certificates and I had not yet told Firefox about my own Certificate Authority.  As soon as I downloaded my CA file and set it to trusted, everything worked again.

Hope this helps you.

E-mail is great, but it has many problems. Did you know that it is very easy to send messages that appear to be from other people? Spammers do this all the time in an effort to encourage you to open their mail. The big problem with e-mail is the absolute lack of security.

There are two parts to security - authentication and encryption:

Authentication is checking that the message is really from the person that it claims to be from. Was is really your bank that sent you that message about your account being suspended?

Encryption is scrambling the message contents so that it cannot be read in transit. This is often compared to the postcard vs. sealed envelope for mail.

The problem with securing e-mail is that it relies on both parties having the desire and the software in order to participate. I cannot simply send an encrypted e-mail to my accountant if she does not have compatible software - and I would need her credentials (public key) in advance. Read more…

Having recently set up Asterisk, I was a little unhappy about the default installation of a MySQL server on the trixbox server and creating the databases there.

I have a separate MySQL server (with phpMyAdmin) and I didn’t want to have to think about backing up and maintaining another one, so I did a bit of Googling to find out how to migrate FreePBX or trixbox databases to another server.

The results were a little disappointing, with only vague references about how to go about doing it, and they seem to discourage it. Boring!

Here is what I did:
Read more…