Persuaded a helpful person in the IT Department at head office to block port 135 on the router at their end of our slow, kilostream connection. Magically, our connectivity is working fine again. They still have to track down all their infected machines though, but at least that’s not causing us a problem any more…. (read more)

So, external network connectivity is slow today. Again. But it seems more than just congested. I suspect rogue network traffic. Right, on with my investigative hats (tcpdump, nmap etc.). I try to figure out what’s going on. I see ARP requests for all IPs on our subnet, lots of them. Not just the active machines,… (read more)

So, in the last few days there have been new releases of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Firefox is now at version 1.0PR (PR == Preview Release), so this is very close to being version 1.0, meaning that it is considered good and stable. There are a couple of nice additions since the version 0.9.x… (read more)

Have been feeling rather under the weather for a couple of days, but switching the TV on and seeing the image below certainly made me feel better: A protestor dressed as Batman managed to evade security at Buckingham Palace and staged a five hour protest on a narrow ledge at the front of the building…. (read more)

On my way to work this morning by bike as usual, a wasp flew straight into my mouth. After a struggle which involved me trying to gouge it out of my mouth whilst attempting to slow down and stop the bike (avoiding both the bushes/ditch on one side and cars/buses on the other), the Evil… (read more)

The Sky One ‘science’ series, Brainiac, has returned for a second series. Presented by Richard ‘used to be on Top Gear’ Hammond and Jon ‘famous geek from Big Brother’ Tickle, it takes a rather anarchic, but educational look a popular science. Last night’s programme addressed such important things as what happens to soap when you… (read more)