Matthew Hutchinson

Spending a lot of time travelling these days, (to and from Belfast), I was bored on the Heathrow Express and decided to turn on KisMAC on my MacBookPro – Before I knew it, I was participating in some casual ‘Wardriving’ and the results confirmed 52 wireless networks detected in around 15 minutes (across ~14 miles). The scary stats in more detail;

• 19 were completely unsecured
• 24 were WEP encrypted – easy to crack
• leaving 9 with WPA encyprtion
• 23 had the default SSID assigned
• all but 8 used the default channel ‘11’
• only 1 was detected with it’s SSID hidden

Its clear the majority of people seem to be uneducated on the level of security their wireless networks are capable of providing. Generally opting to leave thier box running with the default settings untouched.

Had the train being going slower – I have no doubts KisMAC would have recognised a lot more networks with lower signal strengths.

• #cabal
• [15:26] beowulf: matt: @media is soon
• [15:26] matt: yoohooodle!
• [15:26] beowulf: we’ll be on the bleeding edge of web 2.0
• [15:26] matt: we will
• [15:26] matt: yes
• [15:26] matt: rather than the rusty dagger of web 1.0

Excellent set from Ghostland Observatory – grab the mp3 directly (~40mb) or subscribe to the podcast from KEXP.org

Another month another redesign for the blog, this one I am happy with and it will be here to stay (for a while at least) – A lot of gumpf has been removed from the side bar, and the whole thing should be a little faster to load.

I have also switched to FeedBurner – for all my feed needs. Redirects are in place, but update your RSS bookmarks if you’ve got ‘em. (see the ‘feedTower’ at the bottom of every page)

I’ve even created a little css block to publish up conversations from IRC

What’s still to do ? Well, if you’re looking for more information about me, my CV, or the ‘people’ links – they will soon be thrown up on a new page here – and the top right corner image might be a little flashier soon.

Somethings up with submitting comments and (as usual) there is one annoying CSS bug I still have to iron out in IE – but thats life.

Anyone like/dislike the new look, comments appreciated.

I came across this problem when trying to setup Capistrano on my dreamhost box (with this helpful guide)

Capistrano (orginally SwitchTower); is a standalone deployment utility that can integrate nicely with Rails. It allows you to deploy your apps across multiple servers from a subversion; Its handy for any shared environment (such as dreamhost), since you can use it to migrate databases and reset running fcgi processes.

Checking the Dreamhost Gemlist (or; gem list—local) I found that Capistrano wasnt installed – so I had to go about setting up my shared box so I could install any Gem I liked, in my home directory.

Its easier than I thought, but I had some trouble searching Google to find an answer so Im posting it up here; share the knowlegde and all that …

First up, create a new .gems folder in your home directory;

mkdir ~/.gems

Next open up your ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile files and make sure to add the following lines as new environment variables;

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/.gems
export GEM_PATH=/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8:$GEM_HOME

Also adjust your PATH variable to include your new ~/.gems folder;

export PATH=~/bin:~/.gems/bin:$PATH

Thats basically it ! – For any gems you want to install you’ll need to grab them from somewhere online; I picked up Capistrano from here with

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1420&release_id=4528

Then ran this command to install the gem (from my home dir)

gem install ~/capistrano-1.1.0.gem

Since we added the ~/.gems folder to the PATH variable in your bash files, you can simply type cap -V to check capistrano is installed.

Although this is not nessecary for Capistrano – in order to get your rails app to use other gems installed in your home directory, you first have to unpack them in RAILS_ROOT/vendor. Therefore, to be able to require them in your code, enter the RAILS_ROOT/vendor directory and do the following:

gem unpack gem_name