A hope Google extends the shopping idea to the UK; I've wasted too many days this holiday looking for stuff for the house - just trying to find the right table for our kitchen took two days - I just want to search for a round glass 90-110cm table plus four chairs for under 400 pounds and click on 'buy me'.

Just back from ApacheCon in Las Vegas; a little more budget than previous years, but all that matters is that the content is being delivered by experts right? Hmmm, well talking of which, I made a serious judgement error on the amount of material in my talk and ended up covering only 75% of what I put in the paper, which sucked. I'd spent a lot of time getting the presentation just right too, so it was a little devestating to find out I only had 30 minutes left with over half the material still to go.

We got some ASF keysigning going on, but the BOF was scheduled for 8am so some of the main ASF folks were not around to take part which was a shame.

We had a good time in Vegas, getting to see all the sights including the Star Trek Experience again, get out to Red Rock Canyon, and still have time to win about $40 on the slots.

At the moment the UPS bot tells you interesting status reports and notifies you of emergency things. The adsl bot tells you about the cable modem link signal strength and so on. The tivo bot is rather cool, it tells you what it's currently watching and a few status indicators, and in return you can pop up a message on the screen or send a message to be viewed in the message centre. The final X10 bot lets you control X10 things in the house, just some lights at the moment. It doesn't yet report the status, that seems not to work.

I'm having problems getting Perl to deal with the parallel ports correctly so I can't get the alarm, SMS or heating controls to work yet. Also these bots are complete hacks and return the information in psuedo-xml (random made up DTD) and I've not thought about messages vs groupchats vs iq oob for the data. Anyway much fun being able to message the living room lights to turn to 30% brightness

Anyway the idea was to look for something that would use standard components, where frameworks existed in Perl and C for me to write simple code, and to work on the principle of messaging - the UPS for example would respond to status requests and give you things like the temperature and voltage; with a heartbeat notification with the status included every minute; but with urgent alarms to anyone who registers an interest in getting them. Whats the solution? Jabber! In about an hour I had a jabber server running and a test Perl client doing just that; this thing will rock :)

Then, suddenly, the ISS team announced the same issue publically causing us to go into firefighting mode and release the advisory (which I'd fortunately already drafted and got positive feedback on), followed by seemingly hundreds of press calls, lots of additional analysis, and reading ISS say I was untrustworthy in some Chicago newspaper ;-)

Now for some sleep

• Got interviewed for redhat.com
• I was initiated into the need to carry around more paper
• had a few days of fun with Bryce and other US folks. Looking in the US for magazines on how to do interior US home design, although all I found was imported magazines showing how to make your US home look English. Grass, greener, etc.
• Went through far too many security points at airports and found that it's really important to make sure your laptop is charged when they want to inspect it
• spent some time with the Mitre CVE people

The cute Erricson phone works over here in the USA and for the first time I've been able to hold working SMS conversations with the UK - saves me a buck or two.

Replaced my outdated paper log book with my todo list and notes with a system from Franklin Covey. Replaced it with even more paper - but according to the seminar this system will sort out my entire life and make me a better person.

Rest of my time has been dealing with various security advisories for Red Hat and investigating new issues. I'm off to see the Mitre CVE folks in a couple of days in Boston.

Tip of the month: When travelling don't let your batteries completely run out so when you are asked to turn on your laptop at airport security there isn't even enough power to light the 'your batteries are low' light.

# Extended X10 control of LW11G dimmer
#
# Unlike other L*11* modules the LW11G
# seems to only respond to code 53.  Set the data to
#
# 0 = immediate off
# 255 = immediate on
# 1-254 = slowly dim or bright to that level, turns on if
not already

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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