Its that time of the year .........

End of term is coming.

Lots of cans of various sorts littering the streets, pavements wall and gardens  ( like this - not sure what they hope  to acihieve by this )

Mindless damage to car mirror.

Goes with the time of the year and a good night out on friday.  About £60 to fix.

 Alleged to be a  'minor ' irritant to living in the vibrant area of Newcastle. 

its important that this sort of stuff is recorded somewhere. Many Council policies go on about 'cumulative impact' - you can probably live with one incident but when its regular it becomes a major irritant.  So I rang the Northumbria Police non urgent number 03456 043 043.  Must say , very helpful and friendly staff  on the phone. And they have to have a statement.  So they will send someone round. On Sunday . Between 9 and 10 am.

the statement :
"I locked my car and left it outside the house at 6pm. I came out at mid-day  the next day and saw it was broken. A quick inspection revealed it was un-repariable.   Its probable that the key-scratch I ve noticed today across the bonnet is  the work of the same f*$£*^%r. Nothing else is damaged and  nothing else has gone".

But they have to send someone round to talk to me, apparently. I'd be happier if they put the man-hours into stopping this sort of mindless vandalism, but there  may be something about them taking a statement in person that I don't realise. you go .


the phone call took 6 minutes. The intro to the online reporting form  has warning if it takes you more than 30 mins to fill in (!) .
We'll see what they have to say on Sunday.

No No SpyNoMore, youve got it wrong

I had a phone call  from my sister who had somehow  picked up some malware called  PC Security Guardian on her Windows7 machine, and was stuck with the constant popups and warnings. So I resorted to Google, had a good look around to see what i could find out. The best information I could find  was this link  and the suggestion to download Malware Bytes anti-Malware.

This would  all have to be fixed by talking my sister ("whats windows safe mode?") through how to  sort it all out, so i tried some of the anti-malware  first. I've got  windows XP and windows 2000 running as virtual machines inside linux mint . Like this - i can run them both at the same time.

Some wouldn't run under wine (software that lets you run some windows programs, without actually having  the windows operating system,  on linux, (but there again , why would you need to run anti-malware as there isn't really any), but I thought id have a trial run first.  I could be very confident that this setup wouldn't contain any viruses, because I don't go onto the web with  any programs ( its just for windows stuff that i have to run for a course) .Some of them did run under wine on linux .  I downloaded SpyNoMore detection tool (demo version) 2.98.110604 ). I could run it in either of the virtual machines.... But ive also installed wine so i gave it a whirl.


Here's what it found

 But the first  file it found is the one that runs the windows little black box to do command line stuff - and not, as far as I'm aware, a trojan at all !

and dmusic32.dll is one of the files installed with wine , according to this list .

I thought Id contact SpyNoMore and tell them they have a false positive for a very common windows file, but i cant find any contact details on their website!

making more disk space on ASUS eee 901

I've  had an ASUS eee 901 since they were produced ( preceded by a 701). Initially running Linpus linux that it came with , that got replaced with Ubuntu NBR ( now Ubuntu NBR). And NBR works well. The screen height/width ratio is different and putting the menu along the side makes maximum use of the  available area.

I formatted the flash disks as ext2 - not journaled, decreases the read/write to the disk -  and installed the OS on the 4GB disk and used the 16 GB disk as /home.
This has worked well, except that space became a problem on the 4GB partition. For instance , I had to do updates in steps,  one application at a time.

So Google is your friend and I ended up here and moved /usr/share to the other disk.  As predicted , the firefox icon disappears. But there is a bigger problem. this machine is my travelling companion and I have LAMP installed on it. After moving /usr/share , MySQL didn't start and the log is filled with this , occuring every 10 seconds or so

May 29 07:55:42 littleCOOP kernel: [63907.078018] type=1505 audit(1306652142.849:6294):  operation="profile_replace" pid=6795 name="/usr/sbin/mysqld"
May 29 07:55:42 littleCOOP kernel: [63907.097842] type=1503 audit(1306652142.869:6295):  operation="open" pid=6799 parent=1 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 ouid=0 name="/home/.fs-ext/usr/share/mysql/english/errmsg.sys"
May 29 07:55:42 littleCOOP kernel: [63907.103499] type=1503 audit(1306652142.873:6296):  operation="open" pid=6799 parent=1 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 ouid=0 name="/home/.fs-ext/usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml"

It wasn't a permissions problem. With the help of the Tyneside LUG, this was fixed . The files were moved, but instead of a symlink, it was mounted using /etc/fstab

/home/.fs-ext/usr/share    /usr/share    none    rw,bind  0 0


and everything now seems to work.

Charles Lamb - a response

 I replied to the scaremongering about house prices in Jesmond once the Council introduces Article 4 Directions.
What these guys don't realise is that houses, and the area has a value to residents that is not just monetary.

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=16698&uid=186763750485

Bye Bye Bob, Farewell Ron, Hello Dave

North Jesmond

Name	Description	Votes Polled	%Ward Poll	Majority
Peter Emil Andras	Liberal Democrats	870
Tim Dowson	Green Party	273
Rebecca Kate Earnshaw	The Labour Party Candidate	770
William John Holloway	The Conservative Party Candidate	419

South Jesmond

Name	Description	Votes Polled	%Ward Poll	Majority
David Michael James Hardman	The Labour Party Candidate	854
Kevin O'Neill	The Conservative Party Candidate	357
Bob Walker	Liberal Democrats	697
Dr Tony Waterston	Green Party	266

And the Council has changed from LibDem to Labour. There was also an article in the Guardian about the decline of the LibDems in Newcastle.

I went to the hustings organised by jesmondlocal , and, as a floating voter,  the labour pair were certainly the most fluent.
 
We will have to wait and see what the effect of this on this bit of Jesmond. We've got a new Councillor, so we'd better get his email address. 

One thing that cropped up at the hustings was the issue of controlling HMOs and all the candidates were in favour of controls. This was in spite of a letting agent  ( i suspect Charles lamb) who reiterated this, telling us that property values will fall by £ 50-60,000 because of restrictions. i think he's wrong ,  and I'll reply to his facebook post sometime.

I wonder what will happen to the Cycling Forum with the change from LibDem to Labour?

And farewell with thansk, to Ron, who has been a vocal advocate of the area for many years.

Light at end of the tunnel

There has been a survey done by Liverpool Victoria Insurance Company , picked up by the Newcastle Journal  as well as some of the National Newspapers (the Mirror) . Student numbers are going to fall, and Newcastle will be one of the most affected places, with student numbers falling by 50%. Many people think this is a bad thing because property values will fall.
A friend has recently sold a house in Larkspur Terrace. When Estate Agents were looking at it with a view to putting it on the market, they valued it solely as a price/bedroom. It is in an area with a large number of rented properties. The Estate Agents thought there was no point in marketing it to anyone other than as a property to be rented to students, just emphasising one of the problems of studentification - that houses become unattractive to non-students, thereby contributing to the further imbalance in the community.
Is the survey says nothing about the value of houses.  So what will happen ?

A house has a value other than financial ( which may be reflected in the price it can attract) - just look at housing and school catchment areas. What will  reducing the number of students in Newcastle do to Jesmond.

There could be an excess of properties to rent. Will students still pay a premium to live in Jesmond, or will they still live more peripherally and pay less rent?
For some students, parents have bought houses for their children to live in whilst students. As house prices continue to slowly decline, it cannot be a guaranteed investment for parents  who may have been looking to make a profit on the capital.
 The most promising part of this is that if  residents can expect no further studentification, the exodus of residents may slow.
If  houses aren't bought up as buy-to-let  by absentee landlords, they may be bought by year-round residents. As buy-to-let properties tend to be at the lower end of the price range, young families and your professionals could move back into the area, as they are no longer priced out.

Some are more equal than others

 An article appeared in the Guardian - Government denies celebrities get VIP NHS record treatment  - Celebrities will not automatically be opted out of the Summary Care Record, only those people that Big Brother decides are at risk' (undefined),if their location is known,  will be. Of course, anyone can opt out , for any reason.  Notherndoc linked to an article in the GP magazine, Pulse, which  does say that Celebrities will be opted out.

Those behind the SCR are just resorting to sophistry when all these articles are have a line about the rest of us bing able to opt out. Those deemed to be VIPs will no doubt receive a suggestion that they should opt out , but the rest of are left to find out for ourselves.
this whole thing is Tony Blairs' idea . To show his confidence in the  system and its security, Leo Blairs' MMR immunisation status should be uploaded. How long it remains a secret will be a good test of the security of the system that they are so keen to get us all to sign up to.