I wrote a little post about creating a PlanningAlerts scraper for the Northern Territory for my mum.

We ran an OpenAustralia hackfest last weekend and I wrote a blog post that was cross posted on the Official Google Australia Blog.

I wrote a guest post for ScraperWiki about our hackfest.

And I gave a talk at the hackfest:

and wrapped up the hackfest:

ScraperWiki also featured my ACMA scraper a while back (I must get back to that project):

Why the wrong horse? Well seven years ago WordPress wasn’t in the game but I do remember evaluating Drupal and whilst it has a vibrant, active community the same cannot be said for phpWebSite.

I wanted to give our site a visual refresh, make it easier for people to contribute and to move to a more secure platform than the out of date version of phpWebSite we were running on. The obvious choice was WordPress.

I’ve looked before for tools to migrate from phpWebSite to WordPress but never found anything so I decided to write a tool myself. As I was getting started writing a tool, the friend I was working on the migration with discovered a CSV importer plugin already written for WordPress so we decided to see how hard it would be to export data from phpWebSite as CSV that this plugin could understand.

As we didn’t have huge amounts of content it turned out to be much easier to export the Announcement posts as CSV using phpMyAdmin and manually recreate everything else (just a handful of comments and some image galleries).

The trick with exporting the Announcement posts was to use the CSV for MS Excel option of phpMyAdmin and then manipulate the data using LibreOffice Calc into the format expected by the CSV Importer plugin.

Since we only had a handful of comments I simply recreated these using the standard WordPress UI and manually set the dates to match phpWebSite. Photos are stored under images/<module name>/ so I just copied the images/photoalbum directory and uploaded all the images in each gallery using the usual WordPress uploader.

Here’s three simple steps that will massively increase your online security. It won’t make you bullet-proof and you should still do all those other things security people have been telling you for years but these are really easy to do, anyone can do them and they plug the biggest security hole that people have these days – insecure and reused passwords.

Step 1. Create a complex password

Wait! Don’t stop reading because you think it’s going to be hard to remember – complex passwords can be easy to remember.

A software tool called pwgen can generate complex passwords that are pronounceable and therefore easier for us humans to remember.

There’s an online version you can use to generate these. Go off and generate one now and use it for your most important online tool, such as your Gmail account.

Step 2. Start using a password manager

If you’re reading this, chances are you have heaps of username and password combinations for all of the online services you use. To manage these you need to be using a password manager.

Password managers generate complex passwords for services that you don’t need to remember. When you open your password file you just enter one master password and it unlocks all of your other varied, complex passwords.

I use KeePass because it is open source and works on the different platforms I use (Linux and Android). I also use Dropbox to ensure it’s synchronised between all my computers and is always available for download over the Internet.

Go and download it now and use the password you generated in the last step as your master password.

Step 3. Move all of your passwords into your password manager

This sounds hard but the trick is not to go around laboriously changing all of your passwords up front. Whenever you touch a service (e.g. login to Twitter, upload photos to Flickr, etc.), just go to your settings page and use your password manager to generate a new password. It’ll take you 30 seconds.

Off you go – go and change a few now. You’ll feel more secure right away.

Update:

Jonathan Holmes responds, “easy! You don’t understand how freaked out people like me get when confronted by something like KeePass“. That’s a fair point and I feel embarrassed I’ve done the stereotypical geek thing and assumed something easy for me wouldn’t be difficult for a non-geek.

I’m off to eat some humble pie :) In the mean time, hopefully these instructions at least inspire some geeks to fix up their own online security and, in finest nerdy tradition, show their friends and family.

I finally decided to look it up and it’s as simple as: Ctrl-Shift and the character code from Gnome’s Character Map application.

So to type ™, go to Applications > Accessories > Character Map. Then note the character code:

Hold down Ctrl + Shift and type u2122. Simple.

Installation

Install the required software and load the module into the running kernel without restarting:

Drive creation

Set up encryption on the disk and mount it:

Mounting

How to mount the drive:

Unmounting

How to unmount the drive:

The important change was to set the wheel emulation’s button to 2, not 4 as it appeared to have been set to. If you don’t have GPointingDeviceSettings installed:

Update:

This original method didn’t survive a power-cycle but I found adding this file to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-thinkpad.conf will work:

With an always-on Ubuntu 10.04 machine, an old mobile phone and a cheap pre-paid SIM, you can have this setup in under 10 minutes.

First, install the required software; the Gammu SMS daemon for getting the SMS off the mobile and Mutt for sending our emails.

Put this little shell script somewhere like /var/spool/gammu/mail_wrapper.sh, customising the email addresses. It will be used to send the email when an SMS is received:

Attach your phone to your computer (mine was USB) and select “Phone mode” or similar on the mobile (as opposed to mass storage mode or photo mode, for example). Follow your system log to see what port your mobile shows up on, you should see output similar to this:

The logs above show my mobile exposing two USB modem ports, /dev/ttyACM0 and /dev/ttyACM1. Trial and error lead me to discover that /dev/ttyACM1 was the port I was looking for.

Now configure this port in your /etc/gammu-smsdrc file with the line port = /dev/ttyACM1 and add the line runonreceive = /var/spool/gammu/mail_wrapper.sh so that the script we created earlier is executed when an SMS is received. The complete /etc/gammu-smsdrc file should look similar to this:

Now start Gammu’s smsd and, with the configuration above, Gammu will log activity to syslog so you can send an SMS and see the fruits of your labour:

If you run into any problems or need some help, please leave a comment below.

Note that there are more sophisticated ways of setting this up and many gateway providers have a much easier method to achieve the same result without you having to set up anything.

If you need to just do a find and replace in gettext source files, try this out to do a whole directory at once:

I couldn’t find a way to do the edit in place (a la sed -i), if you know of a way please let me know in the comments.

The following commands will let the adm group run Wireshark without elevated privileges – the adm group is the group that allows you to read log files, etc., I always add myself to it anyway.

That’s all pretty self explanatory – the setcap command allows that binary to use special capabilities, namely to control NICs (to set promiscuous mode for Wireshark) and capture raw traffic from NICs.

That said, I love the latest presenter of Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes, and I wanted to read just his articles posted on The Drum. I asked if it was possible to get an RSS feed for specific authors but I didn’t get far so I decided to fire up the ever-useful Yahoo! Pipes to do the job:

You can filter by any Author’s name from The Drum (just copy and paste the name from the by-line) and then select Run Pipe then Get as RSS to add it to your feed reader of choice. If you find this useful or have other suggestions for how this could be used, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.