Ok, so I’ve been a part-time technology writer for The Herald for all of three weeks. It’s going pretty well so far with positive reader feedback and even a couple of responses from companies who’s products I’ve reviewed. But last night I made the jump to mainstream news…

At around 3pm on Monday, a colleague mentioned that the Strathclyde Police site was running slowly. I had a look at their source code and noticed multiple rogue javascript tags that were sliently redirecting users to a website called robint.us. A bit more digging revealed that site was registered to an individual in China and had a history of distributing nasty viruses.

At first Strathclyde Police were dismissive, but after some persuasion regarding the seriousness of the threat, especially to any visitors running older browsers (the site robint.us has a history of distributing IE Buffer Overflow attacks) they decided to take the site down at 6pm.

At the time of writing – nearly 24 hours later – the police site is still offline.

I did most of the background research for the story in today’s Herald (which you can read here) and the story has since been picked up by a number of news sites:

• The Herald
• Evening Times
• The Register
• The Drum
• eWorldPost
• Hack in the box

I’ve also been quoted in the article.  From The Herald:

Grant Gibson, digital innovation manager at the Herald and Times Group, which publishes The Herald, warned that the police should not be complacent about the potential threat.

He said: “Regardless of whether the site is active or dormant at this precise moment, the hackers have a window into the Strathclyde Police page from a location outwith their control. This ‘window’ is registered to an individual in China, which could be reactivated at any time.”

Yesterday I integrated some of the newly announced Facebook Social Widgets into heraldscotland.  Using their new auto-connect system, any Facebook users who visit heraldscotland will now be able to see what their friends are recommending and sharing on our site.

The demo below outlines how it all works…

I’m quite pleased with how smoothly the integration went — literally just a few hours from first looking at the developers documentation to having these features live on the site.

We’re less than 24 hours into the trial, but the results are already impressive — over 1,600 Facebook users have shared our most popular article which, multiplied by the size of their average social graph, means this article has been highlighted to nearly 200,000 Facebook users who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it.

With winter on the way, one thing I really had to sort out was heating for the garage, especially on the summer house side.  The insulation in the walls and ceiling is working well, but with outdoor temperatures dropping to single digits I really needed something to raise the temperature in the winter evenings.

I had looked at various wee fan heaters and oil heaters but nothing seemed quite right for the project.  Then I happened to find a nice glass panel heater in the B&Q sale.   It seemed to tick all of the boxes: not too thirsty (max 1kW); compact; wall mounted; silent… and best of all it’s digital!

It’s ideal for the summer house, just turn it on and it quickly heats the room to the chosen temperature — 12c to 19c takes about ten minutes — then it just maintains that temperature for as long as you’re out there.  The loft insulation seems to be doing it’s job, as the heating element only comes on very occasionally once the room is up to temperature.

And now for the missing link… high-speed internet access!

Even though the garage is only a few meters from the house and approx 15m from the wi-fi antenna in the loft, the metal foil insulation used throughout the garage prevents a decent wi-fi signal from getting through.   I’d occasionally manage to get a connection from my laptop, but it was flaky.   And a connection from my iPhone… forget it!

I didn’t want to run a hard-wired Ethernet connection from the house, so I decided to set up a wi-fi repeater instead, taking the signal from outside the metallic cage and repeating it inside.   I’m already running the dd-wrt custom firmware on my main router and had read good things about its Repeater Bridge mode for this kind of task.   So, I decided to look for the cheapest dd-wrt compatible router I could find to act as the repeater.

I found an ex-display Buffalo AirStation WHR-G125 on ebuyer for £15 which was perfect for the task.  Once it arrived I used tftp to flash it with the latest dd-wrt Mini Generic firmware from the dd-wrt site, then followed this tutorial to set it up in Repeater Bridge mode.

All that was left was to give it a permanent mounting place in the garage.  The WHR-G125 doesn’t have any mounting holes as standard and I was reluctant to spend extra on the official wall mount, so I ended up strapping it onto the roof joists with a couple of zip ties.  The result: the garage now has it’s own SSID which broadcasts a nice strong signal to any devices out there and gives me reliable wi-fi in the garage and elsewhere in the garden.  £15 well spent I think.

Running your webserver from home gives lots of opportunities to connect the real world to the internet.  I’ve previously connected a webcam with motion detection so I can see people entering and leaving the driveway and, more recently, connected a wireless weather station to give regular Elderslie weather updates.

I decided my next project would be to put my front doorbell online.  As well as being a relatively simple, fun project, it also makes some sense: coupled with the webcam it can be used to give me a decent idea of who’s there when the doorbell goes and I’m out.   It also means I can hear the doorbell when I’m at the bottom of the garden, thanks to SMS or IM alerts on my iPhone.

Here’s the project in it’s rough state, before it gets packaged up into a project case.

If you’re interested in setting up a similar project, read on…

(more…)

I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash.  Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language.  And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.   This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.   The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too.  Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files.  The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.  

You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews

s1jobs has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Onrec Awards in the category of Best Technical Innovation. The nomination — which is the first ever technical award nomination for s1 – recognises the huge technical advances made with the new site. 

From a UI point of view, we ripped the site up and started again in 2008.  Making use of the latest web techniques such as image sprites, ajax, streaming video recording and drag & drop personalisation, we developed a site which had far more functionality than the old site, while at the same time being a lot faster and more efficient (there are more details on the original launch post here).

The full list of Onrec finalists is available here: http://www.onrec.com/conferences/250309A/finalists.html