Steve Deakin's Weblog

SSH (Secure Shell) is a remote adminstration utility typically for UNIX systens that provides secure access to the command line.

The service is provided by the UNIX deamon SSHD which listens on TCP/IP port 22.

A popular utility for providing SSH on BlackBerry is midpssh ( http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ ) which is now maintained at http://ota.deltatech.com.mx/ and most importantly now digitally signed to allow low level features.

Recently midpssh this has stoppped working due to RIM BlackBerry Internet Service only allowing HTTP and HTTPS traffic through their proxies.

The solution is to change the SSH listener port on the SSH server to listen to Port 443 (HTTPS) instead of Port 22.

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BuddyPress, the social networking plug-in to multiuser wordpress (Wordpress-MU) has been released from beta to general availability.

I now use BuddyPress on my home CentOS Linux server to provide a internal social network and blogging facility for the family.

I am still trying out different calendar plug-ins to provide a central calendar for the family.

SlySoft publish “AnyDVD” and “AnyDVD HD” for accessing and copying DVDs and Blu-Ray disks by defeating the copy protection mechanisms.

SlySoft is based in Antigua thus avoids penalties under the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) 1998, the CDPA (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act) 1988 and other similar legislation in other parts of the world.

SlySoft are currently ahead of the arms race between protection circumvention and content protection.

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I use Windows and Linux interchagably so I like to choose open source toolsets that run on both platforms (I also find that Linux apps are generally also available on Mac OS X so that’s cool).

Miro is now my favourite video player (Xine has been deprecated in my A-List).

It supports all the video formats I use (Flash Video, AVI, H.264, Windows Media, Quicktime and MPEG), searches YouTube and Google Video, and allows downloads.

The only downside is the arms race between Miro and YouTube for enabling and disabling the download facility respectively but that is OK if you keep your version of Miro up to date.

You can get Miro here: Get Miro

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Fedora 9 was on a countdown and now Fedora 10 is almost ready.

The key features for me are:
* RPM 4.6 which is a major rewrite
* Faster graphical startup – including kernel graphical boot for flashless booting
* Rebase to Gnome 2.24
* Sbin sanity (at last!)
* AMQP Infrastructure – for high speed messaging

The full feature list is here