belial.co.uk

Just finished my Certified Ethical Hacker course here at www.firebrandtraining.co.uk, and have passed the final exam with a 78% mark… which ain’t bad. 70% is a pass, so it was quite close. But bearing in mind the steeper then normal learning curve I’ve had with it, I’m very pleased with myself. Now to find a job! 

Sacha’s blog www.ladyjames.org.uk has now been updated to Wordpress. It used to be on S9y, and S was finding it difficult to use the WYSIWYG editor, in particular the invariable amount of button presses resulting in her losing her blog posts. Wordpress is much friendlier, and auto saves your posts every now and then as you write them to a draft folder, so you can’t inadvertently lose them if you lose connectivity or hit the back button by mistake… we’ve all done it!

All my blogs and sites now run Wordpress on them somewhere… it rocks.

So my 1and1 exchange problems continue. Last week my wifes exchange account died, and stopped responding to all authentication attempts. The support adviser I spoke to identified that it was ’something’ to do with the upgrade to Exchange server 2007 that was ongoing. Sure enough, and after 5 days of no email for my wife, the lines were back up, and we were happy. I was also reassured that my account had already been upgraded and would not suffer the same outage.

Well they were wrong. Saturday saw the start of the Outlook authentication battle… and it’s continued in to today. Having now rung 1and1 to find out what the heck is going on, they replied that they have replicated the error and are looking in to it. I will be updated as to the status of the case by email!!! Bizzare.

I ‘umm’ed and ‘ahh’ed over purchasing this app for over a month. The available documentation describes it as an:

Essential guitar utility, including an amazingly flexible tuner and library of over 1600 chord variations, all on your iPhone.

Well the screen shots look pretty good and the functionality for the price seems good value. So last week I plumped for it.

It’s super. In particular the guitar tuner is amazingly accurate and flexible. It can decern the tone of the string being played and in real time display the corrections you need to make, down to less than 10Deg turn on the machine head on my Ibanez. It can also account for several unusual tunings, and will set its tone recognition to account for most background noise. And if you want to do it the old fashioned way, there is a set of virtual strings you can pluck which play though the loud speaker to tune-by-ear.

Another function contained in the toolkit is a metronome. You can slide the metronome to a bespoke frequency, and set the time tiganture to 2/4,3/4 or 4/4. You can have it just flash the tick, and/or tick using the in-built speaker.

Finally the chord libary, which is extensive. It gives several options for each chord and variants, each is displayed graphically in a TAB-like format. It is really easy to locate chords and to select their variations, simply using the touch scroll interface.

I am really very pleased with my purchase. For me to have bought hardware to fulfil the functions of this app, I’d be looking at close to £50, if not more. This simple app, available from the iTunes App store, is a fantastic addition to a growing list of quality apps for the iPhone.

Well my post on my iPhone and the trouble I’ve had getting it connected to my Exchange server hosted by 1and1.co.uk has now become the highest ranking hit for this site above and beyond all others. So it probably deserves an update…

As of 11pm last night (9th September) my iPhone stopped authenticating with my exchange server. It now simply prompts me for a password. This has now dumped the previous sync data, and left me contact/calandar/email-less. ;( It’s a really sorry state of affairs. Only last month we had an outage of about a week where only the iPhone could sync. Now the iPhone is failing to talk…

I’ve sent a support request to 1and1 and will update this page once I get a reply.

Update (11 Sept 08)

I did get a reply from 1and1 support… but it wasn’t of much value really:

We are currently aware of the issue that you have on your iPhone. We are working diligently to resolve remaining outages and issues. We also understand the frustration you might be feeling right now about this whole issue and how anxious you are to have it fixed. We don’t have a timeframe however we are putting extra measures in fixing this issue as soon as possible. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, and assure you, we will take steps to prevent this type of outage in the future.

My iPhone is now syncing with the Exchange server correctly as of evening 10 Sept 08.