“This is also a unique opportunity because no other government in the world has provided financial incentives to ISPs to implement a service which can be so readily sold on to customers.

We envisage that customers will be willing to pay an additional $5 per month on top of their broadband services to have that higher level of filtering,” Mancer said

- Watchdog Launches Hosted Filtering Services in Australia

Since this comes from the company that “supplied filtering systems to three of the nine ISPs involved in the recent Australia government filtering trials at the Enex Test Laboratory” they’re in an good position to put a positive spin on the whole thing.

I’m a little concerned about what paying an extra $60 a year for a “higher level of filtering” implies about the proposed mandatory ISP filtering scheme? Is the cyber safety of our children being fobbed off with some budget version of their filtering system?

But hey, this is supposed to be a positive post and it’s good to know there is an upgrade plan should the proposed plan be less effective than expected!

Provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material

- Labor’s Plan for Cyber-safety

It’s rubbish.

If you think we’re being flippant, you’re correct, it’s intentional. We could spend ages going through the details of why it’s rubbish, but do we need to?. Why it makes us very disappointed that what appeared to be a very technologically forward looking Government is now being looked on internationally as naive and backward thinking, but do we need to? Why it may even have the opposite effect by creating a very false sense of cyber security, but do we need to?.

What we do need to do though, is add our voice to the many that already think it’s rubbish and you can too.

Today I received an incorrectly addressed email entitled “Welcome to XYZ Club!” from a loyalty club, which I’ve thoughtfully renamed XYZ club, of a group of very large (hence my thoughtful renaming) hotel chains.

As it’s not uncommon for us to receive incorrectly addressed @ingredients.com.au mail, I started to prepare my “You’ve sent this to the wrong address” template to reply to the sender. Unfortunately, the sender was “XYZ Club Loyalty Program <noreply@xyz-club.com>”. The sole job of any no-reply email account is to send whatever mail you send to them, back, reminding you not to reply to them!

My next thought was to check the email footer for any contact information. No, there was no reply information but it did helpfully remind me of the following:

This e-mail, any attachments and the information contained therein (“this message”) are confidential and intented solely for the use of the addressee(s). If you have received this message by error please send it back to the sender and delete it.

Perfect, except, of course, the sender was a no-reply email!

Thinking perhaps their site would have a contact form I could use to report their mistake, I clicked one of the links in the email and arrived at their site to find I have been “signed in” ready to start Step 1 of the “Choose your XYZ Club program”. Clicking around with a little bit of surprised curiosity (ok, yes I was also being nosy, who wouldn’t be?) and trying to find a way to contact them, I find that I could probably have set the password for this person:

This is your first connection. Please enter a new password in order to complete your membership application and gain access to your account.

This only presented two fields; a password field and a confirm password field. Nowhere asking me for any information that was not in the email, eg a loyalty card number that only the real person could have had.

Searching for a simple contact form to report this issue proved fruitless as going via the “Customer Support” navigation, then via the “Report an issue” link, brought me back to Step 1 of the “Choose your XYZ Club program” page.

The only way to report the issue was to finally call them. I’m probably one of the weird few that would actually go this length, but I was now curious to see if their phone support was any better. Thankfully, it was and this particular person has now had their account closed without anyone pulling any 1337 hotel loyalty club hacking skills.

So why am I posting this? Well to gloat of course and have it on hand for the day when the electricity gets shut down so I can point and say “I’m not the only one!”

So if you’re really missing what I have to say or need to tell me what you have to say, you can catch me in any of those places. Once the book comes out I’m sure I’ll have more time for this blog.

Anyway, if anyone has any issues with the feed please let me know.

An official Apple article; How to Add Hosts to Local Hosts File clearly outlines the steps. It’s a little confusing as the instructions for Mac OS X 10.2 or later are to edit the /private/etc/hosts file (the same file as /etc/hosts) directly. However, I just tried using NetInfo Manager to add a host on one of the machines on our network and it worked fine despite it running OS X 10.4.8.

A minor detail to mention is I that the niload command was more like this for me:

sudo niload hosts . < /etc/hosts

Really there is not a huge difference between editing the /etc/hosts file directly or using NetInfo Manager and I’m not convinced the latter really makes it that much easier. Either way, it’s useful to know about alternatives.

It seems these cards were an actual 3D freebie at the [Zend/PHP Conference and Expo](](http://zendcon.com/ “Zend/PHP Conference and Expo”) which means that I was there in an odd, fakey kind of way.

Apparently only those at the conference or featured on the cards got a copy so …erm, let’s just say I was playing blackjack for M&M’s with the kids the other day and it would have been great to see the proud look on their little faces every time the seven of diamonds was pulled out …ahem, cough, hint…

It’s a simple but clever idea that eschews a specific software solution for collaborative content editing in favour of notations in plain text. I don’t want to steal anyone away from reading the article but I did want to note a simple way of remembering their idea…

[delete][replace with][comment]

…so if we take the text…

The Bat in the Hat

…and apply some collaborative revision markup…

The [Bat][Cat][less sinister?!] in the Hat

…it would be revised to…

The Cat in the Hat

It’s a useful trick to to remember e.g., for passing edits around in text format via IM or Email. Whether I use it or not is another thing but I certainly like the inventive use of simple tools.

My requirements are pretty minimal, needing only to have one or two other Macs running OS X (Tiger) access the development server. I’m not going to go into too much detail, partly as I’m too lazy, but also as your setup and needs will be different to mine anyhow. Instead I’ll just give a general run through and point to further reading.

Decide where we’re going to host the party

The first thing we need to establish is the main server which requires that that server have a static IP address. In my case this involved going to System Preferences > Network > TCP/IP and setting Configure IPv4 to “Using DHCP with manual address”. In that same dialog I then set an IP address of 192.168.1.100 and clicked “Apply Now”. That now means that this machine has a consistent address that others on the network will refer to.

Tell everyone where the party is

When the other OS X machines on the network type http://myparty/ in their browsers the first thing their machines do is check in the file /etc/hosts to see if there’s an IP address that matches “myparty”. If there isn’t things won’t go very far. So if you take a look at my one…

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.0.1   myparty
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost

…you’ll see that http://myparty/ maps to my localhost IP address 127.0.0.1 which is fine as my machine is the host. In order that the other machines know where to go for “myparty” we have to edit their /etc/host files to send requests to the static IP address I set earlier:

127.0.0.1   localhost
192.168.1.100   myparty
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost

Set up the virtual hosts

Now that everyone knows where myparty is being hosted we need to prepare. First you need to edit the Apache web server configuration file httpd.conf which by default lives here /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf. I’ve installed Apache2 in /usr/local/ which is the more generally expected place for it to be and since this is my notepad I’m going to go with that. So first I need to open httpd.conf as the all powerful root user so I need to type…

$ sudo vim /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

…whereas you could go…

$ open -a TextWrangler.app /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf

…or whatever your personal setup/preference is. Once open you might like to use this little tip I picked up of having your specific settings in a separate file so e.g. at the end of my httpd.conf I have the following…

include /Users/nicklo/Sites/apacheconf/users

…that points to a directory which contains the file nicklo.conf. Inside that file are my virtual host settings. Having those settings separate from the main httpd.conf makes them more easy to backup along with all my other projects. It also potentially keeps them out of harms way in case a Software Update decides it’s time to fiddle with your httpd.conf file.

In keeping with the example my nicklo.conf could then have the following…

NameVirtualHost *:80

<Directory "/Users/nicklo/Sites">
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName 127.0.0.1
    DocumentRoot /Users/nicklo/Sites
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName myparty 
    DocumentRoot /Users/nicklo/Sites/myparty
</VirtualHost>

You’ll notice the settings specific to “myparty” are the last ones. These basically say if you get any requests for “myparty” on any IP address (* wildcard) via port 80 then send them through to /Users/nicklo/Sites/myparty.

Party on!

All that’s left now is restart Apache via System Preferences > Sharing > Services > Personal Web Sharing or…

$ sudo apachectl graceful

…which is actually better as it will at least tell you if there are any issues rather than just sit there.

Actually, we we still have to build the myparty website/web application in /Users/nicklo/Sites/myparty/public_html but hey, that’s the easy part right?!

Now in an even more perfect world I would be able to tell you how to set up a proper DNS Server on the host machine, that would replace the somewhat hacky need for individually configured /etc/host files. However, right now I’m just too stupid and honestly, a bit scared, to even attempt that. If anyone can give me a simple and if possible metaphorical run through I’d be very interested.

Further Reading

Virtual Hosting on Mac OS X I need to give credit to the comments by “Mats” on that page for much of my setup above.

Staging websites on Mac OS X

Virtual Hosts for Dummies

Location, Location, Location: Tips for Storing Web Site Files

Apache Virtual Host documentation

VirtualHost Examples

Under the advice of the very same shepherd, I did not to go into farming, however, I’m still drawn by stories like this ABC episode of Australian Story on Peter Andrews:

Peter Andrews is a racehorse breeder and farmer credited with remarkable success in converting degraded, salt-ravaged properties into fertile, drought-resistant pastures. His methods are so at odds with conventional scientific wisdom, that for 30 years he has been dismissed and ridiculed as a madman. He has faced bankruptcy and family break-up.

The programme and the Natural Sequence Farming website are a good read for anyone interested in the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and the ways in which traditional European agricultural methods have worked against it.