The Out Takes
Wednesday, December 12th, 2012I’ve done some really nice hiking club videos, but I rarely show the stuff that’s neither picturesque nor insightful.
This had to be put right. (watch in HD if you can)
Part of my video a week thing.
Happy Valentines Day – xkcd loves you!
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012Woo, it’s Valentines day!
(also known as “single people be lonely day“, “puke at people’s facebook status day“, “don’t try to eat out at a this evening resturant day“, “bad colour schemes day” and a plethora of other things!)
xkcd can, once again, neatly sum up my take on it:
(c) xkcd 2012 - CC-BY-NC 2.5
This is what I was thinking again and again:
I don’t want to be a consumer tool or and Inconsiderate jerk.
Of course, once you’ve got to that point, you’ve already overthought the whole thing, panicked, and stapled your hand to your face, again. Gah. I must stop doing that!
The hysteria begins: OMG WTF SNOW!!
Saturday, February 4th, 2012As my Facebook and twitter feeds are filled with people apparently trying to make sure that all of their friends are aware it has snowed, and the news networks busily rolling out stories which imply that 3 inches of snow will be the most historic event (of the last 6 months) and that this is the second most cold 4th of February since 1996, I think Charlie Brooker can put things into perspective for us a bit:
Hackers and Repetition
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012Sometimes reddit throws up some fantastic stuff about life and work.
Repetitive tasks
This graph really highlights what’s frequently referred to as the first hacker virtue “Laziness”. Instead of being content to do a task manually, they want to sit around and do less of that, thus the second hacker virtue “Impatience” comes in to play. The hacker gets impatient with the repetitiveness of the task and thus automates it – a time vs tasks trade off. They should recieve less “tasks” in the long term but there is an upfront cost in terms of time and effort.
Of course, this is a big simplification, and I feel like I’m botching an explanation – you can read more about all that here.
Anyway, go away and automate something. If that’s not in your capabilities, consider learning.
The Skyenet Song
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
The Internet is Serious Business
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
An analysis of the physics depicted in My Little Pony
Thursday, September 8th, 2011My Little Pony, as you’ve never seen it before.
Yes, pun intended.
Geeks on an Island
Saturday, January 9th, 2010In a discussion on the Geekup mailing list about a particularly stupid bit of Government legislation, I came across this:
Robert Burrell Donkin wrote:
It would have been wiser to invest in a couple of islands and some yachts….
Caius Durling wrote:
Any room on there for another (possible) expat?
Simon Ward wrote:
If we manage to find some islands, it seems we’ll already have thriving geek community.
I tried to imagine how a desert island occupied by hardcore geeks would work..
“Ah I’d love to rescue you from that quicksand, but can you just wait whilst I download the iphone app to do that”
“Guys, Guys, guess what!”
- “what?”
“I’ve already sold an e-commerce site to a Monkey I met in the jungle!!”
- “You fool you should have killed it for food?”
“I couldn’t eat a client!”
“…”
“Does anyone have a Macbook display adapter with them?”
- “no”
“oh..”
“Does anyone have a Windows 7 rescue CD to reimage my laptop with?”
- “no”
“:(”
- “I’ve got a Ubuntu CD…”
“Fuck off”
“Guys, I’ve written a program that takes all the weather information I’ve collected, analyses the current weather and gives you an accurate 7 day weather forcast”
- “Cool”
- “What is this?”
“This is today’s forcast”
- “Oh I think I see, the UI could use some work. How do I see tomorrow’s forcast?”
“Simple, just C-M-], C-X, C-^}, M-987″
- “???”
“This is the Emacs interface”
Anyone else got any ideas? Leave a comment
Who can guess your security question?
Thursday, February 16th, 2012I was recently importing some legacy mail accounts of mine out of their silos on assorted free webmail sites.
In fact, I was stunned to find that some of my Hotmail addresses still had email in them and figured that it was probably worth keeping, if only for the amusement value of “this is what a phishing attack looked like in 2007″ or “this is what microsoft couldn’t work out was spam in 2005″.
Anyway, I had trouble getting into one of the accounts so I went through the password reset functionality. My security question was:
Food you’ve always liked: _______
To my surprise, I got it right first try.
I asked my flatmate if he knew the answer to this question and he got it right on first attempt too.
The answer was:
Original right?
13 year old me just got a slap across both wrists. Just think, someone could have had access to a inbox of spam and a MSN account of people I don’t like. The horrors!
This does highlight an important point though, if there’s a password reset functionality on an account, it’s just as important to audit that for weak answers as it is to audit passwords themselves.
Footnote:
Another account of mine had this gem:
Q: do i need a Security Question?
A: no i can guess my password
Tags: email, funny, netsec, password reset, passwords, Security, secutiy question, social engineering
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