life

Once again, I'm writing a complete novel (defined at 50,000 words) in a month. Here's how it's going. (Not well at the time of writing, but I hope to catch it up...!)

(Red is bad - meaning I didn't write anything!)

While in Iceland recently, I took a bunch of great photos. I was really pleased with some of them from the first day in Reykjavik and the second in the hills. Only, bad things happened. My ageing camera (a 6 year old 400D) nearly lost us two days of photos. The on/off switch is very light now after so many years of use and so are the nav buttons... Yep, you guessed it.

There are many applications that link to FaceBook. Some of the apps that I make regular use of are included in this list: FourSquare, Twitter, Klout, various games and toys, etc. But I've always had the choice whether to link them to FaceBook. I've chosen to do this in some cases, and not in others. All good, it's my choice. But apparently, Spotify now requires you to link to a FaceBook account or your can't use their services. That's right, no FaceBook, no Spotify. Hmm.

It's not about who you are, but where you are. At least that's what a whole range of location based games might lead you to believe. It's not that many years ago that owning a GPS was for the advanced walkers, sailors or military among us. Now, they are everywhere and various recreational pass times are really benefiting from their prevalence. This article will talk about location based games, including a discussion about the security problems that they can cause.

If you're following the technology curve, you'll have at least one GPS enabled device on your person almost all the time. Most modern SmartPhones have GPS technology as do iPads and surely similar tablets will do too. Ok, well, how true that last statement is we'll talk about in a minute. Let's just assume that our devices know where they are on the planet and leave it at that for now. If our devices know where they are and they almost always have access to the Internet, then it follows that we can download content that is relevant to our current location.

It's amazing that the UK is still driving their cars given the rises in fuel prices that we've experienced recently. Or is it? I've been thinking about this issue and I'm not convinced that we will loose our dependence on the motor car even if the price per litre doubles! (It's £1.43 today). You see, our economy is based on commuting. I don't know anyone in the 'knowledge worker' industry who doesn't commute to work. That's not going to change over night - especially while organizations are unwilling to allow workers to work flexibly (including from home or nearby cafe).

Yesterday, Mastercard, Visa and Paypal were attacked by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The idea of this sort of attack is that you throw lots and lots of packets at the system you're trying to attack in order to overwhelm it. The tricky part to defend against is that the attack comes from many, many IP addresses, so you can't just filter the attacking IP address. Embarrassing for them because their website (and other bits of infrastructure) went down under attack.

Twitter is over capacity again as I write. This is no big problem in itself. I can live without the constant stream of witty and insightful interruptions to my day. Hey, I might actually get some work done. But the problem is indicative of Twitter's failure to scale its infrastructure to meet demand. The service is free, so who am I to complain? They might do better if we were paying for the service.

In one weeks time, I'll be picking up my P45 and leaving my current employer to head on to pastures new. There. I said it. But I'm not really supposed to. I've been asked to keep quiet about it in the office. As I doubt many of my colleagues ever read my blog, I think I'm safer posting it here than on my Facebook Profile!

Last night my mum asked me how she should best share photos with my aunt. Actually, she requested to be told how to create a zip file so that she could send photos by email. I'll show how to do that of course, but I'll also give some alternatives.

Today, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a client site to tidy up, change passwords and deny access for a guy who has just been fired. They had clearly decided a few weeks ago that he was going to be fired if he didn't improve. I've worked alongside him before and I can see why he got the boot. He meant well, but the spark wasn't there. They knew he'd be angry and obviously thought that he would become the fabled 'disgruntled employee' of many a security white-paper. To make it more interesting, he was their network and security guy so his access was potentially more damaging than most of their other staff. The way that this client of mine decided to do the deed was pretty clever and I can recommend it.