31st December 2005.
Well, it's been a long year and just to cap it all, there is going to be a leap second - the join between 2005 and 2006 will go '58', '59', '60', '0', '1', '2' and so on.
As far as most of us are concerned, this is of no consequence because leap seconds are forgotten about as soon as they happen. On a day by day basis, you wouldn't notice that they weren't there although this did build up (although it was a correction for days in leap years over centuries) and there were riots when it was corrected hundreds of years ago.
Some people however, want us not to drop leap seconds but this will have a detrimental effect on clocks matching the real world where we base our existence on the sun and the seasons. I hope that we don't get rid of leap second forgetfulness in everyday life because clocks like the one above will gradually go out of time.
29th December 2005.
I wrote and developed a program written in Perl that could generate a Sudoku puzzle from scratch and today, I decided that I would make it output a png image (suitable for the Internet) and have it update itself every night with a new one. In effect, you get a brand new, never seen before Sudoku to do every day of the year. It automatically produces a list of the older puzzles so that you can do them if you wish - or, look up the answers to ones that you were stuck on. Click here or on the link in the menu on the left to go there.
28th December 2005.
Well, it snowed. We had all of around 1cm and this is about the biggest footprint you'll find in a walled back garden. The scale is centimetres, not inches.
24th December 2005.
It's hell in Derby as thousands of shoppers try to spend as much money as they can - in full knowledge that the supermarkets will be, on the whole, closed for two days.
This is where madness lies.
10th December 2005.
It's December and not far from the shortest day. We have been putting peanuts down for the furry-tailed tree rats and noticed that there are a fair number of birds going for them as well. So, we invested in a bird feeder and here is one of the Bluetits that visits on a daily basis.
(Note: despite its appearance, this is a real bird and not a model that we might have put there - if we were going to fake this, we would have made it more convincing than this real one is bothering to do)
10th November 2005.
On the other side of town, the new replacement for the Castlefields centre is well under way. Here, Westfield have kept the front of a building that they have decided to use and restored it (why can't Metro Holst do that?). Argos and Wilkinson's will move into that when it is ready and the site will then abandon the path that bisects it at the moment.
However, there is a curious image that Westfields has put up to make us all feel that what will happen in the near future will be all right. They have provided us with an artist's impression of an 'internal cross section' [sic] of the centre. The thing that puzzles me is what other type of cross-section is there? What do they think an external cross-section looks like?
9th November 2005.
The bus station is now blocked off from public access and the only people that are there are now the protestors.
Good luck to them.
Somebody who knows someone that works for Metro-Holst told me that Metro Holst had done the deal with someone in Derby City Council before the council even had a meeting to discuss it. Nice to know that democracy is flying in the face of powerful businesses who would benefit so much from getting their hands on a large piece of city-centre real estate. Or, it would be.
It beats me why a company would think that it could make money from building apartments in a high pollution zone or have any business move into a place that is at risk from flooding. No insurer in their right mind would insure a company that moved into such an area. Metro Holst would - as it is reasonably foreseeable that the area will flood (especially with global warming increasing precipitation in the Derbyshire hills) - have a duty of care to inform any potential tennant that it is likely to be flooded out. If Metro Holst failed to warn any potential tennant, it would be putting itself in a weak position with regard to any future law suit.
21st October 2005.
Went to the biometrics 2005 exhibition in London as I always do. This is an interesting branch of information technology and security. Biometrics technology is now developing nicely. On the right, you can see a BioScript fingerprint access control unit. You type a PIN and put your finger on the sensor. Very neat.
On the left, you can see exhibition display for the OEM sensor for the above. This, being OEM, means that you can put it in virtually any product you want and use the biometric technology that was developed by somebody else.
There are a variety of technologies. This one shines a structured, infrared light at your face and then looks at the virtical displacement of the light. That displacement allows it to build up a three dimensional image of your face which it can then compare with a database of enrolled faces. The reason you can see where the light source is, is because I used a camera that is infrared sensitive. These systems can do around 30 to 40 scans per second and are ideal for monitoring people entering or leaving a building. This one, as you can see, is mounted on a shortish pedestal. To use it, just look at the device.
Everybody's vein structure on the back of their hands is different. This one uses infrared light to look through the skin on the back of your hand at the pattern your veins make. It then uses that image to produce a number for you. To use it, you type in a PIN/UID, put your hand in the machine so that your palm rests on the round metal part at the bottom and then lift up your hand so that the back of your hand seals agains the light-tight seal.
This one measures the profile of your hand. To use it, you type in a PIN/UID and place your hand on the platter at the bottom. There are pins there to keep your fingers in the right place. To stop people from hacking it, you have to apply a preasure to some of the pins. This is nice and simple and is also used as a clocking in device like the vein and fingerprint devices above.
This one is iris technology. To use it, just stand in front of it and make sure that you can see a reflection of your eye in the little mirror. It then uses infrared to look at your iris and produce a number that it can look up in the database. Iris technology produces these 'fingerprint' numbers with such a level of uniqueness that it can be used for biometric identification (identifying someone from a database of enrolees) as well as verification (using the 'fingerprint' number to confirm that the UID someone has entered is genuine).
This is signature recognition. One of the ways of doing this is to look at the pattern produced (including the dynamics of how it is produced) using a device similar to the touch pad on a laptop computer. This one uses a whole new way of looking at the problem though - it listens to it - and is one of the few bits of recent innovation in looking at new ways of measuring people or the way they do things (which is essentially what biometrics is). The user signs (or makes some sort of mark) and the device listens to the sounds that it produces. These are not the audible scrapings we hear but are very high frequencies and are the sort of wavelength that travel only a few centimetres in air.
If you are going to come up with something new, you do, of course, need to have a way of producing consistent test input in order to optimise the design so here, we have the little robot that was used to perform test signatures.
19th October 2005.
They've started processing the bus station whilst we are still using it. That's nice of them. Click on the stereogram images to see the full-sized version in a new window/tab.
While I was taking these photographs, the workmen demonstrated what safety meant to them by working at height without a helmet and riding in the back of an open lorry.
16th October 2005.
So, this dreadful thing, an awful manifestation of arrogance and ingnorance, the apotheosis of architectural mediocrity, takes one step closer to its unwanted reality. The Riverlights is just a heap of rubbish that will, if it is allowed to breath, take away our Aslin bus station - the one that Derby City Council has decided to neglect until people start complaining about it. It might lower the council tax by a few pennies for a year.
It seems that nobody bothered to ask the pigeons what they thought.
15th October 2005.
Elvaston Castle has been a place that I have visited since I was a child and at the moment, there is a big question in the air about whether the gemeral public will in future be able to visit it as we wish.
At this time of year, the fungi are coming out, displaying their spectacular colours and forms. This place has placed sections of dead tree on the ground in areas where people don't normally walk - thus encouraging many species of fungi - and it has certainly worked well. The squirrels are quite tame as well. I hope that we can still come around here in years to come.
6th October 2005.
This is the Victoria Inn in Derby. For some reason, the council wants to get rid of it. (As I understand it, they want to demolish the building.)
This pub is actually a venue for many, good-quality bands that visit Derby - not just local bands but from London and elsewhere. I get the impression that the Council is having pressure put on them from another venue (or venues) that feels threatened by the type of band that appears here.
The Vic is in the middle of an area that has been restored and it is in no way out of place in terms of its architecture or its use. Destroying this venue would be an act of supreme arrogance and ignormance on the part of the council.
18th September 2005.
Earlier on, it was baked beans.
Yesterday, it was water that had been coloured pink.
Today (and I caught them in the act this time), it was a continuation of the pink theme. They (the staff of ASDA in Sinfin) are raising money for the Tickled Pink charity which is for breast cancer -- Angel Delight with marsh mallows in it. I suppose that the difference here is that if you are a bit peckish, you can at least have some of what you are having a bath in.
17th September 2005.
This little delight (on the right) is on sale at Carsington Water in Derbyshire (UK). It is a plastic, penguin filled with bubble bath and it is from 'Fun At Bathtime (R)'.
It is plain to anybody that uses Linux or has seen linux or even a web page about it that this is none other than our beloved Tux - the Linux mascot (on the left).
I have read the labelling on the package all over and cannot find any mention of Larry Ewing (the person who drew the Tux image of which this bubble bath container is clearly a variant). I wonder if 'Fun at Bathtime(R)' make a contribution of a part of their profits to the Linux-oriented part of the computer world? That would be a good idea wouldn't it - if you make some money from them, give them some of the profits back.
25th August 2005.
As anybody who lives or works in or near to the City of Derby knows, the City council is currently giving away all of its (our) land for very little so that we can get a new bus station. Also, we are getting a new link in the inner ring road (which they are using as an excuse to destroy the end of a curved terrace in another part of the city) and we are also getting a new part of the Eagle Centre.
One part of this great master plan that they seem to have forgotten about is the level of congestion that will result from the combination of these projects. They have designed the ring road extension and got it approved based on noise and chemical polution without the other parts of the puzzle in place so we might end up with the city centre having been in a mess for three years, losing the UK's last Art Deco bus station and everything else and still have traffic jams like the one on the right.
One major concern is that, apart from the loss of the existing bus station, the result of our egregious planning department's activities will be a glass box with a few bingo halls in it. This so-called 'Riverlights' development has been sold on the promise of casinos, bars and flats so that people can live in it (it will also be a bus station and have offices).
The reality of it is a little different. If it goes ahead, there will be a strip down one side - looking like an afterthought - where the busses will go. The 'Casinos' will be bingo hall and the levels of polution in this flood-plain area will be too high for housing people. As for the building, instead of something that looks like Birmingham's Hyatt, we will just get a couple of block with some pretty spot lights on it.
When you look at the size of the thing, it is so out of scale with the rest of Derby in that area that it will just not fit - why is it called 'Riverlights' when it casts a shadow over the river derwent? The only drawing I have seen where the thing casts a shadow is donw with the sun at a peculiar angle so that the shadow goes along the building. How often does that happen in a year? Ho hum.
31st July 2005.
At the Grampian pub,
they had bungee jumping which, for a suburb on the south side of Derby proved to be quite an event. They started in the late afternoon and probably a dozen or so people had a go including this young woman who, as far as I could tell, was coerced into it by her (possibly former) friends (I would have said 'no').
This is another jumper who aparently had armed forces training (I suspect, at a related activity and not bungee jumping itsef). At GBP50 a time, it was too expensive for me although all of the safety systems were in duplicate (apart from the obvious single steel cord that hoisted the cage up in the air). Rather them than me. Give me a light aircraft any day.
16th July 2005.
When on holiday just north of Ashbourne, I arrived at the toilet block (as one does, first thing in the morning) to find this beautiful moth sitting on the window ledge. It turns out (thanks again to Bill Grange - Keeper of Natural History at Derby Museum and Art Gallery) that it is a Poplar Hawk moth (Laothoe Populi). It was quite large (the 2p coin next to it is, for those not in the UK roughly 1 inch in dimaeter (25.4mm)) and was so perfect looking that it had the appearance of a model that somebody had carefully made. It was real though.
2nd July 2005 - 4.
Back in the city centre, we found this notice on the bus station. Following all of the hype about how the bus station was going to provide a new casino with all of the glitzy, shiny lights and all of that rubbish - with people being given the impression that we are going to get something like a cross between the Hyatt hotel in Birmingham and Las Vegas, it becomes apparent that we are going to get slot machines and bingo - a bit like a wet Thursday in Weymouth then.
2nd July 2005 - 3.
The Motorshow was in town. As though SciTec and the funfare weren't enough, we carried on walking and right next to the fare was the Derby motor show. This was a large arena with all of the car dealers from the Derby area. I can hardly sa that it was packed because, apart from us, there was a man walking his dog and another kicking a football around. That was it. I suppose that it could have been ready for another day but that wouldn't explain why all of the stands seemed to be set up and manned.
2nd July 2005 - 2.
The fair was in town. What a jolly, fun-packed day this was turining out to be. We came out of the University and into Markeaton park and found this. There weren't many people around though.
2nd July 2005 - 1.
SciTec today at University of Derby, Kedleston Road. This is the third year I (along with my son) have been to this and I would recommend it to anybody who has children (virtually any age from 4 upwards). It covers a wide variety of interests, as the name would suggest, mostly with hands-on activities. On the right, you can see one of the rocket activities - a foam tube that is launched from a catapult.
On the left, you can see my air rocket - a piece of paper wrapped around some 22mm, pvc overflow pipe. It had 3 pennies in the end for ballast and went almost as far as the car park (past the far end of the building on the left - landing in the road).
There were many things there including: this pet skunk (right - stink glands removed); fossils; forensics; lasers and so on.
27th June 2005.
Windows destroyed itself again today. The machine was free from viruses - one minute it was there, the next and it had corrupted itself to the point where not even KNOPPIX could recover it. It was also behind 3 different types of firewall and had a number of other safety measures (intrusion detection, kernel monitoring and so on) in there as well. Unfortunately, I have to use Microsoft Windows XP as part of my job so it had to go back on.
"Surfing the Internet: Safe, fast and flexible." Does anybody believe Microsoft any more? This was a clean install (empty hard drive) and it took longer to install the basic OS than it does to install SuSE Linux (which is actually easier to install as well) and then, you have to do what is essentially the same again with SP2. Why not have XP2 as a complete OS instead of all of these stupid patches that go back years? Why can't they have something that you only need to use recent patches with? There's probably not one of the original program files in the basic OS by the time SP2 has finished.
23rd June 2005.
I was walking back to the city centre from Markeaton park when I came across the new Joseph Wright college. This, as you can see from the picture, is a new building although I wonder what it will look like in 20 years time (if it lasts that long).
One thing that struck me however, was the egregious grouting job which you can see here. For some reason, they haven't added enough pigment to the grout, giving it a lighter appearance in this conspicuous area. I hope that the rest of the college is built to a higher standard.
11th June 2005.
The squirrels are back in town. This one ran up a tree next to a house and then spent some time on the house, working out possible escape routes (the only thing that I was going to shoot it with was the camera). Eventually (after about 5 minutes), it ran down the corner of the building and made its way into some undergrowth.
11th June 2005.
The cat brought this little bird into our lives today. He (or she) is about the same size as a sparrow but his (her) colouring doesn't match anything that we can find in the bird books. It had still got its downy feathers on it above the eyes but it could fly for a fair distance descend at an angle of 1 or 2 degrees below horizontal - not enough power to weight at this stage in its development.
You can see that (s)he is quite speckled but what it is and why it is in a suburban garden in Derbyshire in the UK is unknown.
We've subsequently found out that this bird is a Robin. Thanks to Bill Grange - Keeper of Natural History at Derby Museum and Art Gallery. You can see more pics of it on the wallpapers page (click here).
16th May 2005.
Birmingham II After the National Sealife Centre (see below), we went to the Birmingham Wheel. The original Birmingham Wheel (the one that we heard had details of the views of Paris) is now apparently in Manchester. This one is completely new and will be in Birmingham until early 2006.
The wheel is nice and new and the gondolas hold four people comfortably. You get three goes around (although we got four for some reason - maybe because it was a Monday and empty) and whlist it is a little on the expensive side, the view is very impressive.
As far as the view goes, it is impressive to see little ants of people walking around the square and being higher up than you would normally be to see the Hyatt hotel is something worthy of note but remember that the Hyatt is taller, as are one or two other buildings around and therefore, you don't get to see over the top of them.
So, largely, the view is impressive and the trip is clean but I wouldn't have spend nearly fifteen quid on it. Also, they don't accept cheques (see 'No Cheques').
16th May 2005.
Birmingham I
We went to Birmingham today, to the National Sealife Centre and (above) to the wheel. The entrance fee to the Sealife centre is what I would call exploitative at GBP28 for two adults and one child. This definitely pushes it into the catagory of 'only go if you have money to burn'.
The centre itself is pretty much what you would expect to see - lots of tanks full of various fish from all over the planet. There are some spectacular displays such as the walk-through tank with a giant, circular plastic tube that you wander through - water above you, below you and to your sides. In that tank, they have two sea turtles that have been rescued and although the tank is very big for all of the other animals that are in there, you can't help but feel that for the turtles, it is a bit too small.
The rays and the curious silver fish (both pictured here) are very curious and when they see a flash, they will pose for you or swim past you so that you can take more pictures (okay, so they are curious about the light and have no idea what a picture is). This happened in many of the tanks and in the large shark/ray tank, I put the camera down to take a time exposure (no flash - poor lighting) and one ray swam along and settled in front of me. Coincidence? Looking at this happen many times, I'm not convinced.
As always, you end your trip in the gift shop (the only way to escape this without an emergency is if you go out through the entrance) where everything is on the tacky and expensive side but you would expect that anyway.
One thing that I did find annoying (apart from the rip-off entrance fee) was that they were selling single-use cameras with flash. Okay, so there are some (only a very few) tanks where you were not allowed to use flash so there was still ample opportunity to use the cameras - the lighting in there was so poor that pictures without flash would all need a tripod which is not really practical. It is just that when taking flash pictures through glass, you have to be careful about how you position and angle the camera otherwise they all end up with flash reflections. I can just imagine it now, where people go around the National Sealife centre, having bought a single use flash camera from there (so it must be all right mustn't it), taken loads of pictures, pay extra to get them developed quickly and then discover that they all were spoiled by the flash. Forget about taking flash pictures in the walkthrough tunnel or anywhere else that has double glass/plastic walls.
Having said that, if you could get a tank that was not scratched on the inside as well as the outside, and it was reasonably flat, and you could get your intended subject to swim past at a reasonably distance, you could get a good picture.
5th May 2005.
Apparently, there is a general election here today but I'm not going to be party political. The interesting thing about today is that it is the fifth day of the fifth month in 2005 which gives the result 5/5/5 when you write out your cheque or pay some bill using a pay-in slip (like the water rates and so on).
Whilst there is nothing particularly marvelous about this - apart from the fact that the rather curious US date notation (MM/DD/YY) gives the same result as the date notation used everywhere else on the planet (ie DD/MM/YY) - it did cross my mind that in one year, one month and one day, it will be 6/6/6 which should get all of those mad, Christian types going - you know, the ones with too much time on their hands that have become bored with listening for demonic messages in records that they play backwards and have claimed that UPC barcodes are the work of the devil
Mmm. I can't wait.
(Note: if you get a product with a barcode with a '6' on the inverted right hand side, you will see that the printed ink for the inverted code for a 6 is two thin lines and if you look at the sync strips on the barcode at either end and in the middle, the printed black bars that make up the sync strips are also two black bars hence the claim - they conveniently forget that there are different numbers of white bars in the sync strips to the two in the number 6 (why let reality get in the way of a good story, heh?).)
16th Apr 2005.
We were on the bus on the way home
when my son pointed out this column of smoke in the early evening when we were still in the centre of Derby. I thought that it looked as though it was in the Ascot Drive/Courtaulds direction and took this picture.
In the picture on the left, I've brought the bus out of the shadows a little by making them lighter but the column of smoke is real.
Twenty-five minutes later, we got off the bus on this railway bridge
and took another shot (I've messed around with the expoure to make it more apparent how large the smoke is - we all knew it was black). The top of the smoke by this time had got upto cloud level and was starting to mist out (turning grey as the water vapour in it condenses). The top of the cloud ended up over Courtaulds (or Acordis or whatever they are called this week) but, as we found out later, it was the Glyn Webb shop on Ascot Drive.
Looking at the colour of ths smoke, I would say that there was a high carbon to hydrogten ratio, so there might have been a fair proportion of xylene (dimethyl benzene) in there as this is used as a paint thinner/cleaner.
7th Apr 2005.
Aren't the queues in McDonalds in Derby crap! It's not actually McDonald's fault as such - this is what happens. There is a place where people queue - ie, the front of the queue which gives a yard or so of room between the 'till-line' and the front of the queue (anybody in a wheel chair could use this system very easily). When a till becomes free, the person at the front of the queue goes to the empty till and the queue moves forward. Very fair as you don't end up stuck behind someone paying in pennies whilst all of the other queues zip along.
Unfortunately, there are many people who come into the shop and just go and queue at any old counter, ignoring the fact that there is a queue - this pisses of all of us that wait fairly. Just to make things worse, if they see that the queue next to them has just become empty, they will push in there as well, before anybody waiting in the proper queue has a chance. Like I said, it isn't McDonald's fault that these ignorant, selfish idiots do this but the service could be improved by suggesting to these people that there is a back to the queue and it is where they should be. I wonder if it will ever happen.
1st Apr 2005.
This had us puzzled. 
They (those people with pneumatic drills) had dug this cross in the road next to a bus shelter. Normally, they dig a rectanglular or, at least, a non-re-entrant shaped hole but this is defintely a regular cross.
Why a cross? They came along one day and carefully dug it up and then filled it in again having apparently dug no deeper than around 6" down. But then, we found that someone had drawn a cross on a map and that is where they dug the hole: 'Dig where that cross is, boys.'
17th Mar 2005.
So, we had a G8 summit in Derby although you might think that the level of policing was not what it should have been. The question is: should a policing ratio of 20 to 1 be all right for this type of event? After all, it is an international event bringing important people from all over the planet into one little area.
Well, I think that 20:1 meant that there were too many police there for the number of demonstators that turned up. I mean, is this a police state?. Derby is a peaceful little city unlike its bigger next-door neighbour Nottingham which is the European City of Murder and Drugs Culture 2005.
Anyway, before you think too much about the ratio, let's get one thing straight: there were 1,000 police and an estimated 50 protestors.
23rd Feb 2005.
Well, I'm seriously brassed off. It wasn't really her fault. Let me start at the beginning. Once I'd got this computer's configuration sorted out, I decided to let it run - to get a decent uptime. It should have been quite easy...
You can see from the graph that this has been an exercise in controlling frustration as external events have inadvertently hijacked the scenario. The graph on the right, from Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) shows what I am up against. You can see the current graph by clicking here.
I had the uptime at 82 days when we had a spectacular lightening storm. It was a pleasure to watch and as one flash went over the house in one long, straight streak over a mile long, with a time of about 2 seconds between the flash and the thunder (this translates to around 2,000 feet or roughly half way between us and the clouds), the power went out for around five seconds. I next looked at the computer around 15 seconds later and saw that it had already finished checking the disks (following a dirty shutdown - the reason for this being so short is that the disks user Resierfs which is a proper journalling file system) and was into its normal boot.
Start again...
I had the uptime at 85 days when we had a brown-out (for about 0.5 seconds) at breakfast time. I just ahd the system up and had checked out all of the services when, around half an hour after the first brownout, we had another. To make sure that the server was power-supply-proof (at least for around 15 minutes), I bought a UPS which ony cost about GBP35.00 from PC World in Derby and it works (and tests) fine.
Start again...
I was well on the way to 100 days, in fact, the computer had an uptime of 99 days. I had just finished writing the copy for the issue of PC Plus I was working on (yesterday) and today, was just having a well-earned rest - I had been into Derby and bought myself a copy of Godel Escher and Bach. The keyboard was filthy and my wife asked if she could clean it. No problem - I wasn't using it. I even made it so that anything that appeared to be typed would do no harm by use of a password. This was about 8:30pm.
At about 9:10pm, my son asked me why the computer he was using couldn't get onto the Internet so I went and had a look and found that the power button had been pressed but only briefly because it had shut down cleanly (in the Apache log, the last entry prior to this was at 20:43:39 GMT so it had made 99 days by a couple of hours). So, having made it power-supply-proof, I'm now going to make it wife-cleaning-proof by taping a coin or other flat piece of metal over the power switch. It's my fault really, I didn't warn her about keeping clear of the power button or only keeping to cleaning the keyboard. Oh well.
Start again...
Assuming: that we don't have a power outage for more than 15 minutes; that someone doesn't deliberately shut it down; that it breaks; that aliens land and decide to do something with it; or, some other disaster, it will be early June by the time I get up to 100 days again.
2nd Feb 2005.
Last Christmas, somebody sent us an amaryllis bulb kit (bulb, pot and peat) so that we would have a nice flowering plant each year. Indeed, it sent up two thick, circular cross-section stems with enormous buds on the end which, in turn, flowered, producing four large, deep red flowers from each bud. If you haven't seen an amaryllis, it produces a large, trumpet-horn shaped flower that is around 6 inches long and 6 inches across.
So, this morning, I went downstairs to find that the amaryllis was on the floor, in front of the sideboard, with the flowers broken off and the peat everywhere - a bit like the result of one of those vacuum cleaner sales reps who calls around, sprinkles soot on your white carpet, 
says that his vacuum cleaner can clean it up and then you tell him that you haven't got electricity in the house.
So, who was to blame? The Roborovski hamster (right) is becoming more confident but as his cage was still closed, it couldn't have been him. Then, we let one of the cats in and as she walked past the front room door, she gave it a guilty glance. One family member refuses to support this theory, stating that she thinks it was the tom cat, Ted.
One of the Law lords said something along the lines of demeanor is no indicator of guilt. However, my money is on Maud.
29th Jan 2005.
I've just had a phonecall from those nice people at Orange, asking something or other - it never got that far. I picked up the phone and the voice at the other end said that he was from Orange and ... then I asked him if he could give me his home phone number so that I could ring him at home later on, when it was convenient for me. Unfortunately, they don't do that sort of thing. I really don't see why they shouldn't do that, after all, they did it with me.
Any way, apart from the fact that we had the call from some bl##dy mobile phone service provider, presumably to get us to do something that would enable them to make money out of us (they currently do not provide us with any services and if this is anything to go by, they will have to try harder before they ever do), how on earth did they get our number? We are ex-directory so it is not listed. Are they trying all of the numbers in the UK in the hope that they get someone to say 'yes' to whatever it is they are up to? If that is the case, their sales strategy indicates something along the lines of desparation - maybe it is time to sell your shares in Orange :-). Could this be an indication of the state of their business? Is the Orange rotten right through to the pips? I couldn't really care less. As for Orange, you've lost a potential customer.
27th Jan 2005.
It's that time of year again in the UK as all of us self-employed people get down to the last minute trawls through our receipts and income to get our tax returns done ready for the 31st January deadline which, this year, is on a Monday.
Two years ago, I handed mine in (on time, I might add) and when they asked if I wanted a receipt for it, I said that I wouldn't as I could trust them. It might have been that the people I spoke to could be trusted but, unfortunately, the person who processed it was not. I got the message back, several weeks later, that it had been handed in half way through February and had been processed on the same day (you could tell from the dates in the letter). As though they thought that I was supposed to believe that in February, when they were in the middle of processing enormous piles of tax returns, they could process one that was handed in that day? I don't think so. I phoned them up, wanting to know how this could be put right and what procedures or training they were going to implement in order to prevent it from happening again. He said that it was all right this time because I was owed money by them, therefore they weren't going to do anything about it.
Last year, around September, a friend of mine received a letter from his tax office (I'm not being any more specific than to say that it was in the south of England), saying that he still hadn't handed in his return and he was going to be fined another GBP100 - aparently having paid them the initial GBP100 fine some time ago. Of course, he had his receipt and when he showed it to them, they had to admit that one of their operatives had made a mistake and made up the trail of events, including the payment of first GBP100 fine, in order to make it look like they were doing their job properly. I must admit that asking the Inland revenue for the return of the initial GBP100 fine would have been tempting if this had happened to me - they can only carry their lies so far.
So, I would recommend that if you are going to take your tax return in in the next few days, you, as a minimum, get a receipt simply because it only takes one person in the paperchain that you cannot trust to mess the whole thing up; or, take a film crew along with you. You will never know when you will need the proof.
14th Jan 2005.
As it is 2005, I've just realise that the real-life
company that is featured in James F. Linden's
e-Novel let the Devil Wear Black, has been shut down since 1999 at a rate of £200
million per year. That makes, in 2005, the total cost of getting rid of the wrong
person, £1.2 billion (US$2.3 billion) and that isn't allowing for inflation. Who should
the Tod Bexley Memorial Award for Conspicuous Mendacity go to this year??? Keep it to
yourself :-).
8th Jan 2005.
Chip and PIN - Credit cards are well know in
computer security circles as having piss-poor security - I got an offer in the
post the other day that said that it was secure for online transactions because
it used a password. Huh? Who are they trying to fool?
Any way, the pre-Chip-and-PIN era credit card relies upon the magnetic stripe
on the card and the signature. The till operator compares your effort to make a signature
with the one on the back of the card. Whilst you are doing this, s/he can observe how you
do it - body language, how long it takes and so on. It is true that the cards can be copied
but the embossed number on the card is checked with the one on the magnetic stripe that
is printed on the till receipt and there are a number of other security measures that are
there that shouldn't really be talked about too much.
So, what does Chip and PIN offer? Aparently, they are totally secure
because they use a microchip. True, they can use public key cryptography to make it
effectively impossible for the PIN to be spoofed but there is a vulnerability that they
seem to be ignoring.
Everyone is familiar with passwords and it is reconned that an eight character
password needs to be viewed twice in order for the 'shoulder surfer' to be able to remember it -
once to get the first four characters and once to get the last four. A PIN however needs
only to be viewed once. So, if it is not reasonably practicable to make a card that uses
that PIN (because of public key cryptography), the card itself has to be stolen. Here,
weakness lies in cards that are used infrequently. The card can be taken and then used
with impunity. The first that the card owner will know about it is either when he wants
to use it again (which could be months later) or when the bank calls him. When the
fraudsters have caught up with the technology and can make their own copy cards (you can't
break public key cryptography using brute force if the key is long enough but you can do
various destructive an non-destructive tests on it to discover the contents) a Chip
and PIN card will be substantially weaker than the old signature cards. At the moment,
everybody looks away from someone typing in a PIN because they know that they can see
the PIN. If nobody is looking at the fraudster, even the protection that a signature
has - body language and so on - is discarded.
8th Jan 2005.
You've got to start somewhere. Well, it's 2005
and I thought I'd start a weblog. What about? Anything that
interests or annoys me or that I have an opinion about that is in Derby (UK) where I
live or about computers or computer security which is what I do for a living.
The quality of most of the stands was quite high and the food section was interesting although there were the usual few which were selling 'trinkets' aimed at probably the young immortals who seemed to think that keeping three points in contact whilst climbing was something that was 'old fashioned'. The climbing walls were good and my son enjoyed it. As a family event it was fairly good although queue times made the kids bored.
For the young immortals, there were many opportunities to drink beer and have a go at boulder climbing (why not just take the path?). The price of karribiners and bio-luminescent glow-sticks were very low compared to the shop prices as was the climbing rope - if you want to pick up some gear, it is worth going to one of these events as the entrance price is soon covered. One curious advertisment was on one of the magazine stands and it seemed to catch the essence of some people's attitude. I need say no more on that.
