Google maps is lost Apr 22, 2010 No Comments
It seems myself and Google are at odds over the best alternative route...(click to view a bigger version)
Tinker time Jul 21, 2009 No Comments
We are always so scared about children getting hurt we never give them the chance to find out for themselves...
This is just a short presentation by a guy who runs a "Tinkering School" for kids where they are given real tools and real materials and actually allowed to do things. What they achieve is really quite impressive.
Irrational fears May 7, 2009 No Comments
Between 250,000 and 500,000 die from flu each year in the world, so far only 31 people are known to have died from swine flu this year.
Over 40,000 people die in the US from car accidents per year, yet between November 2001 and October 2005 no-one died on a passenger aircraft in the US.
14 people are know to have died from Anthrax in 2004 none of them in the US.
150,000 over 65's have died from being too cold in their own homes in the UK from 2000-2006.
Side note, most popular day to go to A&E in the UK is a Monday with 16% of admissions
Oh, and those masks you see people wearing in countries with swine flue have been shown to have no affect whatsoever (other than they make you look silly).
Hmm, there are so many more of these types of stats I just can't seem to find them nor do I have the time to go hunting.
Did you know? Apr 14, 2009 1 Comment
Sometimes we forget how fast times are changing, especially when you are caught up in the middle of it. Some of these statistics scare me, other I don't think go far enough, I find that in itself pretty scary.
Software dev needs time! Apr 14, 2009 No Comments
Computers in all forms are a part of everyone's daily lives. They run our communication, our learning, our information, pretty much anything you can think of. Now not every bit of software makes 999 calls possible or directs ambulances, but all forms of software affect peoples lives in one way or another.
Yes, we know you think software should just appear and your developers are clearly not worth your time if they can't write more than 300 lines of code a day, but perhaps you should stop and think about how much poor software could cost you.
Testing is your friend, as is not releasing it until everyone is happy.
So when you rush out that software next time, spare a thought for the un-caught exception which caused a vending machine to spit pound coins out one after another until it runs out.
Congratulations Ben & Jerry's, your poor software has cost you money. Next time, maybe that extra time will save you some in the long run.
Made of fail Apr 5, 2009 1 Comment
Today has just been one of those days.
I have been broken the last week with what feels like one of the more vile forms of the flu and Demelza left for Italy today to go for a holiday with some friends. Both of these things suck, but not nearly as much as I have today.
This morning I have barely been able to construct a coherent discussion or argument with Nik. I have struggled all day to build sentences that, for lack of a better word, make sense.
This is liveable with if it wasn't for the strangle mistakes and bad luck that seem to have followed me round all day.
I think this is summed up today by the trip I made to Sainsbury. Our Sainsbury's has a set of escalators that deal with the single story people need to go up to get to it. To allow trolleys to be taken on them, instead of the usual steps, ours is more of a set of long ramps.
As I arrived at the shops the "up ramp" was stationary so I had to walk up it. The "down ramp" was working just fine. OK, a little annoying. 10mins later and I am coming out of the shop only to be greeted by a closed "down ramp" and yup, you guessed it, a fully functional "up ramp".
I don't know why I bother.
Killer joke Apr 2, 2009 No Comments
Ever get the feeling your girlfriend is just keeping you around in the hope she can later kill you and steal your money?
Either that or she was a serial killer in another life. Love you too dear :P
Advanced Facebook Mar 6, 2009 No Comments
Looks like Facebook knows what I am going to say before I do
(this was last night on the mobile Facebook. I had just written that comment)
A word for the wise and the not so wise Feb 18, 2009 No Comments
It has to be said, this talk from Barry Schwartz is one of the most worthwhile things to come out of this years TED that I have seen so far. It is all about how rules and regulation and fear are stopping development on so many levels. He makes the case for wisdom to be allowed to flourish and it is something many people need to see. In case the video below doesn't work or for those who would like more information about this talk, you can find it here too: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/462
Passwords Feb 17, 2009 No Comments
Statistics on passwords are rare things. Anyone with the tiniest clue about computer security knows that passwords should be stored in some encrypted form to ensure that if someone did break into your system they couldn't just read everyone's passwords. Clearly the world is not just full of smart people so when a largish website got hacked a little while back and its passwords were found to be in plain text the result was inevitable, they got released to the public.
Here is an article with some details on some of the statistics drawn from said publicly released passwords. There are some odd ones in there and some slightly scary ones. http://www.physorg.com/news153650514.html
However, the story doesn't end there. You see, I happen to be part of a big site that stores it's passwords in this painfully bad plain text way. I also happen to be fairly high up there and have at times helped out with the codebase and database. In fact, I still had an old database backup kicking around which I hadn't got round to removing. Now Physorg had 28,000 passwords to look at. I on the other hand have over 130,000! Suffice to say, this is probably more passwords than almost anyone else in the world can get hold of due to most sites default security.
Of course with a resource like that I couldn't help but do a little statistical analysis. Here is a list of the most popular passwords along with the number of times each was used in the 130,000 people.
| Password | Count |
| 88u6755r34 | 1367 |
| 123456 | 1269 |
| password | 836 |
| mchs2005 | 471 |
| 12345678 | 390 |
| Allahakbar | 284 |
| 12345 | 357 |
| humyhumy | 356 |
| catsca | 336 |
| binky | 321 |
| junior | 315 |
| 123456789 | 301 |
| tree777 | 295 |
| brolly | 259 |
| dolphin | 237 |
| aaaaa | 233 |
| liverpool | 231 |
| qwerty | 226 |
| compaq | 207 |
| princess | 200 |
| vagina | 185 |
| mj8jr2 | 183 |
| iloveyou | 173 |
| 111111 | 155 |
| 82308230 | 152 |
| hello | 149 |
| music000 | 145 |
| whatever | 131 |
| class3kill | 126 |
| monkey | 126 |
The first thing that strikes me about these results is the number one password is a very very odd one. In fact, my guess for some of the more random results at the top is they are due to spammers. The site this data comes from has issues with several members making loads and loads of fake accounts.In fact, I have passed this data onto the site owner as a possible way of identifying this person more accurately.
Next we have the string "123456". This password makes up almost 1% of results. This is a huge number and actually pretty scary really if you think about it. What is even more scary is that if you take the numbers 1 to 9 and 10 as a string (aka, 1, 12, 123, 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567, 12345678, 123456789, 12345678910) you end up covering almost 2% of all the passwords.
I also find it a bit of a worry when we have things like "password" and "qwerty" appearing high up the list too.
The other thing i noticed from this data is the number of real world words appearing. By this I mean things susceptible to a dictionary attack.
I thought by now, especially teens (which is who this is data is from) would know what is and what isn't a good password. Ideally it should be something unrelated to you (so not your date of birth!), something not in the dictionary, contain at least a mix of letters and numbers and if at all possible, be a miss spelling with random capitalization. So, something like gU1t4 for guitar, or how about pU2z1e for puzzle. It should be something that you find easy to remember or work out. car number plates are good, but don't use your current one. old phone numbers, maybe with letters in the place of some numbers.
Failing that, use something like Keepass. It stores login details including passwords and locks them all under one master password that you should never write down.