Dropsafe

I had an interesting evening last night, experimenting with using Skype as a zero-cost voice-conferencing and instant-messaging tool. It was an interesting attempt – overall I give the experience 6 out of 10. Normally at this time of year I’d be spending a week in California at a conference, but this year I can’t fit

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Having been introduced to Tequila and Margaritas by a number of my colleagues I felt it was time to learn something about it. Best cheap way, as ever, is read-and-blog: [www.baguiocityonline.com] Brief History of Tequila and the Worm from Mexico Originally, the Aztecs took the heart of the blue agave plant, cooked it, and pressed

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[www.britishseapower.co.uk] PARAGRAPH OF THE MONTH Recently, the author Anthony Buckeridge passed away. Buckeridge was the man behind the Jennings series of novels, with their funny fun at boarding school. His death inspired Christoper Hawtree to compose the following paragraph in the Buckeridge obituary in The Independent: “No clodpoll, he produced supersonic, lobsterous work which, if

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I’ve mused upon the theory of tipping quite a lot, of late; I think I can see some of the logic in it: underpay your service staff this motivates them to work harder to justify tips motivated staff make for happy customers happy customers generate even more customers more customers make more revenue …but in

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In conversation with a colleague on IRC the other evening, I nipped upstairs to the machine room, scanned and uploaded this photo of myself and my colleagues at University of Aberystwyth Computer Unit, circa 1990, in the era when I was first fighting to make sense of DES S-boxes and trying to make E-expansions go

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With the exception of a small number of DRM-faffed CDs: Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf David Grey: White Ladder …which will doubtless succumb to LAME on Linux; aside from these plus one DVD-Single with which I have yet to work-out what to do, my iPod now contains every music and spoken-word

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Now I do not always quite agree with everything that our ponytailed leader says in public, but in this one Jonathan is, as we Brits say, bang on the money. Solaris and its nifty new features is not a threat to any of Linux, linux, or GNU/[Ll]inux; it is a competitor to those firms which

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Spotted by Bart: [news.bbc.co.uk] A bold amphibious escape bid by a bear at Berlin zoo has been foiled in a dramatic shoot-out. Juan the Andean spectacled bear first paddled across a moat using a log for a raft, then scaled a wall. Finally he appeared to commandeer a bicycle, before zookeepers with brooms cornered him…

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Nearly-Live Planetary Desktop Backgrounds! Cool! [taint.org]

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So i pointed a colleague at the new iMac – which I don’t like for some reason, looking rather boxy – and he cited several other PC-In-A-Monitor solutions from Computer Trade Shopper. He then cited this one – Computer-In-A-Keyboard – and I said: It’s a Sinclair QL, innit? Or maybe an Oric? Dragon32? VIC-20? Just

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worth a read, from [www.oblomovka.com] Me: In the Autumn, you take one of these horse chestnuts, drill a hole in it, put a piece of string through the hole, and play conkers. You flick the chestnut at the other persons’ chestnut. The chestnut that doesn’t break into pieces wins, and goes on to battle other

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For years I have been saying variations upon a theme of: There are no new security bugs, there are merely ever-more-complex re-incarnations of the same classes of bug. …and that pretty-much every security bug ever described eventually collapses down to being one of a small number of common fault-categories that you need to be really

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