In thinking about Bruce Schneier’s post on Wired.com, I’ve Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch, I can’t help replaying in my head an Eddie Izzard bit about the kill/stun dichotomy of the “phaser” weapons in Star Trek. There should have been many more settings, not just kill and stun. Kill, stun, limp: … [Read more…]
I remember my first lesson on how to write a letter: how to address an envelope, the rigid explanation of formatting differences between business and personal, the impressive-sounding terms for the parts of a letter (the salutation, the complimentary closing, the postscript). It was in elementary school language arts class. We wrote letters and the … [Read more…]
PayPal just sent me an email saying that starting July 9th, they’ll stop charging for “Personal Payments” if they are funded from a bank account (i.e. not a credit/debit card). I’m guessing this is an attempt to cut into the market share that online banking gets for making these types of payments. It may also … [Read more…]
NatWest, my bank here in good ole England has seen fit to beef up security for some aspects of internet banking by moving to Strong Authentication. Unfortunately, they haven’t seemed to have done the PR on this move as well as hoped. Most of the reaction I’ve read on the net so far has been … [Read more…]
Criminal elements like scammers, spammers, and botnet overlords using internet-based attacks are nothing new. Things got interesting last year, when an army of computers (which appeared to be controlled from Moscow) launched an attack against the government of Estonia, crippling their servers and forcing a shut down of international network access. It was the first … [Read more…]
It’s hard to come up with a decent name for your web startup. Believe me, we spent ages brainstorming, arguing, deciding everything we brainstormed was crap, and brainstorming some more before we came up with a name for the web startup that I was very briefly involved in. Whatever name we ended up with must … [Read more…]
OK, so I’ve blogged previously about how much email at Oxford sucks. But, as I alluded to, and as commented by our friendly neighborhood Oxford-IT-guy (thanks for reading, BTW), Oxford University Computing Services has a plan! The call it the Groupware for the University Project, or just groupware. Groupware is software designed to help groups … [Read more…]
I was thinking about another post I’ve wanted to write about switching from a paper planner (diary for the Brits) to an electronic one. One of the few interactions in which paper calendars tend to come out ahead of electronic calendars is entering an appointment. Mobile devices just don’t have text entry interfaces that can … [Read more…]
I’m a student at the University of Oxford, and as is standard practice, they provide a email system for staff and students. It’s called Herald, and I assume it’s a home-grown email server that has evolved from code written in the 1980s. It’s a piece of crap. I kid, I kid! Admittedly, that’s probably dropping … [Read more…]
I decided to take a stab at writing my own commands for Enso, the command interface by Humanized Inc. I really can’t say enough about how much I like this bit of software: it’s simple, elegant, and free. Humanized released a “Developer Prototype” some time ago, and I’ve only just gotten off my lazy-ass to … [Read more…]