I can clearly remember the reactions of most of my friends when I came out. I’ve worded that carefully, notice.. Friends. All of my true friends were supportive, one guy, a bit of a rugby lad, put his arm around me and said “Well done mate”. Mind you, that was when I’d chosen to come out, of my own accord. Truth be told, I’d actually been outed years before that. Let’s take a look back at that. ...

I recently acquired some ceramic tiles, and after a good bit of cleaning, they’re all presentable and nice. There’s 30 in total. Problem is, I’d like to know what the pattern is, who the designer/manufacturer was, and also, do they have any value. Some friends and family have suggested that they: “Look over 50 years old”, “Look like a morris pattern”, “look handmade”, “look valuable”, “mediaevally beautiful”, “worth finding out about”. ...

Say for example you want to build a new Virtualization cluster. You’ve chosen the CPUs you want, and know you want 32 GB of fast shiny RAM. The next thing to decide on is how the hell you’re gonna store your VMDK (or otherwise) images, and then store the backups and snapshots too. So. A typical VM Host server might be one of three choices. For sake of argument, i’m using Dell as a vendor. ...

In the last two weeks, I’ve seen at least two websites fall off the internet because of a distinct lack of forward planning Firstly, there was Derren Brown’s blog After Derren did his “The Events” trick with the lotto balls and dark magic, the number of fans hitting his page daily looking for clues, news, and gossip, caused the server to fall over. It even caused some of the channel 4 servers some traffic troubles (and they’ve got a lot of nodes!) ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about this facebook meme, “The Name Game” and I hypothesised that this wasn’t a meme, but actually a data gathering exercise, possibly started by scammers. I’ve found another one. One of my friends took the “True Age Test”, and came out younger than their actual age. I’ve just had a brief flick through the questions. Starting off with fairly harmless, questions which are related to the app, “What is your actual age, what race are you, how much exercise do you get” etc… ...

I wonder if you’ve heard of a Drabble? A drabble, simply put, is a story, normally science fiction or fantasy that is exactly one hundred (100) words in length. No more, no less. Here is mine: It was a slow day in the spaceport. “These rocket cowlings aren’t going to fix themselves”, Simon thought to himself, wistfully. It was 4 days since the incident, nobody said a word after it happened, not until this morning, that is. ...

I love collaborative websites. Wikipedia, Blogs, community oriented stuff like Stack Overflow and ServerFault There is however, the lingering problem of vandalism, and it’s one that seems to crop up on pretty much ever collaborative website i’ve ever seen. Wikipedia has a lot of newbies contribs which are utter nonsense, advertising, spam, page blanking and so on. There’s a hefty team of people on Wikipedia however who go around reverting this kind of stuff. I’m one of them. I use mediawiki at work also, so I’m pretty confident around the entire wiki platform, and IMHO, mediawiki is the best wiki software out there. ...

I got an email today from some software company.. Trying to sell me a password management tool. I used to use KeePass which was pretty effective. This one is considerably more expensive. Among its features, it boasts: Generate uncrackable passwords using the integrated Password Formulator Maximum protection of your sensitive data thanks to the security algorithm Rijndael 256-Bit! Instead of passwords like “toothbrush” or “Rover”, which can both be cracked in a few minutes, you now use passwords like g\/:1bmV5″£$p’}=8>,,/2¬%CN?\A:y:Cwe-k)mUpHiJu:0md7p@<i (with a 1-GHz-Pentium-PC, it takes approx. 307 years to guess this password!). Password lists on the internet: Place your encrypted password lists on the Internet and enjoy access to all of them, no matter where you are! Protection from keylogging (intercepting of keystrokes) – All password fields are internally protected from keylogging. I’ve got issues with all three five points above. ...

Another lesson learnt by a company who really should know better. Raid != Backup. This might be widely regarded as old news, but it’s not too late IMO for me to add my $0.02. I picked this up on Slashdot about 20 minutes ago, and there’s a few things that strike me as odd about the whole malarkey. Before I go any further though, I’ve never heard of Journalspace until this article arose, then again, they’re not really in my general field of view, I’ve always had my own blog, on my own space.. so it’s not really my ‘thing’.. Anyway, one thing that is my ‘thing’ is data security and assurance. ...

Anyone who uses internet banking these days will find themselves handing over a vast array of numbers and passwords, authentication tokens and browser cookies. You have a card, this has a chip, you have a Challenge/Response card reader, and you have a pin. There’s at least half a dozen banks in the UK that I can name who use the Challenge/Response type card readers. To log into my online banking, I need my Passwords, Pins and if i want to do “advanced functionality” I need my card and challenge auth reader. ...