I bought an Eee. (For those of you who have been living on a different planet for the last six months, or are technologically-challenged, the EeePCs are Really Small Laptops That Are Really Cheap. And for those of you who know about the full range, I got the 701 4GB Black version) Good points: Cost… (read more)

Oops It was revealed yesterday that there has been a great big security hole in the Debian-distributed SSL code, introduced in late 2006. This ill-advised Debian modification meant that all SSH and SSL keys were insufficiently random (the change removed part of the random seeding which normally takes place). This means that instead of there… (read more)

The article title refers to the third volume in Neal Stephenson’s trilogy “The Baroque Cycle”. As previously reported, I have been meaning to get around to buying and reading this for ages. It has taken me almost an entire year to get through the three books, each of which runs to around 900 pages. I’ve… (read more)

It became widespread news yesterday, April 1st, although it was only formally published today: Microsoft’s “Office Open XML” (OOXML) document format has, unfortunately, been certified as an ISO standard. There are many reasons why this is a Bad Thing. There is already an existing ISO-approved standard, namely Open Document Format (ODF). But obviously Microsoft doesn’t… (read more)

A reinstallation of my laptop at the weekend allowed me to test out an encrypted installation. The point of an encrypted installation is to require a passphrase to be entered at boot-up in order to transparently decrypt the rest of the system. This means that if the laptop is lost or stolen, none of my… (read more)

This week I have been mostly doing the following: Suffering from a Stomach Bug. This has been Unpleasant; Playing tennis, bowling and baseball on the Wii: excellent fun, even though I have acquired one or two Actual Sporting Injuries; Investigating the use of TrueCrypt as a suitable cross-platform solution for encrypting USB memory sticks. It… (read more)

I’ve been using KOrganizer as my calendar and to-do list management tool at work and I decided to investigate Google Calendar to see how it compares, with a view to possibly switching to it. This is what I’ve figured out so far… KOrganizer: has To-Do List with deadline and priorities, calendar events with popup reminders… (read more)

This is rather intriguing. An apparently leaked memo showing plans for rollout of National ID card and the National Register. It’s interesting that, despite all the supposed benefits that the government have raised in favour of the use of a National Register and ID card (“stopping terrorism”, benefit management etc.), that their approach requires the… (read more)

Well, it was a Friday afternoon and I got distracted enough to write a small program which plays Bod Snap. $ bod Bod and PC Copper … … that’s not snap! Farmer Barleymow and PC Copper … … that’s not snap! Aunt Flo and Bod … … that’s not snap! Farmer Barleymow and Aunt Flo… (read more)

Ooh, how exciting: it seems that my little utility ‘colordiff’ is Debian Package Of The Day. The contributor gives it a very good summary and it looks like the comments are providing additional tips that even I didn’t know about. I believe that the deb-a-day feed gets quite a high readership, so this will hugely… (read more)