Bomb.org.uk

January, 2007

31.01.2007 links for 2007-01-31

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30.01.2007 Most Secure Online Bank? I Think Not!

I don’t get my bank. On their homepage they claim to be ‘the UK’s most secure online bank’ yet, they limit customers to using details that can effectively be cracked in no time at all. They insist that you use a all numerical 12 digit ‘customer id’ to login and a five digit ‘pin’.

FIVE DIGITS for a password? That’s utterly ridiculous! From a security standpoint, people should be generating passwords using letters, numbers and non-alphanumeric characters and really at a length of at LEAST 6 characters long.

Personally I use 8 character passwords for non-important things like forums etc and a much more secure 13 character password for important things (such as root access on my home computer). If I had a choice my internet banking would be among the ‘important’ password choices.

This is the point where I name and shame the bank that force their customers to use a password that could theoretically be cracked in just a few minutes using any modern computer – ALLIANCE & LEICESTER

If you value your privacy and are a frequent user of online banking, do not use alliance and leicester. Once I’ve got my finances in order, I’ll be transferring to another bank, and I’ll be choosing a bank that give a shit about basic security precautions.

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30.01.2007 Freaky Dreams…

I had the strangest dream last night. It was one long dream about the impending wedding but it was really surreal. Firstly we were getting married in a church which definitely isn’t going to be happening. Secondly, the church contained a river rapids type ride (like the one at Alton towers) and thirdly, for a surprise I arranged for the staff at the reception location to pull guns on all of the guests and perform a mock robbery.

Gees… how much fun does my wedding sound? ;)

I have a feeling this dream was just because we’ve been talking a lot about the wedding lately and it’s occupying a lot of my thoughts. I’ve also been discussing plans for the stag party with my best man, so wedding stuff is really in the forefront of my mind. I’m excited about the wedding at the moment, but I have a feeling that a couple of months of this is going to start getting on my tits.

Still… that’s why we decided to book the date for September, rather than Summer 2008 – I really don’t think I could cope with nearly a year and a half of all this white frilly girly crap.

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26.01.2007 links for 2007-01-26

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26.01.2007 YouTube & Google Video Unite!

I’m not sure when it started, but I’ve just noticed that when you search for a video on google video, it now also shows results from YouTube! It’s to be expected really, what with Google owning both sites n all – I wonder how long it will be before the two become fully integrated?

Personally, I still prefer Google Video because it lets you download the video to your local machine without the need for 3rd Party applications.

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25.01.2007 Meeting Ella

Hey ho… please bare with me for a while – Ella’s coming to stay for a bit (in case you didn’t know, the latest release of Wordpress (2.1) is codenamed Ella). Site will probably look a bit strange while I do it but it shouldn’t take long.

Update: Well… It wasn’t quite as straight forward as I had hoped, but that was totally due to me fiddling with my hosting config and screwing up some symlinks! The W side of it went completely fine, however few of the actual changes have made much of a difference to my day to day use – well, except for the new HTML view of content which is nice. The new file browser thingy is pretty cool too (although it behaves a bit strangely if the image file is quite small).

One thing I don’t like is how the new built in spell checker kills of Firefox’s built in spell checker – now I have to click a button every time I want to spell check – how annoying is that? (especially if you’re a crap speller like I am!)

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25.01.2007 links for 2007-01-25

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23.01.2007 My Digg Usage Scares Me!

I’ve been using Digg.com pretty much every day for the past six months and I’ve started to notice a very strange pattern in the way I use the site.

Usually I go through the first couple of pages and open all of the comments pages for each article in a new tab. Then when I hit an article I’ve already seen I stop. Next, I read all of the comments and unless the article sounds really interesting, I don’t actually bother reading the article itself!

Now that doesn’t seem normal to me. I think this stems from the fact that practically every article I try to visit is usually down due to the server crushing caused by our old friend the ‘Digg effect’.

The other strange thing is that I don’t actually Digg or bury articles unless they stir a very strong emotion in me, I probably Digg maybe one in every 50 articles that I visit.

I’m not sure if there’s any real point to what I’m saying here except to try and establish if I’m alone in these strange behaviours or if other people use Digg in a similar way…

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19.01.2007 Five Things About Me…

I’ve been tagged by Timmargh in a meme, the subject of which you can guess from the title. Personally I hate meme’s but I haven’t done one in a while and it’s quite flattering to get tagged.

1. I started blogging in March 2001 – this march will be my blog’s 6 year anniversary. I was blogging before blogging was called blogging. Since it’s inception my site has been known as ‘andyspad.net’, ‘greendezire.com’ and now ‘bomb.org.uk’.

2. I hate working for someone else – It drives me mad that my hard work on a daily basis becomes profit that allows them to wear nice clothes and drive a nice car. It’s this one thing that drives me to ensure that I’m fully self employed by time I’m thirty. I want to do something relatively small like being a full-time freelance web developer or photographer (or both!) and work alone – I don’t want to employ other people.

3. I have had sex with exactly seven people in my lifetime. Of those seven people I have only had sex with one of them more than once (the others were all one night stands).

4. My favourite TV series is a sci-fi show called Farscape. I own every episode on DVD (four series box sets and the mini-series finale). My dream is to own a replica of one of the show’s props – a sword/gun combo called a ‘Qulata Blade‘.

5. 90% of the clothes that I own are black. I’m not a goth, I just like black.

I’m tagging: RichyB, Megan (when she’s back online), J, Zee and WildRose (if you are tagged you have to post five things about you on your own blog!)

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17.01.2007 links for 2007-01-17

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