Boardmad

Two very interesting articles on teh interweb [sic!] show a serious change in the state and direction of internet…I wonder if in 20 years time we’ll look back and identify this as the tipping point  ?

Macs to get AV

Windows usage dips

Time will tell ;0)

About 10 days ago Mrs.B took the minx (TM) to a holistic health place in Edinburgh. Now I’m a pretty pragmatic chap and generally unswayed by homeopathy, Chi and such (having said that I have seen and felt very weird things hapen and various martial arts events I’ve attended) but the test done on TM sounded like bare naked bollockery !

However the results were conclusive my girl’s dairy intolerant - badly and fairly sensitive to preservatives,  colourings and general food additives. Spool forward a few days to start of last week and the beginning of the new non-dairy and no-precessed foods regimen for the girl. She took the changes with almost no upset (bless her) and in the space of a week the change was (and I speak with no hyperbole here) staggering.

Which brings me to the basis of this posting…have you any idea what went into your meal this evening ? I do now only because of the experience of the last 10 days, but before then it was a kids chemistry set of crap I was shovelling in my cakehole (sic!) and the kids were getting the same. And this is frustratingly down to the people that sell us our food, I’m thinking of those M&S ads dubbed with a positively erotic soundtrack. And combined with lifestyle and increasing affordability…but how’s it affordable..because it’s laden with flavourings, salt, sugar, MSG, preservatives and additives to keep you coming back for more and for added shelf longevity.

We went looking for alternate milk products for breakfast, soy milk, rice milk…etc everything has a gotcha. Flavourings, added sugar, no added sugar (which means sweeteners), preservatives or Enumbers. Our foodstuffs have become completely and utterly adulterated by the manufacturers and we just trot along like sheep. The yeast we bought this afternoon to make additive and preservative-free bread (every manufactured loaf in the local Tesco had additives - and the bakery confirmed they also added ‘things’ to even their organic loafs) has an E number in it…Yeast…WTF ! And it’s an ester of Sorbitol…a sweetener for goodness sake.

Sigh…vegan-life style here we come.

Sigh…here’s the reason I hate flash ! Got into a huge scrap at work with a colleague arguing our customer-facing offering needed to be Web2.0 and RIA and that flash was the way to go as AJAX wasn’t ubiquitous yet etc etc and I politely pointed out that I personally, on all the browsers I use at home, block flash content.

And here’s why and here’s the original PoC code. Nice bundled-up, serialised SOAP call over an embedded flash object using an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerability and UPnP (Universal Plug n Play - it makes those tricky little apps like MSN Messenger and Skype slip through your hardware and software firewalls like a hot knife through butter).

So the ongoing rule is learn to use your hardware properly and configure ONLY those ports on your firewalls that you really, really, really, REALLY need open and go home this evening and make sure UPnP is disabled on your router.

You have been warned…again !

If this isn’t the final nail in the coffin of this abortive attempt to see off the Leopard advance I’ve no idea what is…

Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh as it’s been snappily entitled has now been released to a slightly wider audience that those bleary-eyed nerdlings initially supplied with the hyoooge service pack earlier last year.

I’ve got a Vista Home basic on my second laptop at home, it’s fine but I’ve yet to get used to the wholesale changes they’ve made to where everything now resides (maybe if I made the switch and just got on with it !) but this ma-hoo-sive SP is just beyond a joke. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that they rushed this codebase to RC1 last year to avoid a publicity meltdown as this scale of a Service pack is just taking the piss !

It ain’t going to be on my primary machine for quite some to come I can tell you…in fact I’m seriously, seriously considering this as my next machine.

I’m turning to the dark side…no doubt.

Just been sent in a phishing attempt, quite nicely done. Well crafted and linked back to the actual lloyds bank site

Main aim is to get you to punch in your user name and password and memorable answers which it then submits to a couple of email accounts. THESE EMAIL ACCOUNTS

mailto:lom.data@web2mail.com
mailto:lom.data@gmail.com

Please feel free to add these to the most useless and inappropriate mailing lists or offers sites you can think of. Ideally include them in any honeypot scripts you may have running on your site.

I thank you.

I applaud the ethos but don’t like the big-business involvement. Smack too much of marketing spotting and attempting to monetize an untapped market. Not only that - what happens when the spotty oik from 3 doors down, piggy-backed on my wifi connection is on www.bigjugs.com pulling down all manner of trouser-tomfoolery ?

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk The BT Fon service lets people share a “small portion” of their home broadband connection by opening up a separate secure channel on their wireless router.

I’ve been watching the frankly hysterical reporting that’s followed the recent discovery in London of the attempted car bombs and the Glasgow Airport Flaming ram raid with increasing levels of surprise and incredulity then I read this post on ElReg by a ex-bomb disposal Johnny…makes funny and grounding reading.

The world is NOT about to end…don’t be complacent but similarly don’t imagine you’re imminently going to be engulfed in some Jihad-ist conflagration. Sigh…just glad no-one was killed or badly injured by these mis-guided idiots.

I’m a huge fan of Halo…I played on multiplayer long before Windows Live came online using a nice wireless connection across the village to my mate’s front room where him and me and our respective partners would snipe, butt-stroke and run one another over with warthogs to our hearts content. This was all on the Xbox which I still have but no longer play much of anything on.

Then a while back I hear that Halo2 is due out on PC, read some reviews, watch come ingame play and am intrigued then wallop !! You find that it’s only to be released on Vista…what a bunch of cheeky, self-serving ingrates these Microsoft gamestudio gits are !

Great article on the BBC yesterday about the public’s response to the ridiculous Olympic logo…they got a bunch of them to try and do better. This got one of the nods !!

And if you don’t know why it’s funny I ain’t explaining !

As ever Dilbert nicely fleshes out the ongoing disparity between what business people say and do and what they actually mean !

This is always an interesting subject for me…in almost every meeting I attend where you’re actioned you end up clarifying the actual ‘meaning’ of the requirements or action point. Now this isn’t always just down to slap-dash, hurried or unclear specification or req’t gathering…more often than not it’s down to ‘meaning’ or context or even what the specifier actually had going on in their head at the time they specified the work and did they adequately convey this meaning into consistent, unabiguous statements that are free from interpretation ?

Then of course in a dynamic and evolving business env’t how does one keep the specification ahead of the requirement ? ;D That’s for another time !!