I am tired
I have been reading up on yubikeys and security for the last hour and a half. I am now exhausted and my eyes are squiting at the screen. I need to pick Jus up in 15 minutes from work. I also managed to bake a banana loaf (using a premade-thingy). I used my watch’s countdown timer to alert me as to when it was ready.
I read this first, which lead me to read a review of Yubikey security (highly recommended reading) which got me onto reading this. TheFrog had some good points and made me rest a bit on my effort to use a Rainbow ikey 3000 to secure my stuff. Then I thought about the reality of using a usb smartcard on non-50hour-customized-software-running-on-hardware-that-I-can-control !!!
Smartcards are still the security high ground I think. I have also been enjoying “Noble Beast” by Andrew Bird. No other music has entered my mind’s ear since I bought it two weeks ago. I wonder how Nathan’s blog is going. I thought about moving my website and blog from slicehost to my own server to save cash and make use of the resources that I have. I originally planed to do my assignment but got carried away reading security posts. I did feel quite obliged to do my assignment ( I wanted to play on my server) but in retrospect I should have just played on my server and enjoyed it. I am tired. Good night.
What where they thinking !
Go to www.bigpond.com Their webserver redirects you to http://www.bigpond.com/homepage (as if you did not know that you were visiting their homepage after typing it in a few seconds ago) Ok maybe you were spammed by the team of russian kitsch anarchists who hacked www.bigpond.com.
Wait a minute. Bigpond’s ‘portal’ has always been an abomination and actually hasn’t been hacked ! Perhaps a recession starved cupid charmed Telstra management to make a homepage with red and blue and pink as neighbors.
It is an ugly site and is contempuos to generation-i (Internet Generation) as to sell rubbish and use plugins on the landing page (and of all plugins in the know universe WHY JAVA !? – who is going to install Java so that we can buy a weight loss ?!)
I can almost feel my retina detaching, trying to slip away down my optic nerve to get away from this horrid vision. Telstra please remove all flashing bobs and whistles and java applets and red covering yellow next to blue next to pink. Make the site simple and fresh. We’d like to believe that you value product and service rather than selling us flowers and weight loss products. At the moment your site feels like a fruit market, not a top telecommunications company.
Keyboard layouts and culture
I always wondered why operating system / computer manufacturers did not just standardize on a keyboard layout. I recently just bought a macbook and when I use it at my desk I plug in my Microsoft keyboard which I have grown up with and am familiar with. It feels quite awkward not knowing what the shortcuts are and even what certain buttons do.
I have used Sun Sparc workstations before and remember feeling quite frustrated at the “silly” keyboard layout that they use. A good friend of mine, Rory who is a solaris engineer was never bothered by the keyboard layout.
I started to ponder why the keyboard layout doesn’t bother people and why people are happy to learn new keyboard layouts. Obviously all keyboard layouts work and some are better for getting particular tasks done than others but I think that the layouts also differentiate the differences in culture of the sets of users respectively.
I think that it helps accentuate that surface tension that exists between any the said cultural groups. You are likely to feel “outside” when you can’t use a Mac keyboard. The Mac folks are likely to feel “warm(er)” when they see a windows user feeling uncomfortable using a Mac keyboard.
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