Frankencode

I like this meme, its a fantastic window into how depressingly geeky we all are.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“Some learned people are intelligent.”

From “Mathematics for the Nonmathematician” by Morris Kline. This is actually an excellent book supposedly for non-science majors to learn about mathematics. In reality its a very nice read on the history of mathematics, with some problems thrown in.

The choice of this book was a grey area according to the rules. The closest was a copy of Nature Genetics, but this is published in volumes and so started at page 700. The next closest was a stack of books, the top one being the latest Buffy comic. I’m not sure comics count. Can anyone make a firm decision about that?

history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
118 ls
104 vim
72 cd
67 make
14 rm
12 ./test-directory
11 git
10 ./mjpass
9 gvfs-mount
9 cp

Its a mess

I’ve been worried recently about how secure I am online. There has been a huge amount of news coverage over here in the UK about personal digital security. As someone who works as a software engineer, I always feel slightly smug when such stories are reported.

I really shouldn’t have done. On spending time looking at where account were held:

31 separate logins.

3 passwords used.

4 sites I could no longer log in to.

Although I had tried to separate out junk and secure passwords, there were some relatively insecure sites using the same password as places that had access to financial details. All in all, very insecure and a complete mess.

What can be done

As time goes by I think this situation may just get worse unless websites wise up. I felt much better about the e-commerce sites I had been to that offered paypal payment methods, or simply payment without having to open up an account. OpenID certainly has a role to play, although seems pretty flawed without some improvements in the phishing situation.

Until then I’ll have to spend the time, dull time, organizing my digital identity. As will everyone else.