Alasdair's Personal Blog

10 ways to know you have reached the future

2010-06-15T22:10:00.000+01:00

At the beginning of every year, decade, century or millennium people feel the need to make predictions for the future. Things that will happen over the next months and years. Often a year later you look back and laugh. Predicting the future is hard, if it were easy I would have won the lottery many times over.

So instead of making some prediction for what is going to happen over the next 12 months I am going to do the opposite. I am going to list 10 things any one of which happening will mean we have reached the future. Each of these things would cause a significant upturn in our world view and would disrupt all life as we know it.

When I started thinking of this post I was going to do it all in one post, but there are two problems:

I haven't thought of 10 yet.
Each one I think of I want to write too much on, so the blog post would be huge.

So instead I'm going to write each thing as a separate blog post, some will be longer some shorter. Also in case you don't know I'm a bit of a Sci-Fi geek, so some of these ideas may appear to have a common source.

Alasdair

What have I been doing?

2010-06-15T22:05:00.000+01:00

Wow, I just noticed I have not blogged for four months. I was never very good at blogging frequently, but I hoped I was better than this.

So where have I been? Well nowhere it turns out. I get a lot of my "rant" and spotted this cool video stuff out via twitter and I've been pretty busy at work, the product I've been working on for the last 18 months shipped in May, so you can guess how busy I have been this year.

Oh, and I didn't do a good job of tracking my time, but I haven't felt that I have been wasting time in the same way. I've been very busy. I was in Las Vegas in May for work, and in San Francisco for holiday too.

My brother works in the video games industry. He also blogs and tweets. I always get jealous when I go to visit him because he is in such an obviously creative industry (most industries are creative, but in different ways). He has been able to meet and work with amazing people over the years and my highpoint of this trip was getting to meet one of the animators from one of my favourite Disney movies of all time (Lilo and Stitch). I'm a bit in awe I have to admit.

So that is pretty much where I have been since February. I have some blog posts queued up, I just need to write them up, so watch this space.

Thanks
Alasdair

Where has all the time gone

2010-02-12T22:21:00.000Z

I'm sitting in my brothers living room babysitting my (almost) 2 year old nephew. It is a Friday night and there is nothing on TV, so a pretty normal Friday evening, so all I have to do is surf the web until my laptop battery dies and wait for my brother to return from his night out. Such evenings often lead to thinking and all I can think of is, where does all the time go. Here are some shocking facts:

My nephew is almost 2, that means it has been a year since his first birthday, 2 years since he was born and about 30 months since I found out his mum was pregnant.
I'm 30
Austin Powers was released 13 years ago.
I've worked for IBM for 8 years, double my original plan.

This isn't me complaining, just realising that I don't know where the time has gone. When I was young a week was a long time, now I blink and it has gone. To make things worse I'm constantly struggling time to do things like, check my emails (210 unread emails this year), surf the web, go to the cinema, meet friends and so on. As you can see I can't even find the time to regularly blog, and when I do I ramble on wondering where my time goes.

So what to do about this? Well it seems to be common that when you want to do something better you spend time measuring. You know the kind of thing, your project is behind schedule so you have daily one hour long meetings with the whole team asking why you are behind until you are back on schedule, or not. So starting tomorrow I'm going to start recording what I do. I bet I discover that rather than being hugely busy I spend too much time at work, watching TV and basically not doing anything when I could be doing these things I'm interested in.

I'll see how it goes.

Alasdair
Twitter: notatibm

Inspirational video

2010-01-24T11:36:00.000Z

I'm not sure what it is but I really like this video.

MacBook Pro battery

2009-11-02T20:00:00.017Z

I have had my MacBook Pro for just over 2 years now (2 years and about 3 months) and I just started getting a warning sign for my battery. I went to the apple store and they told me that my battery had expired. It has had its 300 charge cycles and needs to be replaced.

Now don't get me wrong I am very happy with my MacBook Pro and based on my experience 2 years is about right for a laptop battery. This is my laptop and I'm not planning on replacing it until June/July next year (I'm on a minimum of a 3 year replacement cycle). I see no need to replace my MacBook Pro right now I have a 2.4Gh Core 2 Duo processor with 4Gb of RAM and nice as the new MacBook Pros are, they aren't enough better; maybe when quad core ones come along.

So I have to ask myself do I spend £97 on a new battery now, or do I wait. So far although the apple store says my battery is at 60% of capacity and needs replacing I can still get 1-2 hours of usage from it, which is good enough for me generally. So right now I wont be buying a replacement battery. I'm guessing in 9 months time I may reconsider and if the quad core MacBook Pros are out I may go for a replacement computer, otherwise I guess I'll be buying a new battery then.

Alasdair

Verified by Visa

2009-10-30T20:00:00.001Z

I have considered for a while writing up my thoughts on Verified by Visa, in fact I have started and thrown several blog posts away. So here goes what I hope will be my last attempt.

Verified by Visa is a "new" scheme introduced by Visa to help combat internet credit card fraud. The system is "voluntary" although many banks are forcing their customers to enrol. The scheme essentially works like this:

You enter your details onto a website to make a purchase.
The website either redirects you to a website owned by your bank, or it does an include of the website owned by your bank. The include looks like it is part of the retailers website and while the content is generated by the bank it looks like part of the retailer website and you cannot see the banks certificate information.
The new website presents some secret information you have previously agreed with your bank, to identify itself to you.
You enter a "password" you previously agreed to use.
You are redirected back to the retailed and the transaction goes through.

So having seen this program I had to ask myself "what problem is it trying to solve?". It took me a while to come up with an answer, and it is a little underwhelming. It "solves" the problem of you loosing your card and someone picking it up in the street and using it online; it also solves the problem of someone copying the information on your card down. These people will not have access to your password (assuming you did not choose "password1").

As far as I can tell so far it does not help alleviate the problems of unscrupulous retailers, or man in the middle attacks.

Although I describe the problem being solved as underwhelming I would still, in theory, use it, defence in depth is important and it is an extra layer in the defence.

In a future post I will explain why I refuse to use Verified by Visa as implemented by my bank.

Alasdair

Snow Leopard experiences

2009-10-28T22:34:00.000Z

So I've been using Snow Leopard for a while now, so I thought I would detail some first impressions. First the good things:

Cisco VPN support built in. The Cisco VPN client on the mac caused me many problems, and frequently caused kernel panics. Snow Leopard has a built in client so I've uninstalled the Cisco software and my system is far more stable.
It is smaller. I got hard drive space back. This is great.
Faster. It feels much more responsive.

There are some things I want to try out, but haven't had a chance to. I have a mac and an iPhone and keeping my email, contacts and calendar in synch is not as easy as I would like. Snow Leopard has added Microsoft Active Sync support, and the iPhone has it, so I want to try that out and see if I get a better solution. The only problem is that I need to get an email provider that has ActiveSync.

Finally the not so good:

Wireless is less reliable. I turn my wireless network off when I'm not using it. If my mac is turned on when I turn the wireless network on then it doesn't pick up the wireless network. I suspect this might be related to my wireless network not broadcasting its network name, but it is still not good.
1Password does not work with Safari 4 very well. I have it working now (I had to make Safari 4 run in 32-bit mode), but each 1Password update has a habit of breaking things

So generally I'm very happy, other than a few minor niggles

Thanks
Alasdair

Back from Holiday

2009-10-11T19:52:00.001+01:00

I've been back from my holida for a week now, so it is time to do the obligatory post holiday blog post including photos. First off a brief summary of what I did:

Spent four days attending an OSGi alliance face to face in Palo Alto. Technically not vacation, but I did it and it was a lot of fun.
Went to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. This is free if you enter between 9-10am Monday, Wednesday and Friday and it is really peaceful. I would definatly go again.
Went to San Francisco Zoo. This only cost $15, which is much cheaper than Marwell Zoo (my local zoo), but was much smaller, and the animals all seemed very bored and the cages seemed small. I would not go back.
Went to Vancouver to visit my friends Tim and Steph. Incidentally they took me to a restaurant called Naam which was really good, they had vegan and vegetarian food, but I would not suggest going for the burgers.
Visited the Vancouver Aquarium, which was great. I got to see some dolphins, which I have always wanted to see. They had been caught up in fishing nets and could not be released into the wild.
Went to Los Angeles, and got a tour of Universal Studios.

I had a great time. I also got to play Lucidity which is a new XBLA game from LucasArts. It is kind of a mixture of Lemmings and Tetrus. The artwork is great although I am biased because my brother worked on the game.

So holiday is over and I'm back to work now. I've finally caught up on email (over 500 in the one week I hadn't checked email) although I had to spend time at the weekend catching up.

And finally some links to photos:

San Francisco 2009

Vancouver 2009

There are a few I really like, ones which I would have entered for the Hursley Photo competition, if the submission date hadn't been the day I got home from my holiday.

A particular favourate is this one:

I just need to plan my next holiday now.
Alasdair

Veggie in San Francisco

2009-09-28T03:31:00.002+01:00

So I have been in San Francisco for just over a week now and I have been very well catered for veggie wise. Two highlights:

Underdog. A hot dog store on Irving and 16th Ave, along with their selection of "normal" meat hot dogs they have a Veggie and Vegan selection. Photo to the right.
Pizzaiolo in Oakland (5008 Telegraph Ave, just off 52nd St), while they do not have Vegan food on the menu (and their veggie selection is very small) they had heard of vegan and were able to prepare a varient on one of their dishes that contained no cheese or meat, very good. There is no sign so you need the address, they have a patio too.

For those who know how adventerous I am not I have had Japanese tea in the Japanese tea garden in the Golden Gate Park. Green Tea with brown rice mixed in. No I didn't finish it, but I drank most of it (it got cold towards the end).

Well goto go, Mexican tonight with some of my brothers friends, fingers crossed.

Alasdair

AA gold status

2009-09-07T23:11:00.000+01:00

I currently have gold status on American Airlines (AA) air miles program. I have not flown yet this year, so I had resigned myself to loosing this status. For those who don't know gold status gives you a bonus on the number of miles you earn per mile flown. It is either 25%, or 50%. You get priority boarding and checkin, you can request an upgrade in advance, and that is about it. It might not seem much, but it really makes things go much more smoothly.

So last week I got an email telling me that AA were launching a double elite qualifying points system. This means that for a few months this year if you fly 10k miles then it will be counted as 20k miles for gaining status. You need 25k for gold status. So I went off excited thinking my trip to San Francisco would help me, in one go, get gold status. But it wont. I'll be about 1,000 miles away :(

So I need an extra 1,000 miles to get gold status again. So a return flight to LAX will do it (337 miles each way with double qualifying points). I'm not fussed about visiting LAX, so anywhere up or down the Pacific will do. Looking at the options.

Alasdair

P.S. Just saw a trailer for a new series of Merlin. WooHoo!!! I just hope it doesn't start while I am on holiday, or if it does that iPlayer has it series linked. I just wish Nimueh was not killed in the last series :(

Veggie update

2009-08-29T23:07:00.004+01:00

Last year I determined to give up eating meat. I know I made this decision last summer, but I had no idea when. Until I realized I had announced my decision on this blog. July 10th I gave up meat, and I did not notice I had hit a year as a veggie. A whole year, wow. In fact this is significant for 2 reasons. Not only have I not eaten meat in all that time, I have also not visited the US for 12 whole months either (well more like 14 now). Something I plan to rectify with a trip next month.

When I first made the decision a lot of people asked me things like "how long are you going to be veggie for?", a little insulting perhaps, but I made it to my one year anniversary. WooHoo!!! When I first told my family they were all concerned that I would somehow become malnourished due to a lack of meat, but I have survived.

So some of my tips and tricks. First off supermarkets are not the best place to shop for veggie meat substitutes. Quorn is taking over and while some of their food tastes fine (like their southern fried "chicken" burgers, and the lemon pepper fillets are ok), there are lots of better alternatives. So some of my favorite foods:

Realeat vegiemince
Realeat "chicken" pieces
Redwood Vegi-deli Cheatin Chicken Style Pieces
Redwood Cheatin Choritzo Style Chunks, great in pasta
Fry's Vegetarian Traditional Style Burgers, the only burgers that do not taste foul.
Fry's Vegetarian Golden Crumbed Schnitzel

The only place I can get most of these things is in Holland and Barrett, or GNC. While Holland and Barrett in Southampton is a 30 minutes walk from where I live it often has very little stock. The Eastleigh or Winchester branches are better stocked. Supermarkets are not so good for shopping at.

My next challenge is my two week holiday to visit my brother in San Francisco. The US is not well known for being a good place for vegetarian's, although I am sure it is not as bad as I fear, and San Francisco is pretty open to alternative life choices, so I am sure I will be fine. I'll let you know when I get back.

Take care
Alasdair

Simpsons and Fox News

2009-05-15T22:54:00.002+01:00

This has to be one of the funniest things I have seen on youtube in a long while.

Alasdair

Thoughts on boxes, religious ones.

2009-04-14T22:40:00.000+01:00

Over the years one of the things I have noticed is that many of my friends (and I doubt my friends are unique) like to box me. To my Islamic friends I am Christian, to my Christians friends I am an Atheist, and to my Atheist friends err, well it does not seem to have come up. The point is I have always resisted being boxed like this, and frequently claim to be agnostic.
The problem is I have become increasingly dissatisfied by this idea. My main issue being how is being an agnostic different from being an Atheist. This weekend I found the following video on YouTube:

In some sense the distinction makes a lot of sense. The problem is it misses out one critical factor. How much do people care! Although Laci (the person who made the video) describes herself as an agnostic atheist she clearly cares about it. I expect (although I would hate to speak for him) that Richard Dawkins is a gnostic atheist and he clearly cares. Most people on the other hand I expect do not care. People who do not care will typically answer, when asked, that they do, or do not, believe in God, but otherwise take no action.

This still does not help me though, because I still object to being in the atheist, or theist box, and all I just did is create another two. I would still say I do not care, but I do not care because I have decided that whether God exists or not I'm going to live the same way, rather than not really thinking about it. My flawed thinking goes as follows:

If God exists and is the wonderful all forgiving God Christians believe in then I really do not think he would send a good person to hell just because they did not believe in Jesus.
If God exists and is like the jealous God of the old testament then I want nothing to do with him because he commits mass murder, created us so we could worship him, making us his slaves. These are things I consider wrong, even for God.
If God does not exist I would not want to spend my life worshiping something that does not exist.

I also take issue with the following ideas:

All good things comes from God
All bad things come from the Devil

I feel that these statements absolve Humans of responsibility for the good and evil we do in this world, it allows us to justify all kinds of evil on the grounds that "God wanted me to". I think Humans have the unique capacity to commit both good and evil and we have a choice which we do.

As a result I will put myself in the following boxes:

agnostic about God
a humanist

At least until I change my mind.
Alasdair

Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) FAIL!

2009-03-05T21:59:00.007Z

Since the beginning of this year the US government has required people visiting the USA to preregister their intent to travel via the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). This is a website. This does not need to be done once per trip, but once every two years or so. I often travel to the USA at short notice so reminded by a facebook status I decided to give registering a go. So the first thing I did was to use trusty google to search for ESTA. Here is a screenshot of the results:
Question: Which link is the right one? Think carefully. It is obviously not the last one, but most people would probably go for the first sponsored link, and would get it wrong. It is in fact the fourth result (ignoring the sponsored links). The one titled welcome, with a domain of esta.cbp.dhs.gov. I missed it completely. It looks amateurish and as a result my brain passed it over. The page title did not say ESTA. Come on DHS, you could at least have the page title be Welcome to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, maybe include the DHS abbreviation in there. FAIL number one. Now look very carefully at the url, note the HTTPS at the front. This shows they are taking security seriously, which is good, but I tried accessing using http, and instead of being redirected to https I got no response back. Most people typing the address in wont put HTTPS at the beginning, so I call this FAIL number two (note I am only suggesting http://esta.chp.dhs.gov point to https://esta.chp.dhs.gov/, not any subpage). FAIL number three though is amazing. When accessing the page I get the following javascript pop up:
I suggest you read it closely. It says two things:

The data you are submitting, don't expect us to keep it private. You give us the right to do what we wont, don't expect data protection you weird European types.
If you access this system and you are not allowed to expect the FBI (or similar) to appear at your door with an arrest warrant.

The first I do not really have a problem with. I don't expect the data I hand over on the green I-94W to be private, and this is really no different.

The second is alarming. How do I know if I am authorized or not? This is FAIL number three. I get told I need authorization, but no one has told me whether I have authorization or not. I found a public website on the Internet, the official ESTA system, which I need to use to enter the USA, so I am probably authorized, but they have this big scary warning and often ignorance is no defence in a court of law. In fact given the info you provide them when using this site it would be very easy for them to pick you up if you are not authorized.

I wonder if I'm being too paranoid.
Alasdair

How people really go about decrypting all your secret data

2009-02-02T21:31:00.003Z

I thought today's cartoon from xkcd was brilliant. It is going on my list of all time favourites along with 327.

Alasdair

Leaving Carphone Warehouse

2008-12-08T18:44:00.002Z

I now have a Jesus Phone. I have had a phone on O2 for years, but I was billed via Carphone Warehouse. I was fed up with them. It took me years to get them to accept that I had moved, they neglected to sell me a 3G sim card when I bought a 3G phone, and finally because they were unable to update the address they had for me on record they could not sell me a Jesus Phone. They even told me the problem was that my bank did not have my address down correctly. The bank that sends me stuff monthly (unlike Carphone Warehouse).

So on Friday I phoned up to ask for my P.A.C. I was put through to someone who claimed to be from O2 Direct who sold me an iPhone and sorted out so I would no longer be billed by Carphone Warehouse. Woo Hoo!!!

Except. Over the weekend it turned out the PAC O2 had been given had expired, the trouble was O2 (or was it carphone warehouse) generated the PAC and never gave it to me. I then discovered that the guy from "O2 Direct" worked for carphone warehouse. So I started phoning. First I called Carphone Warehouse, who gave me a new PAC. Then I phoned O2, only to discover that the details Carphone Warehouse gave me for the new phone were incorrect, O2 had never heard of them. At one point O2 told me that my iPhone was setup for my new phone number, and then I found out it wasn't. Argh. Argh. Argh.

So finally after speaking to 7 people my number is going to be ported to the iPhone on Thursday 11th. I sooooo hope this time it is sorted, because if not I have to learn a whole new phone number, and tell a whole load of people my number has changed.

Alasdair

Logging and Tracing in software

2008-12-05T20:29:00.001Z

If your not a software developer this post is not for you.

I read with some interest Jeff Atwood's post on logging. He makes some interesting points, and it got me thinking once again about this whole area of logging. I think a lot of the debate misses an important point. Who is the log data for? There are essentially two answers:

For a developer or service engineer to work out what went wrong after a problem occurs
For a user of a system to check on the state of the program.

To cope with this I have always separated the concept of logging from tracing. Tracing is for the first group, it is an aid for debugging. Logging is for the user. In normal operation trace is disabled and logging is enabled.

The example in Jeff's post I would use info, error and fatal for the second class of user, not the first. Following this the info messages would become debug statements. I would also count the "handled exceptions" as debug data.

Two important things to note from Jeff's post is that logging (or tracing) is not free. If it is not enabled the overhead should be zero (or as close to zero as possible), and the messages for the second class of user should be easy to read, perhaps via a user interface of similar.

In WebSphere Application Server every info, warning and error message is written to a file and results in a JMX notification. At one point the overhead of this was 79ms per message, as a result I aim to only output exceptional messages.

Alasdair

FailBlog

2008-12-04T21:06:00.000Z

Thanks to youtube I just discovered failblog. I discovered it via this video:

I wouldn't say this made me laugh, I was too surprised, it did make me go and look at the blog which has a mix of surprising, confusing and funny clips and images. I just hope the confusing ones are me lacking a cultural reference. Oh, and one other I thought was worth capturing:

Alasdair

Social Fatique

2008-12-03T21:13:00.002Z

While checking out the blogs of some fellow IBMers (Adrian Spender and Andy Piper) I came across this video from RTC (Irish broadcaster):

The video talks about IBMs engagement with social networking. We have Beehive (like facebook), and BlueTwit (like twitter) among other systems. Usually news reports tell us that social networking costs companies money in lost productivity. In this I will admit that IBM is at least different, we are encouraged to engage in and experiment with these things.

That said I wonder if there is another cost to these tools. Each tool that you use has an associated cognitive load. You need to remember to access each tool regularly to tend your garden so to speak. I find that keeping track of facebook and twitter is hard enough, without adding Beehive and BlueTwit. This is why I rarely log into linked in.

I have said before that I am a neo-luddite, but perhaps I am instead a web luddite. In fact I like tools, and I am kind of a early adopter at work, I signed up for Lotus Note v8 and Sametime v7.5 before it was commonly used. I am slow to adopt new web tools though. I use gmail, via my mac mail client. I didn't really use twitter until I discovered twhirl, and my sister was on facebook and myspace long before I was.

Hmm, I started out thinking about social networking overload, and I ended up thinking that all I need for these tools is for them not to be web based. Perhaps one day I'll join you all in the 21st century.

Alasdair

Blog Envy

2008-12-02T22:11:00.001Z

I've had this blog for over two years now and I find it really hard coming up with stuff to say. I have no idea who reads this blog, I maintain it mostly because as someone who works in IT I feel like I ought to. For all I know no one out there reads or cares. Not only that I cannot image who might be interested in reading what I have to say.

I envy people like Scott Adams who can generate a blog post every day, a blog post that is funny or interesting. Or Bruce Schneier who somehow manages to post multiple times a day relvant security related information. Or Jeff Atwood who somehow manages to come up with thought provoking articles about computing and software every few days. I realize that each of these people are well known, but I could select less well known people who still manage it. Not to mention those famous people all started out somewhere.

I wonder what the difference between people like them and me. Is it that I have nothing to say? Or is it that I do not know how to say it? Perhaps it is that they believe that people want to hear what they have to say. I guess what I am saying is, I have no idea what makes a good blog. Research mode on.

Alasdair

Can cook, wont cook.

2008-12-01T20:10:00.000Z

I've written before about how hard it can be to eat when you are on your own. Cooking for two is easier than cooking for one. You have two people to share the workload; be it the cooking or the washing up. Many ingredients are setup for meals for two or more, not one. So you cook for two nights, and that involves reheating and it is the same meal two nights in a row. Yuck.

Another problem with cooking for one is that whenever you invite people round for dinner it becomes a much bigger chore. Many of my friends are now married so cooking for one goes to cooking for three, or even five. There is a much bigger difference in difficulty when moving from one to three or more people. More prep work, more washing up (lots more), and so on. It takes me a while to pluck up the courage to arrange a dinner party.

The final thing about cooking that is hard work is this. If I feel down I do not feel like cooking, so I do not cook or eat properly. If I am enjoying work I have a habit of working late (in fact sometimes even when I'm hating work I work late which is very sad), in these cases I get back from work at 8pm or later at which point I'm too tired to eat properly.

So as you can see eating properly is not easy for me. All these behaviours are learned, and bad, but I still have them. I could either change them, or I could implore scientists to invent a food pill. Guess which I am hoping for.

Alasdair

Minor blog redesign

2008-11-30T18:24:00.002Z

While ITV was providing me with such classic lines as: "you rebel scum", "your overconfidence is your weakness" and "your faith in your friends is yours" I was playing around with the look of my blog.

I last changed the blog in May when I reformatted to a wider format. I never liked 800 pixels wide blogs and I finally found a justification to widen it. This time it is to move the sidebar content out of the main blog post listing. I never really liked it being stuck on the inside, so I have moved it outside.

My only outstanding problem with this is that the centre line should go down the middle of the text, but it is offset somewhat as the center line takes into account the sidebar content. This is not noticable if you only have 1024 pixels of width, but I think most people have more these days. The only fix I have so far centres it well for wider screens, but at the expense of 1024 pixel wide screens.

Alasdair

P.S. "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and fully operational battle station", the inner geek in me loves these lines.

Five things I wish scientists would invent

2008-11-12T22:39:00.004Z

Hi,

So I've been thinking recently that there are lots of things we have to do that are just a waste of time. So I've come up with a list of ten things I wish could be invented so I do not have to do it:

Sonic shower. They have them in star wars and star trek, they are faster, less messy and you do not need to dry yourself. I know showers with water can be nice, but unless you have a power shower it just is not worth the time.
Sleep machine. This is not to say I do not like sleeping, but when you have had three bad nights of sleep in a row you get kind of ratty. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get on a machine for 5 minutes or so and be fully refreshed as if you had a full nights sleep? If Judge Dredd can have one, why not me?
Transporter. My brother lives in San Francisco and sometimes I would like to be able to come home from work (in the UK) and go and have lunch with him (lunch for him, dinner for me). Oh, not to mention it would nice to not have a 30 minute commute to work. Star Trek has them and I want them. Oh, and please don't tell me it is "scientifically impossible" I don't care. I still want one.
Food Replicator. As I have mentioned before cooking for one is a nightmere. Another idea from Star Trek (I'm spotting an unintended theme here).
Domestic Robots. I hate washing, cleaning ironing and tidying. I know I am not alone in this, so lets have some bipedal robot that can do it all for us, and please lets not have ones that decide to take over the world like in the movie I, Robot.

So inventors out there get working!

Living in hope.
Alasdair

Quantum Cryptography pointless?

2008-10-21T23:27:00.002+01:00

I always laugh when I see headlines like this on BBC websites:

"Unbreakable' encryption unveiled"

and even more so when I realize it is talking about "Quantum Cryptography". The idea is that you send data down a fibre optic cable and if anyone views it before you do it changes the photons used to send the data, so you can tell someone is watching. This does not really ensure confidentiality though as the data has been viewed, so you still need to encrypt the data using traditional cryptography.

So what does this really gain us? Well not much is the truth. We can share data and detect when some else sees it, but if they see it we lost already. So we encrypt the data and now we know if someone has seen the encrypted data, but again having encrypted it we should not care if it is seen. Not really that useful. Well in fact it is useful in one way, we use it to send the symmetric encryption keys to the other party. If the key is viewed we try again, if not we use it knowing no one else knows it. Wonderful a secure unbreakable way of exchanging keys.

Only we already have good ways of exchanging keys. It is called PKI, or asymetric encryption. In fact Quantum key exchange does have a slight problem in that I could perform a denial of service attack by watching every photon on the fibre. Thus a symmetric key can never be exchanged. This can be got around by using PKI, but now what is the point of doing this?

Well this has been my thinking on the subject for a while, so I was pleasently surprised to read Bruce Schneier's take on the subject today.

Alasdair

Eating out veggie style

2008-10-19T12:15:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I went out to dinner with my ex-flatmate (and her boyfriend) who live in Kingston-Upon-Thames. Our first choice was to go to the New Inn on Ham Common. So we phoned them up to ensure they had veggie options on their menu. They said yes, so we set out for the pub; to find the menu only contained one vegetarian main option. Roasted peppers with rice cakes, hardly appetizing.

So we decided instead to go to the Riverside Vegetaria. It was amazing. Everything on the menu is vegetarian, most of it is vegan and gluten free. It was the best meal out I have had in a long time, and to cap it all I had more that one option.

Bring on the revolution :)

Alasdair

Upated: To correct spelling