Furthermore: September 2005

September 29, 2005

Nor am I out of it

Shameful admission time: I switched my home PC back to Windows XP from Mandrake Linux. Why? Well, I thought it would be good to use Linux - get some experience of a Unix platform, stop supporting the kind of idiocy perpetrated by Microsoft, open formats yada yada - all that good stuff.

However, there are just too many niggling problems - my printer stopped working one day, and I can’t figure out how to make it work again. I can’t easily sync my Palm to my PC. Hardware generally is harder to get working. It’s harder to install or upgrade anything. I used to find this kind of thing was a spur to learn more about the platform, but now I just find it’s a pain.

On the other side, Windows is now much more stable, more secure - provided you do sensible things like using a firewall, using Firefox, not running as admin when you don’t have to - and generally more familiar to me when things don’t work right.

So back to Windows I go - at least for the time being. I’m still not enamoured of Microsoft, and I’m not keen on the proprietary file formats (not that it affects me that much - I don’t use Outlook, and I can convert Word and Excel to Open Office if need be). I think next computer I buy may be a Mac (Unix and Shinies, as someone put it) but that’s not going to be for a year or two.

New phone

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a new phone. I was considering replacing my Palm IIIc with a Treo, but it looked too expensive to justify. I realised that the feature I really wanted was a decent camera in the phone - I want to be able to take photos for this blog - probably using Flickr. I know that if I buy a separate digital camera that I’ll forget to take with me anywhere, plus I can’t see I’m going to need all the resolution and features of a separate camera, so a decent camera phone is really two birds with one stone.

So, I googled, and I found this useful MeFi thread. Checking out some of the recommendations from there, I found the best compromise of cost and function looked like the Sony Ericsson K700i.

I got an unlocked one from Ebay for a reasonable price - now I just need to get a SIM and a cable to copy pics to my PC (I’m not so desperate to upload things that they can’t wait a few hours). I’ve had a play with the phone using my wife’s SIM, and it looks pretty good - the joystick control is a bit fiddly, but the display is good, and the camera looks fairly easy to use too.

Oh, look, you can get them on Amazon too (yes, I signed up to Associates - I’ll post about that too I guess):

September 11, 2005

Wiki Wednesday

Here’s a reasonable pic of me talking to Suw Charman at London Wiki Wednesday last week. The event was on the 22nd floor of DrKW so there was a fantastic view of the city. Check out some of the flickr photos of the evening

Thanks to Hugh McLeod for blogging this - I’d not have known it was on otherwise and I had a fantastic evening.

Smile Banking Site

I’ve been banking with Smile for a while now, and I recently sent them an email on what I’d like to be able to do with their website. I’ve had a generic response, but I thought I’d blog it here to see how much of it actually happens:

• back button - minor thing, but it keeps catching me out: make the back button work. I know there are some security problems to work out, but it’s so annoying to be logged out when you inadvertently press it.


• security - Passwords and security challenge questions are okay, but leave you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle type attacks. Are you thinking about either a second channel for authentication - I’ve seen sites which send a text message to your phone with some generated key that you have to enter to complete a risky transaction (eg big withdrawal) - or some form of transaction authentication would be good. You could give account holders (optionally perhaps) a hardware or software security app. I seed it with a PIN you send me and then when I want to do a big withdrawal, you send me a challenge code which I enter into the device. It spits out a response based on some well known crypto protocol (which you should ideally make public) which I then put in the site to authenticate that transaction.


• statements - My immediate gripe is that 50 statements seems ridiculously low (and is it per account, or for all accounts?). The storage is minimal so I’m not sure what the reason is - why can’t all statements be online forever (or at least for 7 years, which I seem to remember is the statutory limit). It seems to me that now you’re online, you have a great opportunity to improve the functionality here beyond basic statements. I’d love to be able to search transactions, and even better, to tag them with personal categories which I can then use to create ad-hoc statements of some budget category (eg personal spending, household budget etc). At present I do that locally with spreadsheets, but you could add tremendous value to the site by making it possible to do some of this online. Or, with a web services API, I could write a spreadsheet that would pull data live out of the site and let me analyse it locally. I realise that as a slogan, “Smile - now with web services API” probably won’t directly appeal to a lot of people. It might create a community that would build services for you though. Plus, get in first and you have the de-facto standard.



• notification - I don’t want email (I have too much already). What I would like is RSS or Atom.

Horror and Terror

My brother has now got a website up at HorrorAndTerror.org

You can hear a related piece of work by him here