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Rewarding Friday
24 January 2014 21:36


As it's Friday I rewarded myself with a slice of treacle tart for pudding. I'm not sure why I should reward myself for its being Friday, but I did go to the supermarket after work and do a large pile of ironing when I got home, so that's enough.

I had custard with it, because I forgot to buy ice cream.

Work was a week of two halves: fairly quiet the first half and rushed-off-my-feet hectic the last half. Mainly owing to some awkward person who found a minor security flaw that took me the best part of two days to resolve. However, I must say that the resolution is pretty nifty as it bounces round various bits and bobs to check what it needs to check. In fact, I was so impressed I rewarded myself with a sausage roll, baked potato and slice of millionaire's shortbread at lunchtime today. That's two rewards in one day.

I overslept one morning, having forgotten to set my alarm - not drastically so, but enough to miss my car-share. I'd forgotten to set my alarm, but was woken up 45 minutes later when CGF texted me. My first thought was "who's texting me in the middle of the night". Luckily my second thought was "hang on, maybe it isn't the middle of the night", so I checked the phone rather than roll over and go back to sleep. 65 minutes from bed to work - not bad.

Last weekend was pretty similar to the weekend before: paddling through the flooded river and a short bike ride. We had wellies this week, so could walk further than last week - though at times the water was getting a bit close to the top of my boots. We walked/paddled up to and beyond the point where there was no more water. People walking the other way had dry shoes and legs, which indicated that it was dry up to the next access point (the pub past Tescos). Just saying.

Slightly awkward moment at work when the senior users (who happens to be a contractor rather than permanent staff) of one of the systems I've been working on took me for a coffee to discuss progress. Nothing wrong with that (even if it did seem a bit pointless as we could have had the same conversation over the phone and saved him £3). But then he started talking some other project he's working on in a private capacity, to sound me out if I would be interested in doing the IT stuff. I suppose it was above board, in that he was asking me to work on a freelance basis in my spare time, not poaching me, but even so it seems a bit of a grey area to me. And to him too, judging by the way he left the papers for the other project out "so it looks like we are talking about the real project" (owtte). Anyway, I white-lied a bit and explained that it wasn't really my area of expertise.

News this week about common insecure passwords, of which 123456 was the most popular. But is that really so insecure? If we leave aside the question of it being easy to observe as it is typed in, or easy to remember if it is seen written down (which might be rather big leavings-aside, but never mind), you've got the same chance of guessing 123456 as any other 6-digit number (one in 210 if we assume no digit can be used more than once and that my maths is correct (which might be rather big assumptions)). In fact, it might be even more secure as anyone trying to guess a password would be more likely to try something more obscure as "no one would be stupid enough to use 123456".

Anyway, how do the people that produced this list know the passwords? Any authentication system worth its salt would hold the password in an encrypted format. It won't tell anyone what the password is, just whether or not it's what they said. That's why (amongst other reasons) when you forget your password, an application will generate a new one for you rather than tell you what it is.

Time for another glass of wine. My reward for it being Friday. Oh, have I already had a reward. Never mind; you can never have enough rewards.

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