Vista

Belatedly:

• Mike Little (@mikelittlezed1) – finally!  Although better known for co-founding WordPress, Mike’s also a member of the ORG tech community, so I’d seen him around before online but never met in person.
• @_vixx, who really should get together with @mseckington sometime as they’re both game crazy :)
• Rhys Wynne (@rhysw1) – who very bravely hosted a session on localisation, with particular reference to Welsh
• Simon Dickson (@simond) – who presented an informative talk on how WordPress is being used by government in the UK
• Jeff Van Campen (@otrops), Rachael Furn (@calmbanana), Laura Kalbag (@laurakalbag), Gareth Tickner (@garethtickner) and Robert McKenzie (@m1xzg) for allowing me to join them in a WordHack, which resulted in  Mobile Kubrick.
• Tony Scott (@tonys) – for organising the event :)

My Co-Habiting Partner (CHiP) is a fan of Super Noodles and every so often, green with envy at the ease with which he’s able to speedily majyk up a hot, tasty (each to their own) snack , I try to create a gluten-free version.  Today’s went like this:

Ingredients

• 1 onion, chopped however you like
• 1 tsp butter
• 2 tsp turmeric
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp garlic granules
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tsp coarse ground pepper
• salt
• 1/4 pt boiling water
• 1 portion rice noodles (uncooked)
• 1 olive oil
• 3 cardamon pods

Method

Melt the butter in a saucepan over a medium heat and add the onion.  Stir until the onion has softened to your liking.  Add the turmeric, curry powder, ginger, pepper, garlic granules, tomato puree and vinegar and stir together.  Add the water, oil, cardamom pods and noodles.  Stir briefly to mix everything together and prevent the noodles sticking together. Turn up the heat to bring the concoction to the boil. Once it’s boiling turn the heat back down again so that it simply simmers and keep it simmering until the noodles are cooked and the sauce has reduced to a consistency you’re happy with.  Remove from the heat, pour into a dish and serve.

Result

Tasty :)

Update: Note to self – try adding banana and currant and/or raisins next time.

I have just sent an email asking for my bluegumtree domains to be excluded from Phorm:

I request that my web sites be excluded from scanning by the
Phorm/BT Webwise system, as I consider deep packet inspection to be an infringement of privacy.

Here is a list of the domains that should be excluded (please exclude
any and all subdomains as well):

bluegumtree.com
bluegumtree.co.uk

Many thanks,

Sheila Thomson
webmaster@bluegumtree.com

I based the format of my email on the message sent recently by Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Like him, I have already received an automatic response:

The response I received is almost identical but for the last line: a promotion for  the anti-anti-Phorm website they launched today.  Unfortunately, it’s not been as well received as Phorm might have hoped and may now even be something they’d prefer to be shoving discretely under the carpet.

Anyhoo, it seems all I have to do now is wait 48 hours.  Wonder if there’s any way I can then double-check that my domains are on the exclusion list?

In case you’re wondering, the motivation behind doing all this is that Phorm relies on deep packet inspection (DPI), which I consider to be an invasive technique that infringes on personal privacy and that employing it simply to improve the effectiveness of advertising is a poor trade-off.

For more information about how DPI is being used in this context, see https://nodpi.org/faq

Jeni Tennison is an XSLT guru who shares her expertise unstintingly on paper, at conferences and online.  If you’re an XSLT programmer, Jeni needs no introduction; she’s probably helped you out sometime or awed you with an elegantly simple solution to what you thought was a horrendously complex problem.  She has a knack for it.  And this skill for simplicity and elegance in code is something I aspire to.  And that’s easier said than done in XSLT – no sooner have you matched a “/” and before you can say value-of,  you find you’ve applied templates to the descendant of an ancestor, sorted three ways, with a mode and priorities applied.  So I salute you Jeni and will spend at least some of Ada Lovelace Day refactoring in your honour.

Research has revealed a peculiarity about role models: if you’re a woman, gender matters.  Although any (good) role model is better than none, the effect is greater for women when the role model  is also a woman. Unfortunately, during the last decade the ratio of women:men in technology has decreased or – at best – remained the same in most regions of the world, thereby reducing the pool of potential role female models.  Ada Lovelace Day is an attempt to redress the balance by drawing attention to women excelling in technology.

It’s the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson, social software consultant and digital rights activist – if you’ve never heard of her before, here’s your first new inspirational woman!  Not only did she react to this depressing downward trend by having a proactive idea, she acted on it by publishing a website explaining what it’s all about, created a pledge so that people might register their support and then publicised the two widely.

Today, all around the world, people will blog about women in technology – and maybe you’ll discover a new role model.

Although my G1 has a touch screen, I don’t seem to be able to select and copy text unless it’s in a text input field or clickable. So, for example, I can’t simply copy and paste a reset password sent via email; I have to switch back and forth between email app and browser, entering the random squence of numbers and mixed-case letters a few at a time.

I make a lot of purchases online and of late am having to deal with Verified by Visa (VbV) more often than I’d like.  Aside from whether or not I think such a process improves security or aids phishers, I have some serious issues with the way it’s conducted.

I have yet to complete the process, end-to-end, without having to detour through the “Forgot Password?” section, followed immediately after by a call to my bank, who then walk me through the reset and/or re-registration process.  The things that (often repeatedly) trip me up are:

1. Password restricted to no more than 10 characters I find it difficult enough to remember passwords without a false limit being imposed on their length – especially as I’ve been trying the increase the length of my passphrases because I’m under the (maybe false?) impression that the longer the passphrase the harder it’ll be to crack.
2. Name on Card I have learnt now that what this field is really after is my forename and surname.  Not my name as it’s actually written on the card.

   Also, during my most recent re-registration experience, it occurred to me to wonder if, as I was required to enter my name in lowercase during the registration process, should I be doing so during the actual verification process?  If so, there’s nothing to say I should.

3. Inconsistent date patterns For my date of birth, I am required to follow the pattern ddmmyy but for my card’s expiry date I am required to follow the pattern mmyyyy.  This is especially disconcerting because the pattern used ON my card is mmyy.
4. Obscuring non-password fields The values I enter in the “Card expiry date” and “Postcode” fields are obscured as they would be when entering a password, making it trickier for me to spot mistakes.  These are not fields that are typically obscured and it puzzles me why these are considered to be more sensitive than either my 3-digit security number or my date of birth.
5. Card expiry date This is not specific to the verification or “Forgot Password?” processes but a general database issue.  During my most recent re-registration process it was revealed to me by the person walking me through it that a mistake had been made the previous time and my card expiry date erroneously recorded as “2100″.  Given that Visa set the maximum lifetime period for their cards, it should be possible to use today’s date to calculate the upper limit for a valid expiry date and use that to identify and flag up such mistakes to prevent them getting as far as the database.

I find it difficult to believe that Visa would consider this good customer experience so and as, so far, they’ve not had to take the brunt of my annoyance each time the process has broken down (I love you First Direct, really I do) , this evening I’ve written to them so that I can be sure that they’ve at least been alerted to these issues.

Although I’m sure there are many people who remember their password each time and sail through effortlessly, my experiences have been so consistently bad that I find it hard to believe I’m alone in this.  If you’ve had the same/simliar/completely different issues with Verified by Visa, I’d love to hear about them.

Yesterday I watched Sunset Blvd. for the first time.  It was first released almost 60 years ago (1950) and so, unsurprisingly is very different to modern Hollywood fare.  Although one of the central characters is a very melodramatic former film star the pace of the film is generally pedestrian and fairly predictable; the two often jar.  Another peculiarity was the lack of protest from the male lead at having his independence stolen away from him.

All that aside, it was a pleasant Sunday afternoon film: beautifully shot, very glamourous and easy to follow.  Interestingly, the narration is so complete that it’s possible to almost entirely keep up with the plot without watching a single frame.

Recently some friends resolved to watch their way through iMDB’s Top 250 Movies over the course of this year; one film per week.   This reminded me that there are many old films that I have never seen – or have only part watched – and nudged me into finally doing something about it.

So, first things first: which films?  I had some vague ideas but no list and very vague criteria: older than me; probably black and white; not silent; “classic”.  Hmm…  Fortunately it’s possible to browse iMDB’s Best/Worst lists by decade.  Past that point, the selection process became pretty arbitrary but I do at least now have a list.  I’m not committing to watching them all, in full, but it’s a start.