Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Bailey, a Staffordshire bull terrier, went for a wee against a faulty pylon, reports The Sun.
His owner Gary Davies said: “There was an almighty explosion and the whole street lit up. I turned round and the dog was on fire.”
The power was off in homes in Middlestone Moor, Co Durham for five hours.
Fortunately, according to the article, Bailey is recovering and recuperating.
The November/December issue of Computing in Science and Engineering has a great article titled Software Carpentry. It’s basically a crash course on software engineering for non-programmer scientist types that need to write programs. All the courseware is online, or if you happen to live near University of Toronto, you can sign up to take the course.
From the website’s overview:
Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives programming, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this well. As a result, they spend their time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.
This course is an intensive introduction to basic software development practices for scientists and engineers that can reduce the time they spend programming by 20-25%. All of the material is open source: it may be used freely by anyone for educational or commercial purposes, and research groups in academia and industry are actively encouraged to adapt it to their needs.
Sounds just like me. I’m looking forward to going through the course material and learning something useful that I can use to re-work some of my existing programming projects.
A story over at Slashdot points to an NYT article describing how some researchers cobbled together a device to read those newfangled RFID credit cards. Everything was built using OTS components, and the researchers say an even smaller device could be made. So conceivably, a nefarious bad guy cracker with a modicum of skills could cobble one together, mingle through crowds and lift info off these cards through people’s pants and purses.
The finding comes at a time of strong suspicion among privacy advocates and consumer groups about the security of the underlying technology, called radio frequency identification, or RFID. Though the systems are designed to allow a card to be read only in close proximity, researchers have found that they can extend the distance.
The actual distance is still a matter of debate, but the claims range from several inches to many feet. And even the shortest distance could allow a would-be card skimmer to mill about in a crowded place and pull data from the wallets of passersby, or to collect data from envelopes sitting in mailboxes.
Naturally credit card companies and banks say this is a highly impractical attack method given that other methods (i.e. phishing) are so much more effective. Excellent application of security through obscurity. I guess they haven’t learned that even if it might be less practical than current methods, it just becomes another item in the bad guys’ arsenal.
NYT also provides a link to a paper by the researchers. It’s an interesting read with a lot of good info on how the RFID cards work.
We’re beagle-sitting for a friend of ours this weekend. Finish off the work week with a trip to the dog park, doggie class for Nala tomorrow, Simba needs a bath, both dogs are getting ear treatments (just a mild ear infection) for ‘yeastie beasties’, which they are none too pleased about and JASPCA‘s Paws in the Park is happening on Sunday.
It will be interesting to see how 3 dogs and 2 people stuffed into a car get along.
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