Richard Giles Blog

I won’t be posting messages for the next month. I’m getting married tomorrow and then I’ll be on a month long honeymoon, here, here and here.

See you in April.

I probably won’t get a chance to update the Blog for a couple of days, because I’ll be here until Friday night.

Several companies, including Honeywell, Invensys, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola and Philips Electronics have announced an alliance to create a new wireless standard for low power home automation devices.

Although I agree that it’s worth investigating new wireless technologies, even new standards, I’m a little concerned about their motivation. In the Cnet article, ZigBee to keep network market buzzing, there seems to be the suggestion that the major motivating reason is power. Devices could run off two AA batteries for several years.

Devices are due late in 2004. Haven’t they heard of rechargeables? You’d also think we’d have better power sources by then.

I’ve just implemented MTAmazon. A plugin for the Movable Type blogging tool. It’s just a test to see how it goes. Initially the result is pretty funny. It works with Amazon Web Services by taking keywords, that I define at the time I create the Blog entry, and it then searches for a book and adds it to the page. In general I try and pick only a few words that sum up the entries content.

Honeymoon provided the link What No One Tells the Bride: Surviving the Wedding, Sex After the Honeymoon, Second Thoughts, Wedding Cake Freezer Burn, Becoming Your Mother, Screaming About Money, Screaming, Gadget the link Natural Penis Enlargement: New methods of avoiding and curing impotence, premature ejaculation, and erectile dysfunction safely and inexpensively. NEW Secrets that your doctor won¿t tell you, No Pumps, No Pills and No Gadgets!, and Japanese Invention the link 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu.

Just ordered from Amazon, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Pattern Recognition and Jennifer Government: A Novel. All for delivery to the Wilderness Lodge at Disney World in a couple of weeks when I arrive for my honeymoon. I plan to get them read on the cruise that we are taking for two weeks after the 6 day stint with Mickey and friends.

Sony seems to be jumping on the Wi-Fi gadget bandwagon. Their Japanese site has details on the Sony FSV-PGX1. Gadget Watch at Japan Inc. has details. The FSV is a file server, running Linux, with the ability for any computer running and Operating System to connect to it via Wi-Fi (through CIFS/SMB, NFS and FTP). Doesn’t sound so fabulous until you find out it is Pocket PC size (83mmx155mmx31mm) and contains a 20GB drive. Great to carry from your office to meetings.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the links.

Slashdot has a review of Gibson’s new novel Pattern Recognition. Unfortunately, this novel isn’t released in Australia until early March. At which point I will be in the U.S. on my honeymoon. So, I’ll just wait and pick it up then.

Australian Financial Review, also have their cut on the novel.

The Guardian explores Whuffie and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in its article The currency of respect.

The theory goes thus: if you write a symphony or contribute to society, people give you Whuffie. Your personal Whuffie rating is constantly updated online so everyone can view it. The more you have, the higher the esteem in which you’re held. It is like the way Google ranks web pages according to how many people link to them: the more people who like your page (or symphony), the higher you get rated. Or, if you’ve contributed a lot of unpaid programming to an open source project such as Linux, then appreciative users will buy you drinks wherever you go.

The higher your Whuffie, the more people will listen to you. Plus, it helps allocate access to the scarce resources - the historically preserved attractions at Walt Disney World, for instance.

Thanks to Smart Mobs for the link.

Dave Hyatt (co-author of Safari browser code) has asked for feedback on the GUI features at Your Thoughts Go Here.

No guessing what the number one request will be. Tabbed browsing (that goes for me to Dave). I’d also like to see that RSS client built into the browser as you mentioned a couple of weeks ago. I found Netscapes highlight and select Google from the right click drop down menu useful as well, what about allowing a highlighted text to be imported into the Google search.

Other than that, I love Safari. Great work.

Mitnick has responded to some questions on SlashDot. His stories are fascinating, and reminds me that I must grab his book,
The Art of Deception.

One story he tells amongst the questions shows that although we have security conscious employees, they can still easily get caught out by persistence and imagination.

On one occasion, I was challenged by a friend of mine to get his Sprint Foncard number. He said he would buy me dinner if I could get it. I couldn’t pass up a good meal so I phoned customer service and pretended to be from the IT department. I asked the rep if she was having any difficulties with her computer. She wasn’t. I asked her the name of the system she uses to access customer accounts, to verify I was working with the right service center. She gave it to me. Immediately thereafter, I called back and got a new service rep. I told her my computer was down and I was trying to bring up a customer account. She brought it up on her terminal. I asked her for the customer’s Foncard number? She started asking me a million questions? What was your name again? Who do you work for? What address are you at? You get the idea. Since I did not exercise any due diligence in my research, I just made up names and locations. It didn’t work. She told me she was going to report my call to security!

Since I had her name, I briefed a friend of mine on the situation and asked him to pose as the “security investigator” so he could take a report. He called back customer service and was transferred to the woman. The “security investigator” said he received a report that unauthorized people were calling to obtain proprietary customer information. After getting the details of the “suspicious” call, the investigator asked what information the caller was after. She said the customer’s Foncard number. The “investigator” asked for the number. She gave it to him. Whoops! Case closed!