Neil Hopcroft

part time/evening/weekend jobs London: Potential Flirters needed for feedback

The world is enough

Flying high, falling far

Shame these don’t project – the ultimate drive-in.

For those who remember the 888 – how times change.

Spalding launches John Peel Commemorative Tulip

Hmmm…this is an interesting security risk….I was making an instruction submission to my stockbroker earlier through their ‘secure email gateway’ on the their website. I’ve just received a bounce message from that submissision to the email address they have for communicating with me. What has happened is that their web gateway is set to package the secure messages (they are on https pages) as internal emails but with reply-to set to my email address.

The address this message was sent to is unrecognised, so the mail server has sent a bounce to the reply-to address containing the entirity of my original message, which I had submitted into what was advertised as a secure system, with the implication that (i) you didn’t have to worry about saying confidential things (ii) they could identify it was you saying them.

So there are two risks here, information I thought was protected was leaked over a non-secured network outside of my control and the bounce message contains some information about the internal structure of their systems, like the name of their internal exchange server and the name of the account to which ‘secured’ emails are sent. I wonder if anyone receiving those emails actually checks they came from their webserver…?

Now it happens that what I was saying wasn’t actually that exciting (buy 42 Trifast shares at 67 pence each) so I’m not particularly worried that any of my information has leaked to people it shouldn’t do, so its actually not too much of an issue *for this email*.

(and I’m not even going to ask why uu.net are routing my stockbroker traffic through the phones4u customer gateway…)

This is scary
(warning: contains picture of goths, do not click if you are of a nervous disposition or otherwise weak constitution)

Last night I went to beermats housewarming party, down in Woking. I was there early having gotten myself lost in the wrong bit of Woking – too much reliance on technology, I had no backup plan for when my navigation system didn’t know about his road, so had to phone to get directions. Twice. It would have been a third time but I just spotted their road when I was looking for somewhere safe to pull over.

We spent most of the night experiencing small world syndrome – with various people independently known to other party attendees, I’m not sure if its just the internet thats done this to us, or whether the world has really always been like that and I’m just noticing it now.

Still, there was a nice amount of geeking, to the point we were offered a whiteboard to help consider build tree annotations, an offer we politely declined. The boysenberry juice seemed to go down quite well with varied success in attempts to mix with available alcohols.

A fun night, made all the more disturbing by the collection of My Little Ponies in the roof.

I’ve got mice.

I’ve just been through my ‘big box of junk’ since it had gotten too heavy and was making my shelves fall over, lurking at the bottom of it were mice, six of them, in various incarnations from the oldstyle Microsoft inport busmouse all the way through to PS2.

So if anyone can think of anything to do with the kinds of electronics you get in mice I’d be interested to hear about it.

“Censored 2006 from Seven Stories Press features the 25 most important news stories not covered by the corporate media in 2004-05. Government Secrecy, Media Failures in Iraq, National Voter Fraud, Citizen Surveillance, and Environmental disasters are just some of this year’s topics.”

“Visitor can interupt them by sending SMS message from mobile phone to a number, displayed next to the sculptures. The living statue then ‘writes’ the text of the message, before carrying on as before”

“Brain-computer interfaces (BCI), like the one developed at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, places electrodes in key locations on the user’s scalp to detect nerve activity which is then translated to walking or movement of the virtual character’s hands. The team at the Graz University of Technology have incorporated a fully immersive Virtual Cave for a mind bending walk by thinking”

A keyboard for those who can’t face turning off capslock.

None more black

Who is up for the Drainage Museum run day on Sunday?

“We got a letter from Santa complaining about his reindeer’s death and looked into it seriously”

“This project page was created as an adjunct to the following article by Louis LaPointe, which we recommend as an introduction to the subject.

* Acetone In Fuel Said to Increase Mileage (http://pesn.com/2005/03/17/6900069_Acetone/) – Up to 35% increase reported. Acetone said to improve the fuel’s ability to vaporize completely by eliminating the surface tension that causes an increase in particulate vaporization temperature. (PESN; March 18, 2005)

A growing number of people are reporting their results, as tabulated here. Most have noted increased mileage, more power, more stable idle, faster start-up, cleaner emmissions. Part of that is likely to be from the cleaning of the engine that the acetone accomplishes. A few have not seen an increase in mileage at the concentration of acetone they tried. Too much acetone decreases mileage. Alcohol in the fuel tends to negate the positive effects of acetone. No one has yet reported damage to their engine from acetone being added to the fuel. Several have soaked fuel components in pure acetone for extended periods and have not seen substantial effect other than some minor swelling.”

Looks interesting, with significant improvements shown from Ford and Honda engines, among others. Not sure how well these kinds of results will translate to UK vehicles, where we’re getting far higher octaine petrol and compression ratios to match. I’d be interested, for instance, in results for using higher octaine petrol in the same engines, instead of acetone. Any ideas what this’ll do to your engine or fuel delivery system?