How secure is Chip and PIN? - A report from the BBC.
University of Cambridge’s Steven Murdoch, Saar Drimer and Ross Anderson are investigating the security surrounding the actual hardware that merchants use as a possible way of hacking the banking systems. The’ve published a report on their research and findings.
A simple FAQ is available too.
The University keeps a blog. (it’s a weblog written by researchers in the Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory)
Done it again 
.. and once again it was freezing and foggy .. not quite as bad as last week but glasses, clothes and bike iced up.
Tried a slightly different route .. out on the Malmesbury road rather than the Cirencester road. Then off to Oaksey via Crudwell. Took the same amount of time but slower traffic and nicer roads.
Again made it into work in 1hr and 15 minutes .. that’s an average of 14.5 miles per hour.
Approx 2 hours of climbing down at the Warehouse on Thursday (<F6 grade routes) .. shoulder ached on the last climb. Technicaly felt I was thinking and moving well .. not able to gauge my drop in climbing fitness though. Simply not enough routes, the routes I did where not hard enough and definitely no overhangs involved.
Although shoulder ached on and after last climb, it’s felt really good over the last couple of days. Occasional twinges when moving boxes say .. but that’s it. Even stretching it has felt fine most of the time.
For the first time in ages I’ve cycled into work. Tetbury to Poulton is approx 18.2 miles and mostly flat.
It was very foggy when I woke up this morning so I debated whether I should do it but the visibility seemed to be over 100m so reckoned it would be good enough. This, and the big blob of porridge, raisins and syrup for breakfast, meant I set off late .. I was on the road at around 7:35/40am.
The biggest issue was the ice forming on both my glasses and front facing lights .. I had to scrap the ice off every 10 minutes!
Traffic wasn’t too bad .. the worst of it was leaving Tetbury on the Cirencester road .. just busy and fast. Overall though, the traffic was fine, not too heavy and just about everyone was patient and gave me loads of room .. welcome change from London (my previous commute) where every 10th driver was a potential murderer (I reckon that out in the sticks every 50th driver is probably a potential murderer .. the’re still out there, just less of ‘em).
Anyway, got into work at about 8:50am .. so it ended up taking about 1 hour and 15 minutes. I don’t have an onboard computer and I have no idea if my mobile can offer GPS tracking so I can’t be anymore accurate than that.
So I reckon if I just get out of the house in the morning a bit quicker it’ll be fine for me to be at my desk before 9am after a shower and change
I’ll probably cycle into work 2-3 times a week and car it the rest of the time .. it lets me bring in clean clothes and gives my body a rest while it gets used to the extra exercise.
ReSharper 4.0 Nightly Builds - at long bloody last, light at the end of the bloody tunnel.
Okay not a proper release yet but surely a step in the right direction.
http://www.n4s.co.uk/
Using Object Modelling, VS2008, WCF, SOA, strong emphasis on quality coding and the tools/processes to support it: CI, CC, Resharper, NUnit, NCover and a whole bunch of other usefull stuff
A British man has smashed the record for cycling round the world. Mark Beaumont, from Fife, completed the journey in 195 days - beating the previous record of 276 days.
I’ve just found out my contract start date is this Wednesday and not a week Monday.
I’ve also had some other work land in my lap so it looks like my DDD expedition will be cut some what shorter than I had hoped.
Oh well.
Eric Evans on why DDD Matters Today (Dec 20, 2006) - Interesting little excerpt .. especially the whole “it-all-went-pear-shaped-in-the-90s” comments. That so rings true from my experiences that it’s nice to hear it from someone else .. in hindsight, it explains a lot about many aspects of learning OO in the 90s for a mainstream developer like me.
I’m currently spending time looking at Domain Drive Design (DDD) and I’ve gotten past the theory (I’m re-reading/scanning through two books simultaneously: Eric Evan’s Domain Driven Design and Scott Ambler’s The Object Primer - Agile Model-Driven Development with UML 2.0) and I’m now looking to actually try it out .. I’m thinking that I want to build my domain model but how do I store it? How do I work with it? Document it? How does the code run and how are the objects persisted? I don’t wish to spend time messing around with a database .. I’m just not interested in that side of things at the mo .. and really, I couldn’t care less about the UI either. Although I know loads about both what I want to do is concentrate on the modelling aspects.
Guess what I stumbled upon?
The Naked Objects Framework .. sounds very promising.
In fact what it promises is: “.. all you need to develop are your domain objects - the Naked Objects platform auto-creates an object-oriented user interface (giving you the choice of different styles) and the underlying database (using Hibernate)”
Can’t say fairer than that .. will look into and see how well it actually works.
Resources
Wikipedia entry
Naked Objects Resources
Developer’s Manual