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Finance::Bank::Barclays now useless
6:27pm, Tuesday 13 November 2007 (Updated 3:09pm, Wednesday 28 November 2007)

Barclays have sent me a PINsentry, a chip-and-pin device which adds two-factor authentication to their online banking service. This is undoubtedly more secure. Yet it's much more inconvenient (I'll need to carry the device with me in case I need to use online banking while out at work or visiting a friend), the login process is more cumbersome and takes longer, and also means that my Finance::Bank::Barclays Perl module is now virtually useless, unless/until someone figures out how to interface the PINsentry to a PC. Robot arm, webcam, OCR...?

Update:

Oh, look: "Simple application to work like a PINSentry using any smart card reader supported by pcsc-lite." Time to acquire a card reader!

Overheard in the office
5:14pm, Friday 7 September 2007

"I'm all for catastrophic failures."

Maybe that should be the systems support motto...

Spam of the day
4:19pm, Friday 10 August 2007

From 419-style spam:

Contact them ASAP to avoid the increas of the cheepment, the cheeping fee has been paid

Cheep!

Floating around
3:10pm, Tuesday 7 August 2007

My work desktop's hard disk died (again) so I did a fresh Debian Etch install. I thought I'd try out Gnome - stop laughing at the back. But it hides the root window. How could I live without my trusty floatbg?

1. run gconf-editor (that probably lives in a menu somewhere)
2. change apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop to false
3. in Desktop/Preferences/Sessions, add floatbg as a startup program

Ta-daa!

Haiku error messages
1:54pm, Friday 20 July 2007

These are quite old, but they're still wonderful...

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

I am now thinking calm Zen-like thoughts regarding a recalcitrant LDAP server...