this blog is girtby.net

Break And Enter

My SO came home this afternoon to a crowd of police outside our house. We’d been broken into. Again.

It happened while both of us were at work. The neighbour from two doors down came home and found a Lexus blocking his garage door. We live in a row of terrace houses with a rear lane [...]

Silicon Dating

So I’m reading the Linux Shadow Password HOWTO document and come across the following:

If you think about it, an 8 character password encodes to 4096 * 13 character strings. So a dictionary of say 400,000 common words, names, passwords, and simple variations would easily fit on a 4GB hard drive. The attacker need [...]

That Elusive Last Star

I’m sure the distribution of ratings in my iTunes music library says something about me.

I’ve spent some time thinking about how to assign ratings and even writing scripts to report on my progress. And what progress have I to report?

Of 2720 rated songs in my library, exactly 15 are deemed worthy of a perfect 5 [...]

Bad Company

Being added to someone’s blogroll is usually quite a sincere form of flattery. But I just can’t help but wonder if there’s been a mistake of some sort here.

Ernie Chambers has me added to his blogroll of almost exclusively right-wing whackos like Instapundit, Powerline and Tim Blair. Surely Ernie can’t mean to put me in [...]

Bankers are Funny

Here is section 3.1 of the Usual Terms and Conditions (UTC) for Consumer Mortgage Lending, from the Commonwealth Bank:

If the Security is not in existence at the date of the Contract, you agree to give us the Security.

I think this is mostly in reference to properties that are bought off the plan — [...]

Google Never Lies

Wow. You don’t get more authoritative than Google. Number one hit, no less!

Thanks to Frances for the tip.

A Futile Gesture

The great thing about blogging is that even when you perform some totally pointless task or make a futile gesture, at least you get to redeem some benefit from it by sharing with others.

So, in that vein let me tell you all now that I have attempted to report an email spammer to the Australian [...]

Aesthetics

Now I’m no great aesthete, but why does this

remind me of this

?

(This puzzler brought to you by Wordpress 2.0.1, now with fixed image uploading!)

Ripley’s Design It Or Not

Roll up! Roll up! Ladies and Gentlemen, step this way for the most amazing and horrific of sights ever witnessed by human eyes!

Now my friends, you may have travelled the Internet and seen many astounding and amazing sights. You may have used software so strange as to defy comprehension. You may have suffered web sites [...]

Web 2.0 Release Notes Missing

I would like to announce that as of today I am changing my name to alastr in order to be fully Web 2.0-compliant.

The term Web 2.0 certainly describes something or other. The importance of Web 2.0 compliance can be illustrated by this graph.

Clear yet? No, me neither. But I have great hopes for the Web [...]