Money money money

After lamenting my new-found poverty after Christmas and subseqent January sales, the universe seems to have unexpectedly decided that I'd spent too much, and is consequently trying to reimburse me.

First was the £283.54 interest on my 2-year Nationwide Christmas bond that came in. (Not that I can touch any of it until next December, but woo!)

Then was the completely unexpected £513.16 tax rebate from my 2003/2004 gap year. (Mega-woo!)

And then I discovered £0.01 interest in a Young Person's saving account which hasn't had a penny in it since I turned 18, thereby turning nothing into something. (Tiny-woo, but yay!)

Apparently the financial goodwill of the universe didn't extend to letting me win the £70 million Euromillions last Friday, though. Poot. Still, I'm not too unhappy with the rest :-)

Work work work

We're in week 3 of the spring term (also known as week 17 and week 13, which can get confusing), and this is definitely shaping up to be a very full-on term.

We had three exams at the beginning of last week, then a Prolog assignment due in on Friday morning. I only started learning the language on Wednesday, but it seemed to turn out well.

The biggest thing this term is a Java GUI group project (argh! Co-ordinating with other people?) for which we have to do the whole shebang — use case models, UML, static and dynamic state diagrams... gah. Any time that isn't gobbled up by other courseworks this term is likely to be gobbled up by this. (Why do things take longer to do when there are more people to do them?)

This is also the term to start thinking about my 3rd year project, since I believe we have to submit a proposal in term 3. By some miracle I actually had a (not terribly original) idea before Christmas, so I'm all set to meet with a potential supervisor next week to chat about me writing a... YARAA (Yet Another RSS/Atom Aggregator). Web-based. I might need to learn some more Python over the summer (and Javascript!), but I do have eight months before I start working on it.

My aim is to incorporate scoring filters, where (eg.) a particular feed/author can be scored highly, but individual posts with a tag of "cat pictures" could be given a negative score. Then you can filter out stuff with a score below the lower bound, or just read everything sorted by score and not bother about the few dozen at the bottom that you didn't get time to read. It's all about the metadata... Hopefully I might even end up with something useable :-)

Soooper-genius

Seen in the linklogs recently: a "Mensa" test, where the questions are in the form of "24 H in a D", and the answer would be "24 hours in a day".

33 questions, and the webpage says that getting more than 18 correct makes you a genius in the eyes of Mensa.

I must be a super-genius then, since according to the counter at the bottom, I got 50 correct. (Kevin only got 33 out of 33, even though we collaborated.)

Beat that.

Disaster on the wires

Something of a major catastrophe occurred at the weekend, when apparently the Warwick IT Services' password database (governing the university-wide network) was compromised. The notice that appeared on the main website said:

There has been a security incident which compromised a number of GroupWise email user accounts. Those who were directly involved have had both their ITS and email accounts disabled and will need to contact the IT Service Desk on [number] to find out how to get their accounts re-enabled. All other staff and students must now change their passwords to their ITS and GroupWise email accounts themselves.

(Of course, it wasn't displayed on a very frequently-used webpage, certainly not one that all 15-20,000 university members were going to see on a Sunday morning, but that's by the by.) What it didn't mention was that those whose logins weren't immediately disabled had only two attempts to change their passwords before they, too, were locked out. (This seemed like a strange security policy — if the accounts are so vulnerable that you're going to be locked out after two logins, why give people the two logins in the first place to sort themselves out?)

Now, if you had logged in from a Warwick computer, you would have been greeted with a big notice telling you to change your password immediately. What has happened is that , what with it being a weekend, very few people had logged in using a Warwick computer, and had instead done all their logging in remotely. Idiots, eh?

What this meant was that everyone has used up their "grace logins" (in my case, just by Thunderbird accessing my uni email) and had no warning whatsoever that they were about to be locked out if they didn't change their passwords.

So then, now we have 15-20,000 students each one of whom has to phone the help desk and get their password individually reset. I'm told there were long phone queues yesterday afternoon, once the news had broken on the Warwick blogs (by the two remaining people who'd managed to get their passwords changed in time, and therefore could still log on), and heaven only knows what things are like this morning. It didn't help, of course, that ITS stopped answering the phones yesterday at the normal clock-off time of 5pm.

We had an assignment due in this morning. All assignments must be handed in with an official cover sheet, which is generated by a Perl script once you enter your uni number and assignment name into the form. What with all the user accounts being disabled though, it now won't generate the cover sheet because it can't verify the uni number. Stunning. (Cue 200 panicking CS students running around like headless chickens.) We're better off than almost anyone else though — although we can't log on to the main network, the DCS machines are on a different network, managed by DCS instead of ITS. Which is how I am sitting here typing to you now, rather than trying to aimlessly fill up two hours between lectures without the aid of a computer.

The useful thing about having a blog outside the Warwick network, is that I'm one of the very few people who gets to blog about this before I phone up and wait in a queue for two hours to get my password changed. Everyone else has been effectively gagged until then.

What fun.

Memes that love memes are the happiest memes

You know, I wasn't going to do this meme because for the last few days it feels like about half of the articles in my RSS reader have been this meme. But the fishtank with blue glasses has tagged me, and I was struggling for content anyway.

So feel free to skip this if it doesn't interest you...

Four jobs I've had in my life:

Um. Only the one, so far:

• "Casual web author" for an MoD-owned company.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Blade Runner
• Dead Poets Society
• The Princess Bride
• The Usual Suspects

Four TV shows I love to watch:

• Buffy
• Six Feet Under
• House
• Fawlty Towers

Four places I have been on vacation holiday:

• France (many times, mostly Brittany)
• Keswick
• Sydney/Canberra (when living in Singapore)
• Canada

Four websites I visit daily:

• BBC News
• My Gregarius installation
• Flickr's "interesting" page
• Google

Four places I would rather be:

• Somewhere slightly warmer than here
• Somewhere with better views than here
• Somewhere with more cats/dogs than here
• Somewhere with slightly more space than here

Four bloggers I'm tagging:

Hasn't everyone on the internet done this already?

• Kevin
• Simon
• Missiedith
• David