Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Somewhere in a galaxy far, far way the time is …

Is it just me or does Yoda actually sound a wee bittie Scottish?

I wrote and complained that this unnamed company thought it was okay to post my password around the internet for any hacker to filter and record for future reference (i.e. abuse). I guess I’m like a lot of people who use a single password for a number of things. Here’s their ‘helpful’ reply.

Thanks for your email.

We do take security seriously, and it’s true that email is not inherently a secure protocol, however neither is the web itself by default. Therefore as you sent your password to us in plain text when you registered, so technically speaking us sending it back to you in an email message is not a significant difference.

To be most secure we would run a fully-secure server like banks do, and we would permanently encrypt all passwords immediately on registration. However, we have a large number of users, of varying abilities and from a broad range of computers, ISPs, corporate networks with different restrictions etc., and to create a system which works well for most users most of the time we balance the needs of security against issues of usability and audience. For simplicity and to make our site as friendly as possible we provide new registrants with an email record of their account details so they have something to refer back to.

Please note that you can change your password at any time from within ‘my account’, and if you do then your new password information will NOT be sent to you by email unless you specifically request it using the ‘forgotten password’ mechanism on the site.

Regards

A. Muppet

A few weeks ago I wrote about how wonderful it would be if a company like Google, who provide very useful maps of the Earth and the moon (so I’m lead to believe) put their heads together to produce a map of the galaxy? I’ve long been a fan of Science Fiction so besides pulling out an imaginary few million credits out my back pocket (to pay for a space flight, you see) watching stars, planets, comets, and general space junk go past on my computer screen would be the next best thing. But I might as well wait for the moon to turn green, I told myself. That is, it ain’t going to happen anytime soon.

It was quite by coincidence as I read my way down the ‘Why Microsoft is so bad’ website that I eventually came across Celestia, an open source application, bundled along with a few other Open CD products.

It’s more or less what I was hoping for. You’ve got stars, all the usual planets, and a few I’d never heard of. There is even a number of virtual tours to be taken … very educational. I had a lot of fun tracking the Cassini spacecraft around the galaxy. Because the designers thought of almost everything, you can speed up and slow down time and even reverse it (pity it’s only virtual!). Thus, I was able to retrace the craft’s path back past Venus to its eventual launch from Earth. Going in the other direction, i.e. forwards, it was fascinating to see Cassini spinning around Saturn, around and around … Watching that and all the moons do their celestial dance was exactly what I wanted for Christmas. Thank you Santa.

P.S. For the Uber-geek it’s also possible to download models of Star Trek and Babylon5 models.

For some years I’ve been more than impressed by the Japanese fascination for bathroom technology. Not only do their sophisticated gadgets obviate the need for toilet paper (your bum gets washed and blow-dried) after a visit the bathroom analyzes ’samples’ using lasers, collates medical information, making it able to detect early signs of certain health problems, including kidney disease and cancer. Weird, or what? I like the idea of lasers shooting out bit.

Well, the latest news is they’ve got that one step further: there’s now integrated MP3 toilet technology with detachable remote. What more could you ask for, eh? Link

Update: another great product for the bathroom.

I think it looks quite pretty. In fact, I like it so much I’ve given ‘My Tags’ a whole page to itself! (via the links on the left-hand side)

See here for help getting your own tagroll.

My regular readers may recall that I like to read Google News to find out what’s been happening in the world. In fact, I rely on it these days. So when I first took a look at Google Video, what I expected it to be was some sort of extension of their excellent news product. Perhaps, it would even contain a dash of the interactive features that the likes of youtube.com offer (i.e. rating, commenting and providing easy external links into content). I certainly wouldn’t have expected the big G to ask me to put up with a cold lifeless search interface into a database I can’t navigate. No doubt there’s bound to be some fantastic content in there but how am I supposed to find new stuff if there are no reviews to read.

Imagine what you would do it nobody reviewed films when they came out in the cinema. How would you know which ones to go and see and which ones to avoid? Wouldn’t that be insane?

Well putting that aside for the moment, one better-than-Google service I’ve been trying recently is video aggregator, blinkx.tv. I can say with complete confidence that it’s going to be a great success as they host that secret key ingredient that has historically propelled all new technology into the main stream, that is, porn.

Besides the ‘oohs’, and the ‘aahs’ you can find several video feeds from numerous well known news providers, e.g. CNN, Fox and especially our much admired BBC.

The thing I like about view video news online is that I have the choice of when to watch and what to watch. One thing I certainly won’t miss from terrestrial TV is the cricket. Damn straight!

As I was reading the Slashdot headline “View the Moon in 3D on Your Desktop” an idea started forming in my head. Wouldn’t it be amazing to travel virtually around the galaxy?

What if someone, like Google, gathered together all the star maps and linked them together, in the same way they’ve built up a picture of the Earth. Plus (and this is the crucial interactive part) providing a feature where the virtual traveller ‘warps’ around the galaxy like they do in Star Trek. Namely, as you travel faster than light you get to see the stars go past. Couldn’t you spend hours getting lost in it all?

And whilst I’m dreaming, wouldn’t it be amazing if the stars moved in real-time too?

I just had a quick look at Microsoft’s new ‘live’ aggregator tool. It actually looks fairly good. Plus, I’m encouraged to see that they’re promising further ‘Firefox support’. I say if Mircosoft are prepared to support non-IE browsers then the rest of the web community should do too.

What would have impressed me no end would have been if they’d included some links to Google; I read Google news everyday. I’m going to keep my eye on it for now. In the meanwhile I’ll continue to rely on my Google Reader, did I mention that it’s been upgraded recently?

[Update]

Guess what. I found a link to Google news! The US edition

Click image for more.

Click here to see mine:

If you would like to show your friends or family just how clever and important you are (and you are!) you can get your own search engine by clicking on “Make Your Search Engine»” available on the Googlefor.com page.

Incidentally, I noticed there’s a yahoo version too, but exactly who is that going to impress?