Just reading the following blogpost from my friend Owen's blog about how easy it is to crack WEP wireless encryption. As Owen says its better to have encryption than non at all, if you are unable to use WPA you can also lock down your wireless router by MAC Address. Now every Network card has a unique address which is called a MAC Address you can tell your router only to accept traffic from the MAC address's of the computers on your network.

Now the above is far from foolproof as it is possible to spoof a MAC address using certain Olicom cards and special software. But the hacker will need to scan a lot more traffic to pickup the MAC address of one of the computers on your network and is more likely to move to a network which does not do MAC address filtering. Another trick is to not broadcast your SSID, all networks have an identifier called an SSID if you stop your network advertising itself it will be harder for hackers to find it.

This show is quite funny although you can't help but feel that the people they have selected on this show have been selected with certain tendencies such as he ability not to get on with each other. What ever the criteria it makes very entertaining viewing.

Some of the things I find the most entertaining is sometimes they will send out a research group to find out some market research about what they are doing and then the leader of the team will come up with an idea all by himself. Even if the market research showed that his or her idea would fail he will still go through with the idea and fail. Its unbelievably funny viewing and what is so funny is I have sometimes seen this approach in companies before. They will go through a vendor selection process for a product find a really great product that fits the task and then someone on the board will say we will choose product X instead of Y because we really like the company that makes it rather that if product X is the better product. 

Yep the French have set a new land speed record on their trains at 574.8 km/h, that's fast, very fast...

Now why can't we get some nice fast trains here in the UK? Apparently the French don't just have fast trains their trains actually run on time, what a concept...

We all take it for granted at work, we have email access and Internet access. Some of us however have more Internet access than others based on the corporate policies of the organizations we may work for. We use our computers for word processing, we save the documents we have created on the network for future use some of us may even have version control repositories for our documents and occasionally we print them out to read or hand over to clients or colleagues. But I was surprised and shocked to find out how computers are used at a small law firm I discovered they have some pretty cool multimedia machines with state of the art applications on them and all the machines were being used as were as glorified word processors. The secretaries would type up all the letters on the computers in MS Word, then they would print the letters out and occasionally the secretaries would exchange letters on floppy disks between each other and after they had printed two copies of the letter out and filed one copy they would delete the copy from their floppy disks to free up space! The machines they were using also had underused 60gig hard disks! What I found even funnier was that if they needed to do another copy of a letter or alter it they would end up typing it in the letter again from the paper copy! What was even more surprising was that they were not the only company doing this. If you've seen IT being under used in such a way I would love to hear from you, it would be interesting to find out why.

The situation regarding our 15 UK servicemen has raised a lot of questions primarily "Where was HMS Cornwall" and "Didn't HMS Cornwall see the Iranians approaching?". There is an interesting article found here which examines the incident.

One thing I found interesting and also disheartening was the amount of defense cuts Brown has been imposing on our Naval forces (maybe they are not "meeting their targets") :

• Navy to cut fleet by half  05/01/2007
• 20,000 posts go in defense cuts 21/07/2004
• Half of Royal Navy's ships in mothballs 31/12/2006
• UK Royal Navy faces potential front line cuts 12/12/2006

I can understand defense cuts, but only if we reduce our commitments to operations such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan, NATO and the Balkans.

Yep I tried making toad in the hole last night and I quite simply ruined it. It has got to be one of the worst cooking disasters I have ever had along with using raspberry petit filous instead of creme fraiche for a chicken recipe. Okay I had forgotten the creme fraiche and thought I could use it as a substitute, yeah I know it seemed okay at the time. This toad in the hole the batter was dreadful looks like it got soaked in too much of the fat from the sausages and some sunflower oil (why oh I don't know). Anyway if you have a better recipe for Toad in the hole please let me know or if you think you know what went wrong I'd love to hear from you (I think:)). Anyway don't you just love pizza home delivery?

Today has been filled with April fools day jokes from friends. Even larger companies such as Google have got into the act with Google TiSP a free broadband service available from Google which you receive by lowering a fibre optic cable down your toilet - class! Think Geek also had a load of funny trick products on their site such as the WiiHelm which was suppose to enable you to play Wii games by just nodding your head. The Joke Shop Shop also had people going, by thinking they were giving away free PS3's, when clicking on the link you got the "Gotcha! April Fools!" message.

Oh well I'm glad its all over now (safe!) I still haven't discovered what the BBC's April fools day joke was though.

There appears to be even more politics surrounding this issue and the irony of the situation is that its all over 0.5km of uninhabited sea water (according to Iran). That's right 0.5km a measurement so small when you think about it, lets just have a good think about it now.. that's 500 meters put into terms its probably 1 lap around a regular track at a schools sports day field. Now what secrets or installments could Iran possibly have hidden in that 500 meters worth of sea they have claimed as their own waters? Maybe its the fish they are trying to protect on their side of the border? No matter how you look at it when you get down to the actual argument there isn't much of case the Iranians are claiming the UK servicemen went 0.5km into Iranian territory the British say they didn't. The Iranians display a GPS device that supposedly proves they (UK servicemen) were, although there was probably nothing to stop the guards  who ambushed the UK Servicemen from taking a new co-ordinate with the device after they had taken it off the UK servicemen. The Iranians of course will ignore any satellite evidence that proves otherwise because now the evidence has become irrelevant it has all become part of a far bigger political game that is pushing the price of oil up and trying to humiliate the British. The letters sent back from Faye Turney added an interesting bit to the end which makes you think the letter was written under pressure which states

"Isn't it time for us to start withdrawing our forces from Iraq and let them determine their own future."

It makes you wonder if the Iranians are trying to turn the public against the British government and hoping this will put pressure on the UK to move away from Iraq? The truth of the matter is now neither government wants to loose face and neither one of them appears to have a way of backing down without doing so. The only other action if diplomacy fails in military action something that neither side will want to see happen and its probably what would have happened if the Iranians had captured US servicemen instead of British. At the moment the only deterrent from a military point of view the British have is the Trident nuclear one and I don't think anyone in the UK government  wants to even think of going there.

One of the most recent blogs I have added to my blog roll is Daily Referendum run by Steve Green. The site is always an interesting read and like its name suggests enables voting in a daily referendum on current political topics in the UK. 

According to the following article dated 26 February 2007. The credit card  fraud appears to have occurred between July 2005 and January 2007! This has got to be one of the worst cases of credit card fraud I have seen in the press for some time now.

The amount of card fraud going on now a days you'd be forgiven for going into your bank withdrawing your money over the counter and paying for your goods in good old cash.

Interesting post containing a video on my friend Julians blog about the decline of the PS3 by Sony. The video does seem more inclined towards the Xbox.

As far as I am concerned I think the PS3 is an amazing machine and had the benefit of seeing one at a demo with the most amazing graphics I have seen in a long time. However I think the price tag will be its downfall, maybe what Sony should have done was specked down the machine so it wasn't so expensive when they launched it which I think is the only thing that puts people off the console. The console has just about everything included making it a powerful multimedia machine. If Sony had included a desktop OS, keyboard, mouse etc they may even have been able to target it towards part of the desktop PC market (maybe this would be included at a later date as an optional extra).

Okay its not really a cat tracking device its my newest toy called the Loc8tor. Its basically a mini tracking device which comes complete with two tracking tags the size of a paper clip (well a thick paper clip as you can see on Willows collar) which I purchased from Amazon for £59.99. Its actually intended as a personal tracking device to keep track of things you might loose such as keys, wallets, mobile phones or cats, okay not cats but that didn't stop me from trying it out on two of our troublesome moggy's Willow and Lucy. They have a habit of disappearing  and this little device makes it all the easier to find them when they go missing. You'll be amazed to find out where cats go and do with their time beside the usual finding a warm car bonnet to sit on in the mornings.

The device reminds me of an episode of aliens as the alien gets closer the louder and louder it beeped. The Loc8tor is exactly the same and allows you to have up to 24 tags registered per tracking device, you know your getting closer by the audible beep and a little beep given off by the tags themselves. You can also choose which tags you wish to track with this little gadget and give each of the tags a name. How cool is that!