Mona continues to settle in, but not the
way we expected. She's coming closer and closer to Bruno, but they're not friends yet. And she's
still terrified of the dogs; that will take much longer than I expected. Kittens have
always taken to them very quickly.
Mail from eBay today. I have a second
account that I set up for some purpose, and they've noticed that I don't use it. Can they
shut it down?
No, I think not. I don't know what I might need it for, but it's convenient. All I need to
do is log in.
I failed. Password wrong. No worries: they'll send me a reset link. Got that, went to the
login page. Enter user ID. OK. Enter new password. It's not strong enough! Must contain
at least one digit and one special character to make it easier to crack. I tried, in
sequence,
No security!
Stup1d concept of security!
Stup1d c0ncept of s3curity!
Stup1d c0ncept of s3cur1ty! 1d10t5!
And it kept producing the same message. After a while I realized: Ha, ha, only joking.
Just couldn't be bothered to clear the message.
OK, continue. With Google? No, of course not. That's putting all your eggs in one basket.
But there was no other way! Maybe that was because the email address was with Gmail, but that's no excuse. A good thing
that the account doesn't have access to any of my financial details.
I have a bug
report on makefs, a program ported to FreeBSD from NetBSD. It
works under NetBSD, but the FreeBSD version creates invalid file systems under some
circumstances.
OK, let's compare what FreeBSD and NetBSD do. For that I need a NetBSD system, and the last
one I had (a virtual machine) is ancient. OK, install a new virtual machine. How hard can
it be?
The biggest problem was getting installation media. For some reason, both firefox and fetch failed early in
the download. In the end I downloaded it to my external server and then copied it from
there. But why did a direct download fail?
After that, setting up a VM and installing was a piece of cake. Of course, I still have a
basic machine, but it was refreshing how easy it all was. Somehow that happens too
infrequently nowadays.
Early this morning, while I was reading news on hirse, my mobile
phone, an app failed to resolve a host name. Bloody Android apps! It wasn't
until later that I discovered that that was the beginning of a 30 minute network outage.
OK, what's my MyAussie
app for? Fired it up and discovered that it wanted a password. My passwords don't
cater for mobile phones: this one was 31 characters long, sprinkled with special characters
that are a particular pain to enter on a mobile phone (is that why so many password
restrictors demand them?), and Aussie is too secure to display more than one character at a
time when you enter a password. The result:
By the time I had finished messing around, the network came back, after less than 33
minutes. I give in: clearly Aussie wants me to use a less secure password, so I created one
that it still accepted and tried to log in:
I thought the option of saving a password to Google (Why? To reduce its security?) was a
good touch. But finally I managed to log in, and was rewarded by the option of using the
fingerprint sensor to log me in, which makes things much more bearable. And then I checked:
no outages recorded.
Oh, you want NBN outages? Sure, we
have plenty on offer:
Nine days of outages! Hopefully this is their typical inaccuracy.
In passing, how secure are fingerprint sensors? Probably secure enough for the purposes
that the app fulfils, but wouldn't it be possible to capture an image of my fingerprint and
use that instead? Yes! It happened to Ursula von der Leyenten years ago. Are things safer now?
One of the more interesting culinary discoveries that I've made in the last few years is
KL Hokkien Mee. And now I discover that
there's something related in Beijing: Beijing Fried
Sauce Noodles (Zha Jiang Mian, 炸酱面). There seem to be countless variations, but
they all use a dark sauce, rendered fat pork belly and crunchy skin. One to try.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
