Author: dave Page 45 of 75

The team of adventurers I’ve written about here over the last couple of months has arrived at their destination – the POI (Pole of Inaccessibility), at the geographic centre of Antarctica.

And what a story! They arrived to find a bust of Lenin standing guard on the spot, a statue left behind by departing Russian scientists in 1958. Since then, no one had seen it, yet it stood tall waiting for them after all these years.

The group has posted some remarkable pictures and a complete account of their last hectic push to their destination. It’s worth a read, if you haven’t been following it live on-line.

Their hard-won victory isn’t the end of their adventures, however. Because of the high cost of aviation fuel, the group intend to continue their trek back towards the coastline until their supplies run out. Then they’ll be picked up by an aircraft and taken to another Soviet base on the coast, from where they’ll head back to Cape Town, South Africa.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a lot of different passwords in your life. Keeping track of them all is difficult, and I’m always worried about whether I’m using passwords that are easy to steal.

Creating passwords that are hard (or impossible) to crack is not a problem. Here’s a site that will create a random string of characters that I guarantee no hacker will ever guess.

But the reality is that most of us tend to use passwords we can remember. Like house123 or work246 or our birthdate or wedding date, or a mixture of things we can remember.

The problem is that if we can make sense of the password, some bad guys might be able to as well. But what the heck, is it really that important?

In a word, yes. You don’t want anyone to get access to your secret stuff, like financial records, bank accounts, etc.

But as it turns out, no matter how good your password creation abilities are, there are programs out there that will likely figure out how to break in, if they can actually get access to your computers’ hard-drive (either by loading a program on your harhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifd drive via a virus, or stealing it.)

Wired.com had an article called “How secure is your password” recently that looked at this issue. Here’s an excerpt:

What’s happening is that the Windows operating system’s memory management leaves data all over the place in the normal course of operations. You’ll type your password into a program, and it gets stored in memory somewhere. Windows swaps the page out to disk, and it becomes the tail end of some file. It gets moved to some far out portion of your hard drive, and there it’ll sit forever. Linux and Mac OS aren’t any better in this regard.

Hmmm…seems like all the more reason to start using some best practices when it comes to computer security. So I went looking for some advice. Here are a few articles that I found that are good resources for creating and using passwords.

– Password – A backgrounder from Wikipedia.

– Rate your password strength – A site that evaluates how secure your password is. But don’t use your actual password. Just one that approximates it – you never know for sure who’s on the other end of that computer link.

– Ultra High Security Password Generator – This is Steve Gibson’s password generator page. If you’re looking to get a secure password, this is the place to come. He’s also got some good info on what we mean by a randomly-generated password string.

– Cyber-Security: Creating a Secure Password from The Washington Post.

– Strong passwords how to create and use them – This is a good primer from Microsoft.

– The Simplest Security: A Guide To Better Password Practices – This lengthy article contains some good information, along with some excellent references at the end. It’s been around a while, but the information is still good.

Hope all this helps you secure your favourite stuff.

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not complaining about the snow or the cold out here in Victoria this year. (The photo credit for the picture goes to Debra Brash, Times Colonist)

For someone raised on the Prairies, who spent a decade dealing with the miserable winters in southern Ontario, I’m totally fine with the odd snowstorm, windstorm and torrential downpour, just so long as I can keep walking the dogs without any gloves.

But I’ve got to admit, the difference from “normal” this year in the weather in this area is striking. It makes you wonder whether there is something larger going on, as so many people are becoming convinced of.

What seems clear enough is that our new “normal” is made up of varying levels of “extremes.” Average out enough extreme events and you end up with “normal” but there’s a big difference in how they feel while you’re living through them, isn’t there?

Here in Victoria, we had a significant dump of snow on Wednesday. It was enough to cause chaos on the roads for awhile. But more significantly, the temperature then dropped dramatically, with the result that the white stuff will stick around for a few more days, turning to ice that makes driving and walking difficult, especially since we don’t own any gloves out here. Fortunately, I do have some long pants, so I’ll survive.

The arrival of yet another storm spurred me to dig a little further into the question of climate change. Is it real? Are we in the middle of it? Or the end…or what?

It turned into an interesting exercise, so I thought I’d share a few of the resources I found, so you can visit them if you’re interested.

As usual, I started with Wikipedia, one of my favourite sites. I still marvel at how this web-based encyclopedia, filled with user-generated content, always has something that I’m looking for. I found a fascinating treatise on the issue. It’s a very long, detailed and thorough look at most of the factors involved in the question.

I also found a special website on climate change put together by the BBC.

It’s broken down into 5 areas, Evidence, Impacts, Adaptation, Policies and Links & Chats. If you’ve never visited the BBC site, this is a good introduction. They’ve got a lot of very interesting features.

A few other sites of interest if you’d like more information on climate change:

The New Scientist – Special report on Climate Change.

Canadian Government view.

US government view

European Union view.

And finally, just so you don’t despair that there is no hope for improvement, check out this view of climate change, from Victoria-based cartoonist Ole Heggen. The four cartoons were on the EkosTV blog.

That’s a lot of information, which is one of the joys and frustrations of our information age. But wading through it is fun and interesting, especially if you’re snowed in. And of course, so long as the power doesn’t go off.

I don’t think you have to be an Apple fanboy to appreciate the new Iphone that Steve Jobs announced Tuesday at MacWorld. But it doesn’t hurt, does it? Just look at the thing…

Heck, even Matthew Ingram (not the biggest Apple fan in the world) wants one.

I’m in the market for a new phone and I’ve been thinking about getting a smart phone, like my wife’s Treo. But I decided to hold off, just in case all the hype about the new Apple phone turned out to be true.

Now it looks like waiting was a good idea. If you haven’t seen this new wonder, or want to know a bit more about it, check out the details on the Apple site.

Or you can follow some of the action in the blogosphere, using Technorati. Here’s the results of a search for the Iphone tag in blog posts. But be prepared…the count right now is 2788 posts in English (and rising every minute, it seems.)

The world seems impressed, so far. The stock market gave Apple’s shares a big boost, while punishing other cell phone makers, who are expected to be forced to redesign their current offerings just to catch up.

Apple has a history (as Steve Jobs told us in his keynote on Tuesday) of coming up with products that redefine an entire sector, like the original Mac and the Ipod. Looks like they might have done it again with this gadget.

One downer note about all this. It’ll probably be months – or years – before we are able to get one in Canada. But hey, I’m not that far from Washington State…maybe I can just catch a ferry…

We’ve now entered 2007, which means that at some point not that far away, I’ll be crossing over the dividing line of my expected life span (since I plan to live to be 100!)

Perhaps that’s why I’m noticing things these days, like how my clothes seem to have shrunk over the holidays, and how I seem to make this “grunting” sound when I stand up, and if I kneel down to tie up my shoe, I need both hands just to get back up again.

Yeah, I think I’m getting older. Of course, the white hair gave it away a long time ago anyway — but at least there’s a lot of it.

Apparently, I’m not the only one picking up on this ageing thing. Since we boomers (I’m at the lower end of that cycle) are now approaching our “sunset” years, we’re going to have a significant effect on everything around us, just as happened during every other significant stage in our lives. The magic of demographics say it must be so.

But as getting older becomes a focus for me, I find myself wondering why we age so differently? Why do some of us go gracefully into our later years, while others begin to have all kinds of trouble? Why do some people seem to lose more of their mental abilities than others? And what makes some folks live so long, compared to their peers?

Today, I came across an interesting article in the New York Times that picks up on a few of these questions. It’s called A Surprising Secret to a Long Life: Stay in School.

It’s thesis is simple. The more education people have, the longer their expected life span. It’s a controversial theory, but this lengthy article gives a fascinating look into a lot of the factors that affect old age and there appears to be a real link to the education factor.

The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.

Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education “keeps coming up.”

And, health economists say, those factors that are popularly believed to be crucial — money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison.

I don’t know whether that’s a comfort for me or not. I did get a lot of education – or at least, I spent a lot of time at school. I sure hope that counts for something.

I’m not much for making predictions, but I’m pretty confident that we’re going to be reading a lot more stories in this topic area in the months and years ahead.

My brother-in-law in Vancouver (thanks Darryl!) just sent me this link to a Flickr site with a series of pictures from the December 15th windstorm that hammered Vancouver last month. It was just one of a series of storms that blew through in a week and caused extensive damage across southern BC.

This photoset was posted by .lux (don’t know his real name) and he wrote this as a preface:

(The) Most dramatic photos are of Prospect Point (pictured above).
Photos taken 17 Dec – 2 days after storm, and as bad as the mess looks in some of the photos, much of the debris had already been chainsawed and removed. Must have looked considerably worse earlier.

I know a lot of you reading this don’t live near the coast and you may have wondered what all the fuss was about a few trees getting blown down in a park. But as the pictures make clear, the damage was extensive, and given Stanley Park’s intimate relationship with Vancouver, the city and its residents will be a long time getting over what’s happened.

On a more personal note, I hope all of you had a good holiday season and that you’re ready for whatever comes your way this year. I’m looking forward to it.

Happy New Year!