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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Monday 7 February 2005 (Day View)

Thu 3 Feb | Fri 4 Feb | Sat 5 Feb | Sun 6 Feb |   Mon 7 Feb   Tue 8 Feb | Wed 9 Feb | Thu 10 Feb | Fri 11 Feb |

07.02.2005 – Monday 7 February – Ghosts, Invalid Debiting & The Secure Hash Algorithm

Day

• After sleeping for a ridiculously long time, I headed into the city, driving around with Maz finding computer places in faraway industrial estates. I also withdrew some money from an ATM – just once. I have, however, been debited the amount twice. I am not at all sure how to prove this, but I’ll drop in and have a chat to someone at the bank tomorrow. If they make an ATM eat my card again, I shall become incensed.

Night

• After developing several Hollie-powered complexes at Maz’s, I rushed home via Cold Rock, getting there just before they shut. I had planned to negate this excess with a healthy dinner, but when I arrived back here, Michelle was here, and as we’re both intelligent vegetarians, we had to eat lots of chocolate and drink strong coffee. After some Tim-Tams, a cream-filled chocolate egg, and three score eight chocolate-coated nuts and some “wog bread”, I felt too full to eat a healthy dinner. Joe regaled us ghost stories, including more information I didn’t know, or want to know, about why people won’t sleep in my room – not exactly what either of us needed to hear before bed, and I then escorted Michelle upstairs so the ghosts wouldn’t get her, and bravely shut myself in my room. Then I filled out Centrelink forms and replied to email, ghosts notwithstanding.
  Come to think of it, that’s quite enough about ghosts – I am not sure it’s just the coffee keeping me awake anymore, and I’m not sure whether I should look behind me to “face my fear” and prove it’s obviously ridiculous to even consider something could be there, or if looking around is admittance that something could actually be there, and hence not a good thing to do. Why does my room have to be full of windows and mirrors? I must play loud music and think about pretty butterflies and nice iced cakes... this is the first time I’ve freaked myself out since moving to Brisbane – even Winamp is teasing me, why can’t it pick mindless songs about nothing? Perhaps I’m reading too much into the randomly chosen song titles “Limelight Mix”, “Up around the Bend”, “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing”, “Angel”, “Only You Know and I Know”, “The Ghosts that Haunt Me”, “The Nobodies”, “Graveyard People”, “Live and Let Die”, “A Warm Place”, “Real Things”, “Signs” – they’re probably not all supernatural references, but... why couldn’t they be totally boring titles about love or something? I want to open the door to see if Michelle is still awake, but I am not going to because the hall is out there, and it is long and dark. Ok – this is stupid, I’ve just gone through over a hundred songs, and my imagination is good enough that I can find a supernatural reference in almost every single one – although I’ll admit that the UFO reference in the farcical “I Saw Elvis in a UFO” is stretching the association a little.

6:10am

• I’ve just spent the past few hours messing around and re-implementing the authentication system used for my online journal. It’s now a much securer SHA1 based challenge/response system, which should, as far as I can infer in my current insane and sleep deprived state, be immune to all types of attacks, other than the obvious fact that someone could intercept the actual HTML coming back from the server allowing them to be able to view the page content – but that is not really a flaw with the login system.

Comment by Maz – Tuesday 8 February 2005, 3:43 AM

  BOO!

Comment by Mum – Tuesday 8 February 2005, 9:42 PM

  Beware the jabberwock my son. The slithey tomes that grimble.....

Comment by Damian – Friday 11 February 2005, 9:11 AM

  Ned, I wish you would turn your hand to writing some fiction, some poetry, some sort of prose. Have you read any Roald Dahl stories?

Comment by Reubot – Wednesday 16 February 2005, 7:03 PM

  Ironically, SHA1 has now porported to have been cracked.
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html

Comment by Ned – Thursday 17 February 2005, 12:27 PM

  Collisions are not particularly relevant to the security used here.