All posts by Alastair Aitken »
One password manager to rule them all
A member of a not-for-profit organisation that I’m involved with has just succumbed to a phishing expedition. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated but it was all that was required to extract her GMail user name
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Astah UMLPad – UML on an iPad
Three of us were hunched around the desk gazing vacantly into a single monitor. No amount of staring at the sequence diagram on the screen was going to help us understand it, let alone
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News, news, everywhere and all of it to read
These past few months I’ve been suffering from insomnia; scratch that, make it the past couple of years. Tracing it back, à la the Sherlock Holmes of Benedict Cumberbatch (rather than Basil Rathbone), I
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I predict a riot: the dangers of corner cutting
A normal Monday morning, like any other Monday morning. Or was it? Traipsing from train station to my place of work – a grim box-like prefab of indeterminate vintage stuck on the periphery of
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ownCloud – beautiful, secure, private, data storage
Whilst usually professing not to believe in such nonsense, often I find myself doing or not doing things in the belief that I “don’t want to tempt fate”. Sychronicity does not exist; it’s impossible
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RBS plus outsourcing equals meltdown and feeble excuses
RBS used to be known for its parsimonious approach to information technology rather than technology meltdowns. I could be wrong but I believe that the bank was still using chain printers in the 90s
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Free Bitcoin crash course
There’s a Simpsons episode, Flaming Moe’s, where Homer Simpson becomes overwhelmed by the fact that the bartender (Moe) at his regular drinking dive has ripped off his recipe for a cocktail and is making a
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Don’t believe the hype: Twitter, Mick Jagger and The Large Hadron Collider
Peculiarly, as an atheist, I can remember very clearly the day that my faith was shattered. My almost religious belief in science had been rocked to its foundations by the appearance in the day’s
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The end of the one-man-band web developer
This may come as a shock to old school web designers – often the type whose work boasts “HTML proudly crafted by hand” – but web design has moved beyond the capabilities of a
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Digital Rights Management will destroy the web (as we know it)
Spare a thought for Tim Berners-Lee. He invents the web as we know it, sees it snowball into the phenomenon of the age, and then he has to attempt to stop its wholesale takeover
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