Notes from a wireframe world

Your work is pirated. Thanks to 4 Shared for making me feel great today.

If you want AnDOSid for free, and are willing to be spammed by pop-up’s and risk anything that’s been added to it, you can pick it up here http://www.4shared.net/download/b8j40S1frvxobKsNPl5kuL/com-scott-herbert-AnDOSid-3.html

If you do, I’d ask that you consider joining your local pirate party.

This may sound a bit tongue in cheek, but I’m seriously chuffed.

Scott

The UK governments “Cyber Security Challenge” a set of online competitions designed to raises awareness of cyber learning opportunities and careers. (I.E. recruit white-hat hackers) has had to be postponed

“It would appear that the competition engine has been subject to an attack from an unidentified source, creating a situation which stops some of you from playing at the present time.”

Yes, the UK government Cyber Security Challenge has been hacked (Well OK DoS’ed).

Microsoft’s Excel is the spread sheet solution in today’s PC software market, it’s used for everything from climate change models to financial statements, which make the discovery of this bug worrying.

The bug it’s self relates to a rounding error in the calculation of negative floating point numbers in Microsofts excel 2010 version 14.0.6112.5000 (32-bit) running on both Windows 7 and XP

To reproduce the error

In a cell type “-712376″ (without the quote marks), while it doesn’t affect the bug you may want to format the numbers on the sheet to show at least 4 decimal places so the effect of the bug is clearer.

In another cell type “-667540.81″ (again without the quotes), For the sake of argument we’ll call the cell with -712376 in A1 and the second cell B1. In a third cell type “=A1-B1″ the third cell should equal “44835.19″ however excel reports it as “44835.1899999999″ This error is repeated if you times A1 and B1 by 1, add one to each of the values or even times them both by 100 and divide the answer cell by 100 (i.e. use “=(J3-J4)/100″)

I wonder how Sony will react to this

From the 26th of May 2012, all UK based website need to let you know (and seek your permission) to store certain types of cookies. This site uses very few cookies, the shopping cart (and if your an author here, the login system) use type 1 cookies, which are defined as “These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services you have asked for, like shopping baskets or e-billing, cannot be provided.” The rules say I don’t need your permission to use these cookies (and that makes sense).
However we also access Facebook’s commenting system (and have no control over throes cookies) therefore I recommend you spend a few minutes looking at AboutCookies.org if your in any way unsure what they are.
We also use Google’s advertising network and so most likely use the type 4 cookies i.e. “These cookies are used to deliver adverts more relevant to you and your interests They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Quite often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.”