What are the odds for that? 

Somebody called me on my mobile phone. I was sitting exactly where you do not want to take phone calls, so I pressed the red button on the phone, rejected the call, stood up, washed my hands, and went back to my office. I did not recognize the number and used telefonkatalogen.no to find out […]

Incorrect data in read-only field 

The Research Council of Norway operates an electronic submission system for grant proposals. It works quite well overall. Ok, text boxes accepting 3,000 characters should be larger than just four lines and should not scroll out of view when repositioning the cursor. Ok, columns in the budget table should follow the project period and should […]

Read your thesis before you submit it 

Too late for bachelor students (they had to submit on May 23rd), but in time for master students (who submit by the end of June): please read your thesis before you submit it. One of the theses submitted this year obviously had comments and change tracking enabled. This is a good thing, especially when you […]

Two papers accepted for presentation in the same week 

I will be presenting at this year’s „13th Joint IFIP TC6 and TC11 Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security (CMS 2012)“ and at the „9th International Conference on Trust, Privacy & Security in Digital Business“. Both are scheduled to take place in the first week of September, and I hope that the conference program will […]

Russekort 

There is a habit among high school students in Norway – they give away business cards to strangers. Teaching for final year students ends early in May and they have two weeks to prepare for their final exams. Well, many also spend the time wearing red trousers that look fancy when you are eighteen, and […]

Mater semper certa est 

My (digital) camera has a face detection feature. You can take a reference picture of a person and then the camera will on later pictures show a rectangle around a face when the camera finds sufficient similarity between the photographed person and the reference picture. I do not know why the feature is there, because […]

Your system is low on virtual memory 

Again a public display lacking sufficient configuration for unattended operation. This time I took a picture of a display at Berlin Schönefeld airport showing departure times for local transport options. The localisation of the error message indicates that Windows 2000 or Windows XP is being used for the machine.

Price differences 

In theory, prices reflect supply and demand. I wonder if this holds for bananas. Local supermarket in Gjøvik: 1 kg = kr. 16 = ca. 0.38 EUR per piece Narvesen at Oslo airport: 2 bananas = kr. 12 = ca. 0.75 EUR per piece Food store at Stuttgart main station: 1 banana = 0.80 EUR […]

Security conference invitation identified as potential phishing message 

I received an invitation to a conference on several topics in ICT security, to be held in Gjøvik in May. The invitation was marked by Outlook as „might be a phishing message and is potentially unsafe“. I will guess what happened. The list of recipients was suppressed. Good for confidentiality if you do not want […]

I see the solution, but I do not recognize the problem it solves 

I was at CeBIT this year. One of the new products that were unveiled at the exhibition was „Tutanota, the first absolutely secure, flexible and easy-to-use webmail system in the world“. The idea is to provide a web interface for email and to store the emails encrypted „in the cloud“. That way, the cloud storage […]