While at the Frankfurt conference I had a chance to go on two mini photo trips to the PalmGarden (Botanical Garden) and the Frankfurt Zoo. The former turned in to a bit of an adventure involving doing an almost complete circle while looking for the way in, but eventually we did make it there. Even though the lighting conditions were poor, some shots still came out very well, as you can see here: For the rest, visit the gallery. The Zoo pictures also came out well, but required a lot of post processing to get rid of the "glass effect". The animals seem particularly keen on getting OUT as can be seen by the numerous scratches on the inside class of the big predator enclosures. The highlight is of course a tiger trying to swallow Sebastian and his camera :-) More pictures can be found here.

Thanks to GAIM I have the ability to use multiple IM clients, which now a days is pretty much a necessesity, given that no two people use the same IM system. A few days ago I got a message from the AIM component about the forceable addition of two new buddies to my list, "MoviePhone" and "ShoppingBuddy" that got added to a "AIM Bots" sub-group. It looks like AOL Time Warner thought of a new way to monitize their network. So far these "buddies" don't actually do a thing, and ignore any of the IMs I send them. I suspect in the future (Xmas time) they'll inform me of all sorts of "interesting" things... Fortunately while I had no ability to decline their addition GAIM appears to allow me to put them on ignore or removed them from my buddy list all together. Gotta wonder what's next...

It would seem that the Canadian province of Ontario, of which I happen to be a resident of, is rapidly and willingly being assimilated into our Southern neighbor. The latest bout idiocy comes from our Attorney General who according to the CBC article that can be found here intends to force extension of DST to match that of United States. According to Americans this change, signed into law by GWB will lead to energy savings, right… Of all the things to change, I suppose no one considered doing something about all those SUV drivers, whose cars eat fuel by the truckload, but anyway… The synchronization of the change in Ontario is being argumented by the fact that having the same time zone will make easier to maintain trade links. So, in 2007 Ontario will blindly follow US’s lead and extend daylight time. Supposedly, Quebec, 2nd most populous province after Ontario is well on its way in adopting a similar stance.

While coming back with friends from a photo trip this weekend, I've spotted this wonder navigating the parking lot of a shopping mall. I'd try to describe it, but in this case a picture is truly worth a thousand words. Definitely not something that you see every day.

While on my daily news crawl, I came across a site (http://gdataonline.com/seekhash.php) offering a free and very quick service designed to decode md5 hashes. The principal used here is a dictionary attack; the operators of the site build a reasonably large, 12 million & counting, database of hashes and their corresponding values. All you need to do is specify a hash and if they got it in their database in less a then a second you get to see its corresponding value. While compromising weak hashes via dictionary attacks was never that hard, it did require wasting some time and processing power in application such as John the Ripper (http://www.openwall.com/john/) trying to find the equivalent value. Now, you can do it quite effectively (I’ve tried) via this online tool in fractions of a second. Given that many PHP applications (my own included) store passwords as hashes rather the clear-text, it now raises the needed to encourage users to be a bit more creative with their password strings. Use of high-ASCI...