I hadn’t realised how heavy doses of antibiotics can flatten people even further. Today has been typical of this week: I’ve not had sufficient energy to move further from my ‘nest’ in our spare room to the bathroom. Instead I’ve been curled up under a duvet, too de-energised to even get cabin-fever.
I suspect cabin-fever would have set in ages ago without my iPad mini and its bluetooth keyboard and of course the internet. Today’s entertainment has included:
- audiobooks, especially Bill Bryson’s A walk in the woods. (I’ve just discovered there’s a film of this book.)
- YouTube videos: at first Manic Street Preachers videos until I realised I needed happier input; then Rush and Van Halen.
- slides from Professor Hazel Hall’s post about Information Science Scotland. As a former publisher, I was naturally interested in Dr Christina Banou’s prevention on academic publishing. I also learnt from Hazel’s presentation on case studies (not least that I have a lot to learn about doing social research – my PhD is in a physical science) and Petros Kostagiolas’ presentation ln information needs satisfaction. I should emphasise that viewing these slides was far more than entertainment: they will almost certainly help underpin my work when I return to research in September. Having said that, I was delighted that Petros referenced Roger Waters’ Who needs information? from Radio Kaos. I’ve run out of brains space just now but will look at the other slides tomorrow. It sounds as though ISS was a fantastic event – I wish I could have been there.
I think that’s it for now, except to thank Elly for being so supportive, especially during this time of lurgie.
Digital evidence that Bruce might have a life 
I read a paper today, for the first time in forever, about the problems of Unicode in passwords. It was quite interesting and useful.
Sorry about the ongoing lurgie situation. People in St. A are following sympathetically.
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Thanks! Sympathy much appreciated. BTW, what are the problem of Unicode in passwords? I guess at the total number of glyphs being just too large, and maybe issues with systems not understanding which encoding is being used.
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Different encodings are one potential problem. Then there’s different ways of representing the same logical character (simple example: “é” as in “café” can be encoded as a single character, or as a combination of an “e” and an acute accent). There are normalisation algorithms that can help deal with that, but there are four different ones that are applicable to different scenarios.
Assuming you’ve dealt with that, what happens if your username or password contain non-ASCII characters, and you have to travel to an office where they don’t have keyboards or an OS configuration that supports your character set? Or if your mobile phone’s keyboard capabilities don’t match your computer’s? You can probably deal with password issues using a password reset, but username is more difficult.
The paper covers a few other things such as accidental truncation, and some interesting information about actual usage patterns of Unicode passwords based on analysing leaked account data sets. I fyou fancy readin ti yourself, it’s here: http://www.w2spconf.com/2012/papers/w2sp12-final7.pdf
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