Archive for August, 2010
3D (in)Secure
It’s not news that the 3D Secure system that gets branded as ‘Verified by Visa’ is a steaming pile of something that should be scraped off shoes rather than presented on screens. Ben Laurie was the first serious voice of dissent (that I noticed), but then along came Ross Anderson and Steven Murdoch to ensure […]
Filed under: could_do_better, security | 2 Comments
Tags: 3D Secure, additional cardholder, cardholder not present, CNP, credit, credit card, joint account, liability, payments, phishing, security, Verified by Visa
The end of the bus tour
I took the kids for a day out to the Tower of London last week. Despite one of my colleagues suggestions I didn’t leave them there. It was great – particularly the knights tournament and the water balloon catapult in the moat. On leaving, my wife suggested that we should take a tour bus to […]
Filed under: wibble | Leave a Comment
Tags: app, bus, location, London, tour
Call routing
Joe asked me about call routing following my post about office VOIP. It’s not a straightforward subject, so I thought it probably deserves a post of its own rather than just a comment reply. Point of entry – SkypeIn Having used ‘one number’ for a while in my old banking IT job I wanted to […]
Filed under: technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: ata, ribbit, sip, skype, SkypeIn, voip
OK. I very nearly bought a new tablety netbook earlier in the year, and I’d still like an s10-3t (or similar)[1], but I’m in no hurry to buy a new netbook and here’s why. Netbooks are good enough. They’re good enough for web surfing. They’re good enough for watching SD video (maybe even 720p if […]
Filed under: technology | 3 Comments
Tags: Asus, HP, iPad, lenovo, netbook, s10-3t, s10e, tablet
Office VOIP
This post has been a long time coming, in part because it took so long to get everything working. It was almost 6 months ago that I decided to go down the VOIP route when my company moved to a new office. It’s a decision that I’ve questioned many times, though I think it was […]
Filed under: technology | 6 Comments
Tags: 7940, Cisco, CTI, POTS, ribbit, sip, Snom, Voicehost, voip
SaaS tax trouble
In the last few weeks I’ve had snags with both Skype and Google over billing. I could take this personally – thinking that my bad teclo karma (which must run in the family) is now turning into bad SaaS karma? I suspect though that the problems are much more widespread. Skype I’ve had a Skype […]
Filed under: cloud, could_do_better | Leave a Comment
Tags: billing, cloud, gapps, google, saas, skype, tax, VAT
I’ve been a keen fan of DivX for many years now (though I must confess that I still mostly use the long deprecated Dr Divx in favour of the newer DivX Converter). One recurring annoyance is that transcoded files can sometimes have issues with lip sync. Having never found anything useful online about fixing this […]
Filed under: howto | 2 Comments
Tags: audio, avi, codec, divx, howto, lip sync, sync, video, virtualdub
The arrival of my EFM connection meant that I needed to find some way of balancing load (and failing over) between the new EFM and the existing ADSL. Thankfully there’s a healthy market in low end load balancers, and after digging through some reviews I went for the DrayTek Vigor 2820n. ADSL The device is […]
Filed under: review, technology | 6 Comments
Tags: 2820, 2820n, 2930, adsl, DrayTek, efm, firewall, IPSEC, L2TP, load balancer, network, networking, PPTP, router, sip, Vigor, voip, vpn, wifi
Travelcard travesty
One of the great things about my new office in the City is that I can now do my commute without having to use the Tube. I can jump on a train to London Bridge and either walk from there (~20min) or catch another train to take me over the river to Cannon Street, which […]
Filed under: travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: commute, commuting, confusopoly, FCC, Gatwick, Gatwick Express, Southern, ticket, train, travelcard
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