Adventure Rocket Ship

Bristolcon was lovely. I, er, wasn't. It quickly transpired that I was a walking enactment of that Lincolnism about keeping silent and being thought an idiot. So, um, Pontrilas.

The nice people at Foska sent me one of these this morning (Only ordered yesterday AM. Remarkable), and a very nice thing it is too.

So if anyone else is planning on swanning about Whitby similarly attired, please let me know so we may co-ordinate and thus avoid Fashion Disaster. (Although avoiding Fashion Disaster properly would involve avoiding Whitby entirely, but I'm talking context and relative values here.)

I was challenged to find five songs with the word 'bike' or 'bicycle' in the title by amanda_pink.

It's been rather hard, given that it was followed in my head by the phrase 'that I like'. This immediately discounted 'Bicycle race' by Queen. The only nice thing I can say about that record is that it's been a very long time since I last heard it.

Meanwhile Kraftwerk, inventors of all that is good about modern electronic pop music and the people who define the rock/cycling interface, have yet to release anything with those words in the title. Even though there are two fine singles (one a remix, admittedly) and a cracking album about Le Tour. Annoying doesn't come into it. Boards of Canada have a stab with 'Happy cycling' (on 'Music has the right...') but though it clatters along cheerfully enough, the title's wrong and there's nothing to be done.

However. The first name that popped into my head was 'Bike-ride to the moon' by the entirely splendid Dukes of Stratosfear. You can't go wrong with rustic English psychedelia, and at the distance of some twenty years from the source, XTC in funny hats make an endearing and cosy racket.

I guess it's redundant to point out that it was probably a homage to Tomorrow's 'My white bicycle', which is a genius slab of phasing, backwards guitar and happy fun with the stereo image. What more could you ask from a song influenced by Dutch anarchists?

Hanging around a bit more in the West Country, we find Ted Milton and the rest of Blurt giving it some skronk with the rocking 'The fish needs a bike'. Blurt were recently in receipt of a bit of a critical shoeing not far from here, which isn't entirely surprising given the, um, somewhat exacting nature of the music. I think they're bloody marvellous, mind, and have done since viewing them at Pittville Pump Rooms ably (and drunkenly) supported by a worryingly young Attila the Stockbroker. (Which uk_jon may or may not remember. I wonder if I've still got my Mustaphas badge?)

'Bike' on the other hand, appears to be pre-ElectroSkronk Autechre. It's positively restrained, sounding a lot like it should have been on 'The Man-Machine'. I first came across them via the 'Artificial Intelligence' LP, where they managed to sound a lot like Black Dog/B13, rather than people feeding astronomical data into a confused sequencer.

And then there's Pink Floyd. I approach with trepidation, given there's a good chance that I'll have a terrible psychotic fugue as I flash back to a grim evening of being forced to watch The Wall while (un)suitably medicated and run amok with a large hammer...

... Actually, I think I rather like the song. Especially the second half. Pitch a canteen of cutlery down the stairs, record, play backwards. Groovy daddio! It reminds me of early Severed Heads, in a wrong-end-of-the-telescope time travel sort of a way.


Elsewhere, it appears that there intro-quiz-thing was a bit harder than I thought. Answers real soon now.

However, first a word about brains.

I've been guzzling Omega 3+6+9 pills as an experiment for a number of months. I don't much care if it's just a placebo effect, but they've made a deal of difference to my powers of concentration and focus. However, the last couple of months have been a bit, well, 'meh', as the young people will have it. This appears to coincide with necking fish-based Omega pills, rather than the Linseed ones I was using before, and again since yesterday. I'm not sure what, if anything, it means. I'm probably just more awake because the weather's nice, but if I'm firing on all cylinders I'm not going to knock it.

Anyway. Generating good-quality passwords. Last night's brief bit of hackery demonstrated that there's no point trying to remember the administrator password on this Windows box, since it's quicker and easier to crack it directly from the hash-table. Assuming a dictionary-ish word with leetspeak number/character substitutions:

0:00:00:49 + Cracked Administrator
0:00:00:00 + Cracked test5:2
0:00:00:00 + Cracked test1:2
0:00:00:27 + Cracked test6:2
0:00:00:33 + Cracked Guest
0:00:00:44 + Cracked test2:2
0:00:03:04 + Cracked test4:2
0:00:13:53 + Cracked test5:1
0:00:26:09 + Cracked test1:1
0:00:26:35 + Cracked test3
0:00:41:23 + Cracked test6:1

Times are deltas, and the :1 :2 bits are an artifact of the rubbish way that Winders stores passwords. The point being that the Guest account had a p/w of 'fnord' which is both short and reasonably obvious, the Admin account has a p/w that's in the 'obvious password list'... And the others that took circa thirty minutes rather than thirty seconds were all non-dictionary but pronounceable.

I've been a fan of pronounceable passwords ever since I had to solve this problem the first time, when we were running the ISP nearly ten years ago. Somehow I found this Java password generator, and I've used it on and off ever since. The benefits are obvious. It's a lot easier to remember something which sounds like a real word.

A quick scan of the Winders password-generator 'market' seems to indicate that they're all over-featured and horrible, apart from the one based on the code mentioned above. Unfortunately, the UI is in some non-standard colour set which makes my eyes itch. Can you still hack that sort of thing with a resource editor? It also comes sans source, which makes me slightly uncomfortable. Were I an enterprising cracker, I'd build a password generator that 'phoned home' every so often. I'd probably also get it to disguise its phoning as DNS traffic, on the off-chance that our target was clued enough to be watching the firewall logs.

So that's the generation of suitably obscure passwords sorted. How about remembering which one goes where and making sure you don't use the Paypal one somewhere else by accident? Password safe appears to be the tool to use.

Lord knows what Mac users do. Nothing important enough to require remembering lots of passwords, it would seem.
Edit: They read the first two comments and look smug. Very fine indeed.

KDE's kwallet also appears to do the right thing. I have to admit that I've not yet had to use it properly.