sxa's Technical Musings

This is a blog I registered some time ago, but up until now I've never actually posted articles to it. Recently I decided to make an effort and tidy up some drafts and post them. This blog will be about various technology issues, and hopefully become a useful resource for sharing some things I'm working with, even if I'm the only person who makes use of it! I hope you find some of the articles interesting. Feedback and comments will always be welcome.

I've recently spent quite a bit of time contacting banks via the internet to ask a question to them. Bearing in mind that it is the 21st Century and that email and the internet are no longer 'shiny and new' you would hope that communicating with a company online would be easy, wouldn't you? I was initially trying to contact banks as though I wasn't a customer, just to make an enquiry about a security issue. For some reason, this wasn't as straightforward as expected. I hope this information is useful to anyone who wants to decide on a bank to deal with based on more than just headline interest rates. Also, have you noticed how many banks don't let you have special characters on their web sites, including passwords in some cases? Seems a bit backwards these days to not allow better password choices for protecting your finances. I'll share my experiences: Barclays Contact was via this online form . You get a confirmation email that your message has been r...

After deciding to move to a Nokia N900 running Maemo (soon to be MeeGo I guess after the recent Nokia/Iintel announcement), I'm left with an O2 XDA Ignito still running a slowly deteriorating copy of Windows Mobile. It seems to get slower over time, and frankly is just starting to annoy me. So, given that my second choice for a replacement handset would have been the Motorola Droid/Milestone, I was quite pleased to find http://www.androidonhtc.com which hosts a project for running Android on several of HTC's Windows Mobile devices (recent ones like the HD model's aren't supported yet). It doesn't actually replace Windows Mobile - that remains as the primary OS that the device boots into. What it does is use a little utility called 'HaRET' which you run under windows which reboots the whole device into Android, similar to what loadlin did for DOS years ago - basically the running windows image is replaced by a Linux kernel and a copy of Android. Installation...

I wired up my N900 into my car's monitor a while back. TV-Out is one feature that seems to be limited to only a very small number of handsets at the moment. Nokia has been doing it with the high-end N-series handsets since the N95, and the N900 continues that, being supplied with the CA-75U cable required to transmit audio and video to an external screen. It is only composite video, so don't expect the quality to be fantastic, but it means you can wire the N900 up to a projector, a hotel TV for playing any video files stored on the unit, or in my case the screen in the dashboard of my car. I don't have any integrated satellite navigation in my car, so having the ability to use Ovi Maps on the screen in front of me is a great help. Now if Nokia will hurry up and release their new, free, turn-by-turn navigation for the N900 it'll be a perfect solution [1] . Unfortunately, wiring in the CA-75U cable to the back of the head unit has meant that I don't have a spare for ...

[ Shortened link to this page if you need it - http://goo.gl/n22x ] Don't let the apparent length of this article put you off, the main body of the article is up to the first horizontal line, everything after that consists of transcripts from conversations with the banks Many credit/debit card vendors are now enrolled in one of two schemes depending on the type of card. Visa ones use VerifiedByVisa, and Mastercards use SecureCode. They are fundamentally the same 3D-Secure system (henceforth '3DS'). I'm sure most of you have seen sites that use it during checkout. Initially you register your secret password, and when performing a checkout on a merchant's page, you are presented with (as recommended by Visa) an integrated IFRAME (an IFRAME is a window within a window for the less-technical readers) asking you to put in 3 characters from your password, or to register if you haven't already. The banks tell us that this is done 'for additional security to ...