I’ll sell the 17-40 shortly. In the meantime, I’m still looking for a good deal for a slim polarizer filter, replacing the 77mm with a 82mm thread size…

17-40mm	16-35mm

Jordan turned out to be a great country; very dry with only a green Jordan Valley, liberate Islamic (all women wear at least scarfs though) and full of ancient, biblical or just beautiful sites…

We hiked a bit around at Wadi Mujib…

…around Petra…

…and I could spend weeks dwelling around in the desert of Wadi Rum…

I don’t plan on going on joining organized tour again… Even though we had a nice group and one spends less time on searching for interesting places to go, arranging short tours or dealing with local hasslers extorting too much money from tourists, it also takes out part of the fun of going to a foreign country, talking to local people and dealing with unexpected or suprising situations. And I thought getting on the road takes some time with just the two of us, multiply that by two or three when there’s always someone to go to the toilet or just getting his stuff ready… Well, as an experienced traveler

See for some more pictures at picasa….

It’s hard to believe the new, tiny iPod shuffle I just got can actually play music in a practical way. It has no display, only one on/off/repeat switch and three small navigation buttons hidden in the headphone cord. Somehow Apple managed to make it usable and look good as well. See how it works at the Apple Shuffle site.

Too bad I’m forced to use the heavyweight bloatware-enabled iTunes software to get it started, but now it’s working winamp seems to do the trick as well.

Update:

The iPod flea seems to be smaller :

Many software systems used to be shipped with simple default security settings, like no security at all. This open by default strategy is very usable; you can use every feature without hassle. However, if you want other people to stay out of your business and therefore need some protection, you’re supposed to change these default settings into something that fits your environment (like being connected to the internet or having curious neighbours/coworkers/friends with access to your system). As most people don’t read the manuals of the systems they install (I don’t), this strategy leaves us with a lot of open and insecure systems.

Nowadays, the closed by default strategy seems to be favoured by vendors. Only if you specifically allow features (like services) to be accessible, you can access them. This tends to make the world a little bit more safe.

Having default passwords for a system is slightly related. Without any effort or provisioning, you can have a default admin password in case you’ve locked yourself out. It aleviates the lifes of many help desk workers. You can just read the documentation or google a bit to regain access. You don’t remember the password for your MySQL installation? Just google it! On the other hand, if you’re forced to always define your own password at installation time, or the system generates a random one and informs you about it, it is more secure, but you can lock yourself out if you forget about this password.

Like always, there’s a balance between accessibility and usability.

The reason I write about this is that the vendor of the key-pad locker locks in my gym delivers locks with pre-defined master keys. Nice, because without any effort, the trainers are able to open locks for people that forgot about their user-defined code. However, it just takes one google query to find the manual that tells us that: the factory code is 1,2,3,4,5,6!

Naturally, my gym hasn’t read this manual or isn’t aware the manual is this easy to find. It’s very accessible for the support staff in case a user has lost it’s security code again, but sadly doesn’t provide me with a lot of security for my clothes and stuff either…

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It’s back to Microsoft versus Big blue again

It’s a proper British humor series, with absurd parts like in The Young Ones and Bottom, but now in a modern computer help-desk setting. Watch and laugh!