More from my friend in London who will be away when I am over there – he sent me a few links to places to visit – as GoogleEarth placemarks… Billionairs Row on the western end of Hyde park, the Science Museum (And how to get there from his place since he logged his trip with GPS), and even a local electronics store. How cool. Yesterday I got a phone call from the travel agent suggesting that because I wanted to stay at the Quality Hotel Hyde Park, and the Express Train stopped at paddington that it might be better to take the bus.

Once again GoogleEarth worked really well… Once she saw that the hotel was about half a block from the entrance to Paddington Station she agreed that the train was probably the best choice. If there is a back entrance to the hotel, it will be a 100m walk. Otherwise it will be about 300m or so. Either way it is not worth getting the bus, or a taxi or doing anything but walk.

I found a paper on the Usenix WWW site on how to ‘bug’ a computer keyboard so that it is possible to extract information of what is being typed. The theory is that if you change the timing between keystrokes slightly, this is then detectable on the network even if the packets are encrypted. This scheme is commonly used for telecommunications networks and is called pulse position encoding. Normally though the pulse is not a network packet.

Finally, the SMH is reportingt on Child Care Centres that have excess places, and how councils are unable to do any planning on centres based on the need… They can only stop new centres based on factors such as traffic and the like.