electronic scholarship

Today I applied for a scholarship to study at the university. That's not very special, as a lot of people do this every year, but starting from this year it is possible to do it via the internet.
Over the last few years, my government is putting a lot of effort into administrative simplification and e-government. A lot of government departments are starting to process forms and information digitally, using computer and internet. This means that a lot of information is available through digital databases. Because of this, less forms are needed and the forms that still exist are shorter. You don't have to provide the same information over and over again, as part of it is already available to the administration.
Part of this e-gov wave is the possibility to fill out the tax-form using the internet, for the past 4 years now. Starting this year, applying for a scholarship is also possible using the internet.

I don't have to leave home to submit my application for a scholarship. Using my digital account on the government website I can fill out the digital form and send it electronically through the internet.
The best part is that a lot of information is already filled in, like my postal address and social security number.
In the past I had to prove I could get a scholarship, providing documents of my university, the tax-departement, etc. But due to the e-gov thing, the scholarship department can access this information directly from my university and the tax-database. I don't need to provide this information anymore, which makes it much easier to apply for a scholarship.

Sore throat

I'm feeling ill and I have a sore throat. Or the other way around, but I can't be bothered about what came first or which is causing which.
It started saturday after I woke up. Previous times when I had this it lasted about 5 days before I was healthy again. So this probably means I can pick up everyday activities starting wednesday or thursday.
Until then I'll have to fill my days with sleeping, taking some rest and doing nothing. Maybe I can watch some television or read a book.

Migrated mailbox

Yesterday, when I opened my mailbox, I noticed that it seemed to be corrupted. All folders I use to organise the vast flow of mails I receive every day had disappeared. After checking the university helpdesk, I learned the IT-department had started migrating the current student's mailboxes to the new server that evening. After further investigation of my 'corrupted' mailbox I found a mail (with no subject) which stated that my mailbox was migrated and provided the new settings to be used in my E-mail application.
I was a little relieved when I changed the settings and after connecting to the new server, I noticed that my folders appeared again. But not all. Two of them where still missing. When trying to create the folders in the new mailbox, I found out why they where missing: the folders contained a '@' in the foldername, and apparently this character was refused for foldernames in the new mailbox. This explains why these two folders weren't copied when my mailbox was migrated.
But one of those folders contained over a hundred E-mails I still needed. After copying the original mailfolder, which wasn't yet deleted from the old server, using another server I managed to restore them.

So now I have a new mailbox on a new server, which has a lot of advantages. The old server was getting slow, as it is quite some years of age and has to serve the mailboxes of over 27,000 students at my university. During last semester one had to be very patient when checking E-mail arround lunchtime.
Checking E-mails should be much faster now with the new server.
My mailbox is a lot bigger too and doesn't consume space in my networkdrive.

I'm very pleased to already have been migrated to the new server. But I'm wondering what criteria where used to select which student's accounts where to be migrated first.

Phishing IQ

Phishing (in Dutch) is a technique used by fraudsters, to obtain personal information like addresses, usernames, passwords, credit card information, bank details, social security numbers and the like.
You probably have received several of this type of messages by E-mail, asking you to provide some personal information. A typical phishing E-mail pretends to originate from your bank or credit card supplier, but is not. With clever tricks these kind of mails fool the recipient to believe it is a genuine mail.

Today I came across a phishing IQ test which presents you some real mails, some of which are scams and some are legitimate. You have to decide which are fraudulent and which are not. In the end you get a score on how well you did. If you got something wrong you can look at the explanation why some mail was legitimate or fraudulent.
Doing this test lets you check how good you are at recognising phishing scams. And hopefully you can learn how to see when a mail is genuine or not.

Power failure

Yesterday, a power failure caused that there was no electricity in my block for a few hours.
In the afternoon, lights went out, the radio stopped playing, but what was worse, the refrigerator stopped too, as did my computers.
Having no radio is slightly discomforting, having no lights can be inconvenient, but as long as it's still bright enough outside, not very troublesome. The refrigerator having no power is not a problem at first, but if the power outage lasts too long, it will start to warm up. When this happens the food inside can be spoiled.
The computers are a different story. When a computers halts during a power failure, without proper shutdown can cause several problems like damage to the hardware or contents of the harddrive if they weren't yet written to the disk. It is possible that the computer won't boot after power is restored, or that important data is lost.

Luckily, power was restored after a few hours. Nothing was damaged and the refrigerator was still cool enough when it was restarted, so no food had to be thrown away.
All computers rebooted without problems and only a slight problem with a partition on a harddrive was detected. Fortunately this could be resolved easily.

I don't like it when power failures emerge, but taking into account that the outage lasted only 3 hours and that the previous power failure was more than a year ago, I can't realy complain.
But maybe I should invest in a UPS, to make sure my computers are protected when the next power failure happens.

Zeno's schizophrenia

Last week my new laptop arrived, which was the start of the lengthy process of installing the necessary software and applying some settings, to make it behave like I want it to behave.
The laptop came installed and preconfigured to work on the network of the university I study at.
During the last few days I added another operating system (OS), so I can choose which one I will use, and I adjusted some things so it works on my home network, but most time was spent on securing the laptop as good as is desirable.
You can call me paranoid, but I protected it on several levels with different strong passwords:
Before you can start using the laptop, you are prompted for a password. Then you can choose which OS to use. After the operating system started up, you have to login, using a different strong password.
When the laptop isn't used for about 10 minutes, it goes into standby mode. If you want to start using the system again, you need to provide a password again.

To protect the data, I have some more security measures in place. Booting from CD/DVD, USB or network isn't possible unless you provide a password at startup first (see earlier). So you can't get to the contents of the harddisk by booting with some other software or device.
Taking the harddisk out of the laptop and putting it in another one isn't going to help either, as it is configured to only work with this laptop. The disk won't launch in a different laptop.
And as last safety measure, and I am quite proud of this one, but more on that later, I set up an encrypted partition containing my data. This encryption is not file or folder based, but encrypts the entire partition. This partition can be accessed by unlocking it with a lengthy passphrase.

All security protections, but one, are provided by the laptop or by the operating system. For the encryption off the partition containing the data, I used something called LUKS. The beauty of this system is, that it can be accessed by both operating systems. This way I can always access my data, regardless of the operating system I'm using at a perticular moment.

My setup needs some tweaking to make it more convenient and easy to use, but as far as security is concerned I'm quite pleased already.

Silly climate

It has been raining a lot, today, tomorrow, last week, the whole current month. But last month (July) our country was hit be a heat wave. The weather in this region of the world is very strange and not very consistent. Winter lasted until May this year, as it was very cold and still snowing in April.
Officially it's still summer but according to some trees, fall has started, as those trees are already loosing their leaves. But maybe this was caused by the extreme heat of July.
One might think that the Monsoon season has begun, but the equator is not anywhere near where I live. Probably it's all caused by global warming.