I'm working on a presentation I'll give tomorrow. It's about Struts, a framework that I'm using in our project at work.

Once every month there's a lunch-presentation about a technical subject, and tomorrow it's my turn. It's nice to do: I like this Struts a lot, and I'd be happy if I can make my collegues enthousiastic as well.

Do you like people watching?

Enjoy.

Only the documentation to go, and then I'm ready with the last assignment.

Will be a relief.

I'm ready with the stunnel part of the assigment. This means that the communication between the client and server is encrypted, and that the client can be sure that the server is trusted (a Certificate Authority vows for the server).

I'll start now with the 2nd part: making sure that clients have only access to their own accounts. This requires more 'intelligence'n in the server as there must be a mapping between account numbers and certificates.

This weekend I'll spend again programming. The 5th assignment isn't very large, and I've started it already, but it will still take quite some time.

I was pleasantly suprised to hear that we'll have a day off Monday; I though Whitsuntide would be next week but it's this weekend.

The goal of this assignment is to make sure that the communication between the bank and its client that we made earlier is secure. We'll use stunnel for that.

I don't usually give warning against virusses, but now I'd like to make an exception. Last October a friend received "BugBear", a then-famous virus. Well, now there's a new virus that's called "BugBear B", and it's a really nasty one.

Luckily enough we have good system adminstrators here at Chess. At home my virus-scanner gets updated every few hours as well, so I feel reasonably secure.

But this is a particulary tricky virus: it disables virusscanners, some firewalls, and it spreads itself quickly by e-mail. It knows how to spread itself to Eudora, Outlook and other mail clients. If an Outlook user receives a file with the virus, the attachment will be started automatically. The user doesn't even have to click on it...

My advice: update your virusscanner today. CNN has a story about the virus.

Click here!

A few minutes ago a huge rainstorm came above Haarlem. A big difference compared with last Friday.

At Chess I work on the highest floor so it's very noisy now because of the rain.

Sasha just told me that a new monitor arrived! Our old computer monitor has been broken quite a long time. We had a 3 years garanty that would expire this August.

It took some effort to get into contact with the shop where I originally bought it in Middenmeer; Mieke assistance there was quite useful. The shop was member of a national organisation, and it turned out that we had an 'on-site' garanty. This morning they came and replaced our old monitor immediately with a new one.

Today a good friend called. His laptop behaved weird and a lot of files on the 2nd hard disk were mangled and unreadable.

Luckily enough he made a backup 2 months ago, so the damage was manageable. But it reminded me of something –- how long ago has it been since my last backup? And how long ago has it been for you, dear reader, since your last backup? What would happen if your hard disk would stop functioning all of a sudden?

My website itself is reasonably well covered; a few weeks ago I restored the whole system from the backup, which is always a good indication of the backup’s quality. But I know there are things on the desktop computer at home that are quite valuable to me, but my last backup is a couple of years old. Something to work on.