I have decided to keep tabs on my credit rating to prevent becoming a victim of identity theft. I applied for an extract of my credit rating for $27 from one of the ratings agencies. In filling out the forms I deliberately omitted some trivial information such as some of my past addresses, middle name etc.

I received the details the following day via email (encrypted PDF). I was amazed and disturbed by the amount of information on the extract. It listed every residence I have lived in since turning 18, company directorships I have held (from my contracting days), every financial institution I have had a relationship with.

The ratings agency has cottoned onto this paranoia and offers a service whereby you are notified whenever there is an addition or update of your credit rating/history.

OK, looks like I am getting a Mac for pen testing (more on that in another post), so I started thinking about cross platform GUI development (again). I had all intentions of using the browser as the GUI but sometimes that just sucks.

So I was seeing whats available for doing GUI's on the Mac when I can across this article on using JRuby and SWT. JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written entirely in Java, with full access to all the Java classes. SWT is the Standard Widget Toolkit used as the GUI library by the Eclipse IDE (sponsored by IBM). SWT looks so promising as it uses native widgets, there is also a GUI builder called SWeeT GUI.

Ututo can only be described as Ubuntu-like OS based on Gentoo. No brainer install, sensible choice of base packages, lightweight Gnome based GUI makes for a great newbie distro... they've even disabled root by default.

Don't be put off by the Spanish based home page and the uber geek photo ;-)

SelfSSL is a wizard that generates and installs a self signed SSL certificate on IIS. Handy for doing testing.