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Richy's Random Ramblings

Cold call from AON

Just had a cold selling call from a company called AON asking for me by name (using my old name) and asking when our Professional Indemnity Insurance was due for renewal. The woman I spoke to was nice and polite and did say she would remove us from their calling list when I requested.

Caller ID showed 0800 635 00666, but looking on the internet doesn’t show them up – but I assume by the spelling of the name and the services that they are http://www.rewritinginsurance.aon.co.uk/.

We are more than happy with our current professional indemnity insurance from Policy Bee – who have only called us when we contacted them (just to confirm legal details) and came with good recommendations.

My view is that in this day and age, if you need to cold-call then you aren’t a very good company as people should be recommending you and you should have good ranking well designed website (I’m not saying AON are a “bad company”, but that’s my viewpoint: I’ve never purchased anything from cold-callers and won’t in the future: however, I may well waste your time)

Property sites XML data feed specifications

More as an aid to my memory, but it may be useful for other people, here’s a list of property sites XML (or similar) feed specifications:

Any one know of any others – here’s a list of other property sites which I haven’t found the API/XML/Import details for: can anyone help?

[Movies] Brave or Braver

Is it really non-commercial “piracy” “killing” the movie industry, or is it due to things like this which I saw in Sainsbury’s a month ago.

Yep, Disney/Pixar’s “Brave” has only very recently gone in the cinema, yet “Brightspark” has “Braver” out about the “Bravest Princess in all time”..

Hmm…

Techy: How secure are credit card numbers

From my “over a year ago” post about test credit and debit card numbers, I did wonder how unique/secure a credit or debit card number is. For example: If I knew “x” digits of your card number, how many possible cards would I have to guess at to hit your credit card number.

I’m basing these findings on a the most common length of credit card numbers – 16 digits.

Number of digits known Number of card possibilities if you have the “check digit” at the end Number of card possibilities if you do not have the “check digit” Observations
16 1 1 You’ve got the whole number anyway!
15 1 1 You can either calculate the missing check digit if that’s the only thing you are missing, or calculate the missing number from the check digit
14 10 100 By covering one number and the final number, you’ve just made it 10 times harder to work out your credit card number!
13 100 1,000  
12 1,000 10,000  
11 10,000 100,000  
10 100,000 1,000,000  
09 1,000,000 10,000,000  
08 10,000,000 100,000,000  
07 100,000,000 1,000,000,000,000  
06 1,000,000,000 10,000,000,000,000  
05 10,000,000,000 100,000,000,000,000  
04 100,000,000,000 1,000,000,000,000,000  
03 1,000,000,000,000 10,000,000,000,000,000  
02 10,000,000,000,000 100,000,00,000,000,000  
01 100,000,000,000,000 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 This could just be the check digit

Marking old posts

I’ve just added a piece of code from “Jem on WordPress” to flag that content older than 6 months on this blog may be inaccurate and not reflect “now” (this comes as I’ve just realised this would be my 996th [19 private, 6 drafts] post in a period of time spanning 15th of October 2001 to “today”: and that’s a long time in anybody’s book