Computing Science graduates have amongst the highest levels of unemployment of all recent graduates in the UK. The reason are many and varied but business' generally focus on the lack of applicable skills held by those fresh from tertiary education.
Learning a marketable new skill can be expensive and time consuming. Licensed products and professional certification often come at a heavy cost and training is often unavailable outside big cities like London. That's where Drupal is different.
Despite last minute panics and a slight shortfall in the numbers of developers, the first hackSocial event was a great success. Many thanks to all of those involved for helping to produce such wonderful work. Through development, design and knowledge sharing, we all helped make the world a bit better.
I was awarded the coveted ScraperWiki mug as (joint) best hacker and our team came second overall this event.
We teamed with journalist @csleight who was frustrated with the Central Scotland Fire Services website. Buried several links into the site was a paginated AJAX display that only showed the 60 most recent fire incidents. With Firebug (also the name of our team) we located 15,000 records dating back two and a half years.
These were my first two Drupal modules. I used the requirements from a project that never made it off the ground and produced modules for Drupal's Emfield module. Emfield allows over all management of embeddable content of different types. Provider modules can be plugged in to enable embedding from specific services. I've done this for BandCamp and ReverbNation.
I've been working on a project recently that involved test-to-speech (TTS) software and around the same time found myself talking to a security guard about National Insurance numbers. He told me it was possible to initiate a scam for benefit with just an NI number. I still feel doubtful, but it got me thinking about how public this information is (job application forms etc...) and how it might be collected.
I figured it would be possible to automate a phishing attack and came up with following scenario (fits nicely around the end of the tax year).