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interesting / web — No Comments
23
Jul 08

My New Favourite Hobby

You can check out mine at brady8.muxtape.com. If you make one of your own, link it up in the comments – I always like discovering new music!

web — No Comments
19
Jul 08

37Signals Keeps Your Plaintext Password

So I had to reset my OpenID URL today, and as part of that I needed to login to 37Signal’s Highrise using a username and password instead of OpenID. I clicked the “forgot password” link, typed in my username, and I was very surprised to find an email in my inbox with my original, unhashed password.

Now, I always thought that storing unhashed and salted passwords on the server is a big no-no – there’s no reason to not hash the passwords, not to mention the bigger no-no of sending the original passwords in plaintext by email.

Your thoughts?

interesting / web — No Comments
15
Jul 08

Biggest Regret

Video made from results of Google query for “biggest regret” (via boingboing).

dev and design / web — No Comments
9
Jul 08

Using Rails Just Because

There are many web development shops that are switching to Ruby on Rails, and this is generally a good thing – lots of new exposure to a great language, which means more tools and documentation and development by the growing community.

Now, when a development studio switches to Rails, the one thing you shouldn’t do is try your best to move all your tools over to Rails. Just because Rails is new and cool doesn’t mean that PHP and/or Perl and/or Python are all ugly and should be avoided at any cost. As always, best practice is to use the best tool for the job.

I mention this because I’ve noticed that Lighthouse has chosen to use Beast, a sleek and relatively new Rails-based forum for their support. I’ve experimented with Beast, and I love it! The glaring problem I saw when evaluating Beast for our own use here at lunardawn is that it doesn’t have *any* spam protection, as seen at the spam-filled Lighthouse support. It wouldn’t take much at all to integrate with Akismet to block most spam, and admittedly I could have patched Beast as such pretty fast, but we want to use the best tool for the job while taking away as little development time from our core product as possible.

So for us, we’re looking at either phpBB, which has a large community dedicated to anti-spam measures, or lussumo’s Vanilla, which seems to avoid spam at the moment solely based on its small market share (obviously not scalable to any degree).

geekery / interesting / web — No Comments
27
Jun 08

Stretching Your Brain: Project Euler

For the last few months, I’ve been working on Project Euler – a set of 200 or so mathematical and/or programming problems to solve. A lot of them are pretty neat, requiring a lot of thought to be able to solve them in a reasonable period of time, and they’ve served as an excellent break from studying.

From the summary:

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

I suggest you give it a go! Up until now, I’ve managed to solve 39 of the (currently) 199 problems, which apparently makes me “20% genius”. I can live with that.

web — 5 Comments
3
Apr 08

Stupid (gs) Gridserver

It seems like I’ve been spending a good chunk of my time lately working around all of Mediatemple’s ridiculous idiocentricities with regard to this “(gs) Gridserver” setup that I’m currently subscribed to.

My current problem revolves around trying to get a Git remote repository set up to store my code.

Mediatemple’s usernames they assign you for SSH access have a percent symbol in them, as in “serveradmin%blah.com@blah.com”. Apparently Git doesn’t like percent symbols in it’s configuration, because I get the error:

fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly ls-remote --heads ssh://serveradmin%blah.com@blah.com/data/git/blah.git: command returned error: 1

Any help anyone? Other than springing for the move to another host or moving to Mediatemple’s “(dv) Dedicated Server” product?

web — No Comments
18
Mar 08

Microsoft straddling a negative-width line

Joel on Software has yet another very well written article, this time on Microsoft’s futile attempt to appease web developers by setting IE 8 to use Standards Mode by default:

A few years pass; you’re still selling Qxyzrhjjjjukltks like crazy; but now there are lots of Qxyzrhjjjjukltk clones on the market, like the open source FireQx, and lots of headphones, and you all keep inventing new features that require changes to the headphone jack and it’s driving the headphone makers crazy because they have to test their new designs out against every Qxyzrhjjjjukltk clone which is costly and time consuming and frankly most of them don’t have time and just get it to work on the most popular Qxyzrhjjjjukltk 5.0, and if that works, they’re happy, but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it’s raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purpose of hasLayout, because the spec just doesn’t say. FireQx 3.0 treats snow as rain, because you need windshield wipers in the snow, Qxyzrhjjjjukltk 5.0 does not, because the programmer who worked on that feature lives in a warm part of Mars without snow and doesn’t have a driver’s license anyway. Yes, they have driver’s licenses on Mars.

And although Joel’s article was thoroughly entertaining, Mark Pilgrim has a “Translation from MS-Speak” that pretty definitively fills Joel’s article with holes.