Dave just posted that he had forgotten the password to his machine.  It is co-incidental that we should both have decided to change our passwords on the same day, but that’s what happens when you work with someone for so long that even your attempts at firing him don’t work ;-)  I have used the same password on most places on the net for a couple of years now.  Actually, apart from some sites, I really only had two passwords; one weak and one strong.  Today I decided that it was time for a change.  There are a couple of strategies I could potentially use for passwords.

The first is to use a separate password for each site or application and store them somewhere in a list. While this method would be secure, it requires the presence of a master list.  That list could be a pen and paper, a piece of software or a web site.  Paper and pen are portable but ephemeral and susceptible to tampering or theft.  I would also need to carry them with me wherever I go in order to access any of the things I wanted.  This isn’t an ideal situation as I would prefer not to be dependent on something that isn’t my own memory.  There is also an issue of compatibility.  While I could potentially carry around my password list on an encrypted USB key, I would be dependant on compatible software being on a target computer in order to decrypt my list.

One of the newer options would be to use a site like VeriSign’s Personal Identity Portal (PIP).  This would offer the advantage of the stability of the VeriSign systems and the longevity of a well established company, but suffers from a typical lack of support on the Internet.  So far, there are about sixty sites that support it, but that isn’t nearly enough. It is close though.  If it had an online generator that was targeted to specifically match the criteria of each site (ie: cases and symbols allowed etc) then I would definitely think about using it.  It has a simplified authentication system too – I could download a managed card and use that or my username and password and that would be enough to authenticate me.  While researching all of these methods, I tried the PIP and signed into a couple of sites with it, and I have to say it has a lot of potential. You can install a browser button that pops up a window showing you the sites you have stored logins for.  Clicking on those sites signs you straight in, provided you have authenticated at the site previously.  Its a pretty neat solution, but needs more support.

The second option is to use a far more limited set of passwords, ie: two or three depending on the situation.  My preferred solution is to use complex but easy to type passwords.  For example, the word qpwoalsk, which is meaningless and therefore not prone to dictionary attacks, is also very easy to type.  It can actually be done very quickly with two fingers if you look at it on a keyboard.  It also doesn’t have to be remembered, as the shapes of the typing are squares.  Look at it again. With the left hand you type Q-W-A-S which is a square, alternating P-O-L-K which is another square. They are simply alternated from left to right to make up the password.  Stronger again would be qPwOaLsK, and then qPwO-aLsK.  Neat eh?  Another method would be to use an online password generator and use the phonetics it comes up with to remember the results.  For example fruT32ya actually reads as foxtrot romeo uniform TANGO Three Two yankee alpha.

As you can see, there are lots of different options available.  The only thing to do is to find the right one.

This post on Silverlight vs. Flash was written by someone who is far more knowledgeable than I and presents an opposing view to James’ post entitled “Silverlight? Leave Flash to the experts…”.  Something that bothers me though, is that there are many posts about how this is a Flash vs Silverlight or Adobe vs Microsoft thing.  I don’t see it like that at all.  The fact that Adobe's only serious competitor in this space has come out with a product to do essentially the same thing just shows you how mature this industry is getting. Surely that can only be a good thing for Flash developers.

There have been flash apps on web sites for years, but nobody was really bothered by them.  More to the point, sites with heavy flash content were considered bloated and too slow in a world that predominately connected with modems.  Why should I use the “rich” content view when I’m restricted to a 56k modem, and just want to get to the pertinent information?  Things are changing though.  Connectivity speeds are now on average much higher than before, and we can (and do) look seriously at producing heavy content for pages. I recently started looking again into a more graphical interface for this site, mainly because I just don’t know anyone who uses a modem these days.  I’m not averse to actually having my site built in Flash either – I care more these days about how it looks than the technology behind the site, provided these is mass-adoption of that technology.

Flash is pretty much a standard these days.  Its the first plugin you get for your browser, and sometimes the last.  Everybody uses it. In the last 3,401 visits to my web site, only a maximum of 68 (2%) potentially didn’t have flash installed (meaning it wasn’t installed, or it wasn’t a recognised version).  Now, provided a fallback is provided, I see no reason why I shouldn’t provide a richer experience to my readers.  That in turn translates into potential business for a flash developer, should I chose to go down that route.  I can debug flash and actionscript , but I’m pretty crap at creating it from scratch.

Now, if there was an alternative wouldn’t that create more competition?  Wouldn’t it motivate Adobe to come out with something better than they have now, and wouldn’t the be a repeating cycle? To quote Jesse Ezell who really knows Flash : “So, Flash is great. Silverlight just solves a lot of the major problems that I've run into with Flash”.  Jesse created an open API called SwfSource, which was a huge bug-fixed, properly documented, working version of Flash 4.  After he released it, and Macromedia were seeing posts on their message boards about this SDK as opposed to their own.  They killed the project and dropped the openness of the product.  This time around however, they may have to react.  They won’t be able to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist.  Silverlight is a Microsoft product, and I would guess that Adobe are paying attention to that.  Even more so in consideration of Microsoft’s previous experiences in other markets.

So, Flash or Silverlight?  It really doesn’t matter, provided I get to have the best experience I can get on the web.

Jims Blog | Silverlight? Leave Flash to the Experts...

I was just thinking about the steps required to get this blog from one format to another over the years.  I started blogging in March of 1999, storing my data in the following ways:

• HTML pages, sequentially built and edited by hand.  IIRC these were done in something very basic like Notepad or UltraEdit.  There was no interface for adding / editing posts at that point.
• Access databases took over very quickly.  I was pumping the data into the database by hand first, and then with forms a little later.  Access was implemented here in late March, and took a couple of days to get sorted out. There were two main pages – one to display the first ten or twenty posts, and one to display the “Archive”.
• SQL Server 2000 was implemented on my web host in December 2000 and I immediately jumped at the opportunity to use it.  I had been programming with it in work for a few years at that point, but it was always a very expensive option for a host to supply. It was a pretty basic database server, but it managed pretty well under load.
• SQL Server 2005 was rolled out in February of 2006, around the time that I was starting to think about moving to a new hosting company.  I used this at work a lot more than on DaveWhite.Net.
• SQL Server 2008 has just been released, and is available as an option to me.  I’m not going to take it straight away though, as I didn’t take part in the beta test and don’t really know that much about it yet.

The data been been available on the web with probably not more than a week downtime since March ‘99.  That really isn’t too shabby for something that didn’t start with a design plan… it was more of an organic growth from page to a fully fledged database driven back end.  It is only this year that I have started letting “someone else” be responsible for how I handle the data.  Before this, I had complete control over the database structure.  Now, of course, I am using an open source blogging system, even though I own the data, I didn’t specify how it was setup.  It was a scary thing to do I can tell you… and I think I still have the original blog tables in my database, just in case!

That’s how far we cycled today. The original plan was just for a trip into the Englishergarten, a beer and some lunch and then a quick trip home.  It wasn’t supposed to be more than ten or fifteen kilometres, but we got a bit carried away.  After stopping in the Englishergarten we started heading towards Ismaning and ended up at Anna’s parents house. They weren’t there (it was a lovely day and they had gone out on their own cycling trip) so we headed back home. It was a long trip – 42km as you can see from my odometer, which I believe is a few hundred meters longer than a marathon.  The weather was awesome today too, with temperatures up in the high twenties.  It wasn’t too hot to cycle though, just comfortable enough to enjoy, and get a better tan than we had before.  We were pretty trashed after it, but its probably the most exercise we have both had in quite a long time.  Tired, but feeling good.  One thing is for sure, we’ll be doing that again!

Spotted earlier from on the B3TA board, this is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Awesome

Quite some time has passed since I started to change my blog to the new comment system.  It mostly came about when I switched to using BlogEngine.Net and and started to tag each entry in addition to using the categories.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to get the old categories integrated with the new engine. The were stored in a separate table from the blog content and linked through their indices.  So I figured “what the hell, I can go through it and do it by hand eh?”.  Stupid me. It took longer than I thought, and I have been at it on and off since April 14th.  So now on August 7th the job is finally done.  All the entries have been tagged and categorised, and all new entries will be as a matter of course. Time for dinner now.

I’ve just made a couple of minor changes to the design of this site.  There are more to come though… I’m bored with the stupid complexity of this design.  It was copied from a design called Mollio which was originally designed back in 2006 for a specific CMS (Content Management System) called Farcry.  Farcry seems to be defunct now, and Mollio isn’t supported any more.  Its also not the best of designs either, and isn’t completely compatible with BlogEngine.Net.  Maybe I should say that the other way around - BlogEngine.Net isn’t completely compatible with the Mollio framework. 

There are some issues with the way it displays controls, among them the major irritation of having two identically identified controls on the same page in certain cases.  That’s why you can sometimes see a horizontal scrollbar in your browser; the layout tells one of the elements to display a couple of hundred pixels to the right.  In that case it is displaying from the right of a point which is already on the right of the page. 

So, I was thinking about changing it all.  Its now a lot easier of course, as I can make changes without destroying the previous design; all I have to do is not use it.  When I had my own blog software it was far more difficult to do that as the design was intrinsic to the pages.  Yes, I know that isn’t the way to do it, but I had built this CMS over a period of many years and it had evolved into something that I wouldn’t write today.  So, keep an eye out for a new design…

Okay, so the change I made on Friday was completed easily enough, and very quickly.  This newer version was having problems with the older database on my dev server, so I decided to do a complete backup and then erase everything before upgrading. I thought it would actually take several hours, bit it was all done in about 40 minutes I think.

There were two causes of concern for me.  The first was that I needed to erase the tables in the database and start again.  There is an upgrade path, but it wasn’t working properly for me.  User Profiles and Extensions weren’t being handled properly and the relevant pages were causing errors.  The last time I handled this large a series of SQL transactions it took several hours as the database was in California.  This time however, the server is in London, so was much faster for me.  I probably spent no more than 15 minutes getting the SQL server stuff done.  Steps were as follows :  I had to backup the entire database and copy it to my development SQL Server here.  Then I had to drop the tables and recreate them using the “New Installation” script that comes with BlogEngine.Net.

While the above was going on, I had erased all the files from the server and started to upload the files from the new installation.  I had to be careful not to erase the photo gallery, so I moved that elsewhere while the upgrade was going on.  I had to edit only two files – the web.config and the sitemap.  Web.Config needed only two small changes – one to handle the database settings, and one to ensire strict XHTML conformance (which is slightly broken even now, will get that fixed soon). By the time the files were uploaded, I had taken the backed up SQL data and installed it as a new database on my development server.  That allowed me an easier migration path for the old data, as I could use the SQL Server Import Wizard to handle it all for me.  Once I had the tables done, I changed the settings to match what I had used before, and then tested everything. 

I have to say, this version of BlogEngine.Net is far better than the previous release.  Many of the bugs that were plaguing my installation have been fixed, and there is a noticeable speed increase too.  From my perspective (considering I use Windows Live Writer to write and edit blog posts), there only remains one bug, and that’s fairly minor.  So, hopefully this should all work better and easier for you.  Oh, if anyone is using the RSS feed to read my blog, could they let me know?  I’m going to be playing with that a little soon and I need to know how many of you ready it on a regular basis.  Feedburner says there were sixteen active subscribers… is that really the case? Let me know!

I’m upgrading the engine and database behind DaveWhite.Net in the next several hours.  The database change is going to take longer than the code, so come back tomorrow and it’ll be done.  It had better be finished by then, because I won’t be here from 10am…

We’re back, and I should have updated here earlier, but everything has been a little chaotic over the last week.  Ireland was brilliant, of course.  Although we spent most of the long weekend in Trim, we got out to Dublin on the second day.  There we had lunch with Trev in a nice organic restaurant, before heading south to Rathfarnham to meet up with Max and Kate.  We discussed the possibility of all of them coming to stay (separately), and once again discussed Trev getting a blog established.  Trev, if you’re reading this, set the damn thing up.  Once that is done I can start working on John (unless he has a blog I don’t know about?)  We had missed Max coming to Bochum earlier in the week, but in fairness it is a fairly long distance from here.

Anyway, there was a big party for my Dad’s birthday on Saturday night.  It was much better than I had expected.  All of my parent’s siblings were there for the first time in many years.  I have some photos of my Dad and all his brothers and sister together which is pretty wonderful as one of them lives in the UK and doesn’t get over to Ireland that much.  I don’t think they’ve all been in the same room in many years, possibly going back to when my grandmother died which would have been around 1995. So we had them all line up together and got some decent photographs, from a bunch of different cameras.  I’m going to sift through them (I took a lot!) and see if there’s one that needs to be printed and framed… they’re that kind of special. Most of my cousins weren’t there, so it was a bit quieter than the usual family parties we have in Trim.  However, one of them was, and all I can say is “holy shit!” – when did he go from being the small child I used to know to being a teenager who was still a bit hungover from the night before?!!!  Anyway, it was a great party, and a great weekend.  We were shagged after it – maybe even a little jet-lagged!  That’s what you get when you go to bed repeatedly at 4am.

While we were over, I tried Tayto crisps again.  I had gone off them over the duration of my time in London, and developed a taste for Walker’s Ready Salted.  However it all came back to me this weekend.  I think I munched a couple of packets of Tayto Cheese & Onion in a row, all wrapped in some Brennan’s Bread.  Fucking awesome!  Have to take a trip to the Irish shop here that supposedly sells them, and soon.

I had been looking for a nice pair of sun-glasses recently.  The lens needed to be decent enough to block the sun, but also not too dark that they hampered my vision as I would use them for driving.   That’s the easy part.  The frames were the difficult thing really.  The size of my head means I would need relatively small  frame, and they needed to be strong but light enough not to hurt my nose.  I had tried some Oakley Whiskers on in the airport on the way to Sweden and found them really comfortable as well as looking good on my face.  They were however about €250, which made them very expensive for a pair of sunglasses that Anna kept telling me I’d lose.  Imagine my surprise when I found them for less than half that price in Dublin airport of all places!  So I bought them on the spot.  Obligatory cool photo on the right…

This brings me nicely onto the new camera I picked up.  I had been thinking about getting a point & click digital for some time now, mainly because my SLR is just too bulky to carry around in my pocket all the time.  So we got a 7.1 megapixel Sony which is actually very convenient for us as we have Sony laptops.  The memory cards it uses are obviously Sony Memory Sticks, for which we have native support on our laptops.  That makes getting the images from the camera to the machine quick and easy for us.  For example, I took the photo of my in the new sunglasses about five minutes ago, which would have been possible but problematic with my Canon.  Oh and I can do things like this on the camera (which has a large touch screen on the back).

You might not be able to see it in these photos, but half my face is anaesthetised as I was at the dentist to have a filling in my rearmost right lower tooth.  I’m starting to get the feeling back now, but its a damn uncomfortable feeling, and I can’t eat or speak much because I don’t want to bite off a piece of my cheek.

So, what else?  Oh yes, we bought a bed settee for the office / spare room, so all are welcome to come and stay at any time (with forewarning of course).  Not that you weren’t welcome before, but as we only had an inflatable bed it might have been a little less comfortable than one might want.  Emma is coming to stay next month, and potentially the other Emma and Helgi later in the year.  The invitation is open to you too.

Oh, my laptop was overheating lately.  The USB port on the right also stopped working on me, so I opened a service ticket with Sony, figuring that I might have to send it back again.  The nice techs there recommended I blow it all out and check if the fan was running correctly which I did and I’m ashamed to say it worked.  If this were a desktop I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking it apart to look for overheating problems, but laptops are closed magic to me.  Typically they’re “warranty void if opened” closed magic too, so I don’t have too much experience working inside of them.  Overheating due to dust seems to be a perpetual problem for my equipment.  Though I have to say its a lot less dusty here than it was in Stockwell.  So, if that wasn’t bad enough, the main hard disk in my desktop died the day before yesterday too.  It is fully covered under warranty, and winging its merry way back to the factory as we speak, but a fucking annoying thing to happen with a very modern disk. This is the second “modern” Western Digital disk I have had die on my in recent years.  I have a 750GB Samsung unit that may work a little better so it has moved to being the primary drive in that machine.  If nothing else, I think its faster than the WD unit.