Archive for category: Technology

Earlier this year, I spoke at Seattle's fantastic Ignite event (the 24th edition, in my case) about this subject. This is my second post on the problems with managing passwords in the modern world of technology; you may wish to read the first part, where I describe why this is a problem and why the current solutions aren't good enough.

In the meantime, here's my speech from Ignite, in case you'd like the five minute version!

A common password management API

One of the worst things about passwords...

Note: On May 22 I spoke on this topic at Ignite Seattle 24. If you're familiar with the Ignite format, you'll realize that it demands conciseness, so I wanted to expand on my talk.

This is part one of the expanded write-up.

Background

A few weeks ago, a pretty nasty vulnerability in the OpenSSL software that's used by many popular websites on the internet was discovered. It quickly became known as the Heartbleed bug, and a security company called Codenomicon compiled a fantastic write-up on...

If you use Delicious with the Opera browser like I do, you might have found yourself frustrated because the official Delicious bookmarklet just shows up as a blank icon when dragged to the Opera toolbar. I was, too, so I decided to tweak it for my own purposes.

If you just want the fixed-up bookmarklet…

I reused the Opera icon used to bring up the Bookmarks menus. You can simply hold down shift, then drag and drop this button to your toolbar:

Add to Delicious

You'll end up with something like...

A few weeks ago I was chatting with an acquaintance who wanted to learn to code. He was stuck in a bit of analysis paralysis, trying to decide on the "best" programming language, IDE, framework, etc. to learn was. I've been there too: at one point in my life I literally flipped a coin on whether I was going to go learn Ruby or Python.

My advice to him was simple: just pick something and run with it. As Teddy Roosevelt supposedly said, "In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the...

Anyone who's ever traveled in my car will tell you that I have a pseudo-quirky taste in music. While many contrarian people listen to indie music for their I'm a unique snowflake fix, my preference is to listen to popular music produced in other countries. The result is that my music collection is an incredibly eclectic mix of languages: plenty of English and Russian, languages I actually understand, but also everything from French and Japanese to Kazakh and Indonesian.

You can probably imagine...

If you haven't been here for a while, you might be surprised by two things: one, that the site looks different again, and two, that I didn't bother preserving all the comments that my posts had accumulated over the past few years.

This is not because I don't love you, but rather because my insistence on using odd random scripts like Chyrp meant that I had to transfer my blog posts into this (WordPress-powered) system manually. That was sufficiently little fun in and of itself that moving comments...