Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Piano, Sucka!
January 28, 2008

We planned to meet my mom at King of Prussia mall - the world’s largest indoor shopping place by retail square foot, including an Apple store and several high-end stores like Versace and Tiffany’s - for a little white-sale shopping at JCPenny’s. We left a bit early so we could make a couple of stops along the way.

Abby wanted to buy a spring for a recent invention project. The thing she’s building is a kid of box that beats would-be burglars over the head with a piece of wood if they should attempt to open this particular safe-keeping box. This is in lieu of a lock.

Naming Conventions
January 25, 2008

We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it’s something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.

All of my computers at home are named after “characters” in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin’s Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.

What to Watch in the Downtime
January 24, 2008

Frankly, this writer’s strike and the lull between seasons is killing me. The fact that on-demand passive entertainment isn’t flowing through my retinas to my brain at whatever hour I desire has got me clamoring for Hollywood hide. So what’s a guy to do?

Well, there’s always books. I’m not opposed to books, but I’ve found that sometimes I just want to sit and veg out in front of the boob tube. I’ve come to a few answers about what to watch while waiting for things to get back to normal, and maybe I’ll survive.

Password Namespace
January 23, 2008

Chris recently complained about the phenomenon of services requiring you to enter all sorts of weird characters in new passwords before accepting them. We both remarked about how this is amusingly potentially less secure than allowing the user to select whatever password they want. Why is that so?

Making the assumption that people will select “good” passwords (and this assumption is utterly incorrect, which is why the services make you put crazy things in your passwords), you have a specific number of combinations of characters that a password can consist of. Restricting one of the characters used in your password to a specific character, you’ve actually reduced the number of combinations. Let’s try a synthetic example.

Old Guys in the Sandbox
January 22, 2008

I am not old, in relative terms. But I’m becoming more concerned these days about issues regarding age in my profession.

Many of the folks in the web development industry are in their twenties. You almost have to be to be good at it. By that I mean that if you’re older, you likely weren’t exposed to all the new technology and never had the free time to amass (by osmosis) the knowledge needed to do it well, and if you’re younger, you likely aren’t a professional yet and don’t have the experience to do it well. Obviously, there are exceptions, but generally this seems about the right age within the group of peers I am familiar.