Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

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.

New Webcam Not So Great
January 20, 2008

I had to replace my not-so-old Logitech webcam with something new, since it did not work under 64-bit Vista. The VX-7000 does work with 64-bit Vista, and was the highest quality camera Microsoft offered that would attach to my desktop monitor. (The supposedly higher resolution NX-6000 has a much smaller monitor connector, designed for notebook-thickness screens, but also boasts a better picture.)

I installed the camera easily, the only issue being that the CD did not autoplay and I had to run the setup manually from the disc.

Here, kitteh, kitteh
January 19, 2008

We’re getting a cat. Two, actually.

Berta’s sister Maryann took in a pregnant stray cat and fed it back to health. Of the litter, only two kittens survived, and we’ll be venturing out in early February to collect them and bring them back to their new home with us. Of course the kids are excited, and we spent a good deal of time at the pet store today buying supplies for them.

Annoyed with Verizon, Again
January 16, 2008

I had a strange confluence of events over the past couple days. In the mail, I have received a few notices about services that I can attach to my Fios connection at home. I don’t have interest in Fios TV now that Verizon dropped the ball and we went ahead with satellite instead, but the new 15/15 service is very attractive. I would love to be able to push as much data out as I pull down.

The same day that notice arrived in the mail, I got email on the Verizon billing account. Apparently, the credit card attached to that account is about to expire, and if I want the autopay to continue then I need to update the number via the site they provide. So I decided to update my billing info and see if there was a way to update my service to 15/15 at the same time.