Dan Q
If anybody’s interested, I’m lugging around a sackload of Diaspora Alpha invitations. If you’re the kind of person who’s likely to want one, then you’re probably the kind of person who already knows what Diaspora is, so I shan’t go in to any further detail here.
Leave a comment if you want one, being sure to fill in the “Email” field of the comment form with the email address you’d like your invitation sent to. See you on the flipside.
If you see me in person, you’ll know that this is something I rant about from time to time. But that’s only because people consistently put themselves and their friends at risk, needlessly, and sometimes those friends include me. So let me be abundantly clear:
If you’re reading this, there is at least a 95% chance that your passwords aren’t good enough. You should fix them. Today.
Let’s talk about what what we mean by “good enough”. A good password needs to be:
There’s been a wave of attacks recently against users of social networking websites: an attacker will break into an insecure web forum to get people’s email addresses and password, and then will try to log in to their webmail accounts and into social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) using those same credentials. When they get a “hit”, they’ll explore the identity of the victim, learning about their language patterns, who their friends are, and so on. Then they’ll send messages or start chats with their victim’s friends, claiming to be their victim, and claim some kind of crisis. They’ll often ask to borrow money that needs to be wired to them promptly. And then they’ll disappear.
In this interconnected world, it’s important that your passwords are good not only for your benefit, but for your friends too. So if you’re guilty of any of the “password crimes” above – if you have passwords that are short (under 8 characters), simple (don’t use a mixture of cases and include numbers), predictable (using dictionary words, names, dates, etc.: even if they include a number), or re-used (used in more than one place or for more than one site) – change your passwords today.
Here’s some resources to help you do it:
Microsoft recently tweeted: “It’s not often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for IE6, we’ll make an exception”. This coincides with the launch of The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown, a website that tries to encourage people to drop this hideously old and awful browser in favour of better, modern, standards-compliant ones, thereby saving web developers heaps of work.
That’s not strictly true; they’re encouraging people to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 and 9, presumably, which are still a little lacking in support for some modern web standards. But they’re a huge step forward, and everybody who’d like to stick with Internet Explorer should be encouraged to upgrade. There’s no excuse for still using IE6.
They’re even providing a tool to let you put a “Upgrade now, damnit!” banner on your website, visible only to IE6 users. It’s similar to the IE6Update tool, really, but has the benefit of actually being supported by the browser manufacturer. That has to count for something.
Will it make a difference? I don’t know. I’m frankly appalled that there are modern, high-tech countries that still have significant numbers of IE6 users: Japan counts over 10%, for example! We’re talking here about a ten year old web browser: a web browser that’s older than MySpace, older than Facebook, older than GMail, older than YouTube. Internet Explorer 6 was released into a world where Lord of the Rings that would take you a long time to read, rather than taking you a long time to watch. A world where in-car CD players still weren’t universal, and MP3 players were a rarity. Do you remember MiniDisc players? Internet Explorer 6 does. The World Trade Center? Those towers were still standing when Internet Explorer was released to the world. And if that’s making you think that 10 years is a long time, remember that in the fast-changing world of technology, it’s always even longer.
Just remember what Microsoft (now, at long last) says: Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.
This week, I discovered Breakup Notifier, a whole new way to be creepy on Facebook. I mention it because I just know that there are some of you out there who were waiting for this tool to be invented (and we’ll know who you are because you’ll be the ones to try to keep a low profile by not commenting to say “ugh; that’s creepy”).
The idea is, as it says on the site, that you can tell Breakup Notifier which of your friends you’d be interested in, if only it weren’t for the fact that they’re in a (presumably closed) relationship. If their relationship status changes, you get an email to let you know, so you can be the first to take advantage of the new situation. Like Ted in The Window, an episode of How I Met Your Mother: which if you’ve not seen yet, you should try.
I think that the developers of this site are missing an opportunity, though, to make a little cash on the side. All you have to do is to be able to buy “priority access” on the people you’re interested in. If you’ve paid, then you get notice of a breakup in advance of other people who are interested in the same person but who haven’t paid. The amount of advance notice is based on the difference in your bids: so if I’m stalking watching Alice, and so are Bob and Charlie, but I paid £10 and Bob paid £2, then maybe I’ll get a notification 8 hours before Bob, who get a notification 2 hours before Charlie. It’s all relative, so if I’m also interested in Eddie, who’s also being followed by Frankie and Graeme, but we’re all on the free package, then we all get notified together.
As far as marketing’s concerned, that’s easy: just tell users how many others are watching the people they’re interested in! I suspect that more money would be made if you don’t tell them how much the others have paid, but the whole thing’s as sociologically-complicated as it is skin-crawling. What happened to the good old days, when you’d just keep pressing refresh on your crush’s MySpace page until they hinted that things might be rocky with their significant other?
I talk a lot. If you don’t want to listen to me ramble, and you’re just looking for the free deed poll generator, click here.
After Claire and I changed our names back in 2007, I actually took the time to do a little research into deeds poll (or, more-specifically in this case, deeds of change of name). It turns out that we did it the wrong way. We paid a company to do all of the paperwork for us, and – while it wasn’t terribly expensive – but it wasn’t free, and “free” is exactly how much it ought to cost.
In the intervening years I’ve helped several friends to change their names via deeds poll (yes, “deeds poll” is the correct plural), and I’ve learned more and more about why the whole process should be simpler and cheaper than many people would have you believe.
A deed poll, by definition, is nothing more than a promise signed by one person (it’s not even a contract – it’s got little more weight than a New Year’s resolution), on paper which has straight edges. That’s what the word “poll” actually means: that the paper has straight edges. Why? Because back then, a contract would typically be cut into two on an irregular line, so that when the two halves came together it would be clear that they were originally part of the same document – an anti-forgery measure. A deed poll, because it’s signed only by one person, doesn’t need to be separated like this, and so it has straight edges.
That means that’s it’s perfectly legitimate for you to write, on the back of a napkin, “I have given up my name [former name] and have adopted for all purposes the name [new name]. Signed as a deed on [date] as [former name] and [new name]. Witnessed by [witnesses signature(s)].”
The problem comes when you send that napkin off to the Inland Revenue, or the DVLA, or the Passport Office, and they send it back and laugh. You see, it helps a hell of a lot if your deed poll looks sort-of official. You ought to put some work into making it look nice, because that makes a world of difference when you ask people to believe it. That’s not to say that they won’t laugh at you anyway – the Passport Office certainly laughed at me – but at least they’ll accept your name change if it has an air of authority and is covered with all of the most-relevant legalese.
Behind the dozens of scam artists who’ll charge you £10, £20, £30, or even more to produce you an “official” deed poll (tip: there’s no such thing), there are one or two “free” services, too. But even the best of these has problems: the site is riddled with advertisements, the document isn’t produced instantly, you’re limited in how many deed polls you can generate, and – perhaps worst of all – you have to give them your email address in order to get the password to open the documents they give you. What gives?
So I’ve made my own. It’s completely free to use and it’s available at freedeedpoll.org.uk: so what are you waiting for – go and change your name! Oh, and it’s also open-source, so if you want to see how it works (or even make your own version), you can.
Why? Well: I don’t like feeling like I’ve been scammed out of money, so if I can help just one person change their name for free who might otherwise have been conned into paying for something that they didn’t need: well, then I’ve won. So change your name or help your friends and family to, on me, or just download my code and learn a little bit about Ruby, Sinatra, and Prawn (the technologies that power the site). What’re you waiting for?
Oh yeah: I changed the look-and-feel of scatmania.org the other week, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s become a sort-of-traditional January activity for me, these years, to redesign the theme of my blog at this point in the year.
This year’s colours are black, white, greys, and red, and you’ll note also that serifed fonts are centre-stage again, appearing pretty-much-universally throughout the site for the first time since 2004. Yes, I know that it’s heavier and darker than previous versions of the site: but it’s been getting fluffier and lighter year on year for ages, now, and I thought it was time to take a turn. You know: like the economy did.
Aside from other cosmetic changes, it’s also now written using several of the new technologies of HTML5 (I may put the shiny new logo on it, at some point). So apologies to those of you running archaic and non-standards-compliant browsers (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer 6 users) if it doesn’t look quite right, but really: when your browser is more than half as old as the web itself, it’s time to upgrade.
I’ve also got my site running over IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol – for those of you who care about those sorts of things. If you don’t know why IPv6 is important and “a big thing”, then here’s a simple explanation. Right now you’re probably viewing the IPv4 version: but if you’re using an IPv6-capable Internet connection, you might be viewing the IPv6 version. You’re not missing out, either way: the site looks identical: but this is just my tiny contribution towards building the Internet of tomorrow.
(if you really want to, you can go to ipv6.scatmania.org to see the IPv6 version – but it’ll only work if your Internet Service Provider is on the ball and has set you up with an IPv6 address!)
I’ve been playing about with the beta of Firefox 4 for a little while now, and I wanted to tell you about a feature that I thought was absolutely amazing, until it turned out that it was a bug and they “fixed” it. This feature is made possible by a handful of other new tools that are coming into Firefox in this new version:
I run with a lot of tabs open most of the time. Not so many as Ruth, but a good number. These can be divided into three major categories: those related to my work with SmartData, those related to my work with Three Rings, and those related to my freelance work and my personal websurfing. Since an early beta of Firefox 4, I discovered that I could do this:
Time to do some SmartData work? I just click the SmartData webmail app tab and there’s my e-mail, and the rest of the non-app tabs transform magically into my work-related tabs: development versions of the sites I’m working on, relevant APIs, and so on. Time to clock off for lunch? I click on the personal webmail tab, look at my e-mail, and magically all of the other tabs are my personal ones – my RSS feeds, the forum threads I’m following, and so on. Doing some Three Rings work in the evening? I can click the Three Rings webmail tab and check my mail, and simultaneously the browser presents me with the Three Rings related tabs I was working on last, too. It was fabulous.
The other day, Firefox 4 beta 7 was released, and this functionality didn’t work any more. Now app tabs aren’t associated with particular tab groups any longer: they’re associated with all tab groups. This means:
I’m painfully familiar about what happens when people treat a bug as a feature. Some years ago, a University Nightline were using a bug in Three Rings as a feature, and were outraged when we “fixed” it. Eventually, we had to provide a workaround so that they could continue to use the buggy behaviour that they’d come to depend upon.
So please, Mozilla – help me out here and at least make an about:config option that I can switch on to make app tabs belong to specific tab groups again (but still be always visible). It was such an awesome feature, and it saddens me that you made it by mistake.
When ancient Roman typesetters or web designers were showcasing a design, and didn’t want the content of the (dummy) text on their mock-ups to distract the client… what did they use for their lorem ipsum text?
These are the kinds of things that bother me most when I’m doing typographic layout. That, and Internet Explorer’s consistently fucked-up interpretation of CSS.
Looking Back
On this day in 2006 I’d just come to the end of a long weekend of coding and socialising. The code project was, of course, Three Rings, and Bryn and Gareth were helping out with the big push to make the initial release Three Rings 2 a success.
Three Rings is, of course, a project to streamline the administration of helpline services (like Samaritans) by making it easier for them to manage their rota and volunteer resources. I kicked the project off back in 2002 (based on an idea that Kit and I had discussed as early as 2000), initially only for Aberystwyth Nightline – with whom I was then a volunteer – but it quickly spread and within a few years had become the de facto system for Nightlines everywhere. Later, my work with expanding and enhancing Three Rings comprised a part of my University dissertation.
Among the problems with that early version of Three Rings, though, was that it had never been designed to scale, and so eventually the time came to throw it out and develop a new one, from scratch, in the then up-and-coming Ruby on Rails framework. Gareth was a huge help in the early development, and Bryn got burdened with the task of coming up with a means to convert the data between the old system and the new system, migrating our users across: a horrendous task, because the two systems used completely incompatible data storage mechanisms, and the old system was riddled with quirks and workarounds. This weekend, back in 2006, was the cumulation of that work: Bryn hacking away on his Project: Rosetta system, a stack of Perl programs to translate the data… while Gareth and I made progress on redeveloping features for the new system.
It wasn’t all work, though: we also all took a trip up to nearby Ynyslas, a little way North of Aberystwyth, for a barbeque on the sweeping sand dunes there. As my blog post for that weekend reveals, this involved a fantastic prank in which Claire and I “hid” Jimmy by burying him under the sand, covering his face with an upturned cardboard box, and then frightening the shit out of Gareth when he – having been told that Jimmy hadn’t come – lifted the box to find Jimmy’s disembodied head staring back at him.
Looking Forward
Since that day, Three Rings has continued to grow and expand – it’s now used by a number of charities nationwide, and exists as a company in it’s own right. Gareth and Bryn are no longer directly involved with the project, but parts of their code live on in the system, ticking away in the background.
Ruth now plays a major part in the development of the system, and it actually formed part of her dissertation, too, meaning that my dissertation (which Bryn still has, after he borrowed it to help him write Rosetta) was actually cited as a reference in another document: something which pleased me inordinately.
Claire and Jimmy got together a year and a bit ago, and they’re now living together, still in Aberystwyth (not that you’d know from reading either of their blogs, slackers that they are).
And we haven’t had a barbeque yet since moving to Earth, but weather-permitting, the plan is to do so this week!
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.
I’ve recently undergone an ordeal with Easily, with whom a number of my domain names are registered, that involved a process so painful and convoluted that I couldn’t help but share it with you. All I wanted to do was to change the WHOIS data on some of my domains, because they were horribly out of date. Here’s the process that seems to be standard at Easily:
We’re coming up on one month since this ordeal started. For reference, when I used GoDaddy to do the same operation, I had it done within five minutes, and I could do it all online.
Easily have really, really gone down in my estimation.
In the unlikely event that I’m not the only person who uses SuperGenPass to manage my passwords and MicroB on Maemo on my Nokia N900, here’s a few tips that I thought I’d share (they’re also valid on the N800 and N810 and “hacker edition” N770s, too, I expect):
Today is a good day for the web. Internet Explorer 8, which actually has reasonably good standards support, is now more widely-used than Internet Explorer 6, which is horrific to code for (Internet Explorer 7 isn’t much better).
It’s always been hard to write good quality web sites that work in Internet Explorer 7 and below: generally, I’ve always taken the approach of writing sites to comply with the standards and then to put in hacks specifically to address the problems introduced by IE6 and IE7. The sooner that we can disregard these browsers, the better.
Despite the stupid marketing campaigns Microsoft’s been pursuing to try to increase adoption of IE8, I’m at least a little thankful that they’re apparently working. I’ll be so glad the next time I can launch a site and not even have to think about using <!–[if IE 6]> conditional comments.
Have you seen the latest stupidity that the Windows Internet Explorer team have come up with? Ten Grand Is Buried Here.
The idea is that they encourage you to give up whatever browser you’re using (assuming it’s not Internet Explorer 8), calling it names (like “old Firefox” if you’re using Firefox, “boring Safari” if you’re using Safari, “tarnished Chrome” if you’re using Chrome, and… “that browser” if you’re using Opera) and upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, and they’ll be giving out clues on their Twitter feed about some secret website that’ll only work in IE8 at which you can register and win $10,000AUS (yes, this is an Australian competition).
After looking at the site in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera, I thought I’d give it a go in Internet Explorer 8. But it didn’t work – it mis-detected my installation of IE8 as being IE7 (no, I didn’t have Compatability Mode on).
In the end, though, I just used User Agent Switcher to make my copy of Firefox pretend to be Internet Explorer 8. Then it worked. So basically, all that I’ve learned is that Firefox does a better job of everything that Internet Explorer does, including viewing websites designed to only work in Internet Explorer. Good work, Microsoft. Have a slow clap.
Downloaded your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 yet to help them make the world record? I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the early betas and I’ve got no qualms about recommending it wholeheartedly. The awsomebar is simply that: awesome, the speed and memory usage have become far better than the previous version, and the care and attention that have gone into the little things – like the fact that it now asks you if you want to save passwords after you’ve seen if they were correct, not before – really do make this the best web browser I’ve ever used.
Go download it already.
I’ve been impressed, again, by Dreamhost, who provide hosting for this and many of my other websites. During a fit of stupidity, I
accidentally rm -rf *‘d Abnib Gallery. For those of a less techy nature, I deleted it: pictures and site and all. Whoopsie.
So I thought: perhaps they have a tape backup or something. I filled in their support form, which asks lots of useful questions like “How much do you know about this?”, with options ranging from “I don’t know anything, hold me by the hand,” to “TBH, I probably know more about this than you do!” and a nice scale of rating the urgency, as well as indicating how many calls they’re dealing with right now and a link to an outstanding issues page.
Within half an hour I’d been e-mailed back by a tech support person, who explained in exactly the appropriate level of detail that hourly and daily backups (with grandfather-father-son
fallbacks) of everybody’s home directory are made into their hidden .snapshot directory. I took a peep, and lo and behold there was my backup. Very impressed.
Now, if only they’d improve the reliability and speed of their Rails hosting, I’d offer them a round of oral sex.