I sense a trend

Digg vs. Reddit. At the time of this posting, Vancouver favours Reddit while Calgary favours Digg.

And the CBC shows all those kiddies what’s what.

On password security

It is commonly thought that secure passwords must have a minimum length, should contain odd characters, a mix of numbers and letters, be not dictionary words, and so-forth. And I suppose all of that is mostly valid: if your password is “cat” you’ll likely fall to a dictionary attack fairly quickly.

However a secure password doesn’t need to be all of these things and password systems that require them all really annoy me.

My chosen format for passwords is the sentence. I like long sentences that won’t fall to dictionary attacks and will take forever to brute force. For instance, I might use: “Thatsjustpeanutestospace”. It’s long, easy to remember and no, it’s not my actual password for anywhere.

So it’s annoying to come up with a 33-character password just to be told:

Sadly, “password1″ passes that challenge unhindered.

Old is Ugly

I’ve neglected this site and blog for quite some time now but this afternoon I upgraded the WordPress install, upgraded stale plugins, and removed some old, unused ones. And in the process installed WPTouch, a plugin that provides a mobile-friendly UI for WordPress sites.

And true to the Law of Unintended Consequences, the mobile site now looks infinitely better than this web site. The default WPTouch design is beautiful.

Perhaps I can just convince everyone to only look at this on their phone….