In a few days my UNC Onyen password expires, and it will continue to expire every 90 days after that. The typical semester is more like 120 days, so why does UNC force a password change so soon? I am as much for security as anyone, but UNCC seems to have a better system, they force a password change once every 180 days. I sort of think that password expiration should be based on the strength of the password. I don’t feel like my password is at all compromised…. I never write it down, and even if I were to say it out loud, no one would remember what it is. I do appreciate the fact that UNC wants us to keep things secure by not reusing the same password all the time, but damn this is annoying.
Category: Technical
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Lorem Ipsum – A Tradition of Bullshit
This evening I was working on a new website that I plan to release soon, it is for my art. I have been trying to develop the website without doing any of the actual writing that is required (including my present nemesis: the artist’s statement). As a placeholder I have been using Lorem Ipsum text. Originally I thought that Lorem Ipsum was a new invention of absolute giberish, but it seems to actually have a long heritage. Check it out: http://www.lipsum.com/
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Stupid Privacy Policy Laws
I am never amazed at the stupidity of some people and organizations. Google has been in violation of a California law requiring commercial websites hosted in the state to have a privacy policy linked from their homepage for 5 years. Google has their policy available from their About page (one click from Home), but the people bitching about this say it isn’t good enough. Why is this such a problem? I don’t really get it. First of all, if you don’t see a policy listed, go the fuck away from the site. Second, this is Google, privacy is irrelevant, they collect data on everyone and store it for some unknown future project. Google could move its offices to Russia and then blackmail every person in the United States and we would all be fucked, so its already too late for all of us. Third, Google doesn’t require or even really encourage registration (except iGoogle), so all they can know and store is what you search for and your IP address and then where you go.
If you are afraid of what Google might be doing with information about you, it might be time to check yourself into a different Internet. -
Needing to Centralize
Since starting my photography class I have been using a variety of services and systems for sharing, printing and storing my images. Depending upon the classification of images, they end up in different places.
First, my sharing of images. Traditionally I have shared images directly from the blog either using a link from thumbnails to the large images, or even using one of my own cute database driven tools. When sharing larger amounts of images I have been known to share individually with people who are interested, or by posting to my “main” gallery (http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery2). Now I have a separate gallery for my class (http://aux.livecurt.net/ART390/) as well as my Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/kularski/). I have to use Flickr for my online photography class, but I don’t find it that useful for sharing images with people, but then some people are more familiar with it, and its easier for them. Oh, and just to make things even more fun, I have tried Picasa web (http://picasaweb.google.com/kularski). The thing I hate most about having all of these services is not the difficulty of keeping up with where my images are, but how hard it is to get them there. For Picasa Web, I upload with Picasa. For Flickr I upload with Windows Live Photo Gallery. For my two Gallery2 installations I use an extension of Windows Explorer on Windows XP, or in Vista I have to “print” my images to the Gallery2 “publisher”. Why can everyone not just tap into the normal Windows Explorer publish functionality, or better yet, lets get a standard protocol for this crap so that I can use a single open-source application, probably designed by Mozilla (or as an add-on for FireFox). For my printing providers, things are a little less weird… I’ve used Kodak’s own publisher and also a CVS/pharmacy… both of which are essentially the same, except with CVS I can theoretically pick up the prints the same day in the store. I’ve found that the easiest way to work with it the publishers is through Picasa, but I would still like something better than that.
Anyone have any photo sharing, printing or storing tips? -
Time for GITI Repairs
Now that I have a week of free time, I believe it is time to work one some stuff with GITI.
Keychain – an odd little module I wrote to move all of my software keys out of the GITI notepad and into a separate space. The module is somewhat effective at what it does, but it needs a lot of work in the area of user friendliness as well as a bit more of a pretty interface. There are some critical flaws like not being able to edit information for keys once they have been entered.
Education – This module will never truly be complete or functional. This time I plan to hook up some code I wrote in January. I wrote very elaborate code for moving classes between statuses and being able to apply grades too all of my classes at the same time and also close them at the same time (as a result of the grade posting process). Unfortunately after writing all of that code, I never connected it to itself to enable it to work. I don’t remember why I did that, all I remember is that I didn’t have a use for it at the time, since classes had just begun. I must make it functional before grades are posted in a few days.
Schedule – There have been some functional changes to what schedule understands recently and not all parts of the module really understand what is going on with the new changes.
I am considering writing a new grocery list module, and also fleshing out the library module more. In addition, there are a lot of things that need to be done for any type of GITI public interface to exist. Presently GITI is only for GITI users, and there are a few public components that exist but aren’t part of any type of unified interface. I wish to change that and make GITI more friendly with the general web, and not just a stone face to the world that no one can do anything with. GITI has a new domain, one all to itself, so I am looking forward to utilizing that to make something public happen soon.
There are a lot of bugs that need to be fixed in GITI, but most of them are minor things or tiny repairs, perfect for this week of nothingness. -
Paranoid about Drive Space
Chris and I took a look at the use of drive space on my servers this evening and I was surprised by what was discovered. It would appear that my fascination with collecting porn and my ever growing digital photography store are taking over the most space on my file servers. Since I will be pursuing photography as an academic interest, this causes me a little bit of a panic. I have never liked having my hard drives even close to full, I like to keep things open and clear for expansion, getting close to the 50% barrier makes me nervous. I started looking at 1 terabyte drives this evening and found that they are surprisingly affordable and are available in very fast models. It is true that I have 250GB remaining on one of the drives in the new server, but this doesn’t comfort me. I feel cramped and I feel like I am just going to wake up one morning and find that all of my drives are full… drive paranoia.
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Starting a Website
I am having a hard time remembering how to really start a website. I am still fighting with LiveCurt.net and everything that it hasn’t become yet. I want to have it as a central location for everything about me, but I don’t know how to do it yet. I like having everything in its place, but I also want to have LiveCurt.net to bring everything together. At present, the website is set up in a fairly simple and standard way, waiting for content, waiting for me to take any interest in it at all. I have had many theories about the website, including having the major areas of my life (art, ceramics, things erotic) in their own space, while letting the smaller things (cooking, gardening, my library) come together on LiveCurt.net itself. There are also concerns with my blog subscriptions, address book contacts and things like that, that I hope to resolve on this domain. I have played with the concepts a little in a private SiteEngine, but nothing is really concrete enough to put up for use yet. There is a lot of useless code sitting in that SiteEngine that I would eventually like to pull forward and make work for something in the future. Some of the conflicts I am having stem from questions in my head like, “does anyone really want an email each time I blog?” and “MovableType already has notification settings, should I split it?”. Then there are concerns over authenticating everyone in a unified way. Sure, GITI users of the world will be happy, they just log in and its there, but what about everyone else? Should I find a way to bind to MovableType’s authentication, or should I write an authentication module for MovableType that is based on the SiteEngine/GITI hybrid authentication mechanism? I really don’t know how to answer those questions and its pissing me off. The last thing I want to do is make something that no one will use, or worse yet, write something that ends up being non-functional because of the badly documented SiteEngine authentication structure (did I mention I build the structure, and also ignored writing the documentation for it?)
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Voicemail That I Will Check
I’m giving GrandCentral.com a try. Seems like a great service, but I don’t see myself using the forwarding features much. The voicemail is great though, I can check it anywhere via phone or web. -
Commenting on Blog Entries
Many of you may have noticed that commenting on entries on my blogs isn’t as simple as it used to be. This is because SPAM bots can use the easy forms too well. Effective like 5 minutes ago, everyone who has an AIM ID can now login to post a comment to my blog. Also, the LiveJournal and other authentication methods remain available. If you don’t really want to comment on an entry at this time, but want to test the commenting functionality, feel free to comment on this post with a test comment.
There are a lots of options to authenticate, give one a try.