Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Time to lock it down

You know what password you use on most random websites on the tubes? That one that you thought of when the internet was new and you just wanted to log into the damn site and see what all the buzz was about.  And then you went to another site and you didn't want to have to remember TWO passwords, so you just stuck with you "web" password.  The one that is usually about 6 characters long and only that long because some site required it to be that long.  If it was up to you it would be 1 character long and it wold be the letter "J" because you are right handed and your index finger is wicked fast.  So on and on you carried this one lame password that is probably your first pets name or something stupid like that.

Well now that google has my name, address, reading interest, search history, calendar, email from the past 3 years and now health information, it was time to jack up the password strength. 

Its got letters, numbers, an ascii backspace character and a base64 encoded picture of Mel Gibson before he went crazy in it.  Its 8 pages long and takes me 2.5 hours to type.  But now there is absolutely no chance that anyone will be able to stumble across it and find out that I take Allegra once a month or so for a mild allergy to dust mites.  Suck on that.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Russell's Postulate #45: Naming things

I was doing some serious geeking out after putting Emily to bed and was reading about Currying in Scala. Don't go to either of those links, they are not the point and you probably wont' care. The point is that Currying is some idea that someone thought of once. From the Scala documentation I was reading

This style of ... blah blah blah ... is called currying after its promoter, Haskell B. Curry, a logician of the 20th century, even though the idea goes back further to Moses Schönfinkel and Gottlob Frege.

What this basically says is that Herr Schönfinkel and Herr Frege had this really kick ass idea but crappy names. This brought me to conclude Russell's Postulate #45

A good idea or invention will need to be thought of repeatedly until stumbled across and popularized by someone with a catchy name.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Irony

Main Entry:
iro·ny
Pronunciation:
\ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural iro·nies
Etymology:
Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler
Date:
1502
1: The fact that on normal apples, the little sticker comes right off with no residue, but on double-the-price organic apples you need rubbing alcohol to get off the sticker glue that stays on the apple after the sticker falls apart in your hands.