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Thursday, March 02, 2006

Need a password? I'm in the annoying position of having to think of passwords all the time for different things.  At work, for security purposes we have to change our passwords often.  For my scatter brain, that's time consuming and half of the time I forget. Last week I was annoyed enough to make a password suggestion tool called Hobbitwerk:::pwd. It always has a suggested password but you can use the 'Again' button to get a different suggestion. You can also add some of those "complexity" features: special characters, numbers, and upper case.  When you've got a password you like, down at the bottom you can put in your email address and send it to yourself.  Unless you forget your email password, you won't forget what's generated. Actually this is the second password generator I've made recently. I did one at work but because it was supposed to be high security I was grabbing lots of random stuff so the passwords came out like 98js!@#$.  Yeah, secure but impossible to remember. Hobbitwerk:::pwd is simpler, but better. It just pulls a word out of the dictionary and then adds complexity to it if you need it.  If you increase the required length of a password, words are concatenated together.  It makes things easy to remember, and easy to work with. Though it started off as an idea for an evening I've been using it consistently.  Hopefully someone out there will also find it useful. posted in [home], [technie] 5:45:56 AM    comment []

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Goodbye, MapPoint Mapquest1 Or, in the words of Leto: "Mapquest esta muerte." Check out Google Maps. In the search box, put in a city. Say, Fullerton, CA. Mind blower #1: Click and drag on the resulting map to move around.  Mind blower #2:  Use the zoom in and zoom out options. They are almost too fast. Mind blower #3:  Use the search box for a listing. Like "Pizza Fullerton, CA." Click on the push pins. Mind blower #4:  After clicking on the push pin, check out the "Get Directions" option. Fast and easy to use. The great thing about competition is that it makes everyone better.  Many people are trying to grasp the technical underpinnings of Google Maps. posted in [home], [technie] 1I realized my folly today on the phone with my brother in law. MapPoint, made my Microsoft, is an incredible piece of software (it was used to plan my trip from CA to SD). Mapquest, on the other hand, is the web site that we've all been using for directions the last many years. 1:41:41 PM    comment []

Thursday, October 02, 2003

Knapsack Update As all who read this can attest, my baby programming project is called Knapsack.  It is an RSS Aggregator or, in layman's terms, it goes out on the web and gets headlines and stories from websites you are interested in. One of the problems of being a web browser like myself is that I occasionally see a story and don't have time to read it there and then.  I'd like to come back to it later but I don't want to bookmark it since it's just a story.  This is a perfect scenario for the latest piece of Knapsack: mailgrams. A mailgram is just a story you've seen and would like to email to yourself for later reading.  Email is a good medium because it's persistent (it won't go away) but it's not so permanent; whenever you're through you just delete the email. To the right of the [Mailgram] link you see an option to [Save] a story.  I'll soon implement a more persistent storage medium in Knapsack - online storage that one can always come back to.  I'd also like to make it more sophisticated than just storing a URL - these change quite often and, in the case of some sites like the NY Times, require a login. It's a bit frustrating to have ideas and only be able to inch along in programming (the email concept has been floating in my head since I first uploaded a version of Knapsack) but I suppose it's better than nothing.  If you're bored check it out. Some known bugs: 1. Non-relative URLs get botched in the email, as do pictures.  I'll have to come up with a parsing capability that either resolves these or strips them out.  2. Javascript is a bother in most email clients.  A web based one is usually your best bet at this point with the tool. 3. It doesn't work with RDF. This is a critical fix I'm hoping to have time for soon. 4. It requires bigger screen resolution (at least 1024x768, preferred 1280x1024) posted in [home], [technie] 4:58:54 PM    comment []

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Fighting Back One nice thing about worldwide problems is that really smart people coalesce to work on them.  Spam ended up annoying the right people and Paul Graham's latest essays document measured success in combating spam.  There is also a spam conference at MIT in January - it will be interesting to see how the war goes as various ideas are implemented. One idea I like is to write programs that hit a website linked in a spam URL hard.  Imagine if your email client, upon receiving "spam", just decided to flood the spammer's URLs with requests?  Say 20 or so threads just making request after request?  Big server doesn't care you say, but imagine a million people whose clients responded similarly? Feeling inspired, here is a rough draft of a similar client in C#.  It is just a draft; it doesn't do things asynchronously and doesn't trap for exceptions but it gets the point across.  I've called it Hobbit::Hit Back and you can get the source here.  Wait.  Why don't you email me if you want the source - I can imagine it being easy to obtain code to do something like this online but I'd still be in a bad spot if someone decided to test this tool against, say, Hobbitwerk itself.  Or their online girlfriend's website after she broke up with them... posted in [home], [technie] 6:42:40 PM    comment []

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Hobbitwerk Tools Over the last few weeks a few good ideas for tools have crossed my path.  One was courtesy of J who suggested a page that would allow you to email yourself URLs if your network security prevented you from visiting a website.  I wrote something simple called Hobbit::StealthBrowser to that end:  It's annoying to find oneself unable to send Instant Messages (IMs).  I therefore present to you Hobbit::IMdropper, a web based utility for sending Instant Messages.  Your network may be down, your network administrator may be paranoid, you may just need to get a quick word out; there are a hundred reasons one can think of to have a web based IM option but it's the reasons we can't think of that will prove most important1: The fruits of boredome, solitude and Portishead in South Dakota. posted in [home], [technie] 1Yes, bitten from Contact.  But so fitting, no? 10:42:35 PM    comment []

Friday, July 25, 2003

Knapsack 0.9 I've updated Knapsack to allow individual profiles.  That means that anyone can keep their own feeds as long as they create an account.  The original upload just defaulted everything to my profile.  You can still use my profile to muck around but it would be more fun to set up your own feeds.  Knapsack only supports RSS at this point.  I'll implement the RDF stuff as soon as I have time.  The "Feed Editing" feature is clumsy too - I'm actually itching to change that more than anything.   posted in [home], [technie] 1:06:39 AM    comment []

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Knapsack For a while I've been working on my own RSS Aggregator.  Forget the tech speak, it's quite simple: you download headlines from websites you like.  It's a very rough copy but if you're bored (or want to contribute), you can sneak a peek: [http://hobbitwerk.brinkster.net/knapsack]. posted in [home], [technie] 10:04:11 PM    comment [] Old Friends, Old Memories Once upon a while ago, when I was but a fledgling programmer I decided I must learn a programming language called Java.  I've always been interested particularly in making programs for the internet and when Java was a big craze a company called Plumb Design released the first iteration of their Visual Thesaurus, written in Java.  That's only half the story - at that point in time ESPN had a gamecast engine written in Java as well. The Visual Thesaurus is quite simple - it illustrates related words visually.  Try it out... posted in [home], [technie] 9:49:41 PM    comment []

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