Archive for July, 2008

On Creating Strong Passwords

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

It’s getting harder to generate secure passwords these days. Part of the problem is that, the stronger a password is, the harder it is for someone to remember. A password such as ‘F7c%el(9xfka$hsa’ is an extremely strong password, but probably almost impossible to remember unless you type it many many times a day for a […]

Airport Security for Parents

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

I’ve recently been following a thread on one of my company’s internal mailing lists about tips and tricks for air travel with small children or infants. One of the major stress points seems to be getting through security.
This is stressful because parents are usually traveling with a whole bunch of extra stuff, and have to […]

iTunes Store requires WiFi

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

To access the iTunes store from an iPhone, you need to be connected via WiFi. It won’t let you connect over the 3G internet connection.
This restriction baffles me. Why would they do this? The 3G internet connection is perfectly fast enough. You can connect to the App store over 3G. It seems like they are […]

Rock Band Wish List

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

I’ve been playing a decent amount of Rock Band recently. I’ve been staying away from the vocals, but I can get through almost all of the songs it comes with on “hard” on bass, guitar, and drums. This game is a great way to build or maintain hand-eye coordination.
But it has left me wanting more. […]

Disable Menu Items

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

In a recent post on his blog, Joel Spolsky writes that you should not “hide or disable menu items”. His alternative is to leave all of the menu options in place, and provide messaging to tell the user why an action can’t be completed.
I have to respectfully disagree with his assessment. I think that leaving […]

Fedora Update

Friday, July 4th, 2008

The Fedora system has been running for a few days now. One minor annoyance I’ve encountered so far is the way the system uses yum. It’s not that I find yum to be a bad package manager. On the contrary, it is very easy to use. The problem comes from how yum will create a […]