Version 2.03

Ok No visible changes here. I have just killed of the old home page. It wasn't doing anything except getting in the way of sending people here.

podcasting

I have discovered a new way of using my iPod. Before I begin I confess to being a big fan of shiny things. I am a sucker for beautiful design. This is even when my brain knows that I could buy something that has more storage, more features and a lower price but looks crap. I just can't do it.

This is not to say that there is any thing wrong with the iPod. I bought the silver mini. It feels nice in the hand, the interface is simple and it holds as much music as I can listen to without getting bored. I am not much of a music fan. I tend to get a tune in my mind and I can play it to death, and I prefer to listen to one album at a time. For most artists this just doesn't work when there are only 4 good tracks on an album, so they get ignored. I really like artist that build an album from beginning to end. This is the reason that I still love Pink Floyd. Their albums feel like a single song that goes from beginning to end.

The end result of all this is that I don't feel the need to add a whole bunch to my iPod to listen to. So I have about 2GB floating around idle.

Last week I read a recent copy of Wired magazine and there is an article on podcasting. Now when I first read this I didn't really think much of it. I figured it would be a great way for the shock jocks to publish a world of crap without having to worry about normal broadcasting laws.

Podcasting is basically recording a 'radio' style program save it as an mp3 so that it can be downloaded. Ok so far not a big innovation. The last big step that makes it difference is that these tracks are wrapped in a RSS feed, so that other applications can pick up the tracks and make them available as up to data content.

I followed the idiot-proof steps from the mag and started to download some radio feeds.

What I have discovered is a whole new world of content. Adam Curry who is interviewed in the article is amazing to listen to. He is an evangelist for this new format, but seems to carry his enthusiasim without boring the hell out of me. What is really cool is his belief in the value of the listener, and how important they are.

So far I have listened to Adam Curry, Dr Karl, Triple J's - Hack show, Paris Hilton promoting her movie, movie reviews, American idol commentary, and that is all i have had a chance to taste so far. This makes my music redundant (at least for now). So now i am looking for the content that will fill my head. Now I love my iPod even more.

I hope to get back to more audio feeds. See ya!!

Id theft: Taking a swipe at two-factor authentication

I have just posted the comment below in response to the article linked to above

Bruce Schneier's article http://www.schneier.com/essay-083.html implies that two-factor authentication is too out dated to be of any real use.

I believe that this is a very dangerous argument to be promoting, particularly since the existing username and password security that every service currently uses is not enough and criminals are easily compromising this fact already. In my experience the biggest hurdle is the get organisations to spend any money on any more advanced security solution.

Although second factor authentication using one-use changing passwords from a token device or from an SMS, can be compromised by some increasingly sophisticated attacks, they do stop most of the common existing ones. Key stroke loggers, standard phishing and other methods of just stealing static passwords can currently be used to passively generate databases of stolen login details. They become obsolete with the implementation of second factor authentication.

I also believe that online businesses are at the threshold of a new phase of development where the old username and password combination will be complemented with increasingly sophisticated levels of security solutions. These businesses must invest in these solutions and their customers must be given a choice over the usage of them. The penalty for choosing not to use them may be limited functionality or increased costs elsewhere.

Second factor authentication will not be the final solution for online security but it is the most mature solution for the next phase of security developments.

Web Standards - who woulda thought?

I have always wanted to be able to throw together a really cool looking web page or site. But to be honest the the more that I have learnt about coding html the more confused I have become. Part of the problem is that I am impatient and want the final result to be there immediately. Unless I want to settle for really crap looking pages (which I don't) then I have to learn the detail.

One of the things that has bugged me for years has been looking at the source code of other designers with really nice looking sites, only to find an absolute mess of tags all through it. I remember trying to layout a webpage so that the content sat in the middle inside a box shape of some sort, and being thrilled about discovering that I could use a 'table' to control where stuff landed.

There was another part of me though that thought that was cheating a bit. I mean a table was for putting data in right? Of course I then discovered that even though my table created a page that looked ok in one browser when I looked at it in a different one I was appalled. It looked nothing like I had built it.

Well times have changed, and it is time that I caught up. The thing that was bugging me was that I wanted my words to stay in their own context (ie not in a table) while being able to apply formatting with fixed styles. I could do this in MS Word but nothing seemed to do what I wanted. This separation of content from display formatting is now built into the latest web standards.

I have been reading a book about them by Jeffrey Zeldman. It is interesting what a small core community there is in standards land. Many of the google / blogger / a-list-apart folk all are linked to the promotion and development of these (not so new now) standards.

DECREE: I Will strive to make every webpage that I code compliant with web standards.

Surprisingly this is easier for me now even though the coding is much stricter because the standards enforce the separation that I was looking for. Content is content, Design is design. The two should be able to work together without having to be dependent on each other. This is what web standards brings to the game.

Version 2.02 - Just a bit wider

I am just playing around of the width of the text area. I have set it to be best viewed for at least 1024x768 resolution. If you are not using that then unlucky.