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So I was talking the other day with friends about the prediction for The Rapture on Saturday. That would be Saturday just gone – the Rapture that didn’t happen. I pointed out that the prediction was based on religious numerology – you look for number patterns in things and assign meanings to them. The great [...]

Through my friend Steve, today I discovered The Pierley-Redford Dissociative Affect Diagnostic personality test. Go and try it for yourself… it won’t take long & I’ll wait a minute for you. OK. Interesting? Weird? Yeah, I’d probably agree with both those assessments. My diagnosis came back as “Quiet and very self-assured, you tend to keep [...]

Hmmm – where HAVE I been? Well, the answer to that question is “right here!”. I guess the more accurate question is “what have I been doing?”. One of the things I’ve been doing is restarting my homebrewing. It’s been going very well indeed – incredibly enjoyable work producing 4 batches of beer, 1 of [...]

Twice a year, Toastmasters turn their thoughts to contests. In September each club stages a Humorous Speech Contest and a Table Topics Contest with the club winners going on to compete in Area, Division and District competitions. The organization required for these competitions can be quite daunting to newer members but it’s very important that [...]

Earlier this week, Facebook announced their location sharing service “Facebook Places“. If you’re familiar with services like Foursquare and Gowalla then you’ll know what to expect here… when you’re out-and-about you ‘check-in’ at your destination – an action which lets your friends (and possibly other people) know where you are. Like a lot of social [...]

Yes, it IS important to vacuum once in a while… who’d have guessed? The first computers I ever built (and then disassembled and then rebuilt) never seemed to gather any dust. But over the last 5 years I’ve seen an increasing amount of dust gathering inside my computers’ cases. I have no idea why… it [...]

Last week I showed you how NOT to store your users’ passwords in your database: the biggest sin of all is storing them as plaintext and the ‘false sense of security’ solution is to apply a hashing algorithm to them. We saw that we can use a common hashing algorithm (the algorithm I used is [...]

I’m currently working on a PHP-based web site that stores member details – username, address, password etc in a database. Nothing unusual here… literally millions of web sites on the internet are doing exactly the same thing. But password storage is a dangerous area. Every month we hear about a high-profile web site being hacked into and [...]

I went to a very interesting talk at Agile Vancouver last night and thought I’d share my notes. I love human psychology experiments and this was packed full of them. Combine that with software development and you’ve got a winner. The talk was given by Linda Rising and titled “Who Do You Trust?” Trust is the most [...]

Saturday just passed was Vancouver Cloudcamp. An unconference dedicated to all things cloud related. Errr, that’s aka internet-based computing… not lying in a field saying “hey, that one looks just like a rabbit’s head”. I’m taking advanced PHP at BCIT on Saturday mornings at the moment so couldn’t get there for the morning sessions but [...]