My old “password scheme” was pretty simple, I had 4 different levels of passwords so that if a lower one got compromised the more sensitive passwords would still be safe.  The flaw in this scheme is that if one of your sensitive passwords are exposed then all your other sensitive sites are.  I used to think that my banking websites would have pretty hardened systems, but that’s not necessarily the case.

The only safe way to handle passwords online is to have a unique password for every site you use.  A lot of people complain that memorizing passwords is hard, but I find it actually pretty easy (I memorized thousands of Kanji after all). The real hard part is remembering which password you used for what site.  When you have 4 passwords, you can just iterate through them without getting locked out but it doesn’t work when you have tens or hundreds of passwords to try.

Luckily there are a few companies with products to solve this problem. I looked at services like LastPass and 1Password. 1Password was way to expensive and LastPass was hard to use, ugly, and for some inexplicible reason stored your passwords on a server.  No matter what encryption they use today, it’ll be completely inadequate in 5 or 10 years.

Enter PasswordMaker, it’s an open-source extension for Firefox that generates passwords for websites based on the URL of the site you are visiting hashed with a master password.  This is probably the only scalable solution to the password problem.  It also does this without storing your password anywhere which makes it the most secure solution I’ve found yet. Plus the algorithm for generating passwords is simple so if I’m ever in some kind of a pinch, I can regenerate my passwords by hand (with the help of the md5 utility).

The main problems with PasswordMaker is that it doesn’t work very well on mobile phones.  There’s an Android port, but it’s about as bare as can get.  It could use some UX love. For example, It could take advantage of Android’s Share intent to get rid of the whole URL input dance that you have to do now.

Although this setup is working for me without too much pain, I still think that the whole username/password system is way too complicated.  The fact that I need a program to manage them definitely makes it a smell.  I loved OpenID, but apparently it’s also too complicated for users, so now I’m really rooting for Mozilla’s recently announced BrowserID.  As more and more software and services move to the cloud, BrowserID, or something like it, is pretty much going to be required to keep login-creep at bay. It should help reduce the anxiety that people like my wife have when thinking about whether or not they should sign-up for some new site.

“Otona no Kagaku” is magazine that comes with some kind of sience related device inside that you can put together.  There were all kinds of projects from synthesizers to airplanes, all sorts of fun.  Kids today are so lucky, I wish I had a magazine like that when I was a kid.

Anyway I’m too old for most of them to be interesting but one of them came with an Arduino board (branded as “Japanino”).  Since the magazine cost about as much as a new pre-assembled Arduino + shipping I decided to buy it.  The magazine is filled with a bunch of projects other than the one on the cover and explains how to go about doing them.  It’s amazing all the cool things people are doing with the Arduino. One guy uses an array of Arduinos to electricute himself in the face it seems.  To each his own I guess.

The Persistence of Vision project was really simple to set up.  Just a few screws and the website had all the software you needed already.  Here’s what the finished product looks like.

The IDE is really simple.  It’s amazing how low the bar is to get code onto these things.  Way back when (circa 2005) I still had to build a cross-compiler environment.  The language is like a C version of Processing, which is really intuitive and gets rid of having to write a boiler-plate event-loop in the main function.

Now I’m thinking about what to do next.  At work I’ve been experimenting with a presence system based on bluetooth which automatically locks the computer when I’m out of range.  Unfortunately Bluetooth has a pretty long range.  I wonder if there’s any NFC shields for the Arduino.  It’d be pretty cool if you could use your phone as a smart-card via NFC.

About a year ago I bought the first Android phone available in Japan for the sole reason of making apps. Unfortunately I’ve had very few itches that needed scratching.

About a month ago that changed, because the built-in Gmail app has a fatal flaw.

The Problem

If you temporarily lose connectivity while sending an e-mail, the e-mail gets stuck in a “Sending…” limbo.  There’s no way to re-send the message.  It’s not even possible to edit the message.  It’s not in the outbox, and not in the sent folder.

When OhLife first started I spent 30 minutes writing my first journal entry.  Unfortunately I’ll never get to read that post again because it never finished sending.

Also the native app doesn’t support Japanese emoji.  Which means that sometimes I get what looks like blank e-mail from my wife or my friends which were actually just full of emoji.

I decided to do something about it.  So I started using the Gmail mobile web app which doesn’t have this problem. Pretty soon however I started to miss the integrated experience of the native app.

My Solution

Better Mail is a native android app with a WebView hardcoded to mail.google.com.  But that isn’t all, it also listens to the same new e-mail broadcast as the Gmail app.  It will notify you of new e-mail without a constantly running background process.  It also includes a native menu so that you can navigate without having to scroll all the way to the top. Also, since Better Gmail is a separate application it stays in memory longer than a web-page would which makes it much less painful to use.  I also took the time to fix some of my pet-peeves with Gmail’s notification style. For example, I added a “Quiet Mode” feature that automatically turns off sounds and vibrations when you get new e-mail at 2 in the morning.

The Price

A buck.  Making this application wasn’t trivial, since I had to do some reverse-engineering.  While the die-hard Free Software nut inside me has some reservations about using DRM, it does improve performance a bit.  And performance is the biggest problem.

I have a lot of ideas in the pipeline that I could work on if there’s enough interest.  Eventually I would like to try injecting my own javascript code into the page to provide an even deeper level of integration.

Update:

I’ve decided to work on bigger and better things.  The code is now Open-Source (GPL) and available for free!

The Future

This app is definitely a minimum value product, there’s plenty of room to expand.  If anyone has a feature request let me know via e-mail or in the comments.

Yup.  Up until now I’ve never really needed to actually get etags working in Emacs.  I remember trying to figure it out long ago as a newbie and giving up.  It’s initially difficult because it’s not as simple as just saying “etags my-src-dir”, though once you have a couple of UNIX tools on your utility belt though, it’s practically as simple as “etags my-src-dir”.

Just show me the code.

Although there might be other more correct ways to do this, the following works fine for PHP:

    cd ~/src-code-top
    find . -name '*.php' -print | xargs etags

Woah find and xargs?

etags (unfortunately) only works on files and not directories.  Those files also have to be arguments and not stdin.  So we need to use find to give us a list of file names and xargs to convert each filename into an argument for etags.

Explain find.

find is a swiss army knife of file search but mostly you can just memorize “find . -name ‘*.filetype‘ -print”.  find needs 3 arguments, the directory to start looking in, some condition, and some action. The “.” tells it to look starting from the current directory. The “-name” part means find matching filenames (We use the single-quotes to keep bash from expanding). Finally -print tells it to print what it found one line at a time.

Explain xargs.

xargs takes lines from stdin and supplies it as the arguments to some other program.  Just what we need for etags. Although xargs is as versitile as find we don’t need to supply it with anything, the default behavior is fine.

Ok, now how do I use it in Emacs?

Just use M-x visit-tags-file and point it to your newly minted TAGS file.  After that you can easily find out where the hell that class/function is hiding just by doing “M-.” (You can also return to the file you came from by pressing M-*).  Of course “M-.” and “M-*” work in a stack like manner so you can keep “M-.”ing to dig as deep as you need to and easy get back by pressing “M-*” and equal number of times.

So from this second forward I vow to no longer use HN, Digg, Reddit, nor Slashdot. When I’m bored I will waste my time doing something more useful like write articles in this blog, replying to emails, or programming.

Wish me luck.

expand all regions in VS: C-m C-p

That is all.

So I’m writing that here in hopes that it might be easier for other people to find it.

I’m glad there are Cherry Blossom trees in Pittsburgh.