Sam’s random musings

Handle Passwords Securely: Storage

Computer systems in general and your web application especially, never store passwords in plain-text. This is a very basic concept - if you don’t quite grasp the reason behind not storing passwords as plain-text I’ll take the stance of security expert Matasano Chargen and advise you to use someone else’s security system (Redux, for instance). I’m sure we are all aware of the fact we should not be storing passwords at all; rather, we should be storing a hashed string representing that password. By hashing the password, we theoretically create a one-way encryption mechanism whereby the original password can not be restored. We then validate users by using the same hashing algorithm on their input and check if the two hash strings match.

Hashing is not the complete answer, worth reading on…

(Via MichaelWales.com.)

Tools | MySQL Performance Blog

This page contains links to various tools we found helpful to use in practice. Some tools are written by us, others by third parties, yet another ones may be shipped with your operating system you just need to find they are there.

nice little collection of reminders

EXPLAIN Cheatsheet

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

If you are thinking of hunting for some query speedups in mysql this might help (now don’t be premature

(Via Planet MySQL.)

Behind The Scenes of Google Scalability

The recent Data-Intensive Computing Symposium brought together experts in system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to better understand existing capabilities in the development and application of large-scale computing systems, and to explore future opportunities.

Always interesting to read and see presentations on how the really big boys do it

(Via High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites..)

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p>DTerm: give your Mac a little shell love”

DTerm is a utility just released by Decimus Software Inc. It’s a Leopard-only app that provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows shell commands to be run from anywhere in OS X. In case you’re wondering why, just imagine what less window switching and screen clutter could mean for productivity on jobs that require both Finder and Terminal. Yes, you can do a lot with Quicksilver, but DTerm provides bash name completion with a dropdown, context sensitivity to your current path and full output with clipboard features. You can also type ⌘-↩ in the HUD to run the command in the Terminal, which will open up to your current path.

This is a very addictive application for the geekiest around you. Well not totally the geekiest, because they might not know what a ui is other then a terminal window….

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

PagePacker Open-Sourced: “

I am celebrating the arrival of Mac OS X 10.5 by making the source code to PagePacker available. Here is the compiled application.

Don’t know what PagePacker is? Check this posting.

This is cool app to use to make paper GTD and calendars and stuff, but the nice thing is the source is a great little learning tool for Cocoa

(Via Big Nerd Ranch Weblog.)

My first few days with Leopard… (so I have been working with the seed but only for dev testing) What follows are the things in Leopard that are an issue for me now, I do anticipate some of them clearing up in the next few weeks/ months but…

• GPGMail - Ok I know I should of anticipated that a ‘mail’ plugin would stop working with a whole new ‘Mail.app’ but man this is a drag, my workaround for now is ThunderBird and Enigmail (Note I did have some issues with downloading enigmail for some reason but at some point it just downloaded and installation was perfect). Word on the GPGMail site is that a new beta for Leopard is underway, but hey GPG mail is a pia to begin with now this.
• Time Machine - now for some reason it doesn’t want to set up the first back up, keeps reporting that it failed. Now fine but what part is failing in this, is it the source drive that has a problem, the destination drive. A little more information would be nice!
• NetInfo Manager - kind of a bummer I did like managing my dev machine addresses this way, oh well back to hosts file editing…

CSSVista: Tweak CSS and see it in IE and Firefox at the same time:

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously.

The software is brought to us by the authors of Litmus, a tool that tests your websites on a set of browsers.

cool tool for windows web developers, I won’t use it for a couple of reasons, I’m a mac-a-holic and too much of an engineer to worry about pixel perfection…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)