The Author – Bart Busschots
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Oct
29
Pumpkin Soup
Filed Under Cooking & Food on October 29, 2011 | 2 Comments
It’s been a LONG time since I posted to this series, but I was preparing for Halloween today, and decided I may as well grab some pictures while I worked so I could share my recipe with the world. Because it was un-planned the pics are not great, and my kitchen was less than spotless, but still, I think the shots are good enough to illustrate this quite simple recipe.
Ingredients:
- Half a small pumpkin
- Four onions
- Four potatoes
- Parsley (fresh preferred, but dried OK)
- Thyme (dried)
- Salt & Black Pepper
- OPTIONALLY – Nutmeg, Coriander, and Cumin
- VERY OPTIONALLY – Cayenne Pepper, and Curry Powder
Oct
6
Remembering Steve
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 6, 2011 | 4 Comments
Apple have asked Mac fans to share their thoughts on today’s passing of Steve Jobs with them via [email protected]. I’ve just sent off the email below – please consider taking some time out of your day today to share your thoughts too.
Subject: May his legacy out-shine his short time on this Earth
As one of the very many relatively recent Apple converts, I’d always hoped there’d be many more keynotes to come, and many more revolutions for Steve to introduce us all to. I wasn’t there for the unveiling of the Mac in 1984, or the iMac on Steve’s return to Apple, or OS X, or even the iPod, but I did get to enjoy the keynotes that introduced the world to the iPhone, the iPad, and iCloud. I think it’s safe to say that the first two of those have already revolutionised our interaction with the world, and I lets hope iCloud goes on to do the same.
I’m tempted to dwell on thoughts of all the great things Steve could have shared with the world had he been as immortal as we all wished, but I think that’s the wrong way to look at things. Steve planted a seed, watered it, and cared for it for years. That seed has developed into a strong and vibrant young tree, which is mature and strong enough stand alone now. It’s a tree that will bear many more great fruits, and each of those fruits will be infused with Steve’s passion and vision. I don’t think it’s possible to extract Steve’s values or aspirations from Apple any more, so in my mind, a part of him has found immortality. A strong, vibrant, and innovative Apple will serve as the best possible memorial to Steve. I hope his family and friends will be able to take some comfort from watching his legacy grow, mature, and blossom.
Here’s hoping that Steve’s legacy through Apple, Pixar, and his family, will stand as a beacon through time for much longer than the 56 short years of his life.
Bart Busschots,
co-Producer,
International Mac Podcast.
Oct
3
Introducing www.xkpasswd.net & xkpasswd.pm
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development, My Projects on October 3, 2011 | 6 Comments
Steve Gibson really set the cat among the pigeons with his Password Haystacks site a few months ago, and XKCD’s ‘Correct Horse Battery Staple’ web comic brought that message home to many many nerds and geeks. The basic idea is that you’re better off making your passwords long and memorable than short and complex. In the simplified XKCD example the password is simply made up of 4 common words, but Steve Gibson suggests you should add some padding around those words to make the passwords much harder to guess.
This is a lovely theory, but I’m not imaginative, and I need to invent a lot of passwords every week, so I wrote a Perl module to do it for me, and called it xkpasswd.pm. The first thing I’m announcing today is that I’ve made this library available for free for both personal and commercial use (under the FreeBSD license), you can download it from www.bartb.ie/xkpasswd.
It’s great to have a library for nerds to play with, but what about everyone else? Well, that’s where my second announcement comes in, I’ve also created www.xkpasswd.net, a simple web front-end to the xkpasswd.pm module.
In case anyone is wondering where the name comes from? It’s a mashing together of XKCD, and passwd, the Linux/Unix command for changing passwords. Because I used to use Solaris, and hence the yppasswd command, I liked the idea of keeping the prefix to just two letters, hence xkpasswd, rather than xkcdpasswd.
For any programmers interested in using the Perl module, it has no prerequisites other than base Perl, and all you need to get started is the module and a dictionary file to point it at. The download package contains the module, a sample dictionary, and a sample Perl script which invokes the module.
In the future I also plan to release a JavaScript-only version if the library so that others can embed xkpasswd-based password generators in their own sites without needing Perl CGI support on their servers. I’m also experimenting with creating an OS X Service to allow people to easily generate xkpasswd passwords from anywhere within OS X, and perhaps even a native OS X Application. So stay tuned!
