Merry Christmas!
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Events, Friends
For the first time, in quite a long while I managed to see a White Christmas, in the 11 Christmas’ I’ve seen in Canada, only 2 or 3 have been white. That too, they were mostly all in the first couple of years.
My Christmas news is:
- Andrew’s back from Carleton but I’m sure the break will go by too fast to really enjoy it.
- The 540 site design is more or less done, now it’s just a matter of content, oh and actually getting the “people in high places” to notice it.
- My business is starting to really take off, and I expect to see some very solid results by the end of Jan - infact 2008 is promising to be an excellent year, can’t wait.
- Caught up on 2 old time nerdy movies, Blade Runner & Hackers.
I found Blade Runner to be a much better book than a movie, as it went a tad slow for me. But Hackers on the other hand, I saw it and went “Wow why have I not seen this before”. The movie is full of all the 1990’s stereotypes about computer nerds/hackers, which I love for their naive humour.
I learnt two things out of Hackers, thank god for cable modems, and the demise of the 28kbps world. And that I hope to heaven that your password isnt still “god”.
Tags: cadets, holiday, Media, movies
The truth behind the Wii shortage…
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Hardware
Self explanatory,
Truecrypt
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Software
Well the newest addition to my software collection is TrueCrypt, an amazing open-source application supporting on-the-fly encryption.
Oh and did I mention its totally free and takes all of 5 min to setup. Unless that is, if you start poking around in their extensive online documentation - then you’re stuck for the better part of an hour. :P
The download was totally painless as the whole program is less then 5 MB, (only a 1.5MB rar download), and getting is setup is equally as painless if you follow the Beginners Tutorial step by step. There are quite a few options so just diving in, is probably not recommended unless you know a lot more about encryption, or just have a much higher risk tolerance towards the word “format”.
TrueCrypt has a couple of options when it comes to security precautions, you can have just the conventional password, (20 characters being the recommended, up to a maximum character amount of 64!), use a “keyfile”, or a combination of the both for ultimate security. The advantage of using a key file is that unless the user knows that they have to add a keyfile, they will keep getting innocent error messages from TrueCrypt. The keyfile can also be just a regular pre-existing file on your drive, which TrueCrypt does not modify - it just uses up to the first 1024KB. So as you will of course have other files on the drive, you can just use one (or more) as your keyfile. When combining that kind of security with a 20-30 character password, all I can really say is….Wow good luck!
So for me, I have a 3.99GB (maximum file size on a FAT partition) encrypted volume and I have enough space to run the unencrypter from the same drive, (it’s portable of course).
For anyone who read the Digg article on whether or not a defendant can be forced to divulge the password to his laptop, TrueCrypt also has the solution to the problem. By creating a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume, you have a plausible deniability on the questionable contents that may be stored on the drive.
Not that I am advocating child porn of course.
And if you havn’t been on Digg before, well, what can I say..
Tags: Encryption, Portable, Software, USB
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
Man, I have totally re ‘thunk’ my view on PHP.
In the past the only times I have come into contact with PHP is when I was editing a blog and delving into the code, and let me tell you from looking at the ugly mess of braces and semi-colons - I was happy I didn’t know what I was doing!
But then Ian recently helped me convert the 540 website into a PHP version. As we were on Vent at the time, I got to listen in on his thought process…and it seemed easy. And sure enough, when I looked at the code and saw all the includes it really did make a lot of sense.
And now after having worked with the files myself and done a lot of redesigning the website, I can definitely say that PHP is a must for any web developer. The main reason I am liking the PHP integration is because I can now keep one header/footer file and just have PHP call it and include it in each page, thereby making my life a lot easier when it comes time for site wide changes. The same principle can be applies to navigational aides, sidebars, basically anything that is used repetitively on the site.
In order to further my knowledge I’ve been working on a script that will recursively browse a directory and display its contents. This script will be the foundation for my picture gallery.
