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Password Security

Is it just me, or when you set a password on a site, it is very distressing to be told that your password has a maximum length? And then even more distressing when you can retrieve your password, in plaintext, from said site?

Unfortunately, UCAS, which handles all the applications to universities in the UK operates this kind of password policy. I am shocked and appalled at this, that they are storing my password in plaintext in their database, and not using a hashing algorithm of some description (for instance MD5). It's not even difficult to do so, in PHP, all you need do is use the md5() function. In the end, it may even make your database faster, as the password hash of MD5 is always 32 characters, and so the field it is stored in can be a fixed length field, making for faster lookups.

So please UCAS, wake up and smell the security leak, before it's too late. You're gambling with young peoples futures here.

Vista Bloat

So, after firing up vLite, it turns out that more than 1 GB, yes 1 GB of the Vista DVD is dedicated to languages and localisation. Now while this may be interpreted as a good thing, ie. at least Microsoft caters to everyone, they could at the very least make language specific versions, so that much less than a quarter of the DVD is just languages, it just seems like a lot of unnecessary data for a mostly English market...

I think, in the end, I managed to gleen nearly 2 GB's worth of stuff off of Vista's DVD, which will (hopefully) mean a leaner, faster Vista for me when I install it over the top of HP's install. No more *$&%ware hanging around for me!

New Laptop

I finally have a computer from the 21st century! It replaces my old, dying machine that is getting on for a decade old now, but still going strong. I'm probably going to turn it into a server, for backing up files and hosting some private web space.

But anyway, the laptop is a HP G70, Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 at 2Ghz, 3GB of RAM, BluRay combo drive (very nice!) and a built in webcam (I forget the amount of megapixels, 0.3 or something).

Also excited at the prospect of finally having Vista, which despite all my criticism in the past is not too bad in terms of performance or boot time. It does not bode well for battery life though. Unfortunately, because it's an OEM laptop, it comes loaded with a lot of *%$&ware, which took more than an hour to actually get rid of, and I don't even get installation media, I have to pay £30 for it! The cheek!

It seems that I shall be downloading legally obtaining a copy of the Vista OEM installation CD for my perusal, and then I get to try out vLite on it, to see how much I can shrink the behemoth down...

Alpha v0.1

I've been working on this for a little bit. Alpha is a remote control for media players that .NET applications can reference and use. Unfortunately I've only implemented iTunes support at the moment. Winamp is coming very soon though.
Head on over to Google Code to grab the binaries or source, and for full documentation of the API: http://alphamedia.googlecode.com/