Perfect Paper Passwords

So I was listening to Security Now! from grc.com and Steve Gibson was talking about using a second form of authentication for his employees to login to a special webapp to work from home. So the idea was to create a "one-time" password system that you add to your username and password much like paypal now allows you to use a dongle with the 5 digits that change based on an algorithm. Steve's Perfect Paper Password method takes a hash of some secret (most likely random for each user and stored like salt fPublish Postor a hash), then does a 256 hash and passes it into a AES encryption method along with a number to indicate with card like 0, 1, 2.

Well, Steve implemented the whole thing in assembly langauge and I thought it would be cool to have it in a native C# implementation. Well it turns out the 256 hash methods and the AES encryption (Rijndael Cypher) are included in the .NET 2.0 framework (didn't check 1.1). So to implement the basic algorithm was less than a page of code. I will continue to work on it as I have time and perhaps make it as an optional component of logging into my website.

Mortal Kombat for the DS

A mortal kombat game for the Nintendo DS with WiFi! This is awesome! I love playing Mortal Kombat and now I can play it with anyone around the world on my DS, that's freakin sweet. Back when I got my DS and started playing the WiFi games like MarioKart I thought that mortal kombat needed to the same and now they have. Thanks Midway!

At the same time I picked up the new Zelda game for the DS. It's pretty cool and has creative uses for the stylus. You can draw on the map when you get a clue so you don't forget it, you swing it around to use your sword and use to tell link where to run.

Leopard, grrr baby!

Installed Leopard this week and it rocks! Spotlight is mucho better, the finder works great and applications seem a little snappier (startup times). The "new" spaces feature works so easy, just hold Ctrl and press the arrow key to switch between spaces.

I found a little trick for spaces. If you have multiple apps open in one space and want to move it to another, then follow these simple steps.

1. Click and hold on the top of the application's window
2. While you have mouse down press the Ctrl key.
3. Finally press the arrow key for the direction where you want it to go.

If you have Mac OS X Tiger, just upgrade. You will like it!

P.S. - Students at colleges can buy it at their campus bookstore for $69.99

VMWare Fusion, awesome!

I installed the trial version of VMWare's Fusion for the Mac so I could run Windows XP without boot camp. I had tried parallels and that program sucks. Fusion is just about as fast as the mac itself. The processor that shows up in windows is the same processor and since I have a Core 2 Duo, which has 2 cores it would appear that it depicates one to the virtual machine.

I will be buying this program for sure. Not have to reboot is a big time saver and it doesn't take up as much hard drive space as boot camp because it allocates more space as needed. You can use the hibernate feature in windows to allow for faster startup times.

I did run into a problem that was my own fault. I wanted to bump the memory down to 512 from 768 so that it will take even less time to come out of hibernatio. After I did that I tried to start it and it froze! Well that's what happens when you have a windows machine in the hibernate state and you effectively pull the chip out :)

The solution was to find the vm file in your ~Documents/Virtual Machines/ folder, right-click the file and do show file contents and delete the file like this one "Windows XP Professional.vmem"

After I did that it gave me a few error messages and basically allowed me to reboot the VM. There is also a text file that contains the settings such as memory size "Windows XP Professional.vmx" I had to edit that and set the memory back to 768.

SDLC Choose Wisely

Who hasn't heard about Agile, XP, and even SCRUM? They are the latest "in" thing for software development. I thought Agile was a way to do software quicker for small teams and deliver features at a time. Well I was partially right.

Agile requires that the customer is available for immediate feedback and that the team actually works on the project in the same room in a timebox (1 or 2 week iteration) so the customer can provide immediate feedback to the project team.

...

Singing Michael