Never use the Lifestream and wp-twitter plugins at the same time on WordPress 3, or you’ll end up in a feedback loop you’ll never believe.

Lifestream was fetching twitter feeds and putting them on my WordPress blog, and then WP-twitter was posting those posts back to Twitter which Lifestream fetched again and posted, etc. etc.

Found it, fixed it, now I hope my 100 (yes, I AM popular) followers will forgive me.

If you are currently using an 8 character (or less) password than you really have no security at all. With today’s cheap and fast computing power, a skilled hacker can crack an 8 character password in under two hours. And it doesn’t matter if your password is “H%gd1f4&” or “password”. Today’s fast computers will iterate through all possibilities, from AAAAAAAA to zzzzzzzz (or for you computer geeks: from !!!!!!!! to ~~~~~~~~) and everything in between, in under two hours.

For now, it is best to switch to a 12 character password. Using current computer power would take about 17,000 years to crack. However, computer speed continuously increases, so that number is shrinking by the day.

So what to do? Experts say that thinking of a “pass-phrase” rather than a “password” would be better: think of a phrase like “The Capital Of Canada Is Not Beavertown!” or “My son’s name is not Sally” or even “Count Iggy is Not a Canadian”. Of course, there are still a large number of online businesses and even banks that do not allow passwords longer than 8 characters. This will have to change soon, so you better get ready memorizing that new pass-phrase!

Here’s the link.

Yes, I finally did it. I installed a new theme for my blog. Functionally it is working, although there’s still a lot of tweaking to do. But I figured three days is enough to be down…

The Photo and Pages sections are being worked on the coming weeks, so keep checking back to see the final result. All other sections will be worked on as well.

Anyway, don’t hesitate to let me know what you think. (be kind).

Discuss.

The next time you grab your digital camera, phone or PDA to browse the ‘Net or talk to your friends, or control your fridge, or whatever you do with your phone, I want you to think of the two people who made it possible: Professor Steve Furber, and Sophie Wilson (formerly Roger Wilson). Back in the early eighties, these two people, with no team or money, developed the original ARM1 microprocessor chip, the predecessor of the StrongARM chip, which core is now used in over 90% of the world’s hand-held devices. Without their work, there would not have been such an explosion in hand held devices as we have seen in the past ten years. While Intel and IBM just wanted to make bigger and more powerful chips, Steve and Sophie set out to make the chip smaller and less power hungry for Acorn Computer‘s new microcomputer. Steve tells this story:

“Acorn Computer realised that it needed a 16-bit microprocessor instead of an 8-bit, for its microcomputer which had been adopted as the BBC Micro. Acorn CEO Hermann Hauser asked Intel if they could license the 286 but Intel said No.”

There were, however, other 16-bit microprocessors, and the job of evaluating them fell to Furber.

“We looked at National Semiconductor’s and Motorola’s but they were too slow “, says Furber. The obvious answer was to design their own but this looked daunting.

“The general view was that microprocessors had a mystique – that they were designed by very special people”, says Furber, “I’d never designed a microprocessor, and everything I knew about them I’d learned at the Cambridge University Microprocessor Group where people met to make computers for fun. We knew that it had taken National 200 years of development time to build their 16-bit microprocessor, and Acorn couldn’t afford that – we only had 300 people at the time.”

“Then we came across the Berkeley RISC. A group of graduate students had built a microprocessor with only a tiny percentage of the resources used by National. In late 1983, I started working closely with Sophie Wilson who had developed all the versions of BASIC for the BBC Micro.”

“Sophie and I went on a trip to Phoenix to the Western Design Centre (an independent microprocessor design house which designed the 6502)”, remembers Furber, “we found it to be a cottage industry working in a bungalow in a back street. That gave us confidence. Sophie started playing with instruction set design. Our mentality was: ‘Let’s have a go at building a microprocessor’.”

The next problem was to persuade the boss. “Hermann was a great guy to work for ” says Furber, “if he had confidence in you technically he’d back a crazy idea. Building our own microprocessor was a crazy idea – but he backed it.”

“Steve is one of the brightest guys I’ve ever worked with – brilliant ” says Hauser, “and when we decided to do a microprocessor on our own I made two great decisions – I gave them two things which National, Intel and Motorola had never given their design teams: the first was no money; the second was no people. The only way they could do it was to keep it really simple.”

Furber defined the architecture while Sophie developed the instruction set. “While IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain,” remembers Hauser.

It was the birth of a microprocessor phenomenon – a chip which did the same amount of work as other 16-bit microprocessors but used one tenth of their transistors – and consequently one tenth of their electricity.

“At 1pm on April 13th 1984, the first ARM microprocessors arrived back from the manufacturer – Plessey”, recalls Furber, “they were put straight into the development system which was fired up with a tweak or two and, at 3 pm, the screen displayed: ‘Hello World, I am ARM’.”

JANUARY 27 UPDATE: Apple just unveiled iPad tablet computer powered by, you guessed it, a customized A4 chip based on a licensed ARM core.

I will be working this weekend (weather permitting: wireless is no fun in a thunder storm) to upgrade my webpage to WP 2.8.1 and install a new theme. This Blue Zinfandel theme has served me well, but is beginning to show its age…

So over the course of this weekend, widgets may stop working, disappear, reappear, and screw up the layout–no worries: I’m on the case!

See you all on the other side!

Neo from hallsofmacadamia requested this bit of code which will allow you to put your (ever growing!) Blogging Tories Blogroll list into a scrollable “window” to reduce its screen size:

Just wrap your <script></script> code from BT with a <div> like so:

<div style="width:220px;height:300px;overflow:auto;">

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"
 src="http://www.bloggingtories.ca/scripts/btblogroll.js">
</script>

</div>

The <script> code you already have, it comes from the BT site when you sign up.
The sizes specified in the style tag of the div are the width (22opx)  (make it the width of your sidebar minus 1 or 2) and the height (300px) of the scrollable box. You can put it to any size you want by changing these two numbers. A scrollbar will be automatically added by your browser if your list is longer than your height (by specifying the “overflow:auto” in the style tag). You can also add a border to it (any color or size) by adding:

“border:1px blue;” to the style tag, like so:

<div style='width:220px; height:300px;
  overflow:auto; border:1px blue;'>

Have fun!

This is our fifth anniversary at shopWebSpace.com and while it has been a good five years, we are implementing a shift from basic web hosting to ready-to-go packages for the technology challenged (while keeping some hosting packages for our current customers).

I have noticed in recent years how everybody wants to get on the web, and many people have the know-how, but there are a lot of people out there who want to start a blog or a community website or even a social network, but have no knowledge of servers, gigabytes, terabytes, databases, DNS records, email forwarding and what have you, and so are “stuck” having to use Google Blogs, or Blogspot (no offence) for their basic needs. Even though those are free and easy to use, they are very limited in terms of your “look”, or layout. You can express your thoughts, but not your personality. And that is where our new services comes in: for a low monthly rate you get your own hosted website with pre-installed scripts and themes or templates. We take care of everything: from registering your domain name and renewing it every year, to installing scripts for you with the plugins you want, or install a new template you want. We have a “WordPress Blog” package, a “Community Site” package, a “Social Networking” package etc. They are truly ready to go: as soon as you sign up, your blog or community website is operational. No installation required.

I am also happy to announce, that for those looking for more technical solutions, we now offer SSL Certificates, Instant Mobilizer, as well as Hosted Exchange.

Here’s hoping the next five years will be as exciting as the first!

Microsoft announced a new system called Windows Azure. It is joining Amazon.com Inc. and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power “in the cloud,” distributed across massive data centers worldwide. That will let companies build web-based programs without having to manage their own data centers.

Leaves this question: do you think it is wise to put all your data in Microsoft’s hands?