Javascript Cryptography on the iPhone

How can I store my list of passwords on an iPhone or iPod Touch? This is the question that I attempted to solve as I geeked out over the weekend. I know I can buy an application like 1Password and sync between a laptop and an iPhone but I already have a pretty good password manager (since I wrote the one I use years ago). After a bit of research I came up with a few possibilities: create an iPhone app to sync with my password manager, create an encrypted bookmarklet (this is the way 1Password used to export passwords to the iPhone), or create a html page which will alter its own structure after I enter a password....

S3DropBox 1.1 has been released

This release now permits the S3DropBox to be used in corporate environments (ie. behind authenticated proxies), including being able to handle NTLM authentication with proxies. HTTPS support has been enabled, although HTTP is still used by default. Check out the new release here....

S3DropBox is now on Google Code

In June of 2008 I released the initial version of the S3DropBox as a download available from this blog (see S3DropBox). Since then I've been adding little enhancements to the drop box as updates to the linked zip files. This of course is not the right way to share an application or its code-base, so I've created a google code project at http://code.google.com/p/s3dropbox/. Feedback, patches and wish-list items are always welcome....

Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

If you believe that Software Craftsmanship is important then its time to nail your pants to the mast. Sign the manifesto....

What is using my USB drive?

For a while I’ve been trying to find out what is using my external USB hard disk on my mac when I want to eject it. Its been driving me batty and I usually resort to a few choice expletives before pulling out the cable anyway. Recently I read about the lsof terminal command - for example: lsof /Volumes/BACKUPHD This shows you what processes are currently busy stuffing around the specific volume....

JCrawler rules

A year ago I wrote a post about about writing a program to performance test web applications (see Thumper). Since I finished off the original set of python scripts, I haven't really had the time to continue developing this application further in either Java, Ruby or any other language. Fortunately there is someone out there who thinks that threaded performance tools have an inherent flaw. Enter JCrawler ... go out and try it....

svn2cvs

I am currently working with a team that uses subversion for day-to-day development but needs to use cvs due to a corporate policy. So I suggested that we create a build on our continuous integration server to automatically merge changes from a subversion working copy to a cvs checkout. I had a quick look on the internet for something to do the merging and managed to find and play with a perl script to merge from svn to cvs, and with a java application that was supposed to do the same....

Bluetooth fun and games

My application for an iPhone was rejected last week. Apparently I am not a good credit risk for O2 even though I can buy the iPhone and a 12 month contract outright. I wonder if Apple know how many customers are turned away by O2's business practices? So I have bought myself a Sony Ericcson W980. Very nice little toy, looks very cool, 8GB memory and a 3.2 megapixel camera. Oh yes, Vodafone don't seem to think that I am unworthy of a phone plan....

Flickering screensaver on Leopard

Since switching over to mac I've been using both a Quicksilver trigger, and right-clicking on the little padlock icon in the toolbar, to kick off my screensaver and lock my computer. After updating to Leopard I started to have a flickering screensaver, as if more than one screensaver was active at the same time. This has been bugging the heck out of me, but I've finally come across a solution on Mac OSX Hints (http://www....

How to kill your database

Love these videos on SQL database performance best practices - part 1, part 2 and part 3....