Google Docs in Plain English

Amazon.com Widgets

Amazon has recently released Amazon.com Widgets which allow you to easily connect your blog to your Amazon.com and Amazon Associates accounts. Here's just a quick example of their WIshList Widget:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The folks at CommonCraft have done it again!

USB 3.0 coming in 2008

"The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second." Read how on Crave : The gadget blog.

What ancient language am I?

Your Score: Older Futhark

Language of the Norse, Older Futhark! Thirty symbols, all told. And no hardier, more warrior-like tongue has ever graced the longships of the Viki or left the Celts and Saxons in such quivering fear. There's only one drawback, that being you died 800 years ago.

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Secure Password Generator for Firefox

Looking for a secure way to generate solid passwords on the fly? Try the SecurePassword Generator Firefox add-on. 

Once installed you can find the program on Firefox's Tools menu. When run a new window will appear:

Here you can simply click "Create" to receive a six-character complex password. Here you can choose to make passwords that can be typed with just the left or right hands or both hands. (Assuming you're a touch-typist.) You can also check the "Make mnemonic" option which will give you a password solely made up of letters.

The Characters tab allows you to control the complexity of your password. Here you can change the length of the password, tell it to include/not include letters, numbers, other characters (punctuation), and tell it to exclude certain characters. You can also adjust the sliders for letters, numbers, and others to control how many of each you'll receive.

When you do finally want a password, just click the "Create" button on the Create tab and your password will be generated in an animated way. (You'll just have to see it as I just can't figure out how to explain it.)

Lastly, use the "Copy to Clipboard" button so you don't have to retype it.

This is an ass-on I'll personally be using in the future and showing off in my security workshop.

Longest flickr tag ever?

Flickr user, and librarian, ricklibrarian uses the tag zone1referencelibrariansvisitedthewheatonpubliclibraryonseptember6. I've got to say it's the longest one I've ever run across.

Do your patrons know your WiFi policy?

In my tech support & security workshop I discussed WiFi and why you should offer it in your library. We also talked about basic WiFi security and the dangers of open, unsecured WiFi from the user's point of view. I was asked about policy issues and was able to remember most of what I talked about in my article on the issue published last year in Computers in Libraries. However, I had totally forgotten that that morning when I connected to the open WiFi at the Omaha Public Library I had to click through a short, to the point, yet completely wonderful screen that made me accept their policy. It covers everything. So, for the benefit of yesterday's workshop attendees and for all my other library readers, here it is.

Windows Live Writer photoset

My complete set of Windows Live Writer screenshots is now available on flickr.

Windows Live Writer - Insert Book Information plugin

This plugin is similar to "Insert Amazon Link" but works a little differently. This one allows you to search by title or author (but not by ISBN, the only option in the other plugin), and generates a smaller output with cleaner code. (Still HTML and tables, but no MS-specific code.)

The Interface:

The Results:

The First Quarter : A 25-year History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent Read more about this title...

Writer now supports XHTML* (emphasis on the asterisk)

As a follow-up to my post wondering about Windows Live Writer's "XHTML-style" output,  a Microsoft employee just pointed me to his blog post on the topic.  Basically, it's about what I expected: we're trying and we're close. Works for me.

Testing the Insert Amazon Link plugin

I poked around the Windows Live Write plugins and found a few more interesting ones. This one does an ISBN search in Amazon.com and inserts the book information, cover, and link (including your associates ID). Here's the plugin interface:

Here's the result:

Amazon.com: The First Quarter : A 25-year History of Video Games: Books: Steven L. Kent ISBN: 0970475500 ISBN-13: 9780970475503

The code is a tad messy as it includes some specialized MS code, and is a non-CSS table but it sure does make for easy insertion of this content. (From a validation standpoint, it is close. The only errors are no alt attribute on the cover image, an 'unselectable' atribute which MS seems to have made up, and the code itself is HTML, not XHTML (i.e. mostly missing the trailing slash on empty elements). This last one is only a problem since my blog is XHTML. I'll probably write to the author of the plugin asking for fixes in the next update.)

Flickr4Writer

Search and ye shall receive. Clicked on the "Add a Plugin..." button in Windows Live Writer and found Flickr4Writer, just what I needed to be able to browse my flickr stream and insert an image. I'm loving WLW more and more by the minute.

It works by allowing you to search for images in flickr. Put in your username and it pulls up your photos. You can then limit to by photosets and tags. I'd like to see CC licensing information included with the photos but that's minor.

Not perfect (what software is) but it does the job I need it to do.

First test of Windows Live Writer

Not much to say yet, but the software did seem to successfully detect all of my Blogger account settings despite the fact that I publish to my own server, not blogspot. (One kudo point so far.)

Also, the interface seems nice and easy to use. There is an edit code view and a live preview of what this post will look like on my blog once it's published. (12 kudo points for that feature!)

Images can be inserted by browsing local/network drives and through a URL. It doesn't seem to be able to pull images from flickr directly, but I can just do the usual copy/paste of the flickr code so that's not too troubling.

There's more features. I'll post more if/when I find things worth mentioning. My initial opinion: a pretty sweet app.

Huh?

I'm about to download and play with the latest beta of Microsoft's blog authoring software Windows Live Writer and I've noticed one of its "features": the ability to "Publish XHTML-Style markup" [emphasis added]. I'm sorry, but the code is either XHTML or it isn't. There's no such thing as XHTML-style or XHTML-like as far as I'm concerned. I'm still going to play with it but sometimes Microsoft, you make me wonder.

Would you like some video with that ebook?

Would an e-book that included some video bits make you more likely to buy the book? Well, Avon (the book publisher, not the cosmetics firm) has released Lady Amelia's Secret Lover, "a historical romance novel with a decidedly modern bent". Plus, "as you read this e-book, author Victoria Alexander will pop up onscreen [sic] at various points in the novel to talk candidly about the plot's turning points and her vivid characters. This multimedia experience will draw you into the novel with words and insights directly from the famed romance author!" I'm intrigued enough to have spent the $3.99 (actually a reasonable price for an e-book!) had it been more my style (Horror, SciFi, maybe even Fantasy). Sounds interesting though.

Jackie goes to the Olympics

Wikipedia's 2,000,000th English article

El Hormiguero (Spanish for "The Anthill") is a television program with a live audience focusing on comedy, science, and politics. It is hosted and produced by screenwriter Pablo Motos and airs on Cuatro, a Spanish television station. Recurring guests on the show include Luis Piedrahita, Raquel Martos, Flipy (the scientist), and puppet ants Trancas and Barrancas. The program will begin its third season in Fall 2007. It has proved a ratings success, and will expand from a weekly 120-minute show to a daily 40-minute show in its upcoming season.

via Milestone Wikipedia articles

The unintended consequences of large-scale storage

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has posted about something called Rainbow Tables. Now, I don't want to turn this blog into a discussion of encryption so let me boil it down for you.

Windows passwords are stored in an encrypted format known as "hashes". When you enter your password, Windows encrypts it for you and compares it to the stored hashed version. If it matches, you're let in. If it doesn't you're not. There's no way to decrypt the hashed version of your password in any reasonable amount of time, if at all, and is therefore considered a secure method of storage.

The problem now is that you can get a database of pre-hashed content. Known as rainbow tables, these are basically a table with just two columns, first column, a word (or other combination of letters) and in the second, the matching hash. Now, if you have a hash, you can look it up in the table and see what the original password is. In other words, it's not decrypting the hash, its hashing all possible passwords in advance.

This is such a simple hack. So, why is it coming to light now. Well, the problem is large-scale portable storage. In the past, tables such as these were considered to big to bring to the computer you're trying to hack. But these days, a 1GB flash drive would allow you to carry a rainbow table that covered all conceivable passwords between one an 14 characters in length, containing just English letters. Here's Jeff's chart showing example storage requirements:

If you're suddenly not worried about a Rainbow Table measuring 64BG I've got a 500GB portable USB hard drive I'd like to show you.

Here's the bottom line, in Jeff's example, the password "Fgpyyih804423" (one that's probably a hell of a lot stronger than any password you use) was broken in just 160 seconds using a rainbow table.

When gamers become parents

Keep in mind that the average age of a gamer is 32.

The other night my wife and I were going at it. Things got a little louder than they should have and I thought I heard little footsteps headed our way. There was a brief moment of panic, but it was a false alarm. Thankfully our kids did not walk in to see Mommy and Daddy kicking ass on Guitar Hero -- a game they have no idea exists in our house.

Read the rest of the story at The Sneeze.

The IT Crowd is back!

Not the forthcoming US remake, but a second series of the original UK hit! (Three episodes in and I finally noticed over the weekend.) Anyway, here's the bit that's been making the rounds regarding anti-piracy warnings. (You'll need to poke around on BitTorrent for the complete episodes.)

Amazing Tetris Player

I used to be pretty good at Tetris (I stopped playing when I dreamed about falling Tetris blocks one night) but this guy's totally insane. The speed really picks up at the three minute mark, then the blocks go invisible for about the last 45 seconds!

What kind of nerd am I?

Thoughts for a quiet morning

Carl lives on.

Student Evaluations

As someone who is evaluated by students on a regular basis, this video was just too funny not to share.

via dvorak.org

LIS Feed Bankruptcy

1931 unread LIS feed items is just too much. So, I've marked all of them read with a single click. If I missed something important let me know. I'll start reading again on Monday.

Redefining the Dictionary

One for Laura

Cory Doctorow on how to write a great blog post

Hire a librarian?

On Tuesday I was visiting the Morton-James Public Library in Nebraska City, NE and noticed this sign (right) in the computer lab. I asked about it and it turns out that they do offer the service of a librarian to "do the work for you" at the rate of $5 per 1/2 hour. They don't get many takers but there have been a few. Mainly they've found that it actually encourages people to learn how to do it for themselves instead of just expecting the staff to do it for them. (They do also offer free one-on-one computer classes.) Shelly from BCR has already left her opinion in flickr, what do you think?

Librarians, Ubuntu and Digg

Typically I would bypass Digg and link you directly to the story but in this situation, Digg is part of the story. Turns out that one library has decided to switch to Linux now that support for Windows98 is gone and had heard about Ubuntu Linux on Digg. What suprises some Digg users is that librarians read digg. Check out both the story (assuming you can get the link to work due to the Digg effect,) but also check out the Digg comments. (On person even linked to Jessamyn's video on YouTube.) Let's all defend ourselves.

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