You need multi-factor authentication. Passwords are no longer good enough.

How secure is your password? If we’ve learned anything over the years on the Internet it’s this. You shouldn’t trust your password. It has probably been compromised. Even if it hasn’t, you might as well treat it as such. These are strong words, but it’s not an illogical stance to take. How good are your password practices? Do you mix case, use alphanumeric characters, spaces, or symbols? Is your password over 14 characters long? Do you change them on a regular basis? Do you recycle them? Is it based on a dictionary word or known item from your life?

Chances are you are not doing at least a few of the points above. Which is why for years I’ve been an advocate of password managers. I’m presently using LastPass, which is the genesis for this post. I’ve used quite a few of these in my day (most recently kwallet and KeePassX. Some are better than others, but almost any is better than nothing. LastPass, however, has particularly impresed me. So what makes it so special, and how can it help keep us more secure?

This blog is now Solarized! I made the change today, after having already moved to this color scheme in my shell, editor, etc… I’m really enjoying it on my desktop, so I thought why not the blog? The color scheme is supposed to help reduce eye strain while maintaining nice contrast of content. That sounds about right for me, living in this sea of florescent light powered cubicles.

I elected to use the light variant of solarized for the blog content and scheme and use the dark solarized variant for code snippets. I think it’s working out kind of well, but probably needs some tweaks.

The link above has all the gory details, whereas I’ll keep this post a short one and just dump out the gist of the color scheme’s SASS CSS.

Happy Hacking!

So having spent some time fumbling around in octopress, I’ve made my first modification. Internet Explorer is a constant source of pain when theming websites. As this is my personal blog there isn’t really a reason to be particularly friendly to Internet Explorer, and so I thought why not prompt my visitors to install Chrome Frame.

Chrome Frame effectively replaces the rendering engine of IE with Google Chrome through a plugin for IE. In effect users who install it are now running Chrome, and as such are treated with properly working CSS/HTML5/JS support. Which now means they can see my nicely rendered 3D logo all in CSS courtesy of Mark Otto. Wonderful, but how to get my visitors to install Chrome Frame?

The site is live on Octopress, which I recently moved to from Jekyll. It actually wasn’t an easy process, but this was mostly my fault. Once I realized I had no clue what I was doing with Ruby everything went much smoother. I’ll need to throw a more detailed post on the ordeal and some of my thoughts for moving. I’m going to avoid a howto because there’s already plenty of great examples for it (though I’ll be sure to link them).

Hooray for a live blog again.