Toxic Elephant

Don't bury it in your back yard!

Safe Passwords

Posted by matijs 03/08/2006 at 11h19

In the have-we-learned-nothing category, the New York Times refuses my extra-safe password, saying:

Password can only contain letters [a-z], numbers [0-9], periods [.], underscores [_], and hyphens [-].

That’s almost as stupid as godaddy’s registration page choking on my attempts to use an ampersand in a password.

I wonder if “only letters [a-z]” really means they should all be lower case. Let’s try… No, upper case is allowed. So, it’s stupid and wrong.

Tags no comments no trackbacks

Mark is back

Posted by matijs 27/05/2006 at 14h47

One of the first blogs I ever read, dive into mark, is back.

In 2004, Mark Pilgrim declared it was time to find a new hobby.

Preferably one that doesn’t involve angle brackets. Or computers. Or electricity.

Now he’s looking for ways to backup the 100GB of data he plans to generate every year for the next 50 years. Clearly, he has changed his mind.

(Actually, I noticed Mark’s return via a post on another interesting subject.)

Tags no comments no trackbacks

RSS Sucks, Atom Rules

Posted by matijs 26/03/2006 at 14h37

Why we need Atom now
by Tim Bray (via
bitworking)
once again brought the horrors of RSS to the front of my
working memory. I will not elaborate here, but the main problem seems to be
that there are nine versions of RSS, and even
more implementations. The result is that you can never get things right.
Atom to the rescue.

Not wanting to be the
Bitch and Moan But Never Does type,
I removed all links to RSS feeds from my web site. The remaining links are
all Atom feeds, but the word Atom will not be in the link text, to
facilitate the fading of technical details into the background.
It’ll just say feed.
I will probably add the new standard feed icon.

The RSS feeds are still there, of course, since
I want my URIs to be permanent.

Tags , no comments no trackbacks

CSS Shame

Posted by matijs 25/11/2004 at 23h42

All this time, it turns out, people using IE5.5 (36 so far this month), and perhaps IE5.0 (44 so far this month), have been unable to read my website: The left and right sides of the text were simply cut off. I knew IE6 didn't show the vertical borders, but at least it showed the whole text.

Somehow, it feels similar to suddenly finding out you've been walking around all day with mismatched socks, or a torn shirt — assuming those things weren't part of your fashion statement. It's simply a little embarrassing. Anyway, it should all look fine now. The vertical borders even show up in IE6.

Oh, and I'm working on a new layout, so here are samples before and after, just in case the site looks completely different when you read this.

Tags , 1 comment no trackbacks