Passwords - Weak, Hackable, Hard To Remember

For those of who love the comic xkcd will not be surprised to find multiple comics on passwords and their use in our everyday digital lives.  The division I worked for, not the corporate overlords,  were pretty serious on the creation of strong passwords and allowing the users who used our network ways to retrieve those passwords along with educating them on password security.  Security was always top on the list when building new features into our systems.


One of my former colleagues, mentor, and friend, Jeff Powell, has a well written treatise on passwords.  It's an excellent read and I've been recommending it to family, friends, and anyone who's concerned with password use in the modern age.  So go check his blog post and then get ready to change how you use and create passwords!


Bonus: For some comic goodness, here are two xkcd comics regarding passwords after the jump.

Ruby for Newbies - Nettuts Screencast Tutorial

Over at net.tutsplus.com Andrew Burgess just started up a new screencast tutorial series on the programing language Ruby.  Its a very basic look at what Ruby is and some of the initial steps of setting up the ruby environment and the first steps in learning the language.  The tutorial covers 1.92, the latest version of Ruby but Andrew indicates that you could follow along with 1.8 initially.  It looks like a very interesting programing language and I'm looking forward to the future screencasts.  Take a look at the video below and head over to nettuts youtube channel to subscribe so you don't miss any of the tutorials.





Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!

Ubuntu 10 out on 10.10.10

While technically its 10.10.2010 by the modern calendar it is no surprise that ubuntu 10 was released on today's date at 10:10:10 GMT,  instead the typical 6 month release cycle the ubuntu community is used to.  


Some of the new features are of Ubuntu 10 are:


Performance Upgrades
New Unity UI (better management of screen area for Netbooks)
A Applications Market Place (for developers to better access community)
Multitouch Enabled Display (hardware needed)


So if you'd like to try out Ubuntu or upgrade from 10.4 head over to 


http://www.ubuntu.com and download the 10 release for your desktop, netbook, or server!


Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!

"How else do you think they make 5% resistors?"

In an article on Electronics Design, Strategy, News blog titled 7% Solution the author Howard Johnson, PHD explains that manufacturers typically only shoot for a ±10% tolerance on a entire production run of a resistor, and because nothing in life is 100% absolute they have variations in their production.  At the end of production when they do their final tests against on  they throw away all the resistors that absolutely fail, they then take the resistors that pass at the ±5% or better tolerance, separate them, and sell them at markup as  ±5% resistors, and the rest they sell as the lower ±10%. So that's how the ±5% are made, per se. Interesting huh.  Just a fyi, its always good practice though to verify a resistor you plan on using with a calibrated multimeter.


From the article,

 A 10% carbon-composition resistor is made in a somewhat slipshod manner. The manufacturer tries to get it right, but some of the variables are just too difficult to control. They make up a batch, test them all, and then throw away the bad ones. What's left is a distribution of values truncated on either side at the ±10% limits. The other main feature of the distribution is the big gap-toothed section in the middle. That's where they pulled out all the good parts and sold them at a higher price with a ±5% tolerance. How else do you think they make 5% resistors?

I encourage you to go and read the entire article at their website or you can always download the .pdf linked here.

Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!

1st! - The inaugural post for dbclunie.com !

Welcome to the inaugural post for dbclunie.com ! 

This blog is going to focus on the integration of my professional career as a Senior Lead Software Quality Engineer, and any hobbies or interests that pertain to my profession, some are directly involved but most are vaguely associated. Examples of posts you might find on here include DIY electronics work, as I'm an electronics enthusiast and have a great facination with micro controlers, rfid readers, etc. You may also find articles on web development as I'm a budding web developer and enjoy constructing, tweaking, tinkering, my various blogs using html/xhtml/css and a little javascript. I'm hoping to delve into more perl, python, and php, and maybe even some c++ to round out my skills so you're likely to find examples of experiments with those languages here too. You can always learn new things so what I'm hoping for overall with this blog is use it as repository/showcase of these learning efforts.

Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!

9UP7A9C2RT7Y