Security

Reading Coding Horror blog and it struck quite a chord. Password retention is either hard work or ignored. If you repeat the same password, one foul-up and your stuffed. If you keep 101 different passwords you need the organisation of Mary Poppins. The piece recognises the temptations though. Facebook? Let me sniff your gmail contacts and I'll see if they are on facebook! Oh what a good idea.

The blog made me think about password usage too. Try

$md5sum -
saltPassword
^d

I.e. 'salting' the password used. If my password is Password then it won't take much cracking. Dependent on the salt used, it may be far harder to crack according to the article. Neat idea.

Another grammar lesson for me today. I'd written

They say a womans work is never done.

Woman. Singular. The work is hers, so possessive. Bleak admission, I either do it by intuition or guess. I guessed wrong according to Fowler. I was given the quote

The nurses assistants were well trained. If we put the apostrophe before the s in nurses (nurse's), we are indicating a single nurse as owner. To indicate that we are referring to more than one nurse, we have to put the apostrophe after the s (nurses').

Which makes sense, but treads on the bounds of possessive puzzles number 3 ("In The Times''s opinion" anyone?). The intriguing bit I found was that the apostophe originally indicated the omission of the e from the possessive inflection 'es'. Now that does make more sense!

Oh, yes, back to security. In resolving my OS issues, I reverted to FC7 and tried to install drupal. In my selinux ignorance I started to try and let drupal write ... not quite all over the disk, but definately into /etc and /tmp. selinux put its matrons hat on and forbad this so I tried to fix it. And failed. Totally screwed up the domain of the directory... and in words of one syllable, re-installed the darned OS. Yesterday I tried to update one of my webpages.. or at least the XML from which it's generated. I couldn't get write permission. I asked on the selinux IRC channel... and after following a few suggestions, the Redhat selinux documenter shrugged his shoulders and gave up. selinux is now switched off, and shall remain so.