I’m back to dabbling with web development, and am planning a comprehensive overhaul of ThatsWACC.com, which will support user accounts and will require a backend database.
Current best practices for storing user passwords require the passwords to be encrypted using a ‘Salt’, which involves hashing the password text with a 40 character string and only storing the resulting output. In this way, even the database administrator can’t figure out what the ‘clear text’ password is.
The 40 character ‘salt’ string can (and should) be a combination of upper-case, lower-case, and numeric characters. I was too lazy to come up with anything better than “asdf” 10 times in a row, but thought that might be a weak key. I found a few sites online that would generate these for me, but had a nagging suspicion that these sites might be hosted by Russian hackers who would love to keep track of every security Salt used on the web. So I made an Excel spreadsheet that would run on a LOCAL machine, with no macros, that I and anyone else could use to generate Security Salt keys no one else would possibly be able to access. It’s Kludgy, but it’s also simple and it works, so I’m posting in here in case anyone else finds it useful.
With Julie and the boys in Houston for a few days, I finally had the free time to offload the movies we’d recorded on our (now hopelessly obsolete) mini-DV camcorder. One tape only had six minutes of film, but it captured a very fat baby Spencer sitting at his high chair exploring his world. It is an amazing glimpse of a child playing and discovering their world, and food in that world, and the tools used to eat that food.
One challenge associated with having an extremely curious five year old is that they ask lots of questions, and then remember the answers to these questions. So when Spencer found the DVD case to a World War II movie lying around, I soon found myself explaining (in very general terms) what happened during World War II. A few weeks later, Spencer comes home from school having created the following 12 page story on WWII (Spencer drew the pictures and dictated the story to his teachers). Spencer embellished the story a bit, but it’s not like Tarantino didn’t do the same thing with ‘Inglorious Basterds’.
Here is the story:
World War II: by Spencer
Once Adolf Hiter wanted to be the boss and take over the whole world. So, they rided on horsie to the fight.
And that is a guy, a man who is shooting a laser gun at a bad guy on Adolf Hiter's team. This guy with 3 hands was fighting Adolf Hiter with a sword, a firedart, and a fire ball.
And these are bad guys on Adolf Hiter's team. A good guy on the United States team shot a cannon at these guys on Adolf Hiter's team.
And the United States won the fight. This guy holding the trophy is the guy with three hands. Here he is holding the big trophy. He's very strong.
And here he is again, holding the big trophy.
Here is the guy with the three hands on the United States team.
I took the boys to their second baseball game yesterday – and it reminded me of why I used to be such a rabid baseball fan. It was a great game (Braves vs. Astros, 10-1 final); the weather was great, and the seats were amazing (4th row, about 20 feet away from the Braves dugout). Lance Berkman was playing 1st base for the Astros, and Glenn Hubbard was the 1st base running coach for the Braves.
Spencer LOVED the game. William had to be continually bribed with food (and then cotton candy).
I also experienced a great moment of ‘post-racial’ enlightenment during the game. One of the intra-inning audience engagement promotions included a ‘dance off’ between two fans. One of the dancers was a white guy (in a red shirt), the other was a black guy (in a white shirt). After they finished dancing, the crowd cheered to reflect their votes. The white guy (named Donny, according to the announcer) was the winner. Spencer had been watching this on the screen, but was confused about the outcome.
Spencer Quote: “I love you Aleph 2!” (Aleph 2 is the second form of infinity, larger than the ‘ordinal’ numbers).
William was hanging on the front of the shopping cart at Fry’s. He held his left leg arched behind him and said “Daddy, I’m skating”. He looked exactly like a figure skater.
We were playing an Indigo Girls CD in the car, and William heard the word “Ego”. He asked what it meant, and I said ego was like someone’s opinion of themself. That someone with a big ego would think they were the greatest person in the world. “Oh” said Spencer. “Like Bucky [the cat in the ‘Get Fuzzy’ comic]. Buck has a BIG ego.”
We’re about to build a new computer for Spencer, and went to Fry’s today to buy a new motherboard, processor and RAM. Over dinner tonight, Spencer reminded me “The hard drive is like the library for a computer”.
