4 months ago and I’m sure I could of told you what my password was. Unfortunately I only used the password two or three times so it didn’t sink in, then I went on holiday completely forgetting about everything school related including my password. Of course our school has some good computer technicians who promptly allowed me to change it.

Password security is an interesting topic so I’m going to write 4 posts about some good practises. In later posts I will cover storing, remembering and choosing passwords. In this post i’m going to consider the question: “What should you do if someone forgets their password?”

Well, the most important thing is proving that they own the account. Our brilliant technicians, lazy as they are, failed to implement this check. I just told them my name and typed in my new password. The best way of checking identity is using biometrics. A quick check with the photos on the school database would of proved that I am indeed Thomas Milburn. If they didn’t have my biometric information they could of asked me about something personal.

Not everyone is happy giving away personal data so make sure you don’t ask something too private. Questions concerning irrelevant personal facts are probably best like: When did you first go abroad? What was the name of your first teacher? and What is your favourite book?

Of course no one should forget their passwords in the first place. Watch out for my next post about the best methods of remembering passwords.

I hope that he gets plenty of work to keep him busy and perhaps we can work on some projects together in future.

I have to say that I’m finding Facebook rather surreal and overwhelming. People poke each other and write on walls! And I seem to be bombarded with emails. If you join Facebook the first thing you should do is disable email notifications for just about everything.

I’ve managed to find some old friends from when I used to live in France. No doubt they won’t remember me at all but I hope that Facebook can put us back in touch. After all school starts back tomorrow and I’m studying French!

This was just about what I expected but I was pleased not to receive any Bs. I wasn’t sure how well I’d done in English or in Art but I managed to pick up As in both.

I’m going on to study at sixth form. I’ve decided I’m going to study French, chemistry, physics and further maths. It’s going to be a fair bit of work. You may be wondering why I’m not studying computing. The truth is that I’ve gained the majority of my experience from articles and people on the web; I think that I’d find lessons rather slow paced.

Right now I’m off school and working on a few projects of my own. Here are a couple of teasers I have prepared!

Some of my own ideas include a speedometer which measures the speed performance of your WordPress installation, analyses the speed of other plugins and your themes, checks files are cached properly and suggests ways to speed up WordPress. Another idea is a magazine plugin which allows posts to be grouped together into issues which can be published together. Finally I thought of a plugin to make event posts. These event posts would have a time and date, be integrated with calendars or displayed like usual posts in the loop and have notifications.

I want your input into what I should develop. Have you ever felt that WordPress is lacking a certain feature? If you have any plugins that you want developing please leave a comment. One idea will be made into a WordPress plugin.

As a sidenote, I’m going to be away from the 17^th July to the 17^th August. If you try to contact me I might take a while to reply.

Father’s day was celebrated here in the UK last Sunday. I decided that I’d rise to the occasion and make something special. I can’t say that I’m a whiz with Photoshop because I don’t actually own a copy of it, instead I rely on a rather old version of Paint Shop Pro.

Paint Shop Pro is a nice application. It lacks some of the more advanced canvas and brush features of Photoshop which means that it lacks the creative edge. Also I have yet to find a way to convert Photoshop brushes and documents to Paint Shop Pro documents.

Anyway, I found a great tutorial on psdtuts.com to make a grass effect. My dad loves gardening so I thought it suited him well. I had a quick flick throught the steps to check there was nothing that Paint Shop Pro couldn’t handle before getting to work.

I think the end result was well worth it and it only took me a couple of hours. Sure it isn’t half as good as the tutorial example but my dad was impressed.

You can download the full sized wallpaper from flickr. It’s a bit late for father’s day this year though!

Hopefully, I can find some more time to get to grips with Paint Shop Pro and maybe I can find some money as well so I can buy Photoshop!