Instant Quiz is still work in progress so some features haven’t been implemented yet. Quizzes don’t show answers and the quiz UI may change. In the next few weeks I am going to try and hook Instant Quiz up with Facebook so Facebook users can create quizzes for their friends to take.

I have about five different passwords. I have a general password which I use for all the sites which aren’t very important and don’t store important details. I have another password for trusted sites and shops which store more information. I have a stronger password which I use for my bank account, I have a different password for my email and web hosting. Finally, my computer has a unique password.

I can remember 5 passwords and every year I make sure that I go around and change them to something new. Unfortunately, some passwords I can’t change. Nor can I remember them because they are so complicated. What should I do?

The obvious thing would be to get a sheet of paper or a new document and write them all out. That’s not great though for several reasons. Firstly if someone finds this document or sheet of paper all the passwords are theirs. Secondly, if my house gets flooded or my hard disk fails I’ve lost them all.

If the passwords are on your hard disk, a regular backup can solve one problem but makes the other a lot worse. Now you’ve got loads of disks which can be found by someone and have the passwords extracted from.

My solution is steganography and encryption. There are loads of programs out there which will encrypt your files. These are great but you need some extra protection. This is where steganography comes in. Encrypt your file using the program of your choice then change the file name and give it a different extension. Anyone looking through your files will have a hard time trying to find where you store your passwords (passwords.doc is rather obvious).

My last tip is don’t rely on your internet browser to save your passwords. They are all stored completely unencrypted and in the same place, perfect prey for malicious software and nosy friends!

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!

Out of all those browsers though Google Chrome will probably remove IE from it’s prime position as king of the browsers. Google has the worlds biggest advertising spot and they will surely be prepared to use it. Google can bundle their new browser with all their products. What if Google said that only users of it’s browser get the full benefit of it’s web applications?

I’m not sure that Google Gears will be good for the consumer. If it develops a large enough market share, Google will have almost unrestricted access to our private lives. Already the release material suggests that Google will use it’s pagerank system to help classify sites. Google will probably also use the data from the browser to target their advertising schemes even more effectively.

A monopoly isn’t good because it restricts people’s opinions and views. Google has the ultimate say on whether a webpage has good content or not. Everyone searching on Google will get the same information and thus will be lead to the same conclusion. If everyone thought the same things then we wouldn’t have healthy debates. After all there is never one right way of doing something.

On the other hand I hope that being an Open Source project, the likes of Opera and Mozilla will be able to take the best parts out of Google Chrome and package it into a less biased browser which is compatible with the way I use my browser now.

I’m looking forward to the more streamlined and standards based web that Google promises but I doubt that will be a reality. Look at their homepage 66 validation errors!

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!

If you’ve not heard of XAMPP it stands for

• X (meaning cross-platform)
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• Perl

It is a portable application which will work on a Mac PC or Linux. It comes bundled with pretty much everything you need to dive straight in. About a year ago I installed my own Apache, PHP and MySQL stack however it took me ages to install correctly, the MySQL stopped working and the installation was a pain to start and stop. On the contrary XAMPP is a breeze to install and comes with a control panel.

There are a few pitfalls to developing code for an online site on a home computer. Firstly the functions available to you online will vary from those on your home computer because the software works slightly differently on different operating systems. The other pitfall is to develop some code and then have to rename all the links when you deploy it.

This is where building a virtual host comes in. Say I want to make a cheese identifying application (I don’t) and I have purchased the domain name whatcheese.com. When developing my code on XAMPP I can set up a virtual host which means that when I go to whatcheese.com I am redirected to my localhost.

In XAMPP with Windows this is a matter of changing two files. They may not be exactly the same files though on other operating systems. Firstly go to your xampp installation and go to Apache > Conf > Extra and open up httpd-vhosts.conf. In this file we can reference all the virtual hosts we want to create. Add the following to the file.

NameVirtualHost *:80
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerAdmin sampe@mysample.com
DocumentRoot "C:/Program Files/xampp/htdocs" #existing document root
ServerName localhost #if you type localhost in your browser you will get this virtual host
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@mywordprees.com
DocumentRoot "C:/whatcheese" #your new document root
ServerName www.whatcheese.com #your virtual domain name
ServerAlias whatcheese.com #your virtual domain name alias
<directory "C:/whatcheese"> #your new document root again
AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes #set folder options
Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
<limit GET POST OPTIONS>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</limit>
<limitexcept GET POST OPTIONS>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</limitexcept>
</directory>
</virtualhost>

This basically sets up a new virtual host in apache. If you go to whatcheese.com now you will be directed to the real online site whatcheese.com and if this doesn’t exist you will get an error like “server not found”. We need to tell our operating system to redirect to 127.0.0.1 (our computers local IP address).

On Windows you need to go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts Open up the file with a text editor and add the following lines to the bottom of the file:
127.0.0.1 www.whatcheese.com
127.0.0.1 whatcheese.com
This tells your browsers to go to 127.0.0.1 when they meet the domain name whatcheese.com as opposed to consulting a DNS server for the IP address.

That’s all there is too it. Restart apache and go to whatcheese.com and you will see whatever files you put in the C:/whatcheese directory. How cool! Now when you have finished developing your code on your home computer you can deploy it to your server without any problems. Just remember to remove the lines you wrote in the hosts file so you get sent to the online site.