Overheard: The secret to Wikipedia is Squid?

“Down time used to be our most profitable product.” Domas Mituzas, as quoted in A Look Inside Wikipedia’s Infrastructure

Domas Mituzas works as a MySQL support engineer for Sun Microsystems in his “day job.” He says that Wikipedia has 200 application servers, 20 database servers and 70 servers dedicated Squid cache servers.

Guess we  need to define Squid!

Overheard: How to remember your strong password

“For most people, changing passwords is little bit of a pain in the ass.” Smackdown, Passwords That Are Easy To Remember But Impossible To Guess

Way back in the day when the kids would do the modem dance (bong, bong) and yell “I’m in!” when they got through to AOL, my oldest daughter forgot her new password after changing it three times in one day and had to call AOL to find out what her password was.

Yep, that’s what you did in those days. You’d call AOL up on the phone and give them your old password and they’d give you your new password. The reason I remember this is because it turns out my oldest daughter had chosen a VERY BAD WORD for the last password that worked — and pretty much cried because she had to say it out loud on the phone to the AOL rep in front of her parental units. (She was 13. It’s good that she felt bad.)

In that spirit — sort of — the author of the blog Smackdown has created a strong password generator that encourages you to pronounce your strong password out loud and memorize it that way.

The random ones from his generator are still too hard for me to memorize, but if you stretch the idea and pronounce your strong password as if it’s a text message abbreviation, it fits my learning style perfectly.

So I’m going to make up some new strong password rules for myself and see if I can not cringe the next time I’m forced to change passwords.

————–

Here are my new strong password rules, and a couple of examples for you to see how my new speak-aloud process works. (Give yourself extra points if you’ve already been doing this and I’m just late to the party.)

RULES FOR STRONG PASSWORDS

1. Should be at least 8 characters long
2. Should contain at least one number and one special ASCII character
3. Should be a mix of upper and lower case letters

My own additions:
4. Substitute the number 1 for the word “I”
5. If the word is capitalized, or the word is important, use upper case letter

EXAMPLES OF HOW TO CREATE AND PRONOUNCE STRONG PASSWORDS USING MY SPEAK-ALOUD METHOD:

tr2GDumd — pronounced “There are two GUIDE DOGS under my desk”

1ma*diPMM — pronounced “I am a star, damn it, PAY ME MORE”

1dcwbP@l@inGB — pronounced “I don’t care who becomes President as long as it’s not GEORGE BUSH”

Try creating a new strong password of your own — not only will you be able to remember the darn thing and impress your system administrator with your super-strong passwords, you’ll have a mysterious smile on your face every time you type your passphrase and everyone will wonder what you’re up to!

Overheard: Is the set-top box doomed? Not likely.

Less than two weeks after the blogosphere and press erupted with stories that the cable TV set-top faced extinction as a result of Sony signing onto a major interactive TV initiative by cable operators called Tru2Way, folks close to Tru2Way say the first certification test of the technology is a “disaster of spectacular proportions.” Cynthia Brumfield, Terrible Troubles with Cable’s Tru2Way Initiative?

Cynthia got slammed for this blog post, but even James McQuivey (Forrester) has said “So here’s where I stand on tru2way: I’ll believe it when I see it.” As close as I can figure it, here’s what the big deal is:

1. Cable companies would like to get rid of set-top boxes. They cost them money.

2. TV manufacturers are getting extra press by announcing they are getting behind Tru2way as the standard for allowing the TV itself perform the functions of the set-top box. (True2way is open source.)

3. A lot of industry experts don’t see how the business model for this change is going to work — consumers worry that putting the interface in the TV means it’s one more thing that can break on their TV — vendors remember a former effort to get rid of the set-top box (called CableCard) that just confused everyone and went belly up.

Overheard: Microsoft gets a “D” in SOA

Just what the world needs…yet another programming language. As soon as you say it’s aimed at non-developers, “real” developers will avoid it like the plague. And without “real” developer support, it’s dead in the water. Fred Fredrickson, responding to Mary Jo Foley’s blog post Microsoft declares its modeling love with a new language, ‘D’

Overheard: Symantec and SaaS

I don’t believe Symantec have their head around SaaS. Up their own SaaS maybe, the pricing shows that. Mark Twomey, SwapDrive. It’ll cost you!

Thank you Storage Anarchist (Barry A. Burke) for sending me this quote.  Barry, if you will recall,  coined the popular phrase ”Hitachi math.”

Overheard: It’s official — IBM Roadrunner is world’s fastest computer

Perhaps surprisingly, more than 5 million PlayStation 3 owners in the U.S. have first-hand knowledge of at least one of the processors that carried the Roadrunner to victory. Walaika Haskins, IBM Roadrunner Meep-Meeps to Top of Supercomputer Rankings

The IBM supercomputer is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell chips similar to those found in the gaming console. The system’s 6,562 AMD Opteron dual-core processors handle the basic compute functions, leaving the Cell chips available to deal with the heavy lifting necessary for the math-intensive calculations in which the processors specialize.

Overheard: Keystroke dynamics in two-factor authentication

Nathan Harrington amended the GNOME Desktop Manager to include keystroke dynamics in the user verification process. When the user enters their username, the timings between key press events are measured and compared against a stored pattern. Jason Striegel, Add keystroke user verification to Gnome

I think Nathan Harrington has one of the coolest jobs of anyone I know. He’s always putting something new out for people to tinker with.

Overheard: Social Spreadsheet for distributed workgroups

We hope to have 80% of the features of Excel but create a better process for working across workgroups. Ross Mayfield, as quoted in Next from Dan Bricklin: A wiki-spreadsheet combo

Overheard: Web 2.0 is not about the cloud

Enterprise 2.0 is not about the cloud. It’s about sharing information inside the firewall to solve business problems.

Wanted to jot down that thought before I forgot it.

Overheard: Is Firefox 3 really ready for prime time?

It’s clearly come a long way, but with all the download hype, is Mozilla pushing out a not-quite solid product just for a publicity stunt? Fahmida Y. Rashid, Firefox 3 on Linux: Questions about Stability

Today is Download Day 2008 for Firefox 3. Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of software downloads within a 24-hour period. I sort of want to join in the fun – but I just can’t risk it today — too many fires already.