iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

My web site passnerd.com has had some recent updates.

Here’s what to look for:

• There’s a new complexity picker.
• The site has got even more light-weight and should load even faster than before.
• There is a new mobile version ( preview it at passnerd.com/?mobile )
• You can enter the password length into the URL, for example: 6 characters passnerd.com/6 , 12 passnerd.com/12 , 32 passnerd.com/32 — worth bookmarking.

The site still is a quick way to have a scure password suggested to you from work done one YOUR computer, not “my” end. I created the site as a service to those who need it, and it makes pennies a year, but one of these days if it earns enough I’ll create an HTTPS version – but I want to stress that it’s just as secure without it because it uses JavaScript on YOUR computer’s end to create the password.

I’m always looking for suggestions or feedback from anyone that is willing to share them.

Unless you’re reading this posting via Facebook, you may have noticed that you now have to sign in to add comments to my blog postings.

I tried to resist as long as possible, but the signal to noise ratio was getting too high for me whenever I had to approve comments.

I could have add a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” But I find their squiggles to be fundamentally inaccessible, even the audio or reCAPTCHA ones, and I didn’t want to further promote the technology.  My admiration for Alan Turing aside.

So I’m now asking commentators to sign in via Facebook Connect or OpenID.  Both technologies never disclose your password to my site, and warn you about what they are disclosing and in this case it’s not much more than your name/handle.

You may not know it, but you may already have an OpenID! Google, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress and others all provide the service to their users.

This also means that comments are no longer being closed after 90 days.  Feel free to comment on all the postings going back to 2004.

Thanks for your time and patience.

Since I just went through the process of setting-up my own self-managed VPS (virtual private server) system I figured I’d share my experience in the hopes that it will help someone else with some basic command-line comfort looking to gain control of their web hosting or being the process of scaling up.

This is the start of what I hope will be a brief series of blog posts describing the process.

I went with a VPS system because of the considerable cost savings over a full dedicated system and the ability to scale-up from a low-power system to a high-powered system. In fact, I did just that when I initially opted for the 128mb system, but found that I need 256mb. My VPS (and previously shared host) is A2 Web Hosting and they’ve been pretty good to work with.

Here’s what mattclare.ca is currently running, I’ll go through each elements and how I’ve configured them:

• CentOS 5 Linux Operating System

  Including:

  • Installing the basic files and packages
  • Securing SSH and the rest of the server
  • The Apache web server
  • MySQL database
• Google/Gmail for mail (and calendaring, etc.)
• JungleDisk/Amazon Webservers for backup

.. thanks to me.

I just wanted to toot my own horn and let everyone know that a modification I made to our local Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies “Client Relationship Manager” (AKA any other set of words that match CRM) called INTERLEAVE will be incorporated into the next release.

Interleave is a (business) process automation application and what I implemented to track my own work at Brock University. It allows me to stay on top of issues and names, and ultimately be able hand-off issues with some accountability and be able to report on the work I do year-to-year.

Our installation was getting a little slow, and I had tracked it to having a lot of clients and that creating a lot of communication between the web server and the database in certain situations. INTERLEAVE has it’s own caching infrastructure to speed this situations up so I took a look at it and just wrote some simple PHP code around it to have it store the cached items inAPC’s cache instead of the database.

This is an advantage because APC implements shared memory in PHP (among other things) and that allows to be stored between transmission between the web server and the client WITHOUT the need for a database, or the internal communication and overhead that requires. There a number of tools that do this for PHP, but APC is the one that should be included into PHP 6.