Typos, passwords, and Facebook’s elephant memory

Over the weekend I changed my Facebook password. All I did was add one character to my old password, so all this week I’ve been accidentally typing my old password out of habit. Each time, I’ve gotten this message:

The first day I disregarded it, re-typed my new (but barely different) password, and went on my merry way. By the third day I was wondering if somehow Facebook was detecting the fact that I was getting my password wrong, but only by a single character (after all, I was), and interpreting it as a typo and showing me this message even though it wasn’t the “email or username” that was wrong.

How would that work? Well, I don’t know. Of course, computers can detect when one word is similar to another (i.e. a typo, like when Word shows a red line under a mistyped word), but every web developer knows you never store users’ passwords–instead you (usually) store a cryptographic hash of the password, which can never be reversed to find out the password. This is a big topic I can’t do justice to here (if you’d like there’s lots to learn at Wikipedia), but suffice it to say a normal hash can’t be compared to a wrong password to see if it’s just a typo. I wondered if Facebook’s engineers had implemented some kind of advanced hash that makes such comparisons possible, but in the end it was moot—because I was wrong. Facebook wasn’t looking at my password at all. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Install Twitalytic on DreamHost

One of my biggest frustrations with Twitter is that archives only go back 3,200 tweets, meaning that for now the entire first half of my Twitter history is totally inaccessible to me and everyone else. So I was pretty excited when blogger and hacker Gina Trapani announced her then-unnamed Twitalytic project.

Twitalytic—which Gina released as an alpha this week—is a PHP application that combats the disappearing tweet problem by archiving your tweets, plus all replies to them and all mentions of your Twitter name, and along the way aggregates meaningful data about your relationships, all on your own server.

Of course I set it up as soon as I got a chance. I could have installed it on one of my home machines, but I decided to put it on my public web space, which happens to be hosted on the cheap by DreamHost (disclosure: affiliate link). Being alpha software and pretty untested, setting Twitalytic up on DreamHost didn’t go entirely smoothly, but I got it working eventually. Since I’m sure others are struggling with the same task, I wrote up the method I used to get it working:

How to install Twitalytic on DreamHost.

I posted the instructions on Twitalytic’s GitHub wiki because I want other people to be able to improve and correct them, so if you see any errors or potential clarifications or simplifications, please edit the article and improve it.

P.S. Gina enthusiastically thanked me for posting the tutorial, but it’s worth quoting what she wrote on the Twitalytic home page: “Do not run on a public, production server. You have been warned.” Nevertheless, if you’re as determined to set it up as I was (and perhaps as foolish), I hope my instructions are useful to you.

“Send To” LiveJournal and Iterasi for Google Reader

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about my last two posts about adding Send To buttons to Google Reader for for Instapaper and Evernote, including links at my old stomping grounds ,Download Squad.

These articles are fun for me to write, so I’ll keep it up for the time being. In the Download Squad comments there were requests for instructions for LiveJournal and Iterasi. They both turned out to be easy enough, so read on for the instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

Evernote “Send To” button for Google Reader

I was thrilled to see that Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker picked up my Send-To-Instapaper tutorial for Google Reader. In the comments on his post, member “illadvised” asked, “Has anyone tried an Evernote ‘Send To’?” Great idea!

This one, as it turns out, is even easier than the one for Instapaper. Read the rest of this entry »

Instapaper “Send To” button for Google Reader

This week Google added a feature to Google Reader called “Send To” that lets you send a link to any feed item to various web services like Facebook, Digg, and Twitter. Very cool! But the coolest part is that they also made it easy to add other services to the mix–any service that will accept a HTTP GET request.

Already people are coming up with cool uses for this. Digital Inspiration, for example, shows you how to add a Send To link that’ll make a PDF document (via Lifehacker) out of the linked item.

My first thought, though, was to make a Send To link for Instapaper Read the rest of this entry »

The little (shiny) things

The other day I bought a refurbished Dell Studio Hybrid, a cute little desktop computer called a “hybrid” because inside it has as much in common with a laptop as with a mini-tower. I’ve never bought a Dell before, but its nine-inch form factor and attractive chassis along with the refurbished price gave it a lot of appeal as a replacement for my hulking living room machine.

It has a lot of nice design touches,  most of which I saw in the many photos online, but there’s one that I didn’t notice until I started playing with it, unwisely turning it this way and that while it was running. Well, I won’t spoil it for you—check out the video above (there’s no audio).

Losing it

For the past three weeks I’ve been tracking my diet with a free iPhone app called Lose It! (iTunes link). It’s not a perfect program, but I highly recommend it.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: When you first start Lose It! it asks your weight, age, height, gender, and your goal weight (mine is 190 pounds). Then it asks you how many pounds you’d like to lose per week, from one half to two (I picked 1½), and comes up with a daily calorie budget for you (mine started at 2,099). Then, when you eat or exercise, you punch in what you ate or what you did, and it subtracts or adds calories to your budget appropriately.

The heart of the Lose It! experience is the built-in food database, which includes some thousands of home-cooked, supermarket, and restaurant foods. It’s super-easy to use, but if Lose It! doesn’t live up to its eponymous promise for you, it’s the database that you’ll blame. It’s just not that comprehensive, and there are a lot of odd holes in it—grilled chicken breast is absent, for instance. Most of my tastes are as banal as that, and I find myself manually entering about half the foods I eat.

Despite that, Lose It! works for me. Partly because I don’t mind googling half my meals, but mostly, I think, because it brings accountability to my eating habits. Now I know that if I eat that second delicious cupcake I’m going to have to make a note of it, and it’s going to subtract from my budget and, if I’ve already eaten enough today, maybe push me into the red. Even if the database and budget math weren’t accurate (and I  believe they are), Lose It! would still be valuable to me just by making me push a button every time I put something in my mouth.

What you’re really wondering, though, is “Does it work?” When you stick to your budget, yeah, it does. I’ve lost around four pounds in three weeks. Just under my pound-and-a-half goal, and that’s without any exercise on top of my usual regime of nada. At right you can see my three-week weight chart.

You can see that for the last week my weight has gone up and down, trending pretty horizontally. Which, for the price of zero dollars, I’m completely happy with. I’m feeling healthier, I’m not gaining weight, and I just don’t feel like eating as much. Lose It! doesn’t even sport any advertisements or branding, which is great, but makes me wonder if its makers aren’t working on a for-pay follow-up. If they are, I’ll buy it.