Month: February 2014

I ordered some software from SAP about five years ago. Today I needed to access the order data (long story) so I attempted to login to my account. I have my order number, so I used the “forgot password” function. I figured I’d receive an email with a link to reset my password, or possibly a temporary password I could use. Instead, I received this:

Note that somepassword was my actual password. They sent it in a plain-text email. This means they’re not hashing the password, and possibly not even encrypting it in their database. Rule number one of password security is to never have password data in a format where it can be recovered like this. For a supposedly “enterprise-level” company like SAP, this is shameful. I can’t believe in 2014, after all of the password breaches we’ve seen in just the last year, that there are companies who still do this.

Naughty, naughty, SAP.

I’m doing some test work for a major product launch tomorrow. Fortunately I have control of the product administration area so I can control the prices a bit. My latest order included quite a discount.

By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a savings!

I’m working on a Windows 2008 server for a client, and ran into problems doing something as simple as extracting a zip file.

Path too long? Seriously? Doing some searches on the web, apparently even Windows 8– the latest version– has this same problem. Unix solved it around 1975; Linux and Mac systems have no limit and never have. It’s 2014. Why can’t Microsoft figure out a way to allow long pathnames?

Ugh, I can’t believe people use this operating system daily.

Tonight we headed up to the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins to watch Kyra perform in an honor orchestra. This is the third elite group she’s played with in the past month, which is pretty impressive– and also pretty taxing. She has to get up early, head out to wherever the band is playing, and spend 6-8 hours straight practicing the pieces the conductor has selected. But since these are the really good high school musicians, selected from all over the area, the performances tend to be quite impressive.

She had a brief dinner break after her all-day rehearsals and before the performance, so we picked her up and went to dinner. We learned two important things about Fort Collins:

1) The Beau Jo’s pizza parlor has closed down. We were all set to go there to celebrate Laralee’s birthday, but when we arrived at the spot, the place was shuttered and they’re building some new restaurant. Bummer.

2) There’s another restaurant down the street with a name that is as mysterious as it is awesome.

Back in the spring of 1993, some friends and I decided to go to the Smoky Mountains for spring break. I had just bought my very first car, a classic baby-blue 1982 Nissan 300SX.

As we left St. Louis for Tennessee, I was fiddling with the CD player. I had a Discman jacked into one of those cassette tape thingies that you insert into a cassette player in the dashboard. Yeah, pretty high tech. Anyway, I was changing the disc and not watching the road, and I drifted left a bit too far, hitting the interstate guardrail at 70 miles an hour. The entire left side of the car was scraped to bits, and the driver-side door was badly dented.

My poor baby! But, what’s done is done, and the Smoky Mountains still awaited. So we soldiered on, me a little sobered by the fact that the accident could’ve been much worse, and my friends joking about my bad driving. Later in the trip, we decided to re-enact the fateful moment when I hit the guardrail. The result was a classic photo that I loved so much I had it blown up and hung in my room for years.

As it turned out, the driver-side door wouldn’t even open any more, so we spent the rest of our week-long trip climbing over each other to get out the passenger side. I later had the door repaired so it would at least open, but the lock never worked quite right. (I later had a radar detector stolen out of the car, likely because of the lock issues.)

Ahh, good times. That trip had a lot of good memories… just ask Dirk.

While I was cleaning out the storage room today, Laralee was plowing through boxes and boxes of “family history” stuff her mom had collected over eighty years. These boxes contain everything from written diaries to dusty photos to crazy mementos. She was looking for things we should scan so we have digital copies (papers and photos) as well as organizing the piles into family members and approximate dates.

As you can imagine, it’s a daunting task. It took her about two hours to go through the first box, and judging from the pile still on the table, I think she might be halfway finished with it. Then there are all of the other boxes in the corner.

At some point, it might come down to a decision like the Christmas card archive: some of this stuff is just not worth keeping. I guess we’ll see if she’s as much of a packrat as I am.

Today I bought a couple of (fairly) watertight storage boxes with the intent of putting some things in our storage room into them. When I was helping with cleanup of the flood damage last September, I saw too many basements where everything the people owned had been completely destroyed by the mud and water. Although we don’t have anything truly irreplaceable in our storage room, I think it’s prudent to at least take some precautionary measures.

Armed with the boxes, I went into the storage room to figure out what should be stashed. My eye was drawn to the pile of large manila envelopes stuffed with Christmas cards from years past. Yes, that’s right: each year we gather the hundred or so cards that we receive, and put them into neatly labeled envelopes which go on the storage shelves. We’ve done it for eighteen years (since 1995) and every year Laralee says, “Are we really going to look at these? Ever?” I assure her that one of these days we’ll be glad we kept them.

Today, looking at an entire shelf of cards and pondering whether they’re “important” enough to go into our anti-flood containers, Laralee once again pointed out that it’s just silly to keep all of them. “In fifty years, Kyra is going to hate us,” she said. “When it’s time for her to put us into a home, she’s going to be cleaning out the basement and find all of these cards, and have to haul them to the dumpster.”

Sadly, I had to acknowledge her logic. In eighteen years, I haven’t ever thought to myself, “I’m kind of bored this afternoon– maybe I’ll pull out the Christmas cards from 1998 and read through them!” So I went to work, emptying the envelopes into a big pile. I glanced through them, laughing at a few clever cards or remembering old friends we don’t hear from any more. By the time I was done, I had a pretty impressive pile. Kyra and her friends buried me with the cards:

Assuming we get around a hundred cards a year, and considering this is eighteen Christmases’ worth, this pile probably contains close to two thousand cards. It was pretty heavy on top of me.

We hauled them upstairs and half-filled the recycling bin. Then I went back to the storage room and found all sorts of things that went straight to the trash. Broken blenders, stale food, parts from appliances we don’t even own any more, cracked picture frames, old posters, stacks of papers from college, and dozens of other odds and ends that make absolutely no sense to keep. Load after load went to the trash. I had only intended to spend a few minutes stuffing a watertight box, but in the end it was three hours later when I brushed off my jeans and looked at a storage room that was quite a bit more empty, and a tad more organized.

Oh, and in the end I only had enough stuff to fill one of the bins. I guess next weekend I’ll tackle the other half of the room and fill the other bin…

The tech world is abuzz with the news that Facebook bought WhatsApp, a phone messaging service with about 450 million users. The price tag? Nineteen billion-with-a-B dollars.

Seen on Twitter:

Sad because it’s true. Our priorities are pretty out of whack these days.

Randall Munroe, creator of the awesome web comic xkcd, has a knack for putting things in perspective. I really enjoyed one of his “What If” questions regarding supernovae.

Wow. Astrophysics is so cool.

One of my new favorite games is Small World.

What other game has Flying Trolls and Berzerk Elves? Sweet!