• This bye honey. Secretary of State feeling call me back bye.
• Yeah, Hi Ed, This is coat and I’m calling from to use. I’ll try to get on the phone to discuss with you. Talk to development services, which would provide for fit, you must on this. I would like to discuss with you when deed in about our company expert. If you could give me a call me ###-###-#### Have a great day. Bye bye.
• Hey Ed, The, P here. Gimme a call. I wanna sell your duties today. Bye.

“move idisposable.net to techcloud.com”

The problem was, I’ve been terribly busy building out the cloud products and services practice at LTech.  My two sons are getting bigger.  It’s been hard to blog.  Twitter amused me for a while, but I’ve lost interest in it for day-to-day use.  I wanted to start blogging again and bought this great domain name, techcloud.com, but life happens and got in the way.

Well, the long Thanksgiving weekend, full of turkey, stuffing, and cranberries, has afforded me some time to get the blog into shape.  I have changed the theme around, moved it to a new URL, and set up a bunch of draft posts to write about over the next few weeks.  My goal is to have at least a post a week, but I will probably fall short of that.  In any case, the more feedback I get from people out there on the ‘tubes the more I’ll post.

Anyway, thanks for listening and welcome to the new, improved, TechCloud.

Very frustrating.  Will try again tomorrow.

Why do I need an uppercase character?

Why do I need three numbers, a special character, and an ümlaut?

Why does my bank let me choose a reasonably complex password, but the Web 2.0 thingamabob require me to drip blood on my keyboard to get pass their rules?

Developers at these sites – please stop!  Let me use a password 6-8 characters in length, with anything I want in it.  Have a blacklist of obvious passwords, and leave the rest to the users.  Better yet – use OpenID!

I want to call special attention to the biggest violator of all, ADP.  Researching this post, I found this from Jeremy Zawodny that sent shivers down my spine.  You see, I used to manage payroll with ADP and I remember the frustration of their password rules (and frequency of change requirements).

Here is a taste:

Passwords must:

• contain a number

• contain an uppercase letter

• contain a lowercase letter

• be at least 8 characters in length

• be fewer than 15 characters in length

• contain a "special" character

• not be recycled (though this is not explicitly listed, it’s true)

• not contain more than 3 repeating characters ("zzz", "aaa", etc.)

• not contain more than 3 incremented or decremented numeric strings ("123", "876", etc.)

• not contains more than 3 incremented or decremented alphabetic strings ("abc", "zyx", "mno", etc.)

 You could argue that "Hey, its PAYROLL -so what if its a bit more secure?" but please, are all of these rules required?  Is it really more secure, or is there a much bigger risk from social engineering than brute force hacking?

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on openid
• OpenID » Blog Archive » Member Vote to Approve the PAPE Specification

Does anyone know what this is supposed to be?

Despite all of this, they have fresh API’s that wipe the floor with the top competition.

Let’s start with search.

Google: Corny AJAX Search API – No server-side access without significant hacking and busy work (see http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje).

Yahoo: Super Powered Search API – Ala carte formatting.  Full search capability including context searching, images, video, news, local, and more.  Rate limited.

Next episode, we’ll take a look at image search in particular across some other Yahoo APIs and competive options.

My favorite bit:

{a: b} #same as { :a => b }

So much cleaner! =>

Check it out, leave comments if you like it or use it.

Thanks