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It’s a brand new year!

Well, it’s been a new year for a little while actually, but 2013 has been a busy one so far. I’ve been working hard on some interesting things, but I still managed a sneaky skiing trip.

2012 was an awesome year; I welcomed it in rawkus style with my former housemates, and then a few days later, after the hangover had cleared of course, flew my first passengers as a newly qualified pilot!

I went to birthday parties, ate some great food, climbed, and enjoyed the company of some great people. I played Capoeira with my group at the Oxford Olympic Torch event, but otherwise managed to miss the worst of the Olympics by camping in the Czech wilderness followed by some epic climbing in Italy.

I have some big plans in motion for 2013, hopefully I’ll be able to dial up the awesome a few more notches! I want to finally get to grips with a foreign language, and ideally live abroad for a while in the native country. I want to progress my flying career in some way, advance to more complicated aircraft or perhaps do an aerobatic qualification. I intend to see more of the world, and climb more mountains (both figuratively and literally!).

Work wise, I’m working on a few exciting things (some of which will see the light of day really soon). As an FYI, I’m always interested to hear about your projects, especially if you need some technical and strategic muscle to help you!

Lets go!

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failwhaleIt seems like just the other day when I had to change a whole bunch of my passwords thanks to LinkedIn having it’s password database stolen by crackers, and now I’m having to do it again. This time it was Twitter that dropped the ball, but I am at least grateful that they’ve publicised the incident so widely.

Username/Password systems suck, I’ve written about this before. We should, as an industry, aim to move past them as quickly as possible, and it’s nice to see some attempts at this (although, a lot of those attempts are attempts to centralise identity in one form or another).

Like most people, I did recycle passwords on a number of services, and yes I know this was bad, but I only have a limited space in my head and I don’t enjoy having to remember long strings of alphanumeric characters. The main issue I’m having with this latest breach, other than the hassle of having to go around and change a bunch of passwords again (which is largely my fault I admit), is that Twitter, like Facebook and Google, can be used as a way to log into other services via OAuth.

This is very handy, and means that you can quickly sign on to a 3rd party service without having to create yet another password to remember. However, the downside, is that this central identity MUST be secure. Facebook and Google both add extra security to their accounts by having 2-factor authentication systems in place, so, when you access your account via a new device, you have to go through an extra security challenge – typically, entering a code sent to your phone or from a key generator app.

Twitter, on the other hand, doesn’t have this extra level of security. This means that the crackers could have access to not only your twitter account, but also any 3rd party service you’ve used twitter to log in with.

This is a big deal.

Personally, I think that any service that provides OAuth logins to other services, but doesn’t provide 2-factor authentication, is being somewhat irresponsible, and I really hope that Twitter fixes this with the utmost urgency. I for one will be using my Google account more…

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Over the past few weeks and months I’ve had to cause to write, update and dust off a number of Elgg plugins that I’ve had kicking about. As a good open source citizen I’ve stuck them up on github so others can have a play.

Here they are, in no particular order:

» H5F 1.8

This is an Elgg wrapper around the H5F HTML5 form compatibility library written by Ryan Seddon.

This plugin lets you use handy HTML 5 form extensions like “required” and “placeholder”, as well as some of the new types like <input type=”email” /> in your forms and have them work in older browsers.

» Input Country

Input country is a wrapper around Ben Werdmuller’s phpCountryDropdown tool, and provides a handy dandy country selector input type.

Install this plugin to be able to take advantage of this in your forms.

» Profile Completeness

This plugin provides a view and a widget that displays the completeness of a profile based on the number of fields in the profile that are populated. This list of fields can be extended and modified based on a plugin hook.

I’ve used various incarnations of this plugin now for a number of clients, and since it keeps coming up I’ve tidied it up a bit and stuck it on github.

» Recaptcha

Lastly, here’s an Elgg 1.8 version of a recaptcha plugin I wrote some time ago.

It hooks into the Elgg captcha engine, providing captcha verification for registration and the “request new password” functionality out of the box. It also replaces the input/captcha view.

There are a couple of other recaptcha plugins, but I couldn’t find one which just provided the captcha and nothing else, so here’s mine.

That’s it for now, enjoy!