Currently a lot of Google services work fine with https (docs, calendar, blogger.com) but none seem to offer the same default options that Gmail has.  Hopefully that will change soon.

Co-incidentally, it may just have something to do with this recent announcement from their Chief Legal Eagle.

You can read Magaret’s announcement here.

What it is:

‘Moments Like Today’ is a collaborative project that aims to inspire people to post “moments” of their lives in three sections: mornings, afternoons, and evenings.

What I did:

While the concept and design came from Margaret and Myra, the functionality and everything back-end came from me.  With some zend framework, some man-handling of APIs from Flickr and Vimeo and a little bit of jQuery fun, the end result (for now)  is live.

If you’d like to participate in the project you can visit the Moments Like Today and read the how-to for more information.

Social Gamer:  A small site that allows you to rate and review games that you play online.  Right now it’s focusing on Facebook Games but will expand to include Wii, DS, Xbox360, PSP, and PS3 games.  But for now, It’s still getting the infrastructure put behind it.  You can play around with it right now if you want and feel free to share it with your friends. This project is getting most of my attention right now.

Refill Revolution:  A start up in sunny California dedicated to promoting the use of refillable bottles. The site is in the first phase and running in a closed on-campus beta test at Berkely.  That’s all I can really say for now on this one.

Moments Like Today:  A collaborative effort between myself and Margaret.  There’s a facebook group, vimeo group and flickr group.  So far there are about a hundred contributors to the project and once it’s up and running on the main website there’ll be a nice little interface for you to browse peoples ‘moments.’

Triviosity!: A simple, quick online game of trivia.  It’s in the early stages still so I won’t link to it.  But it’s going to start on as a facebook app, but also be functional outside of facebook.

And now you know why my summer project got delayed. And now you know what the frack I’ve been doing.

One random day I thought I’d try it out and see how well it does. I’m only using a laptop with no real GPS technology built in.  I have a phone, but it doesn’t support anything fancy. It’s just a phone.

When I first clicked the “Show My Location” circle on Google maps, Firefox was kind enough to ask me if it was OK for Google to know this. I said yes, because I wanted to know.  To my surprise, awe, and WTF? It had my location closer than I could have ever imagined.

I was shocked because Google’s estimate (apparently based on my IP address and “near by wireless devices”) was about 40 feet off.  I can literally throw my coffee mug and hit the pedestrian that’s standing where this little blue dot is.

The green pin indicates where I actually am.  The blue dot is where Google thinks I am “within 150 meters”

I thought it was a fluke that it was so close based on that broad set of details.  So I gave it a few more tries.  where I live, Google has me located right across the street.  A place I went last night Google had me located just on the corner. Again, a stones throw away.

This certainly has me thinking of how the hell can they be so accurate.  An IP address is a pretty broad piece of information.  At home and most cafés that I go to the IP addresses used are from large cross country providers.  Details for these IPs are usually provided on a city-level. The only real way to get exact locations for these IPs is to get a legal subpoena and ask the ISPs themselves for who and where the IP was used at a certain time.

That leads me to wonder about the other piece of information.  “Near by Wireless Devices.”  Like what? other access points? other.. other what? My laptop has no other nearby devices.  Is it taking into consideration the 10 or so other wireless networks that I could try to connect to?  It must be.

But how does it know where access points such as “Harper Sucks” and “dlink” and “omar2″ are physically located?  This is the part that frightens me.

I think because I know how GPS works. I know how cellphone triangulation works.  I know how wireless triangulation works.  But all those methods require known points.  How do they know the points of these other networks?

Boggled.  Time for more research.

Maybe I have indeed lost my mind when it comes to security practices. But I’m pretty sure these limitations are actually insecure.

First: you’ve just given crackers a set of boundaries to work with.  It’s a lot easier to brute force attack passwords when you’ve got a set of limits.  The smaller the window, the easier the attack.

Second: you’re pushing people, who are smart enough to use already secure passwords, to use weaker ones.  The number of times I’ve registered for something only to have either forgotten my password (because I was forced to use an insecure, weak password.)

This guy’s got the idea too.  I’m actually surprised there aren’t more complaints like this. His search query to google reveals a lot of fun things with password restrictions.

Silly things like:

• No spaces or symbols
• Must have one number
• Must have one symbol (followed by a list of allowed symbols)
• Must have one UPPER case letter
• Must have one lower case letter

Any combination of those silly things. Every limitation placed on a password field makes it one step easier to crack a password.

Here’s some of the worst sites I’ve used lately that have horrible password policies:

• Club Sobeys – 5 to 8 characters, one number one upper case, no non-alpha numeric characters.
• BMO Mosaik – 5 characters only, alpha numeric. I wish I was kidding on this one.

Got any horrible sites that you use?

But they don’t, and they won’t so I’m stuck here thinking of a good way to link users accounts across multiple 3rd party sites.  I’m sure if I stop thinking about it things will just fall into place.  But unfortunately people don’t agree with waiting patiently for a brilliant idea.

C’est la vie, I guess.

You can view the progress as I start building.  Progress is still fairly slow at this moment. But now that all the frameworks are in place and my apache ninja skills have been revived I should be able to kick it up a notch.

I’ve also made a slight change in how I’ll be storing the images in the database.  I’m going to just be doing a plain old base64 encode of the binary data.  I’d much rather just store binary data in the database as a central repository for all paths, but there appears to be some issues with this and the fact that the entire django community hates binary data in a database.  So I’m not going to fight it or waste any more time on it.

In order to attack this project, I’ll be using PHP, Zend Framework, and a touch of magic to use Vimeo’s API.   For the photo portion of the site, I’ll likely avoid using PHP’s internal graphic tools (for quality purposes) and pull out some trickery with ImageMagick.

1. Learn some Python w/Django
2. Get myself Railed a bit
3. Figure out PostgreSQL
4. Write an iPhone/iPod Touch App
5. Write an Android App
6. Finish the Zend Framework version of pileofcrap.org
7. Make sillysounds.net not suck
8. Do a top-secret startup.
9. Do another top-secret startup.
10. See if I can get this Gravis MouseStickII working.