I am usually not an evil person but when it comes to marketing my blog sometimes I can get a little evil. A few months ago I found about this blog http://www.johnchow.com/ which is somewhat popular well at least more popular than mine, I used to visit this blog once in a while and I found myself making a typo when I typed the blog address on my web browser, I would type the "N" before the "H" , so I figured that there’s probably more people who do that mistake and I setup to get the misspelled domain name http://www.jonhchow.com/ and have it redirect to my blog which is http://www.josenet.com/ , I have already known of people who stumble to my blog my misspelling the address. I am definitely not the only person online doing this but thanks to this technique more people have discovered my blog. Below are the stats about the misspelled domain name and you can see most of my visitors come from the United Kingdom, Canada and USA.

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So we got a nice four day weekend for the thanksgiving holiday this year and went down to Oregon for a road trip, Oregon is a cool place to visit, it has a lot of beautiful forests and ocean side but unlike its neighbors states (Washington and California) Oregon does not have sales tax, sweet !!! yet another reason to love Oregon. We stayed at this place right on the beach called Elizabeth Street Inn, which was right on the  beach like many hotels around Newport, so a nice walk on the beach was very accessible. There are plenty of things to see and do in this small town, like checking out the view from the Yaquina Head lighthouse, going to the Oregon Coast Aquarium and also see Mariner Square. We wore a little surprise by the weather, it was pretty cold but it was always supper sunny the 2 days we stayed there. Check out some of the pictures below from our trip.

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I don’t usually wear the same pair of sunglasses for years in a row because I they get lost somehow, and that’s one reason I don’t like spending too much money for a pair of shades, however after seeing how the Oakley sunglasses compare to other ones, they are definitely worth every penny, now if just can find a way to not misplace my sunglasses. That way I won’t have to buy a new pair every year. Checkout the video here.
Oakley’s Rolling O Lab: The Science Of Sunglasses - The funniest movie is here. Find it

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I was reading this article about a hacker that got into a wordpress blog and created an account for himself, the owner of the blog quickly disable the account and hopefully did other things to help secure the compromised site, like installing updates etc.

The interesting thing here is that the passwords for the system were stored as a plain old and straight MD5 hash, and for all folks out there you should know that when talking cryptography a hash is a one way function that creates a “signature” string based on the data that was hashed and there is no way to pragmatically engineer an algorithm that would do the opposite (to get the original data based on the hash). I also want to point that to most people when someone talks about hash it should be assume that they are talking about one way algorithms that generate a hash “signature” of the data and there is no way to get the original data back based on the signature, It’s amazing to see how many people hear or say the term “hash” and they thing is a encrypt/decrypt process.

Most system out there would do the same thing store a straight hash of the password to the database, and if the system does not enforce user to create strong passwords or at least using a salt when creating the hash, then someone who can gain access to the database can do a google search and see if the password’s original value has been indexed by google, and that would be very easy to spot specially if the password is a very generic word.

If the system would at least had used a salt value when hashing the password then it would have been a more difficult to actually map that hash to a common word.

So remember for your security use passwords that have a combination of more than one word, some numbers and at least one special character!!

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So I’ve been learning recently about NHibernate which is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tool for .NET, it is open source and it’s based on Hibernate (for Java). Basically what it allows you to persist your .NET objects which I call POCOs (Plain Old C# Objects) to a database, it’s been fun learning about the technology specially since the .NET 3.5 is almost out and I would like to see how it would compare to NHibernate. I found this really good screen cast about using TDD (Test Driven Design).

I would say it’s a pretty good screen cast that will teach you how to setup a test project for your NHibernate architecture, and might teach you a thing or two about TDD.

There are a few things I still need to find out more with this technology like mapping objects to multiple tables, hopefully I’ll find out more and write a post about here soon. In the mean time go and watch this helpful screen cast.

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Looks like the folks at American Express are so good at protecting your information that they have decided to allow your password to be no more than 8 characters. Which is one of the more secure feature I have ever seen in any site, really, that was so brilliant, 8 characters is way more secure than say hmm 7?

I usually like to make password at least 12 characters long with a combination of multiple words, special characters and numbers just in case someone tries to brute force my account and guess my password. Usually hackers can get into someone’s account if they know your username then all they have to do is use brute force (try as many passwords as possible) until they get the password right, now with 8 characters that might not take long for someone to brute force the password at least not as long as a password that might be 12 or 15 characters long.

I would really like to know what were they thinking when they decided to make it no more than 8 characters.

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The other day we headed out to Oregon in long drive all the way to Crater Lake, that was close to the end of the summer, we had a nice day, the weather was beautiful and the scenery was spectacular, the forest around the crater is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen, around the crater there are not many trees but the entire crater of this old volcano is surrounded by the Umpqua national forest. Check out the pictures below.

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