brunobergher::blog

Once again, writing as a personal note, and hopefully as something that could end up being helpful for others.

I struggled quite a bit a few days ago trying to setup simple HTTP authentication (.htaccess + .htpasswd) in my development machine at work (Windows XP). I just wouldn’t work the same pair of files that worked successfully in the remote testing server (Linux) resulted in failed authentications when in my dev machine.

After a lot of research, I discovered the cause: .htpasswd passwords should not be encrypted under Windows! It took some time to find out about this, specially considering every single example of simple HTTP authentication I could find was scoped to Linux (including the many .htaccess generators out there).

In short, the lesson is:

when using .htpasswd files under Windows,leave the password as plain text.

So, for example, to protect a given cave directory with user name alibaba and password opensesame, you’d have an .htaccess in the parent directory such as

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Cave"
AuthUserFile /path/to/password/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

with the corresponding .htpasswd file in /path/to/password/ (remember this path is relative to the root of the volume where Apache is running from)

alibaba:opensesame

while in Linux, the .htpasswd file would read

alibaba:b3xT.a9Xe7LsM

I hope this helps someone!

These are a couple of very famous quotations in the tech field:

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

and

I think there is a world market for about five computers.

They are supposedly attributed to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former president of IBM (1952-1971), respectively.

The wise folks at the Freakonomics blog have been running these so called ‘blegs’, a blog-beg, where they ask the readers of information they’d like to straighten out. These two quotations have been featured recently, and had been properly debunked as myths by both the authors and the readers. See here (Gates) and here (Watson).

I assume more of these interesting and perhaps fictitious phrases might come up in the future, so it’s worth checking back again.

On a side note, these posts broght to my attention The Yale Book of Quotations, which went straight to my Amazon wish list, since I’ve been collecting quotations as a hobby for quite some time. It seems like a great book if you’re into this kind of thing.

My friend Nancy sent me a link to this video:

Poetic Prophet (aka The SEO Rapper) has a few other marvels like ‘Link Building 101′:

The good people at TED are nice enough to be already releasing some this year’s presentations, which happened just a couple of weeks ago. One of the few videos they released so far is this perspective-shifting presentation by Dr. Jill Taylor.

She’s a distinguished neural anatomist, which took the unfortunate event of her having a stroke and turned into a life changing experience, of a huge level of unexpected learning, especially for such an accomplished scientist. Direct link.

The ending is what’s core to the presentation, and needless to be commented on, but I must say I found the beginning, with the clear explanations on the differences between each of the brain hemispheres also quite enlightening. Having the notion of what is going on inside, and the fragility of how the brain accomplishes the very sophisticated processes we take for granted every day, well… it makes you think.

Google Reader is great, no question about it. It’s my favourite feed reader, and proves itself useful time after time.

There’s just one thing that bugs me sometimes: when you have 137 subscriptions, as I do at the moment, it can get really hard to know what to read first. I realized how I was getting behind in information because it’s hard to decide what feed tagged as ‘design‘ to read from a list of 29, even knowing not all of them are really important.

So I did something simple: started a new tag, named ‘_must_read_frequently’, and set it as the the initial folder, under Preferences. Then I went about my feed list and tagged six or seven of them.

It’s been a lot easier to prioritize.

I know it’s something very simple, and not innovative at all, but maybe it just might be useful for someone.

* You can name your new tag whatever you want, of course; I just recommend adding the underscore or some other special character before it’s name so that it shows up as the first item in the folder list.

The Guardian published this map illustrating how the Earth’s continents are connected through sea cables.

Interesting graphic, informative, but type sizes can get too small, and make it hard to understand some things.

I’m impressed with how we trust most of our Internet connectivity to just a few wires… Seems kind of fragile, doesn’t it?

Today I stumbled upon this amazing website through someone at work. The site describes itself as

(..) an excerpt of SpaceCollective.org, a soon to be
released, invite only information exchange dedicated to the future of everything.

So far it is a very rich combination of pictures, graphics and quotations with great information concerning many of the topics that might of great interest to a lot of people, among them technology, design, physics and biology.

The layout is very innovative, with a modernist, rigid grid, which is deconstructed in a captivating way, all done in meritorious HTML (although with some intense help from JavaScript).

But what caught my attention the most was the uncanny resemblance between website and Pentagram’s Alan Fletcher’s book, The Art of Looking Sideways.

The thousand-page tome is a precious collection of quotes, curious information, graphical experimentations and visual comments on a huge variety of subjects such as aesthetics, humor, curiosity and the human brain, among many others.

Fletcher writes that he has a necessity to acquire stuff. The books is a compilation and extrapolation on many concepts and information he has been collecting over his life, and decided do put together in the book. It’s an endless source of interesting information, insight and inspiration — probably one of of the best books I ever bought.

Finding Collective Perception brought me back the feeling of flipping through Fletcher’s book. But with the priceless difference that the website is growing, with even more up-to-date concepts and information, while hinting with the possibility of user contribution, which would be great.

* The picture above is a reproduction of a print by German artist Eno Henze, which has great work by the way, found in Collective Perception.