Go to your Chase account and enter your password. Now log out, and enter your password with a different pattern of capitalization. So if your password was Password, now try pASSWORD. I bet you it worked and Chase still let you into your account.

I’ll preface the coming diatribe with a statement about my expertise. I am not a security researcher and would never call myself an expert in the field of cryptography. I’m just a software developer who likes to poke around in security matters in as amateur a way as possible. The material covered here is a basic explanation, and there are many more factors in play. Feel free to contact me if you have more that you’d like to discuss. Continue Reading →

Educators have a goal, to teach children. These days in America our goal seems to be concerned with how to trick, or worse, force a kid into learning. Instead what they really should be focusing on is how to relate the information to the child. That is how you get a child excited to learn. Continue Reading →

When you’re learning, it’s important to make mistakes, that’s how you learn. When you spend 10 hours looking for what is wrong, and it turns out you wrote if(x=1) when you meant if(x==1), I can guarantee you the next time you look for why a piece of code is magically broken, that will be the first thing you’ll check. If you do this enough times, you’ll find yourself fixing stupid mistakes before you even make them. That’s how you get good. Continue Reading →

As Merlin Mann would say: if you have 27 priorities because then you don't have any priorities. With schoolwork and work-work catching up to me I have very little time for my own coding. It's important for me to make sure I get done what I need to get done. Midterms, homework, deadlines and life have been making it difficult of late for me to sit down and churn out a bunch of code for myself, even though the things I want to do are quick and simple. When I do have some spare time it hurts to even think about coding. Continue Reading →

Apple may not have formally said it, but they did have a “one more thing yesterday.” They pulled Siri from up their sleeves, which many technology pundits had predicted (kudos to 9to5mac.com on the original scoop). What is surprising to me is that a lot of people appear to be under the impression that Siri is a parlor trick that you can use to show off your phone. This is not voice control, this is not FaceTime, this isn’t even the Compass app. This is something you will use every day and come to rely on.

Siri is real; it is a revolution though it may seem gimmicky until it’s perfected.  Continue Reading →