LinLog

Author's note: Here's another random "from the archives" post.  This is from May 6, 2007.  It's more of a "personal reminiscience" type post, more in keeping with the "personal journal" nature of a blog than my usual subject matter.  But hey, it's my website, so I can post whatever the heck I want.

I live in Corning. It's a small city in central New York, about 30 minutes from the Pennsylvania border. As locations for software developers and other technologists go, it's not quite in the middle of nowhere, but it's close.

However, there are still advantages to be had. For example, there are the air shows. It just so happens that the Elmira/Corning regional airport is also the location of the National Warplane Museum (note: that has changed - now it's the Wings of Eagles), and the airport just happens to be across the street from the local mall. So when we went shopping on Sunday, we got a nice view of the day's airshow while we were driving around. The part we saw was a bright red biplane doing loops, barrel rolls, flying in low over the highway exit. It was actually very cool. I wish I'd had a camera....

Commentary: I remember watching this plane as my wife and I walk though the parking lot of the Tops supermarket in the plaza across the street from the mall.  I don't remember exactly why we were there (it wasn't our normal market) or what we'd done before, but I do remember that it was a sunny afternoon and I kept looking up at the red biplane doing loops and barrel rolls overhead.  It was a symbol of freedom - rolling unfettered through the blue sky, no cares about what was going on below.  I was a little jealous - I'd been feeling trapped in a job that I increasingly disliked and I wanted to be like that plane.

It's funny how images like that will stick with you sometimes.  It's been seven years, but I still remember that plane, even though I don't remember any of the context.  In fact, the only other thing I remember doing that day was working in my garden and thinking about that plane.  Perhaps it's not a coincidence that my garden was one of my main sources of escapism....

Author's Note: This is another entry in my "from the archives" series.  I've decided it's time to clear some of those out of my queue.  This was an unfinished stub entry I last edited on April 20, 2007, when I was still working in county government.  I actually still have some recollection of the incident that inspired this entry, nearly seven years later.  There wasn't much to the original entry itself (as I said, it was kind of a stub), so this post will feature some commentary on my own comments.  Yeah, I could try to actually finish the post, but I only vaguely recall what my original point was and I'd rather make a different one now.

Question: what is the purpose of having a "help desk" when all they do is forward support requests to the programmers and analysts? Isn't that the opposite of help?

I admit that's not entirely fair. Our help desk does all sorts of things and often solves small problems on their own. So it's not like they're just a switchboard.

It just annoys me when they pass on a request without even trying to get any more details. For instance, when they get e-mail requests and just copy and paste the body of the e-mail into our help desk software. Then they print out the ticket on a sheet of blue paper and lay it on the desk of the programmer or analyst who last worked with the department or system in question.  There's no indication that they even asked the user any questions.  It seems like I'd be just as well off is the user just e-mailed me directly.  At least we wouldn't be killing trees that way.

Commentary: I don't even really remember what the partiuclar issue that prompted this was anymore.  I just remember coming back to my desk one day, seeing a blue print out of a help desk ticket, and realizing from what it contained that the "help" desk had done no analysis or trouble-shooting on it whatsoever.

This was one of those moments that was a combination of anger and shaking my head in resignation.  I had a lot of those in 2007.  I guess it was just part of the realization that government IT just wasn't for me.  In fact, it was that August that I took the job with eBaum's World  and moved into full-time development, which is really what I wanted to be doing all along.  So really, it all worked out in the end.

Today is a special day - it's my grandma's 100th birthday. My parternal grandmother, Althea Geer, was born a century ago today. I'm not much on the sappy personal posts, but I figured this deserved mention. Birthdays happen every year, but it's not often you get to celebrate a milestone like that in your family.

My grandmother still lives by herself in a tiny village in upstate New York, in the same house where she raised my father. She's lived there most of her life - I remember playing in the back yard as a child. We'll be going over there to visit her for an open-house celebration on Saturday. I'm sure we'll have a pretty good crowd coming through. And then on Sunday the plan is to have a family celebration at my parents house.

I'm hoping to get some nice pictures of the occasion. In particular, some of grandma with my son. He's her only great-grandchild and she adores him. Unfortunately, it's a pretty long trip, so she doesn't get to see him very often. So it'll be nice for him to be there for such a special occasion. Of course, he's still too young to remember it when he's grown up, but I hope to get some picture to commemorate the occasion.

So even though you're never going to see this entry (I don't think she's ever even used a computer), happy birthday, Grandma!

Edit: A correspondent from the Walton Reporter had a conversation with my grandmother for the occasion and wrote a very nice article about it.

After shamelessly reusing passwords for far too long, I finally decided to get myself a decent password manager. After a few false starts, I ended up going with KeePass. In retrospect, I probably should have started with that, but my thought process didn't work out that way.

Originally, my thought was that I wanted to use a web-based password manager. I figured that would work best as I'd be able to access it from any device. But I didn't want to use a third-party service, as I wasn't sure how much I wanted to trust them. So I was looking for something self-hosted.

I started off with PPMA, a little Yii-based application. It had the virtue of being pretty easy to use and install. There were a few down sides, though. The main one was that it wasn't especially mobile-friendly, so there were parts of the app that actually didn't work on my phone, which defeats the whole "works on any device" plan. Also, it really only supported a single user, so it's not something I could easily set my wife up on as well. (To be fair, the multi-user support was sort of there, but it was only half-implemented. I was able to get it basically working on my own, but still.)

More importantly, I wasn't entirely confident in the overall security of PPMA. For starters, the only data it actually encrypted was the password. Granted, that's the most important piece, that's sort of a minimalist approach to account security. And even worse, I wasn't 100% convinced that that was secure - it's not clear to me that it doesn't store a password or key in session data that could be snooped on a shared server. Of course, I haven't done an extensive analysis, so I don't know if it has any problems, but the possibility was enough to make me wary and I didn't really want to do an extensive audit of the code (there was no documentation to speak of, and certainly nothing on the crypto scheme).

The next package I tried was Clipperz. This is actually a service, but their code is open-source, so you could conceivably self-host it. I had a bit more confidence in this one because they actually had some documentation with a decent discussion of how their security worked.

The only problem I had with Clipperz was that I couldn't actually get it to work. Their build script had some weird dependencies and was a pain to deal with (it looked like it was trying to check their source control repository for changes before running, for some reason). And once I got it installed, it just flat-out didn't work. I was able to create a new account, but after that every request just returned an error out. And to make things worse, it turns out their PHP backend is ancient and not recommended - it's still using the old-school MySQL database extension. The only other option was the AppEngine Python backend, which wasn't gonna work on my hosting provider. So that was a bust.

It was at that point that I started to think using a web-based solution might not be the best idea. Part of this is simply the nature of the web - you're working over a stateless protocol and probably using an RDBMS for persistence. So if you want to encrypt all the user's data and avoid storing their password, then you're already fighting with the medium. A desktop app doesn't have that problem, though - you can encrypt the entire data file and just hold the data in memory when you decrypt it.

It also occurred to me that accessing my passwords from any computer might not be as valuable as I'd originally thought. For one thing, I probably can't trust other people's computers. God alone knows what kind of malware or keyloggers might be installed on a random PC I would use to access my passwords. Besides, there's no need to trust a random system when I always have a trusted one with me - namely, my phone.

Great! So all I really need is a password manager than runs on Android.

Well...no, that won't do it. I don't really want to have to look up passwords on my phone and manually type them into a window on my desktop. So I need something that produces password databases that I can use on both Android and Windows.

Luckily, KeePass 2 fits the bill. It has a good feature set, seems to have a good reputation, and the documentation had enough info on how it works to inspire some confidence. The official application is only Windows-based, but there are a number of unofficial ports, including several to iOS and Android. It's even supported by the Ninite installer, so I can easily work it into my standard installation.

For me, the key feature that made KeePass viable was that it supports synchronization with a URL. There are extensions that add support for SSH and cloud services, if you're into that sort of thing, but synchronizing via standard FTP or WebDAV is built right in. KeePass also supports triggers that allow you to automatically synchronize your local database with the remote URL on certain events, e.g. opening or saving the database.

For the mobile side, I decided to go with Keepass2Android. There are several options out there, but I chose this one because it supports reading and writing the KeePass 2.x database format (which not all of them do) and can directly read and write files to FTP and WebDAV. It's also available as an APK download from the developer's site, as opposed to being available exclusively through the Google Play store, which means I can easily install it on my Kindle Fire.

Keepass2Android also has a handy little feature called "QuickUnlock", which allows you one chance to unlock your database by typing just the last few characters of your passphrase. If you get it wrong the database is locked and you need to enter the full passphrase. This addresses one of my main complaints about smart phones - the virtual keyboards work to actively discourage good passwords because they're so damned hard to type. I chose a long passphrase which takes several seconds to type on a full keyboard - on a virtual keyboard, it's absolutely excruciating. This way, I don't have to massively compromise security for usability.

So, in the end, my setup ended up being fairly straight-forward.

1. I install KeePass on all my computers.
2. I copy my KeePass database to the WebDAV server I have set up on my web hosting.
3. I set up all my computers with a trigger to sync with the remote URL.
4. I install Keepass2Android on my phone and tablet.
5. I configure them to open the database directly from the URL. Keepass2Android caches remote databases, so this is effectively the same as the desktop sync setup.
6. Profit! I now get my password database synchronized among all my computers and devices.

I've been using this setup for close to a month now, and it works pretty darn well. Good encryption, good usability, plenty of backups, and I didn't even have to involve a third-party service.

I got a new toy the other week - a Sandisk Wireless Flash Drive. This was not normally something I would have bought, but it showed up as a Kindle-exclusive special offer on my new Kindle Fire HDX (post on that coming later) - the 32GB model was only $20, which is about 66% off the normal retail price. I didn't really know anything about the device or how it worked, but for only $20, I figured, why not?

(Photo by Pierre Lecourt, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0.)

It turns out that this is an interesting little "flash drive". First, to be clear, it's not really what I would normally consider a "flash drive". For starters, it doesn't actually have any built-in storage - it has a MicroSD slot with a 32GB card in it. So the "flash drive" itself is more like a MicroSD card reader that's also a networking appliance.

The networking portion is actually kind of cool. In it's most basic configuration, the Wireless Flash Drive acts as a WiFi access point. You associate to it and it supplies you an IP and can serve out content. However, it also allows you to configure it to associate to an internet-connected access point. So you can tell it the SSID and WPA credentials of your network and anything on the LAN will be able to access it.

The device is built to work with a mobile app (available for both iOS and Android) which allows you to not only access the data on it, but also configure it. However, while the app is actually not bad, it turns out you don't need it. The device provides a web interface that lets you configure it as well as browse content. And on further research, it turns out that the Wireless Flash Drive serves it's content out over WebDAV! So forget the mobile app - you can actually access it from any PC with a WebDAV client.

Though I haven't had opportunity to use it heavily yet, I have to say the Wireless Flash Drive is actually a pretty cool little deice. I probably wouldn't pay $60 for it, simply because I don't need it that much. But if you happen to have a distinct use for such a device, it's pretty cool and more open to tinkering than I'd expected.