When so called secure institutions like banks, insurance companies and others ask you to create a password, you expect them to allow strange characters like ,.$#@{}[] to make the password stronger. To my surprise on several occasions I’ve experienced that they did not accept other than plain letters and numbers! What!? Didn’t the developer that implemented that logic raise a flag??

One specific case is with BankId (a national authentication mechanism for all banks in Norway), where I know the underlying implementation support strong passwords. However, when prompted by my bank to create the password, you’re not permitted. Actually I had to type in a temporary weak password and then change the password in the login screen which support the expected behavior!

At some point there had to be a discussion like this:

Developer: What type of password should we support?

Product Owner: What do you mean?

Developer: Should we allow people to make up their password from everything that they can find on their keyboard?

Product Owner: No, the normal alphabet and numbers should be sufficient. Or else people just forget their passwords.

My above experience with BankId was just an example from today, and in that case there were a workaround, which is not the common case. I always get puzzled when this happens. What puzzles me even more is that to prevent people from entering strong password, you actually have to code a business rule for exactly that! And what about those who only permit numbers!? What’s that all about?

Sorry for this rant, but I think it is important that we as developers, architects and technically skilled people take responsibility to avoid stuff like this to happen. I just can’t see one single good reason for limiting the users choice when it comes to passwords.

This is a non technical post to add even more pressure on myself than the actual investment of my new bike and associated equipment.

I found it was about time to add some physical fitness to my life other than moving from the computer to get coffee or to and from the car on my way to work :-)

So this is a promise to myself (and now to the rest of the world I guess) that I will ride my new racing bike to and from work whenever the weather permits (read not snow or ice).  However, I might need a few weeks of training to actually physically be able to get to work on a bike :-)

Are you using InfoQ? I found InfoQ to be a great source of information long before I started to write for them. During this time I’ve discovered some tips and tricks on the site.

As a user of the InfoQ website you can either just browse news or you can take advantage of some of the more advanced features the site has to offer.

Disclaimer: This information is based on my personal usage of the InfoQ.com website. There might be more functionality available (and probably is) or I might be wrong about some functionality I’ve covered here.

Website functionality

Not functionality per say, but in the top left corner you see how many visitors InfoQ has on a monthly basis. Here showing almost 400.000 visitors for March 2009, which I think is pretty good!

On the left hand side there is a list of all the communities that InfoQ writes about. Un-checking communities let you filter out stuff you’re not interested in. Clicking on any community you will see all content from that community.

Based on your community selections above you can get a personalized RSS feed, that of course gets updated whenever there are new content on InfoQ.

On the right hand side of the site, there is a box with tabs showing Articles, Presentations, Interviews and Books and one tab showing All.

This is a great source of info which I learned to appreciate quite late. Today I use it very often, especially to find recent presentations and interviews.

Note: All content you see here will also be announced as news items.

InfoQ publish content in four different languages: English, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese.

In the top right corner of the news section there is a button for contributing news. Use this for suggesting tings you want InfoQ to cover or maybe you have an interesting article that you want InfoQ to consider publishing?

Other options

If you are a registered logged on user, you can go to Preferences and check the box for the InfoQ Newsletter. This will give you a summary of the content for the past week. If you don’t have time to monitor the website on a regular basis, this is a nice option for many.

InfoQ also have it’s own bookshelf written by several different authors, many of them being editors for InfoQ. Books currently available for free online reading (print version at a small cost):

• Scrum and XP from the Trenches
• Starting Struts 2
• Agile Patterns: The Technical Cluster
• Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book
• Getting Started with Grails
• Domain Driven Design Quickly
• Scrum Checklists
• Enterprise SOA Adoption Practices
• Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks
• Java Transaction Design Strategies

URLs

Community
By adding the name of the community behind the infoq.com URL you get a page displaying featured content, news, articles, interviews, presentations and books about that particular community. For e.g. NET you would use http://www.infoq.com/dotnet.

Topics
By clicking on a topic, e.g. you get a box like this:

It’s quite self explanatory, but the Exclude might need some extra explanation. On InfoQ you can exclude topics you don’t want to show up on the website. So let’s say I want to follow what’s going on in the .NET queue, but I don’t want to see anything about Windows Forms, I can do that by selecting a topic as showed on the left or go the Preferences and add that topic to my exclude list.

Tags
Tags work much in the same way as Topics, except they’re tags and not topics :-)

Twitter

InfoQ is also present on Twitter. You can follow at http://twitter.com/infoq or just add @infoq to your Twitter client.

Planet InfoQ – Opinions and Perspectives from InfoQ Editor’s Personal Blogs

The title kind of says it all :-) Check out http://planet.infoq.com. Here you’ll also find Tweets from all the editors on Twitter.

About a month ago I was contacted by Kjersti Sandberg at Programutvikling. She asked if I knew about any companies in Bergen that would be interested in having a full day seminar with Mary Poppendieck. I figured this was a great opportunity and contacted some of the companies I knew in Bergen. Webstep found this very interesting and invited customers and employees for a full day seminar with Mary.

At the same time I asked if she would be interested in doing a talk at NNUG, which she did! So, If you haven’t seen this already, the invite is out, so go sign up (for free!).

Mary is well known for her experience and knowledge within the Lean and Agile community:

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed software development, supply chain management, manufacturing operations, and new product development. She spearheaded the implementation of a Just-in-Time system in a 3M video tape manufacturing plant and led new product development teams, commercializing products ranging from digital controllers to 3M Light Fiber^TM.

Mary is a popular writer and speaker, and coauthor of the book Lean Software Development, which was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. A sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development, was published in 2006. A third book, Leading Lean Software Development, will be published in late 2009.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone within your company or to your friends, because this event has a much broader crowd than the usual NNUG crowd of developers and architects. At least your manager should have this in her/his inbox by Monday morning :-)