-
Search
About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
Archive
Categories
-
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Have an idea? Ship It! – A Houston Code Camp Presentation
Yesterday, I attended and presented at Houston Code Camp. You can see what others were saying by looking at the twitter hashtag #houcodecamp. The event was a resounding success and I’m hoping we do another next year. Regarding my presentation. … Continue reading
XKCD & Password Security
If you were on the internet last week, you probably saw an article, twitter, or Facebook post about the xkcd comic on password strength. The comic, which was (most likely) inspired by an article entitled, “The Usability of Passwords” basically says that using a multi-word password (3 or more words), is more secure than what I have referred to as “complex passwords” in past articles on this blog. The writer of the original article makes the point (which is what the xkcd comic points to) that passwords using three or more dictionary words, has more entropy and is thus harder to crack, therefore making them more secure. While there is a bit of truth to the article, it leads to some false understandings of how hackers actually go about hacking passwords, and make assumptions that aren’t entirely accurate. Continue reading
Cutting Worker Costs on Heroku
When we launched LiveShow, we utilized what Heroku calls a “Worker Dyno” to handle background tasks, specifically sending emails. Using a Heroku worker dyno allows you to offload work to a background task so that it doesn’t hold up the actual web server portion of your app. The downside to worker dynos is they cost money, $0.05/hour to be exact. And when you run one all day, everyday for a month, that can add up. Continue reading
