“I hope to post more frequently, too. Posts on my old blog became less and less frequent until they eventually just stopped. I am going to do my best to stop that from happening this time, promise.”

Famous last words. That piece was part of my first post on my brand new blog. I finished it on the 24th of November, 2012 at 1:02 PM. Since then I’ve written one, two… three posts, the last of which was written 99 days ago.

I think the biggest difficulty to overcome in blogging (at least for me) is sticking to it. I have attempted to start a blog so many times but, as a notorious procrastinator, I always end up failing. Sometimes I manage to stay at it for a few weeks. Other times, it’s a few days. And then, a few months down the line, I decide...

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Last year I conducted a study that investigated the manner in which users signed up for and logged into websites. Today I am publishing the results in the form of a handy infographic.

The study consisted of volunteers signing up for various online services. A week later, the participants had to sign into the accounts they had created. By looking at the information submitted, certain deductions could be made such as the strength of the passwords chosen. The results were rather dismal. Even today, internet users are not choosing secure passwords and are reusing the same password across multiple different websites.

View the infographic on Visual.ly.

Some notes:

• Over three hundred internet users participated in the study.
• The study was conducted within the borders of South Africa. This may have resulted in some country-specific bias.
• No personally-identifying information was recorded. Passwords were analyzed before being hashed...

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A few months ago I overheard a conversation between a techie and a cricket player. The sportsman asked the other why he was so fond of Firefox and why he insisted he also use it. The “geek” grumbled something along the lines of “It’s just better”. Not a particularly helpful response. I may have said, “Because it is more standards-compliant than Internet Explorer and supports the newest HTML5 and CSS3 features.” But that may have even been worse.

More recently, my cousin informed me that she had bought a Android tablet. Initially, she wanted an iPad but then a well-intending individual informed her that Samsung’s device had better specs. I don’t have anything against Samsung or Android but specs shouldn’t have been the deciding factor in her purchase.

That brings us to this past weekend. I downloaded episode 329 of Security Now. The podcast often encompasses unnecessarily long discussions...

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I have loved writing for quite some time. The English language is a beautiful thing. I also love reading. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time for either of these things for the last while. I hope to make them part of my life again soon.

The Rain is my first attempt in a long time to write a short story. From now on, I am going to be publishing my short stories on this blog, as I write them. Most will probably be absolutely horrid (feel free to let me know in the comments) but, hopefully, overtime they will get better. That’s the theory at least. In the meantime, I will just have to endure the public humiliation.

You can read my story by clicking the big green button below.

Read The Rain.

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I have a brand spanking new blog. It has a new design and new backend. Or rather, it has no backend. This beauty is running on pure HTML. There is CMS, server-side programming, database, anything. How? I am using Jekyll.

You create a template for your site, create blog posts, and run it all through Jekyll which then spits out pure HTML to be uploaded to your server. Very neat. This means that when you visit this site, no time is wasted running code or querying a database—the pre-generated HTML is simply passed on from the server to the client.

I hope to post more frequently, too. Posts on my old blog became less and less frequent until they eventually just stopped. I am going to do my best to stop that from happening this time, promise.

→ Read more.