automaticable

Woo, we’re on vacation!  That’s right, the bro’s drove down from Downers Grove last night, and we’re Georgia-bound this morning.  The next 8 days are to be spent hiking, fishing, swimming, canoeing, and all-around have a good time.  We’ve got a few competitions laid out so far, but I think the whole week will be competitive craziness.  I’m talkin’ watermelon seed spitting contest, Euchre tournament, and “who will-jump-over-the-fire-naked” bets.  Anything goes this week.  We are on the road in less than 35 minutes.  Later, automaticable.

PS: In case you weren’t following, yes, Kyle does owe me 22.22 beers this vacation.  And yes, I did make my 50 mile goal.  And yes, I am doing the Chicago Half Marathon in September (more on that later).  I’m not really sure what kind of beer it’ll be yet– any suggestions?

Adding to the first annaul Mountain Man Competition, Brian suggested we have a whittling competition. He actually suggested we whittle with butter knives just to make things difficult, but I think that would just be frustrating and tedious…we will handle those details later. Anyway, over the course of our week in the woods we will use whatever tools we can find to whittle the most impressive pieces of wood you have ever seen. We’ll post pictures when we get back and have a poll for whose carving is the best. Like this idea? Have your own?

Help us come up with more ideas!

How do you want to see the Wegner brothers compete over a week in the mountains? Leave your ideas in the comments. We only have a few days left, but any great ideas will have their own post created (which includes a link to your site, if you have one) and the competition photo-documented if possible.

This is open to everyone: automaticable readers, vacation attendees, random extended family members…anyone really. There is only 1 rule: no running competitions! (grrr…)

We are only a few days away from the Wegner summer vacation and it is about time I announce our first annual Mountain Man Competition. Not only am I announcing this to the folks here on automaticable, but this is the first time the other vacationers are hearing of the idea as well. If you want to help participate, make sure to read through the end of the post to find out how you can be a part of the Mountain Man Competition.

For the first aspect of the Mountain Man Competition, we are going to have a beard growing contest. I’m not sure what the state of all the participants’ facial hair is, but for everyone participating we will have a final clean shave Friday morning and document our spikey growth over the entire week. Expect a photo-blog of our facial evolution when we get back. The winner gets to bask in his (or her?) manly glory as the most masculine (and hairy) person of the bunch.

Help us come up with more ideas!

How do you want to see the Wegner brothers compete over a week in the mountains? Leave your ideas in the comments. We only have a few days left, but any great ideas will have their own post created (which includes a link to your site, if you have one) and the competition photo-documented if possible.

This is open to everyone: automaticable readers, vacation attendees, random extended family members…anyone really. There is only 1 rule: no running competitions! (grrr…)

Well, two weeks and three days away until I leave on the trip of a lifetime with some of the closest people to me in my life.  Most of them you have heard from if you’ve read automaticable for a while.  Kyle Wegner, Scott Wegner, Joe Wegner, Stacy Friel, Lindsay Gerke, and I will all be road tripping down to the Smoky Mountains in Bryson City, North Carolina. This trip should be a lot of fun because it’s our first real big vacation where our parents haven’t been watching over our shoulders and there to guide us in what we should and shouldn’t do. My brothers and I have been camping and being outdoorsy for as long as I could remember, but we’ve never done anything of this caliber without our parents planning and them being there. But we’re finally making it our own and going down a path that has yet to be ventured by all of us. Granted we’re using a lot of the techniques that we’ve learned by observation through the years, like cooking teams, cleaning teams, planning out our expenses to a T and how much each meal SHOULD cost and what not. It’s kind of exciting to see how it will all come together in the end. So far we don’t really have many adventures or excursions planned for our trip, all we know is we have a cabin next to a lily pond, six people, two cars, and a weeks worth of time to have fun and enjoy everything that the Smoky Mountains and North Carolina has to offer us. If any of you Automaticabalites have been there and have suggestions for us to do or see, please, leave a comment and let us know! I’m sure when we return, there will be plenty for us to tell about our adventures and photos to go along with our delightful adventure.

Tonight Stacy and I decided to make our own granola bars, and they turned out pretty darn good.  I had been wanting to try making them for a while now, and finally got around to it.  It’s a great snack to make because it’s relatively easy to make, pretty healthy, you can throw in whatever you want, and really cheap.  We made a 9″ x 13″ tray of granola bars for around $5 in ingredients (not to mention they were mostly organic).  And the best part, is they’re delicious.  We’re talking:

• Rolled Oats
• Flour
• Brown Sugar
• Raisins
• Chocolate Chips
• Walnuts
• Almonds
• Honey
• Sunflower Seeds
• Vanilla
• Salt, canola oil, etc.

I mean, it sounds great, doesn’t it?  And now I have snacks for the next couple weeks– cool.  I can’t wait to make it again, there’s already a few other things I want to try (namely, peanut butter, mmmm).

Does anybody else have a tasty they like to make?  Or perhaps the missing ingredient to my nearly-perfect granola bars?  Let’s hear it in the comments.

Good news folks: I’ve been keeping up with the crazy running showdown going on between Kyle and myself, and it looks like I’ve earned my first six pack! I think Kyle’s legs may have fallen off or some other catastrophe, because he hasn’t run in almost a month. That’s good, because we still have almost three weeks of fierce, beer-driven competition left.

Oh, I’ve also created a new page dedicated to the long-distance running battle.  Now you can keep tabs on our progress run-by-run until the very end.  I’ve logged almost 20 miles so far, but I’m going to up the ante and strive to bring my total to 50 miles by the end of the competition, July 25th.  Think I can do it?  We’ll see.  Think Kyle can keep up?  No chance.

[ Running Showdown ]

I’ve started another pet project for the summer, and I believe it’s ready for a stable release.  The program is called Pwdhash Sharp, and it’s a C#, Gtk-based desktop implementation of the PwdHash password-generator, written for Ubuntu.   We’ve written about PwdHash before, but if you’re not familiar:

PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of [site address and password] fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF).

Now with Pwdhash Sharp, you get the same functionality integrated into your desktop.  When I first started writing this application, the PwdHash Firefox extention wasn’t compatible with Firefox 3 (although they’ve updated the addon since then), so that was another reason I needed an alternative.  Pwdhash Sharp is also convenient for non-browser applications which require a password– now you can easily use strong passwords for them as well.

Pwdhash Sharp 0.8.4 is the fourth version released, and is now relatively stable.  Some of the features include:

• Passwords exactly match those generated by PwdHash, so they are interchangable.
• Native GTK window and icons.
• Create and retrieve passwords for web- or desktop-based applications.
• Minimize to tray for convenient access when you need it.

There are two ways to download Pwdhash Sharp 0.8.4.  You can either download the .deb for your platform from the release page, or you can get uploads via my personal PPA.  The benefits of the PPA is that you will receive automatic updates of pwdhash-sharp as they occur, just like all other programs in Ubuntu.  To add it:

• In the panel, select System > Administration > Software Sources
• Select the “Third-Party Software” tab, and “Add…” to add a new entry.  In the popup, enter the line:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/swegner/ubuntu hardy main

• Close the software sources manager, and allow the repository cache to reload.  Now, you can install pwdhash-sharp from your favorite package manager.  On the command line:

sudo aptitude install pwdhash-sharp

Once installed, you can launch it from the “Accessories” submenu.  Use it just like the form on the pwdhash.com website.

I’m pretty happy with the project so far, but it’s by no means complete.  It’s been a learning experience in packaging for Ubuntu, as well as developing using Mono and GtkSharp.  There’s still a few bugs to work out, and some features that I’d like to add.  Namely:

• For some reason, Pwdhash Sharp can’t be launched from within Gnome Do.  Anybody have this issue?
• I’d like to add some preferences to automatically copy generated passwords to the clipboard.  Also, it might be useful to automatically minimize, and “forget” the previous site password, for security reasons.
• Also, “man” pages aren’t generated correctly, but this seems to be a packaging issue.
• It would also be nice to port to Windows, and should be relatively easy since it’s in C#.  I could either do a Gtk port, or use a native Windows interface.  Anybody interested in helping?

So, give Pwdhash Sharp a try, and let me know what you think.  I’m open to suggestions and feature requests.

PS: The PwdHash algorithm generates only pseudo-random passwords, which could be decrypted, given at least half of the key.  Can anybody figure out the password in the screenshot?