A development server recently became compromised, and while this isn't necessarily a good thing, it does raise awareness and provides impetus to strengthen security measures. Access Control A few axioms: Access control is better through certificates (what you have) than passwords (what you know) Two-factor authentication is better than both (what you have + new ... Read more
HTTPS Everywhere is a wonderful concept, but of course we need functionality first, which means dealing with the whole PKI issue. So, when stuff is located in countries with limited IPv4 addresses, how can this be accomplished? - Simply put SNI allows for any number of certificates to work on a single IP address. Basically ... Read more
When I was in a PhD program, and before that an MS, the academic researchers and the administration all talked about how important advances in science and scholarship will come from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Disciplinary boundaries had been mined through the decades and ages, and it is cross-disciplinary research where the findings will be ... Read more
I received an email about Paymo v.3 which was recently released. Paymo is a time-tracking, project management and invoicing cloud-based app (with native applications for desktop and mobile). Paymo has been around a while (hence being on their mailing list), and they have an impressive feature set and really thought through usability. I would recommend ... Read more
The entrepreneur is a creator. The businessperson is a destroyer. Enough said. This kind of dichotomy is annoying at best and completely fictional at worst. The reality is that the entrepreneur is to the businessperson as public relations is to propaganda. That is, they are the same, just better pr/propaganda. At the same time, there ... Read more
I've been engaged in thinking about education and professional development since encountering the fantastic difficulties (most vividly displayed as a university lecturer and student advocate in an advanced graduate program in the mid-2000s). Since then, I have developed a fairly good idea of the exact, largely intractable nature of the difficulties specifically in higher education ... Read more
In rough, this is the publishing workflow that gets books from conception/marketing to publishing and distribution. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Publishing a book or journal is first and foremost a marketing decision. That is, it has to in some way reach and appeal to a readership, and that includes who are the distributors (electronic and print), ... Read more
This is my attempt to give a good set of guidelines based on two sites: Migrationology and Bellroy. What these sites do well and what they do poorly will be discussed, delivering a list of what is important. This post builds on the discussion in Multiplatform Web Design. Summary of Mobile Web Best Practices Here ... Read more
This brief report could just as easily be called The Status of Education 2.0 but I think we are over this versioning. What is really at work is a de-institutionalization of education as an institution. What we are witnessing is the reorganization of learning outside of the organizing principles of the Medieval University. Institutional Decline ... Read more
These misleading terms Adaptive and Responsive don't matter much, but rather the result which is an experience of the user (and higher conversion rates) across various platforms (including operating systems, browsers and screen resolutions). For authors and publishers (both book and web formats), design is a rather important topic. Hardcover, paperback, ebook, web are physical/digital ... Read more