The Cafes » Web Development

Dear Amalgamated Bank,

I’ve recently begun using online banking to manage some accounts and was hoping to do that with my primary checking and savings account at Amalgamated Bank as well. However, your terms for AmalgamatedOnline state:

A personal computer running Microsoft windows with Internet access is required to access our Internet Banking System (the “System”). For security we require the web browsers to support 128-bit SSL encryption. For example, Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 5.0 (or later) and Netscape Navigator Version 4.75 (or later) are acceptable.

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For reference, here are the categories one can use in the mode field of an Amazon Associates recommended product query string such as http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cafeaulait&o=1&p=16&l=st1&
mode=dvd&search=Whedon&=1&fc1=&lt1=&lc1=&bg1=&f=ifr:
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I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was webmaster for a major photo agency here in New York. My first task was designing their first ever web site. We had lots of great photographs going back decades, and we decided that the best way to display them would be with white text on a black background. Why did we decide this? Because photo galleries have black walls.
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If you’ve installed PHP in /usr/local as many people do, then your php.ini file is in /usr/local/php/lib. If you’ve installed PHP somewhere else, then you’ll find it in the corresponding lib directory. For instance, I like to put PHP in /opt/php5, so my php.ini file is in /opt/php5/lib.
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I had dinner with Bill Venners in Santa Clara last night. A lot of the action at the recently concluded Software Development 2006 conference focused on REST, so that was very much on our minds. We’ve both spent a lot of time working on server side frameworks for publishing systems, he at Artima, me here at The Cafes and its sister sites. Gradually the conversation wandered into authentication systems.

Among other topics, I described to Bill the cookieless, registration free authentication I had designed for version 1.0 of this site. I’m no longer using that system since switching to WordPress for other reasons, but I’m still quite proud of it; and I’m not sure it’s been duplicated anywhere else. However Bill immediately noticed one fatal (but correctable) flaw in my approach.
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