Sure, it makes sense to disallow copying passwords from a password field, but disabling pasting is just being annoying.

News flash for developers doing this (such as Intuit, in TurboTax): I’m not thrilled about manually typing my 20 character random password. Just let me copy it from my password vault and paste it into your field.

In the case of TurboTax, it diminishes the value of data import if I have to type more characters for my password than there are numbers on the form to input.

TurboTax's castrated password field

It’s become fairly clear that HP is not webOS’ savior. It’s also unlikely that webOS can come back from the dead for the second time. But it makes me sad, since webOS and its devices hit a sweet spot that no one managed to exploit.

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I’ve just spent the past few days migrating a Team Foundation Server source repository to Subversion. It took longer and was more difficult than I expected it to be.

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I recently spent some time building an install package for a web application using WiX. There are some nice IIS extensions for WiX to help with that, but they’re missing the ability to set some advanced properties, like an Application Pool’s “Enable 32 Bit Applications” property.
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For those of us poor folk who didn’t make it to PDC this past fall, Microsoft has been taking the show to us in the form of its MSDN Unleashed series. Rob Bagby, developer evangelist, came to Salt Lake City to present and give updates about new and upcoming technologies for developers.

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Friday was the third and final day of the QCon conference.

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It’s another day of industry stand-outs at QCon.

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QCon is a software development conference sponsored by the InfoQ site and software consultancy Trifork. I am in San Francisco attending it, and here is a summary and some thoughts on the first day’s sessions I was able to attend.

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The “story” in agile development’s “user story” is not a narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Many are short on verbs, which is a big hint that something non-narrative is going on. “User story” is shorthand for a set of concepts and principles. The danger with taking a simple word like “story” and assigning it a new meaning is that novices, and occasionally even experts, confuse the jargon with the traditional definition.

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Over twenty years ago, I moved from Oregon to Utah to start going to school at BYU. As we were driving to Provo from the north, my mom, who had been born in Utah, commented, “This place right here is called the point of the mountain.”

“That’s stupid, there’s nothing here!” I remember saying, a bit more harshly than was appropriate. I think my mom was a little taken aback, and didn’t bother to try to justify why the place deserved to have a name: It separates Utah valley from the Salt Lake Valley, and the counties with corresponding names; it’s the highest point on I-15 through the Wasatch Front and the place you’ll most likely hit snowy roads.

I realized later that I was just experiencing culture shock. After an email discussion with a coworker today, I realized that culture shock is possible between programming environments.

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