Ping.

Dug out the cookie for my account. It's amazing, the junk I keep on my home directory(ies).

Procudure for Mozilla, Netscape, Galeon and maybe others... but not Opera:

• look in ~/.mozilla/<profile>/<junk>/cookies.txt
• find advogato.org line
• change the expiry stamp (that 10 digit number) for a newer one.
  Pick a date in the future with a command such as date +%s -d "2006-08-14" or perl -e 'print time+3600*365, "\n"'
  Not sure how I'll edit my diary in 2038...
• quit Moz, replace the line in your current ~/.mozilla, restart
• visit your page - if it doesn't work, check that the site you're on (either www.advogato.org or advogato.org) matches the cookie line
• beyond this, I can't help. You do have a backup, right?

Other relevant links

• Advogato FAQ (unofficial?)
• patch for password reminder doesn't seem to have been applied here

PerlUnit

I did some stuff to it. It's now less broken and very slightly more documented, but I still need to check & apply some patches before making a release. A coup for the CPAN perms is probably due soon.

Work.

Got a new job, it's keeping me rather busy. That was a while ago - sorry I forgot to tell you earlier, but I didn't think you were particularly interested.

Still here. Haven't done anything interesting. Nothing new there then.

I'm scared.

Hashcash hits Slashdot

The Hashcash for mail filtering project is posted to Slashdot. I have to post some replies of course, so I expect 128k upstream bandwidth won't be enough for my website.

This too shall pass.

MS Palladium FAQ on crit.org

Well, sort of.

If you have something to say, get over to the CritLinked version of Ross Anderson's TCPA FAQ.

Why am I worried? Well I have the cached copy of MS's FAQ because crit.org doesn't work directly on their site.

nb. Notes applied to pages don't seem to be noticed until after they've been fetched through crit.org and the target page has been refreshed. I imagine this is a bug.

I can't say I would have planned for these two to arrive at the same time, but never mind.

Stylesheets. You would think the novelty had worn off by now, wouldn't you?

I got nothing useful done over the weekend (surprise!). I wanted to write code, but I ended up farting about instead. Stupid me.

"Forgotten password"

OK, I'm back. I had lost the authentication cookie that let me be "logged in".

I hunted around for my password, but I can't find it in the usual places - I probably didn't record it. With hindsight I see that this is not so clever, but most sites like this have an "email me my password" button, so it didn't seem necessary.

I recovered a copy of the cookie from a backup and appended it to my cookie file (the one that says "Do not edit!"), so I can post stuff until that expires. I can't do the XMLRPC thing though, I don't think. No big deal.

Next, I Used the Source. AFAICS the cookie I recovered was generated randomly when I created the account. The copy in the browser is supposed to expire in May 2003 (so if I go quiet about that time, you'll know what happened). The code doesn't seem to put an expiry time on the cookie in the Advogato database, so maybe I can just change the browser's expiry date?

If I ever hit the Logout link, it'll be Game Over.

Whining about the lack of "email me a password"

No, sir!

I can't be @rsed to code it myself. I don't see why anyone else should do it for me.

It would be much easier to make another account, or just leave the site. I'm sure it will cope without me. 8-)

I have other things to do. Always other things.

So you see, this is "Open Source in-action". Boom boom.

I'm not alone

While Reading The Fine Web, I found three other Advo users have also lost this passwords in some way, and found some route back in to the system. (One each, IIRC, of: finding the password, finding the auth cookie and pestering the admin for a change)

So, there's obviously a need for an "Advogato forgotten password FAQ" of some sort. This diary entry would serve, I suppose, as the other three entries served me. The problem is that AFAICS they expire to a dark place where Google refuses to look.

The two solutions that spring to mind are for me to post back-issues of my diary on my own website, or to post this drivel to the front page.

For now, I'll do neither. Maybe I'll get around to "backing up" my diary to my website once something important falls off the bottom.

(Update: Argh. I only wanted to edit a couple of typos, but it wants to put <p> in front of everything. The formatting was fine to start with.)