From the GNU Automake Documentation:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a developer in possession of a new package, must be in want of a build system.”

Awesome.

I released an alpha of the latest version of BlowPass today. It’s almost a full rewrite, the structure is that different. Anyway, you can get more information on the BlowPass dev blog.

Well, tonight I finally got around to working on OurUNO. I decided a long time ago to convert it to a framework around which anyone can build up a college review site. I started cutting up the code around 9:00 and it’s now 3:45 of the next day. Ouch.

I naturally decided to use Smarty to template this guy, and then I decided that there was going to be a definite need for good docs. I chose NaturalDocs and it’s pretty good. It’s got 0 learning curve for the basic functionality, and outputs pretty docs.

I got most of the system documented tonight, and converted about, contact, index, and viewReviews to Smarty. There are still some problems with NaturalDocs I have to figure out (like how to group files together) and lots of files to template of course.

I think I can have a package together within a month. I’ll hook up to sourceforge soon, maybe snag a domain. It’s actually been a lot easier than I thought it would be so far. Smarty is pretty kickin, as is NaturalDocs. The latter could, ironically, use better documentation.

So I thought that I had moved past BlowPass. I guess I was wrong. I’ve been spending every spare moment working on it. I found what I feel is a better Blowfish library at www.farfarfar.com. I still can’t implement any of the vector tests because they’re all in hex and translate into nasty characters. This means I have no actual idea if the crypt is working. I also quickly stopped trying to write my own Twofish implementation. I could handle it in C I think, but not JavaScript, I don’t know enough of it and it’s little oddities.

Regardless of all that, I’ve got my prototype AJAX down pat now (okay, AHAH) and I’m working up my own open source version of passlet.com. Here’s a nice list of features/todo’s.

• Uses a non-proprietary algorithm (Blowfish)
• Has AJAX-y-ness
• Uses PHP
• Uses a database abstraction library TODO
• Slick animations (mootools?) TODO

You can check out the current version at http://static.velvetcache.org/projects/blowpass/demo/ to play around.

I saw on my Ajaxian feed today a neat service called Passlet. Essentially it is a password keeper, like KisKis or the one built into Firefox. The novelty here is that it uses JavaScript to handle all the encrypting and decrypting on the client side. That means no transmission of clear text information, not even over SSL.

I happily admit I’d been thinking about this concept for at least 4 months. See, I liked KisKis a lot. It was Java, used good, solid encryption and had a nice interface. Problem was, it’s hard to keep my thumb drive version synced to my box versions, and I rarely remembered to anyway. So I thought, why not make a web based password keeper that used JavaScript to keep it secure?

The result was BlowPass which uses a JavaScript implementation of the Blowfish cipher. I was working on the Ajax stuff when I got frustrated with mootools and left it alone. It has several key weaknesses, and I suppose I could learn from Passlet, but, I may as well just use it instead of finishing BlowPass. If you want the source to BlowPass leave me a note. Thats my GPL disclaimer since the Blowfish implementation was GPL’d.