Life is grand

The day I have been dreading for nigh on a year has arrived. Since Yahoo! bought Flickr there has been the impending merger of not just their cash coffers but of their sign-on systems. That day will be the 15th of March and from the looks of it you must comply.

Like Photub I am stuck in the unenviable position of not having my ideal Yahoo! sign-on. I used to have it but since I rarely used Yahoo! I ignored it and eventually forgot it. I spent a good few hours trying to convince Yahoo! to couch up the account but it all hinges on an uncomfirmed postal code that I cannot remember. All the other details I provide to Yahoo! are correct, it is just 4 digits of a postal code which are preventing me.

Why Yahoo! can’t just send a new password for that account to the email on record which I know and own and control and check every 5 minutes, I don’;t know. They won’t. They want a piece of irrelevant data (Yahoo! have never posted me anything, why do they need my postal code?) Not too mention the account has been inactive for at least a year now. Can’t they kill it?

It isn’t the end of the world and it just means I need to sign up some bastardised Yahoo! account name but it isn’t ideal either.

A bitter sweet day for Flickr. It will feel strange signing into it with YahoosChihuahua411Pwned.

Brian read my previous post and quickly replied with this functionally identical C# code:
string schars = "0124356789abcdefghijk";
string password = string.Empty;
Random rand = new Random(DateTime.Now.Millisecond);
while (password.Length < 9) password += schars[rand.Next(0, schars.Length)];

The only real difference is the rand seeding. I still find the Ruby easier to understand thanks to the upto method and the fact that numbers are objects in Ruby. Thanks for the code though Brian.

I have never been a big language geek. My CV lists a raft of them; C#, JavaScript, Ruby, VBScript and even COBOL. But I know many coders (like Kenny, Brian or David) who have a much deeper understanding than I do. On a daily basis Brian shows me twists and turns of C# that I had no idea about. I am not ashamed about this though. Programmers aren’t one type. We have generalists and specialists, high-level chaps and on-the-metal sorts.

Occasionally though along comes a language or system that works the way I think. I then go to another level of understanding with it. HTML and CSS may not be strict programming languages but I do know them to a far greater degree than I do other languages. I am dead confident with them which is a nice feeling.

I reckon Ruby is fast revealing itself to be a language I will grow to be confident in, one I’ll understand beyond my usual level. It feels right.

Just an hour ago I needed some Ruby code that would generate a random string of characters (for a password system in this case.) One Google later and I came across this post. A comment by Scott Becker blew me away with its usesfulness and simplicity. Here is the code:
schars = "0124356789abcdefghijk"
password = ""
1.upto(8) { password += schars[rand(schars.length),1] }

In other languages a line like that would leave me scratching my head and turning to Brian but in Ruby it made elegant, simple sense.