So I got into work today and was presented with the dreaded “You password will expire in 10 days. Do you want to change it now?”. So I said yes to get on with it, but surely this is a ridiculous security measure. How does this make my login more secure if you get me to change it all the time. I’m not going to take the time and effort to come up with a secure password and commit it to memory if every 6 weeks I’ve got to come up with a new one. All joking aside one of the team came back after Christmas and because they’d changed their password literally the day they left for holidays they couldn’t remember it. After nearly a day we got an administrator over from IT who reset the password for them. Nearly an entire contractor’s day wasted.

I’ve got a number of passwords stored in my head. I’ve got really really secure passwords with numbers, underscores and punctuation that I use for logging into my bank for example. They don’t ask me to change it every 6 weeks and if they did do you know what I’d probably do? I’d write it down. I need to get into my bank accounts and if I forgot the password and had to wait for them to reset the password, or got through the pain of a call to telephone banking it could be a serious problem (especially if I wanted to pay myself out of my business account). This is why banks DON’T make  you change your password all the time.

So dear IT bods at Auntie. Please stop making me change my password. I can’t be bothered coming up with a decent one anymore. D’ya know what I’ve done now? I’ve stuck with one password and each time you tell me to change it I add 1,2,3…etc. Probably not what you had in mind.

So I’m probably over a week late on this, but I wanted to hold fire until I’d had a chance to think  about the Flash and Apple row.

So the iPad doesn’t have Flash and the iPhone doesn’t have flash. Apparantly Steve Jobs has criticised Adobe for frankly being a bit shit about developing the Flash Player for the Mac and anyway HTML 5 is coming around the corner so that’ll sort out flash for once and all. And then the flame war began across the internet being mainly won by the flash haters going on about how it’s about time that Flash died – how inaccessible it is, how much you hate full flash sites, how it’s not standards compliant, how it’ll mean that all the advertising gets taken out. Well done Apple for eliminating this crap software from their version of the web.

I’m a Flash and Flex developer so I’m a bit biased, but bullshit. It’s not just Flash that doesn’t work. No plugins work on the iPhone and we have to presume on the iPad. Because people don’t tend to develop in Java Applets for the browser anymore we haven’t heard all of them complaining so the focus has been on the bad boy in the room – Flash.

The more important question to answer is “Why doesn’t the iPhone have a Flash Player?” – after all it’s a pretty open secret that Adobe have had the flash player working on an iPhone in their labs, and well too. So the performance argument is out of the way. Accessibilty? For the least accessible gadget ever created? Do me a favour. Might it be apps?

Long before Steve Jobs coined the phrase “apps” for the iPhone I like most other Flash and Flex developers have been creating apps. Apps for linking to backend data, charting, video players, audio players, games, chat, mash ups – hang on this is sounding a bit like wot the iPhone apps are all about.

So if Apple allow the Flash Player on their iPhone or iPad they may as well throw away their app store. Thats the real reason, the rest is just bull.