Sam Ruby and Jon Udell points to Nic Wolff's password generator as a simple ingenious simple single sign-on (SSO) solution. It's a neat technique but the core idea is definitely not a new one.

For example, Dan Boneh and Stanford students used it in PwdHash, an IE plugin, as an anti-phishing solution. Applying the technique on the password generation side reduces some weaknesses in the PwdHash solution but there are still significant user experience and security issues remaining.

Also, countless lazy yet paranoid users have practiced the technique manually ever since the password input box was invented. Please don't remind me how long ago that was. Not on my birthday.

If you haven't been paying attention, WHAT-WG has been on a rampage (of an exciting kind) defining what they hope will become the next generation of web standards.

Just checkout the advanced 2D graphics methods the new Canvas tag will be supporting (warning: large HTML file). My my. Look at them curves on that…web page. BTW, I hear recently released Lazlo 3.0 engine supports this API as well.

While Lua the little script language is not as well known as Python, it is popular in the game industry (World of Warcraft uses it to drive client UI) and there is even a sourceforge-like website just for Lua, LuaForge.net.

For persisting Lua data types, there is Pluto which converts any Lua data type (even functions, closures, and threads) into an octet sequence which can be written out to a file (i.e. game save/restore), sent over the net (LuaSocket), or inserted into databases using LuaSQL (ODBC, ADO, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, JDBC, PostgresSQL supported).

For my recent need, persisting tens of thousands of small Lua tables to local storage, I used lgdbm (tar.gz file) with QDBM which I've been using in other projects instead of gdbm for performance. I am not releasing the source code to my Lua binding for QDBM (lqdbm?) because only minor modifications are needed. I'll do that when and if I expose other functionalities of QDBM like B+ tree.