This week does NOT share any quickly identifiable fun facts. Wikipedia does NOT have an entry about 362, it simply redirects to 300. The page was created in 02006 and has been idle until you dear read go and change it. Thanks to astronomy for having a 362 reference. This week shares its name with 362 Havnia, (A latin reference to Copenhagen) a main belt asteroid and GD 362 a white dwarf start approximately 150 light years away.
Today is the first day in the Old Icelandic month of Þorri. Traditionally, people give thanks they made it through the winter, but in the old Icelandic calendar, this is actually the start of the 4th month of winter. The half-way point in the winter season. Þorramatur (Food for Þorri) is usually pickled, fermented and putrified to make it last through the rough months where hunting, fishing and fresh items were harder to come by. People still celebrate by eating this food, unironically!
This week we managed to get some projects moved forward. We’re pleased to announce the return of Material Conference this November 16, 02018. If you didn’t make it to the last edition, you can watch all the sessions on YouTube and see what you missed. This year will be very similar. We’re in the process of confirming speakers and continuing to plan to make the day fun and exciting. Last August, while fun, turned out to be too chaotic for our attendees. We’ve pushed it back a few months right outside of the high-season, so the flights and hotel prices and availability will be more reasonable. Also, you have the chance to see some Northern Lights!
This week was spent getting to pieces of technology working for one of our clients. In Iceland, the government offers an official single-sign-on solution connected to your national ID number. It is very helpful and actually easy to implement into your site. It has three levels of security: name and password, Phone PIN PKI authentication and actual chip & pin card. Hopefully they will also introduce some two-factor authentication (2FA), but that should be seamless to any one using them as a login provider.
We implemented Íslykill on some of the sites and now we can move away from storing or dealing with passwords for most of our customers.
All this dovetails nicely into other changes we’ve been making for the upcoming GDPR. Part of the new ruling is that it needs to be as easy to leave the system as it is to join it. Our sign-up process is a simple web-form, but we realised we never had a “delete account” option, so we implemented that as well.
Each week, we take another small step to meeting compliance with the upcoming laws for ourselves and customers.
Bric-à-brac
One of the great things about having an office in downtown Reykjavik, or any big city for that matter, is when you get out to stretch your legs, you can pop into local bookstores. The post-holiday sales are in full force and we picked-up this beautiful book about Finnish Design for nearly 75% off! If you want to read a much better book report, check out Dan Hills write-up.
We’re not really sure what we’re watching, but if you look close these cartoon-ish designs are moving in 3D with parallax, so this is more complex than it may first appear – if you can understand it at all.