Since it’s the summer, I have some free time on my hands. With all this free time, I have been hatching a few ideas in this big head of mine. I don’t know where they come from, but I think they could be useful, and I think it might be cool to start development on them.

Online Password Management Software
I got this idea while I was redesigning the security system at my workplace. Seeing as how everyone says you shouldn’t use the same passwords for all your accounts, I found it rather difficult to keep track of all of them.

Well, I did a little research and found a few desktop applications that will securely store passwords and usernames. The one thing I didn’t like about any of them was the fact that, 1. They only worked on one platform. (I found a really nice one for Mac OS X, but not for Windows) or 2. They required you to keep a USB stick with you to store passwords and whatnot when you were away from your personal computer. I used to carry my USB stick with me all the time, but I don’t anymore, so I found this to be kinda a bummer.

I decided that I would try to make a secure online password security system. It would use a MySQL database backed and encrypt the passwords in the database. That way, I could access my passwords from anywhere. Of course, I’ll need to keep the security major tight in order for this to work, but I figured… why not?

P.S. I’m still working on coming up with a better name. Online Password Management System is lame…

NightLight
Ok, so this idea came from the Online Password Management System. I wanted to create the system on my current webhost. I mean, they have PHP and MySQL, why not? Well, I ran into a road block when I found out that they don’t have the mcrypt PHP module. That means no encryption.

Well, being resourceful, I decided to host my own development server. I have an old machine sitting around not doing anything, and I figured I would install Linux on it and do development on that. I did have one little problem… I have run out of decent-sized hard drives. When I say decent-sized, I mean more than 1GB. Right now, I have two small drives of 550MB and 850MB. I would have like to install linux on those, but the distributions I found either were too big to fit, or didn’t have Apache, PHP and MySQL installed by default. i.e. No tiny LAMPs…..

I went searching online for a tiny Linux distro that had a small footprint, but still had Apache, PHP and MySQL. Nothing. Many tiny desktop linux distros, but nothing for a server. How odd…. Oh well. Then I realized, “Why not make my own distro?” I mean, how hard could it be? I’ve been using Linux for about 4 years now. I kinda know what I’m doing…. I found LFS, a tutorial for building a basic Linux OS from nothing. Cool! I can do this. I can create my own distro, running Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. It’ll be a tiny LAMP. I figured I would call it NightLight considering a night light is like a tiny lamp.

Well, I’m currently attempting to build my first distribution. Wish me luck, and if it works, hopefully I’ll become famous!