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So here I sit, a long way from home, making a very late state on my columns for this week. Of course I would much rather be at home but there's a tropical cyclone of immense proportions making travel home a rather risky business just at the moment.

We left home, to visit some clients in the next state, knowing that there was a tropical cyclone coming but all reports said that it was going to be of very low intensity and might even fizzle out before it reached the coast. Unfortunately all those reports and forecasts were wrong and instead of being of low intensity and fizzling out it turned into a monster.

Even though it crossed the coast a bit over 200 miles north of where we live, the rain and winds are having an impact for a long way south of where we live and that puts the storm between us and home. Hopefully, now that it has crossed the coast it may slow down and begin to dissipate but there is still a chance for it to turn and head back out to sea before making another run at the coast.

But, regardless of what happens with the storm, we're making a run for home tomorrow. I would much rather be home and facing the storm than stuck down here not quite knowing what was happening and watching the work build up.

And one of the major jobs that we will have to deal with when we get home is a problem that should never have arisen if the client had taken my advice instead of thinking that they knew better. We built a member's site for a business that had 186 people who need to have access to the site and wanted to give each of those 186 people their own strong password.

Unfortunately that didn't meet with the client's approval. They wanted each person to have the ability to create their own password but only after they had been able to gain access to the members' area. If that sounds a little twisted then you're not the only one who finds that a rather strange way to do things but the client is always right.

Basically what the client instructed us to do was give each of the 186 people the same password ... sounds really secure doesn't it? That password would be emailed to each of the people along with a request that they change the password once they were inside the members' area. Of course, people are going to rush to change their passwords, they won't keep on using that same password, they all know better than to do that.

Of course if you believe that then you'll believe anything.

I'm not sure how many of those 186 people did change their password but my guess is that it wasn't many. Even the manager of the business that we built the website for didn't change his password. So this was a situation that was never going to end well ... and it hasn't.

We were just checking into our accommodation down here last night when the manager rang me. Something had happened, no one could log into the website, I should get it fixed right away. Yep, I should work miracles via a very poor wireless connection even though my password, one that I changed, doesn't work either so even I am locked out.

Oh the joys of working with people who have no clue about the need for secure passwords and then expect you to work miracles when things fall apart because of dumb choices they made.

It's hard to believe that in this day and age so many people still fail to understand the importance of having secure passwords. Heck, Internet has even reached the point where many security experts are telling us that passwords have had their day and we have to move on to other more secure ways of allowing some people access to content while excluding everyone else.

Here we are at the point where passwords are becoming obsolete while there are still so many people out there who haven't reached the point of realising how important passwords are. It makes you wonder how those people will survive online when even more secure methods of content protection are introduced.

Those new methods of giving people access to secure areas are coming but some of those are going to be obsolete even before they are introduced. So what the standard way of securing content areas will be in the future is just about anyone's guess at this point but whatever the new system will be there will be even more people left behind when it is introduced.