Heftel Family
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Well, here we are in the 21st century – the second decade of the 21st century, even, and Internet security, specifically the problem of weak passwords, still plagues our society.  A new study, based on analysis of 32 million passwords, shows that the most popular password is – can you guess? – “123456″.  One in five users leaves a key under the virtual doormat with obvious passwords like “qwerty”, “password”, “iloveyou”, or “princess”!  (original story here).

Why is it that we can’t pick secure passwords?  It seems it’s just human nature.  A password that is secure is, by definition, hard to remember for a human.  Here are five tips that will help your passwords remain secure.

1. Here’s a simple hint – if your password can be found in the dictionary (any language!), it’s not secure enough!  It’s easy to crack a password that’s listed in the dictionary – it’s routinely done in college computer science classes.
2. Put letters and numbers in your password.  Try replacing some letters with numbers (i.e. 3 for “e”, 1 for “L”, etc) or symbols (@ for “a”).
3. Mix up uppercase and lowercase letters in your password.
4. Use more than one word in your password.  You could use a whole phrase, for example, or make it an acronym by using the first letter of each word in a phrase.
5. Use symbols such as punctuation in your password.  Note: some websites won’t allow you to use anything but letters and numbers.  It’s dumb, but they do it.

Hopefully these tips will help you keep your password secure!

Oh, man, I laughed when I saw this:

How true that is!

Recently I started using Google Chrome. I downloaded it, tested a few things, and before you know it I was using it every time I wanted to go online, leaving my old standby FireFox unused and un-clicked.  I will attempt to organize the reasons for my switch into a bulleted list below:

• It’s fast. You open the program, it displays.  The quicker I can get to my webpages, the quicker I can get to work.
• It maximizes screen real estate.  I hate having my usable browser area cluttered by a bunch of toolbars I don’t want that came bundled with other stuff I did want. (Internet Explorer, I’m talking to you).  Chrome even goes so far as to use the top window bar (which is normally not used for anything except the program’s name and window controls) to put my tabs in when maximized.  I love that!  Every little bit of usable screen real estate helps when developing websites on my small laptop screen and I appreciate having those 20 or so vertical pixels back.
• It comes with great developer tools.  FireFox has an add-on called Web Developer that I truly love for debugging websites, especially CSS.  But the built-in developer tools that come with Chrome blow it out of the water!  You can change CSS properties on any element and watch how the rendering changes, without re-uploading the CSS file.  And you don’t have to download an add-on to do it.  While I was writing this post, I used the real-time CSS modification abilities of Chrome’s developer tools to fix a problem with my WordPress theme that was chopping off the title of my posts if they got too long.
• Did I mention it’s fast?
• It’s simple.  It shows me what I need, and hides what I don’t.  It doesn’t bury clearing the cache in some tab in some dialog box, under the heading Temporary Internet Files (again, IE, I’m talking to you).
• It has all the keyboard shortcuts I loved in FireFox and had gotten used to as a Web Developer.  Things like CTRL+SHIFT+DELETE to clear cache and cookies (essential for web development), CTRL+T for a new tab, CTRL+SHIFT+T to re-open the most recently closed tab (handy when you just closed something and realized you weren’t done with it yet).
• Did I mention it’s fast?

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now.  The list is in no particular order, and is not terribly thorough, but there you have it – my unofficial list of why Google Chrome beats the pants off of any other browser out there.  I still keep the other browsers installed on my machine to make sure the CSS I’m crafting works across browsers and doesn’t break my nice site layouts, but as far as day-to-day heavy lifting goes, Chrome is my new best friend.

Attention, Kodak EasyShare Wireless Digital Picture Frame users! Kodak has made it extremely easy to share what’s on your picture frame with everyone on the internet! Each picture frame has a unique RSS feed that includes its MAC address, and the frames have wi-fi capability built-in, so anyone on the Internet that has your feed URL can see ALL the pictures on your picture frame. There is even a chance that someone could modify the RSS URL of your picture frame and load pictures of their choosing on it – even before it gets out of the box. Read the original post here. Kodak, you need to think the security implications of a wifi-enabled digital picture frame before releasing it to the public!

Cool, huh? Click on this link to spell your message with random pictures from flickr!

I was noodling around on the ‘Net and found a ransom note generator. Enter your text, and it creates a ransom note! How cool! You can go to the link to the original site, or enter the text to create a ransom note from here:

This XKCD comic made me laugh out loud, in the middle of the workday, in the middle of the office. I relate to this so much it’s scary:

Here’s a link to the comic on the original page.

This is my first blog post from my iPod touch. I find that typing on the small keyboard takes longer than a normal keyboard, and the lack of tactile response makes it easier to have all sorts of weird typos. The auto-complete function works fairly well for common words and common typos, but you still have to verify that the iPod software didn’t screw you over while trying to be helpful and user-friendly. Still, the thought of posting to my blog from a handheld device is decidedly cool, and makes my inner techno-geek drool. I got bored in church today and wrote a letter to my Latvian buddy Artjom – in Cyrillic characters, from the iPod. That, I have got to admit, is cool. It even had limited auto-correct in russian! In the iPod/iPhone 3.0 software I would like to see a much better Russian dictionary for auto-complete.

While on the topic of the iPod, I wonder why the included safari browser doesn’t allow you to download files from the web. I mean, I have an iPod that can surf the web, and I can’t download music to it from a server I own, nor can I download pictures to it unless I email them to myself. That is quite annoying!! I haven’t checked to see if I can email myself mp3s and download them to the iPod – I’ll have to try that and get back to you.

All in all, though, the iPod touch is an incredible piece of hardware and software. I mean, it beats the computer I first learned to program on at the tender age of 11 in every aspect, from memory to processor to storage. Plus it connects to wi-fi, plays mp3s and video, has a touchscreen, and a better display than what I used to use in my games back then (I started programming games I’m mode X – 320 by 240 graphics, 256 colors). And did I mention it fits in the palm of my hand? We do indeed live in a marvelous world.

I have a profile now at technorati, here’s the link to visit it: Technorati Profile