Strong passwords are paramount if you have to protect your online resources from being accessed by bad guys. However, you may not be sure if the password you use is strong enough. To check the strength of your password, please use the Microsoft Password Strength Checker.  Enter your password, and the site offers immediate feedback on the strength of the password. I would recommend if your password is weak, then try until you get something you can remember and as well strong.

Actually, it is not that difficult to choose something you can remember and at the same time it is strong. In general a strong password should be at least 8 characters wide and should be a combination of  small letters, capital letters, numbers and one of  printable special characters like ~!@#$%^&*()_+ …

One way to generate a strong password and yet easy to remember is to follow the below methodology.

Choose a name that you can remember. Lets us choose justin

Let us create a 9 character password using “justin” as the core

In unix world, ^ stands for beginning of a word/line, $ stands for the end of word/line

So first morphing of justin is ^justin$

Now we need to add at least  a capital letter. Let us choose “s” in “justin” to be capital letter.

So the second morphing is ^juStin$

Now we need to add at least a number. lets count the position of letter “s” in the word “justin”. it is in the 3 rd position. Please not in previous line we capitalized character “s”.  This is in a way helps your brain to remember that 3 rd character in the word “justin” needs to be captilized.

so the third morphing is ^ju3Stin$

This is good enough. Microsoft Password strength checker shows this as STRONG password. To make it even stronger, you need to increase the length to 14 characters and above.

If you are too lazy to generate your own strong password

Then you can use pwgen.net to create a strong password. But, it is not easy to rembember the password generated by this site.

If you really want a super strong password, then you cant beat GRC’s password generator.  This site is recommended if you are looking for a Wifi WPA pre-shared key.

Also, you can use one of the free tools available in the Net. Please be aware of any downloadable tools as it may be infested with spyware, adware or malwares.

If your domains are hosted at Nearlyfreespeech.net and if the  webserver for one of your sub-domains  is hosted on your home machine, then you need to update your sub-domain’s DNS info with the current IP address info. This is normally called as Dynamic DNS update. NFS.N provides a set of API’s to access  their DNS services to update the DNS information. I have created a simple perl script that does the Dynamic DNS update to NFS.N DNS servers.

How to use this script

1) Pre-requisites

Perl ( Perl 5 and above should work. Mine is Perl 5.8 )

Perl Modules:

WebService::NFSN;  LWP::Simple;  XML::Simple;  Data::Dumper;  Text::Trim;

You can install all the above mentioned modules via CPAN.

NFS.N Credentials

username ( This is the name you use to log into NFS.N website )

API auth Key. ( If you don’t have it , raise a secure support request at NFS.N support website. They will mail you the key )

2) Download the script into your home directory. The  script is available here

3) on the command prompt type, updateIP.pl username your-API-Auth-Key your-domain-name ttl_value name sub-domain-name type    A

( All the bold words as it is )

for example, your user name is jonny, your API auth key is XYSDGFGJHK , your domain name is jonny.net, ttl_value is 600 and sub-domain-name is home_server, then the command will be

updateIP.pl jonny  XYSDGFGJHK   jonny.net  600   name   home_server   type    A

4) You need to run this periodically. You can run a corn job that executes the above periodically. Recommended interval is 10 mins.

Acknowledgement

This script is based on a TTL_Value update script from C.J.Madsen. Infact, hs is the one who wrote Webservice::NFSN.

Additional Note:

NFS.N services requires that the time difference between your home server and its servers are not more than 5 secs. If it is , then the authentication step will result in error and hence you will not be able to update. The most reliable way to keep the time of your home server in sync with NFS.N server is to update your home server’s time using Network Time Protocol.  pool.ntp.org is a global , distributed NTP time servers that i use for keeping my server’s time in synch with NFS.N. And I do this once a day.

Here is the  command. You need to run this as root.

ntpdate  pool.ntp.org

How often you wondered that a definition for a word from different dictionaries would have been better. Stop wondering. OneLook is for you. It is more than  ”words” search engine. It indexes words from various dictionaries and provides a comprehensive information about the word. For instance, it gives a quick definition, pronunciation audio clip and usage of the word in phrases. Please see the screenshot for the word “pleasant”

You can also use this tool to find a pattern consisting of letters and wild-cards * and ?, to find the words matching that pattern. This is really cool. For example, say, you want to find all the 4 letter words that start with ’sh’ and ends with ‘t’  , then you would enter “sh?t”. This would produce the following result

1. sh!t
2. shat
3. shbt
4. shdt
5. shet
6. shft
7. shht
8. shit
9. shlt
10. shmt
11. shnt
12. shot
13. shut
14. shwt
15. shyt

WinMerge  is one of the best Sourcecode compare  and Merge tool i have used. Over the years, i have used several tools and the one i really like is from clearcase. But as you know, that tool is very expensive and it can be used only with Clearcase SCM.  But of the free tools available, i would say WinMerge is the best i have used so far. I would say it is better then some Diff&Merge tools that comes along with commercial SCM packages like Visual SourceSafe, Perforce etc.

WinMerge Folder Diff tool is very useful and can produce reports in CSV,tab de-limted , HTML and XML format. This serves as the merge documentation for later reference. Its File Diff and Merge tool is also very user friendly and provides several Merge operations.

I would highly recommend WinMerge to anyone who has to do a lot of merging which is typical of large scale Software development.

One of the best sites i have ever found on Software patterns, anti patterns and refactoring.
Sourcemaking Patterns Antipatterns and Refactoring

Well thought out and with lot of common sense.
Especially, Death-by-planning AntiPattern is very good read.

If you are into Software project management please read more of Antipatterns.This give good insights on common project management pitfalls.

if you are a programmer,designer then Patterns and Refactoring is for you. It somewhat resembles Design patterns by Eric Gamma et al.