seePyou

Password anxieties

In today’s Internet, the community tools are just too many. Forums for all your games, account login pages for your various memberships, mailbox and ISP passwords, FTP login info… so many things to keep secure.

The best thing for everyone to do really is to use the maximum allowed number of characters in the password box AND to use different password for every different login dialog. Yeah, right! Who can remember all that?

Well, your computer can! It’s been some time since I had looked for a good password manager, last time I did I was disappointed. But today I found an OPEN-SOURCE password manager (I’ll explain later why that is important) that works almost transparently. Don’t even fear the almost part, because that is only when you setup a new account/password, after that it is completely transparent.

It is named KeyPass and it uses the latest and highest complexity encryption methods to keep your passwords safe. One of my favorite features is the fact that it does not need an installation, so that allowed me to have it running of my USB flash drive and so I can just carry this with me wherever I go and my passwords will always follow me.

Furthermore, the program can generate totally random passwords for you which you can then use for your accounts. It has a very fancy way of doing that by combining user selected charsets (that means, do you want only numbers, numbers and letters, numbers letters and symbols, etc.) and random mouse movement (translating the way YOU move the mouse into some kind of code that mixes the password characters) to generate an encrypted password of high complexity.

After you make your account and you want to login, all you have to do is click on the Username textbox and click the special key combo (normally Control+Alt+A) and it will fill out the username and password and log you in! Can’t get any simpler than that!

And in case someone steals my USB flash drive it is calculated that the time it would take for all the PCs in the world to crack the database is much longer than the time it would take our Sun to die…

P.S. The fact that KeyPass is OPEN SOURCE means that everyone can see exactly what it does. This DOES NOT mean that it becomes easier to crack your database, but it does mean that everyone can see that it is secure, does not contain any spyware/malware and does not contain any backdoors. It also means that if an error exists, it becomes much faster and easier to detect and fix. Finally, if that doesn’t make much sense, it means that it is free!

5 comments December 26th, 2006

YouTube embedded player

I found the answer I was looking for (was there ever any doubt?... OK, I can see there was...)

Here is the code that would NOT work:

and here is the code that DOES work:

So the answer is simple, just remove that transparency parameters and it should work! I hope more people find this usefull...

P.S. I'd like to thank Amit of Canned !! - my Atropine for creating iG:Syntax Hiliter that shows the code in plain text and in color formating. Great job!

Add comment December 21st, 2006

To teach or not to teach

Teaching is said to be its own reward, and I believe that. I like it when I show someone something new, I enjoy seeing them smile at their new discovery and I believe that the world is based on a good education. So when I got a chance to be a teaching assistant in my university, I jumped at the chance. Every Monday, from 14:00 to 18:00 I try to the best of my ability to help first year students discover the world of computer programming with Java.

Does everyone like programming? Of course not. Should I expect them to be eager to learn and understand why things happen? Again, no. But for better or for worse, it is my job to help them pass the course at least with a C. And to that end I try to make them understand some basic notions because they will need those. So how to deal with people that just want the answer?

One student asked me how he should proceed with an exercise, I told him a basic plan, create the main class and then use a JOptionPanel to get the input from the user. Now this is a student that supposedly has used this JOptionPanel many times before in previous exercises. So when he asked me "What is a JOptionPanel?" I was stomped... After some time I realised that he never coded anything, he only got the code from friends, the net, a book or the lecture notes. He even asked me what that bit of code was for, even though he proclaimed that it was he that did it. He didn’t ever try to understand the code, he just produced a program that worked and was satisfied with himself.

When I asked him how he hoped to pass the exam that was to come next week, he remained silent. I still don’t know what the best course of action would have been, but I just told him to go back to the first exercise and try to do them all again by himself until he can do them without looking at previous examples, until he understands the code.

University is not about simply producing work. It is about learning. I like the fact that the British system will not pressure you to produce large amounts of work, that it lets you learn as much (or as little) as you want. In the end, the exams are designed to award those that really learned.

But the "teacher" in me wants everyone to learn, so cases like the one I just spoke of sadden me. He didn’t learn anything, he was just happy to make the programs work and now he faces a very real possibility of failing in the upcoming exams. And I do feel like I failed for not having noticed him before.

Add comment November 28th, 2005