more passwords

If it seems like I haven’t posted anything here in a very long time, then that’d be a fair assessment.  There’s no real excuse, just a bunch of little things have gotten in the way.  So, instead of a single theme for this post, there’s going to be a bunch of them.  The biggest news at the moment, apart from the financial crisis in the US is of course the death of Rick Wright.  If you don’t know who that is, then shame on you.  Rick Wright was the keyboardist for Pink Floyd, and responsible in a very large part for their unique sound.  He died on Tuesday after a brief fight with cancer.  There have been many things said about his untimely death around the world and the web, and I don’t feel eloquent enough to add anything new.  Suffice to say that his musical brilliance will be missed dearly.

I had to re-install Windows on my laptop last week.  Vista was getting a little slow as a result of all the crap I had installed on it. So I backed up the last of the bits and formatted it a couple of days ago.  Everything is all back up now, though I still need to install some minor apps.  I posted a few weeks ago about my search for a new password(s) and I think I have a viable solution.  There’s an open source app called KeyPass Password Safe that manages passwords, and also has a fairly comprehensive password generator built into it.  It allows me to generate very random passwords with as many characters as I like, in addition to specifying the characters that can be used.  So, I could generate one with upper and lower case letters, and then another which is the same but with added symbols or extended ANSI characters. They’d look like dkBaQ3iDwAlAKnmqV5Df, or 0h-y_PiWVaeKn3H3LTkO or even 5^Zl-uexa*\]YaD:jKFJ)"U%F.Y(7+bE$nxs<zN".  This makes it very useful for web stuff, as there are so many different combinations of what can and can’t be used on different sites.  Portability is something I’m still working though.  For now, I have the app installed on two PCs and simply synchronise the databases if I make a change.  However, there’s an option to synchronise over the web which might be a good idea.  The program will also run from a USB key, so it is portable.  Nicely enough, there source is completely open, so the trust issues inherent to software like this don’t exist should you decide to crack open the code.   Although it is a Windows program, there’s a Mac port, and if you have Mono installed it seems to mostly work on Linux.

There are a bunch of new builds of the Windows Live apps were released today into open beta testing.  I haven’t done much with them so far, but it should be noted that the latest build of Windows Live Writer doesn’t work with BlogEngine.Net.  I’ve mailed someone about it and been told that there’s a hot fix in the pipeline for BL.E users.  Very unfortunately the crash occurs when trying to detect the style of the blog, so you never actually get a chance to get in and create a post with it.  I’ll update more when my contact in Microsoft gets back to me. I had some nice screenshots to go along with this post, but of course I can’t actually use Windows Live Writer to compose in so they had to be removed.  The alternative would be to hand-resize the images and then manually upload them.  Damn this program makes blogging too damn easy.

My sister arrives here in a couple of days.  We had a friend from London over to stay last weekend too, so everything is a little chaotic at the moment.   Emma is going to be here for the beginning of the Oktoberfest, though I'm still not sure if we can get in anywhere.  We may have to take her there during the day and sit outside the tents if things keep on going as they are right now.  It seems that you have to book tickets for Oktoberfest well over a year in advence. To add a whole bunch of interestingness to the mix I have an interview tomorrow (now today) for a job that appears to be perfect.  Its a combination of web development, product management and internal marketing all rolled into one package called “Senior Web Architect”, and the more I think about it, the more I want it.  It has all of the functions I’m looking for in an “ideal” job – though of course I have no idea how the paper description would actually relate to the real job.  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow eh?