Helpful Coder

Passwords are something we all have to live with. There are other authentication methods slowly coming into use (i.e. two-factor) but it's hard to see passwords going away anytime soon. I assume everyone knows the basics - use "good" passwords, don't share them between sites, don't write them on a sticky note on your desk, don't save them in a file named "passwords.txt" on your computer, etc etc. That's all well and good, but there's so much more you can do! Good Passwords A "good" password is hard to guess, is what we're told. I think most people are unclear about what exactly "guess" means. These days, it means that it needs to be resistant to password cracking attacks that are getting ever more fast and sophisticated. Just making sure that you have numbers, characters, upper/lower case, etc isn't enough. The gold standard most important thing about a password is that it is long . The longer the better....

(yes, decided to try to post some more, got really busy for a while and this project - among many others - got sidelined...) A couple days ago Dropbox saved me from a significant amount of repair work. Dropbox is a free online backup/file sync tool available for windows, mac and Linux. Basically you set up a folder different computers. Anything in that folder is a synced to all the other computers. This is handy for easily keeping things available that you need on different machines. It's also handy for collaborating with other people, in that you can give people access to specific subdirectories of your dropbox folder. I did this for a project I was working with a designer on. He spent hours working on a photoshop file, then told me that it was ready for me to use... I opened the file, and only about 10% of the required stuff seemed to be there! Uhoh. I called him, and he swore up and down that he'd done the work, etc. Well, Dropbox also has another handy feature - previous v...

This is probably a problem that others have encountered, so I thought I'd address my solution here... If you work on a lot of different websites, you tend to have a lot of username/password/etc info that you need to keep track of somehow. You can try to remember them all, or use the same info for each - the potential problems with these two approaches are obvious. What is needed is some way to store this info securely and ideally across different computers, and with an eye towards keeping it backed up - obviously losing all the passwords to your clients' websites would not be a good thing! The only worse thing would be having that information fall into the wrong hands. My current solution makes use of two free pieces of software. The first is Dropbox - a free cloud-based backup/sync program. Essentially, it sets up a folder on your computer, and anything in that folder is backed up to their server and sync'd with other machines with dropbox that are connected to your ac...