In this day and age we often get asked for passwords to secure our content or personal information. Many people find if difficult to come up with memorable passwords and popular choices are things like the day of the week when they set it or literally the word “password”! So, I though I would share my way of coming up with a memorable password that appears to be a random string of characters

For this method you need to come up with a phrase of several words. This may be relevant to a particular the site or company or personal to you in some way, it could be some lyrics to a song or poem or a private thought etc. For an example I will use the following well known line from a nursery rhyme:

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water”

We can easily turn this into a memorable password by using the first letters, so in the above case, we get:

jajwuthtfapow

Already, we have a 13 character password. However, we can make this stronger still, by using other common techniques, for example swapping words that sound like numbers for their corresponding number. i.e. to = 2 or for = 4. So with the above example, we get:

jajwuth2fapow

We can also add in symbols (where supported). For example we could swap and for + or &. So again with the example above we end up with:

j+jwuth2fapow

Remembering the phrase and the simple substitution rules for numbers and symbols provides us with a good strengthen password. Obviously we still should use different passwords for different sites and it is also wise to have a phrase that isn’t obviously related to a particular site.

As a .Net developer, I am probably the last sort of person that would leave the world of Microsoft Windows based PCs in favor of an Apple Mac. But I have successfully made the transition and wanted to share my experiences with any other .Net / would be Apple fans.

I had been deliberating for a good year whether to buy a mac or not. I originally had no intention of leaving my PC altogether and though that it would be nice to have a Mac (maybe a Mac Mini) for the more creative / design aspects of my work. But now, having used a Mac for the design side it is true that the Mac fits the design role better than a PC, for a start the operating system is beautifully designed and therefore inspires the same in your own work. On top of that it displays colour more accurately and printed material looks the same colour as it does on screen. Other features just make working faster such as when clicking the middle mighty mouse button accesses Exposé, which allows very rapid switching between programs. Dragging files around is a joy, you automatically drill down into directories as you hover over icons and the list goes on. To the point, in fact, that I can’t go back, I have sold my PC and am based 100% on Macs. So where does that leave me as a .Net developer.

Well thanks to the Intel processors in Macs, running windows when needed is a breeze, in fact I would swear in runs Windows faster than on my PC, even in Parallels (virtualisation software like Virtual PC or VMWare but that can display running applications on the Mac OS desktop rather than within a host window). Once Parallels is running, when I open Visual Studio 2005 Professional it seems to open instantly and is very workable, even on my MacBook. So now I can design my web sites’ look and feel in Mac OS X and then when ready to code in asp.net, boot up Parallels and work in Windows giving me the best of both worlds.

The transition wasn’t as easy as Apple like to make out. For a start you have to look at computing in a new way. When George Cook, a friend of mine who also recently made the jump, advised me to switch to Mac, he described the problems I encountered “like the matrix, your eyes are open but you are not seeing”. Which is very true when you switch to Mac OS X you have to stop treating it like a PC. For example, with Mac OS X when you click the red X in a window’s title bar, you don’t actually close the application, just the window, which can be very confusing for a windows user and your first reaction may be to try and kill it (either by pressing Apple-Q or by holding the mouse button over it’s icon in the launcher and selecting quit), but you don’t need to. This is Mac OS X and it is designed to have these applications left running. So for example when you next open iTunes, Firefox etc they open instantly, and amazingly it does not seem to impact performance (Although iPhoto seems to struggle). Getting emails over from Outlook on my PC was a challenge but I succeeded in the end (using IMAP) but in the end it has all been worth it and I have not looked back.

So I can recommend to anyone who would like to go Mac but feel that cannot as they are .Net developers, to go for it. I have had no regrets and for any Windows only software you can just boot into Parallels. I recommend you still keep your Windows copy of Microsoft Office on your Parallels based Windows, as Mac Office 2004 is not designed for Intel Macs so crawls along. Also there does not seem to be an official port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X but Neo Office is not bad if you really don’t want to run office in a virtual machine.