Rob Chartier ~ Contemplation...

Relieve yourself from Password Hell!

Rob Chartier — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:16:14 GMT

(this comes across as a product plug, but its well worth it - I try to give credit where its due)

As time goes on many of us find ourselves in knee deep in Password Hell. You know how it feels, you have about a gazillion web sites which you have signed up for at some point in time and you have no idea what credentials you used for each. Many people that I talk to start to consolidate their passwords to a single value, or a set of values and use them across all their logins. Ask any security guy about the implications for that and he is likely to slap you upside the head. Not to mention this doesn't play well with those sites which require fairly complex passwords and have policies set which you need to keep them changing after X number of days or whatever. Another way which I found myself doing quite allot was trying the password reminder function prior to registration. What a mess.

Recommended Tool

So whats my solution you ask? Well its quite simple: I use a password manager application. After quite a deep look in the market for the "best" manager out there I went with RoboForm.

Diligence & Pre-sales support

Whenever I do any sort of diligence on a product which I plan on spending my hard earned money on I usually do a number of basic checks. On of which is randomly contacting their support department and asking a somewhat silly support question. This is important for me because I like to see how they handle pre-sales support. If they are not willing to answer my question, or simply never get back to me I just dump them and move on. Support, for me, is quite an important part of the software lifecycle. No support, no puchase. Yes I have been told many times that I'm quite a binary person; there is usually no gray area for me.

That initial support request and every single support request since I actually made my purchase from RoboForm has been exceptional. Recently my USB flash drive was stolen and I was forced to upgrade (twist my rubber arm) to a new drive. Well with RoboForm you are allowed a certain number of activations, which I passed my limit. I hit their support site and within 4 minutes (yes 4 MINUTES), they responded to my inquiry and upped my activation count. I couldn't ask for anything better; exceptional service. I guess this is what prompted me to blog about it this morning.

More on RoboForm

I have become so reliant to RoboForm I simply cant see my online life without it. I use it to store my complete personal and professional profile and with one click of a button it simply fills out all the registration forms for me. I also force myself to ensure that my login information is stored in RoboForm once I complete the registration process. Then, in the future, when I stumble back onto the site RoboForm lets my login with a single click. I never have to remember if I have registered previously, and what my credentials were.

What else is there?

1. Well it has a flexible password generator. If you have have no idea what exactly constitutes a "complex" or "safe" password then you can use its tool.

2. It stores all data in DES, AES, 3DES, Blowfish, RC6 protected format, all with a single "master" password to unlock.

3. It integrates with Internet Explorer and Firefox

4. The Portable version runs on my pen drive (carry your passwords around with you)

5. You need to only remember your Master Password to gain access to all

6. The interface is somewhat customizable. Text labels, Icons only, Icons and text

7. AutoFill options (with and without asking)

8. Fill and Submit options

9. AutoSave for new passwords at new sites. It just knows what you need saved!

10. Import/Export IE, Firefox, Outlook, Gator, - saved passwords, favorites, contacts, etc..

11. Search tool bar (much like MSN's and Googles) for searching the web only

12. Customizable hotkeys.

13. Automatic version checking, notification, and downloading...

14. Customizable startup process (to show/hide the splash screen)

More Info

Reviews | Complete Feature set | Pass2Go (their portable version which I use) |

Lastly, you might want to consider GoodSync as well. I have purchased this as well, great product for synchronizing your pen to your primary machine for a backup. USB Thumb drives are somewhat unreliable and this tool has managed to save my but many times!

Vancouver Technology Festival - 1 week left...

Rob Chartier — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 22:30:02 GMT

We are in the final week before the Vancouver TechFest kicks off. If you live in Vancouver or are traveling near here be sure to drop us a visit and watch some of our top notch presenters.

Code Metrics - Complexity & The .NET Framework...

Rob Chartier — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:22:01 GMT

If you have never heard of "Cyclomatic Complexity" a good place to start is here. I decided to grab the Reflector Addin by Peli which will examine an assembly's methods and produce a list of code metrics for each given method, one of which is the Cyclomatic Complexity and run it on "mscorlib.dll" and some of the results are actually quite alarming.

Just in this one DLL there are 24 methods that score 50 or higher, the highest being DateTimeParse.ParseByFormat() which scores at 98. Now if you look at Table 4 in the article I linked above you will notice that they state that "greater than 50 - untetsable program (very hight risk)"

I would love to see the code coverage report on these methods. How much of these top methods are actually being testing? How thorough is their process for getting these "untestable" methods tested. I would also like to see the number of bug reports for each method > 50 in the framework and compare those to those < 50...

I decided to dig a bit deeper than just mscorlib.dll. Here are some of the things I found...

System.dll has 20 methods > 50 with the worst at 178

HttpRequestCacheValidator.FetchCacheControl(String, Boolean) : Void

System.Data.dll has 14 methods > 50 with the worst at 118

BinaryNode.EvalBinaryOp(Int32, ExpressionNode, ExpressionNode, DataRow, DataRowVersion, Int32[]) : Object

System.Drawing.dll has NO methods > 50, with the worst at 29

Icon.Initialize(Int32, Int32) : Void

System.Web.dll has 19 methods > 50, with the worst at 184

BrowserCapabilitiesFactory.UpProcess(NameValueCollection, HttpBrowserCapabilities) : Boolean

System.Windows.Forms.dll has 35 methods > 50, with the worst at 169

DataGridView.GetClipboardContent() : DataObject

System.Configuration.dll has 3 methods > 50, with the worst at 89

ConfigurationElement.DeserializeElement(XmlReader, Boolean) : Void

System.Security.dll has NO methods > 50, with the worst at 35

Reference.CalculateHashValue(XmlDocument, CanonicalXmlNodeList) : Byte[]

and the all time worst method for Cyclomatic Complexity is...

System.Xml.dll has 15 methods > 50, with the worst at 224

XmlSchemaInference.InferSimpleType(String, Boolean&) : Int32

Also, it has 1557 instructions, 31 locals..

How can anyone test this accurately?

VS.NET & Vista

Rob Chartier — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 22:18:26 GMT

I have had about 5 people ask me about Visual Studio .NET 2003/2005 and Windows Vista, so I thought I would just post it up.

The core links to refer to are:

Visual Studio on Windows Vista

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta and Visual Studio support for Vista

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta

Some key points to take note:

1. Some changes in Vista will impact Visual Studio and thus we're unable to support Visual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 on Windows Vista. Its about time to upgrade anyways. Check out the Web Application Projects if you hate the way 2005 does its default project structure.

2. Your existing .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 based applications will continue to work on Windows Vista, and will be able to take advantage of many of the new features available to Windows Vista applications.

3. For developers using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, Microsoft is in current development on an update to Service Pack 1 called the ‘Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Vista Refresh Beta’. This update builds on the improvements made in SP1 and delivers a first class experience for developers wanting to take advantages of the new features in Windows Vista. The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is expected to ship after the consumer availability of Windows Vista in Q1 of 2007 and is now available in beta. [DOWNLOAD: Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta]

Until Microsoft releases all of its source code they have to go sit in the WikiCorner

Rob Chartier — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:51:54 GMT

I really do not understand the point of view of Wikipedia, nor the very biased author of this silly little article: "Microsoft in hot water over Wikipedia edits"

Let me summarize what I conclude after reading it:

1. Microsoft, alone, is not allowed to have anyone review or manage content on WikiPedia. Even if this person is an independant expert on the subject. Paid, or unpaid.

2. IBM is allowed to have content updated as they please, and pay people to do it, seemingly because they support Open Source software in a larger fashion than MSFT. So I guess that just makes them better?

3. Microsoft's only course of action in order to have any sort of content on Wikipedia updated is to create a slew of whitepapers which address each issue and to link into the Wikipedia and hope that the people at Wikipedia or even IBM review the whitepapers, and update the content for them. They are not allowed to tell Wikipedia about it, because they will just be ignored.

As long as Rick Jelliffe didnt post an ad up for Vista (Buy it now!) then isnt the whole purpose of Wikipedia to be a collaborative project? Why is MSFT being singled out here?

The headline should read: "Wikepedia sells out to IBM and refuses to let Microsoft contribute" or "Until Microsoft releases all of its source code they have to go sit in the WikiCorner"

The LCD Phidget.

Rob Chartier — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:55:21 GMT

A few months ago I purchased some of the super cool products listed on the Phidets.com site, specifically I picked up the RFID kit and the blue LCD display. These things are extremely simple to work with, here is some sample code.

All it does is creates a timer which automatically will update the two lines on the LCD screen with the current time, weather conditions and if Winamp is available it will attempt to grab the current song title.

Full download is available, for a limited time.

Single Code Base : Deploy on the Web and in Windows...

Rob Chartier — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:41:48 GMT

As you can tell I really love this VisualWebGui stuff from Guy Peled. Take a look at the latest ability, its called "Dual Mode". Essentially you build your web site using their technology and you deploy to the Web normally, or deploy as a complete Windows Forms application! Of course you will have to make special consideration for your business objects and more importantly your data source but its just damn cool.

I know I have been waiting for something like this for many, many years now.

Ceedo, its not worth it just yet.

Rob Chartier — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:04:12 GMT

Other than their virtualization technology I dont really see much value to their offering. They have a fancy menu which hides in the system tray if you tell it too, but you can get that for free.

Ceedo, is it worth the $30?

Rob Chartier — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:00:45 GMT

At first glance Ceedo just seems like another USB Launcher...

Firefox, about:config

Rob Chartier — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:46:16 GMT

Have you seen about:config in Firefox?