Perhaps, the easiest way to ‘remember’ all your passwords is to use password manager software like RoboForm. Alternatively, the built-in password manager in most browsers should suffice most for most people.

However if you are after something more natural that involves the use of your memory, here are some tips to help you out.

Using your memory has its advantage in that you can still login to any website even from a computer that doesn’t have access to your password manager data.

The following are five quick tips to help you create a secure and easy to remember password. Most of the tricks involved coming up with a general rule and use it to generate a password that appears to be random.

Consonants & Vowels

Choose a base password and combine it with the first two consonants and the first two vowels of the domain name. If your base password it QWER, for mail.yahoo.com the first two consonants are ML and first two vowels are AI, so your password would be QWERMLAI

Words Shifting

This technique involves shifting a word up, down, left or right one row on the keyboard. Choose a base password then combine it with the shifted words of the service name.

In case of Blogger.com and with a base password say ASDF, just use the keys to the left of the keys in BLOGGER to produce VKIFFWE. So your password would be ASDFVKIFFWE

Use Your Date of Birth

Select a base password; say your nick name that not many people know of. Then combine it with the first three letters of the domain name and transform any other letter into your date of birth.

If your secret nick name is TUDOI, your password for Amazon.com in its initial form would be TUDOIAMA. Then transform every other letter into your date of birth. If you are born on 1 January 1980 (1180), your final password would be T1D1I8M0.

To make you password more secure, instead of using an easily identifiable numbers such as your date of birth, you could use the time of your birth.

Create Acronyms from Your Favourite Song

This method involves creating acronyms from words in a song or any other phrase that has meaning to you and combines it with the first and last letter of the domain name and the number of character in the domain name.

Say your favourite song is Home by Chris Daughtry, you can use the “Well I’m going home” WIGH, You password for Sabahan.com would be WIGHSN7

Use a Phrase That Has Numbers In The Middle

Come up with your own acronym from a phrase that has numbers in the middle. Then combine it with the first and last letter of the domain name.

For example the phrase “I have three sons and two daughters” would become IH3SA2D. In case of PayPal.com, your password would be PIH3SA2DL.

You should not use the example passwords above as your own as they have been published publicly.

Keep in mind that each service has its own password requirements in terms of characters allowed and length. You could combine these rules or create your own rules that suit your needs.

To create better and secure password, you should

• Include both uppercase and lowercase letters
• Include alphabetic characters (A-Z), numbers(0-9) and symbols (@#$%^&())
• Do not use a dictionary word or common name
• Create a password with at least 6-8 characters
• Change your password frequently

Previously, the official Alexa toolbar only exists for Internet Explorer.

Once installed, the toolbar sits quietly in your browser status bar at the bottom right showing a site traffic trend, reach meter and traffic rank. In addition, a new related links menu is added to your browser menu bar.

I feel the traffic trend information is too small to be useful. Unless I can see how a site traffic trend compares to others, I might as well visit Alexa to view and compare traffic trends.

While the official Alexa toolbar has just been released, the unofficial one has been around for quite sometime. A Firefox extension for Alexa called SearchStatus offers almost everything the official toolbar has and more.

The SearchStatus does affect Alexa ranking as stated in the download page. Its users form part of the panel of toolbar users that contribute towards Alexa statistics.

For every web page you visit while using SearchStatus (excluding secure domains and those you have configured as private), certain information, including your ip address, the url of the web page you visit, and general information about your browser and computer’s operating system will be transmitted from your computer to Alexa. Some of the url’s you visit, which are transmitted to Alexa, will contain information that is personally identifiable.

If you are concern about your privacy, Alexa claims that it doesn’t attempt to analyse web usage data to determine the identity of any user. Basically you just have to trust them not to misuse your browsing habit information.

Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important?

To the general Internet surfers, Alexa traffic rank means almost nothing really. But if you are trying to sell advertising on your website, it’s important to have a good Alexa ranking. This is because Alexa is used by many advertising companies when evaluating how much your blog’s worth. Having a good Alexa ranking puts you in a better position to demand (or enjoy) higher payouts.

In addition you could use Alexa information to confirm if someone is telling the truth about his site traffic level. For example if a site claims it gets 50,000 unique visitors a day, and it’s ranked about one million on Alexa, this guys is probably lying.

You can further verify this with the site’s Google PageRank and inbound links. Surely a site that gets that many visitors per day would have a higher PR and tons of inbound links.

Alexa traffic rank has its drawback in that it only counts visits from users who surf with their toolbar installed. Since those who install Alexa are usually the tech savvy type, a site caters towards webmasters typically enjoys a better Alexa ranking than a gardening website for example even though they both have the same number of daily visitors.

Let say you are always curious to know any blog’s Technorati ranking and you visit Technorati.com all the time to do the search. Normally, you go to Technorati.com and click in the search box and enter domain name and click Search .

Smart keyword will make these steps redundant. To create a Smart Keyword for Technorati.com, visit their page and right click on the search field.

Choose Add a Keyword for this Search… The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Enter a name for the Bookmark, e.g. “Technorati”, and give it a keyword, e.g. “tc” and save the bookmark.

Anytime you want to search a blog Technorati ranking, just enter tc blogname.com into the Location bar and press Enter. You’ll be taken to Technorati search result right away!

Of course you can create Smart Keyword for any of your favourite sites that you search frequently, alexa.com, bittorrent site, Amazon.com, Sabahan.com and so on.

Those who are a fan of keyboard shortcuts will be happy to know that you can actually access your bookmarks faster using a nifty feature in Firefox which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut.

Even if you are not a fan of keyboard shortcuts, this feature will save you a lot of time daily. I’ve been using it for a couple a days, and I am completely hooked.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are an avid reader of Sabahan.com, ahem…, and it’s one of the first sites you visit when you launch your browser.

If you haven’t bookmarked it already, press CTRL+D or select Bookmark This Page … under the Bookmarks menu. Once that’s done, go to the Sabahan.com bookmark and right click on it and select Properties from the popup menu.

In the Keyword field of the Properties dialog, enter a keyword, let’s enter “sb” (without the quotation mark). Then press OK to close the dialog box.

Next time when you want to access Sabahan.com, just enter sb into your address bar and press Enter. Lo and behold you’ll whisk away to Sabahan.com in no time.

This feature becomes even more useful when combined with other Firefox keyboard shortcuts.

For example, if I want to access my Site Meter account while browsing a website. I’ll press CTRL+T to open a new tab, then type sm and press Enter. It usually takes me about two seconds to do that.

You can also use it to compare organic search results in different countries or if you want to see how your AdWords PPC campaigns appear in different regions.

Previously, I’ve been manually appending &gl=country to the query string in my search URL to view the search results in a particular country. For example, if I want to see who are paying for the keyword “free stuff” in the US, I constructed the following:

http://www.google.com/search?q=free+stuff&gl=US

In contrast, the local search returns only one or no AdWords competitor for that keyword.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free+stuff

This information helps you get a better feel how the competitions are in other countries and adjust your AdWords campaign accordingly.

However, sometimes using a mouse actually slows you down. The precious seconds it takes to move you hand away to move you mouse can add up over the course of a full day. You can save time and avoid reaching for the mouse if you are familiar with keyboard shortcuts.

The following keyboard shortcuts will make web browsing with Firefox even more fun and productive.

1. Access Your Favorite Websites Quickly

   If you have been typing the http://www prefix and .com domain extension into your browser address all this while when trying to access a website, you can avoid this extra step by going to your address bar, then type the middle portion of the desired address, and press CTRL+Enter

   As an example, if you type “sabahan” and press CTRL+Enter, you will land on http://www.sabahan.com

   

   

   In addition, you can press SHIFT+Enter to go to a .net site and CTRL+SHIFT+Enter to a .org site.

    

2. Jump to The Address Bar

   Press ALT+D to quickly jump to the address bar. Alternatively, you can use CTRL+L to do the same.

   This shortcut comes in handy when combined with the previous shortcuts.

    

3. Jump to Google bar To Search

   If you have a Google search bar installed in your browser, you can use CTRL+K to quickly jump to the text box and perform a search immediately.

   

   I find this one a handy time saver.

    

4. Go Back One Page in Your Browser History

   Instead of pointing your mouse to Firefox ‘back” button to go back to the previous page, just use your backspace key.

   

    

5. Open a Link in a New Window

   To launch a new window with a link, most users will click the link and select “Open Link in New Window”.

   

   A faster way of doing this is to hold SHIFT while you click on the link.

    

6. Open/Close a Tab

   Opening several tabs simultaneously for browsing enables power users to be more productive. Now instead of using the popup menu or lunging for your “open new tab” button as shown below, use CTRL+T to launch a new tab.

   

   Alternatively, double clicking empty space on the Tab Bar will open a new tab. The middle click/mouse wheel click on a tab will close that tab without the need to point your mouse on the “close tab” icon.

    

7. Open a Link in a New Tab

   You can use middle click / mouse wheel click to open a link in a new tab. While this is not a keyboard shortcut, it’s one of my favourite shortcuts.

   
   
   For those without middle mouse buttons or mouse wheels, you can press CTRL while clicking a link to open it in a new tab.

    

8. Open Your Home Page In a New Tab

   Use the middle click / mouse wheel click on the Home button to open your homepage in a new tab.

   

   Those without middle mouse buttons or mouse wheels can press CTRL while click on the Home button to do the same.

    

9. View Selection Source

   You can view the source code of a section of a page by holding down CTRL and left click on the part of a web page to highlight that section. Then right click on the selection and select “View Selection Source” to view the source code for that particular selection.

   

 

10. Reopen Previously Closed Tab

    Using the tab bar right click menu to undo a closed a tab is a tad slower when compare to using this shortcut.

    

    You can reopen recently closed tab by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+T.

With these shortcuts you can now enjoy faster and more productive browsing with Firefox!

Once installed, SearchStatus sits unobtrusively on your status bar. You can view any info about a website by left clicking on the extension to access its popup menu as shown below.

The performance information includes the site’s Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming link, Alexa related links, and backward links from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

In addition, you can view the site’s Google PageRank, Google related links, and Google cache.

That’s not all; you can even view the site’s Whois information, Meta Tags, Keyword Density, robots.txt and so on.

While any of this information can be accessed in many other ways, SearchStatus makes it easier for you by making everything accessible with a mouse click rendering many other webmaster tools redundant.

I’ve been using this SearchStatus extension for a while. At a glance, I am able to determine if a website is as popular as the owner claims it to be. So if you are like me who’s checking the status of any website quite frequently to see its link importance and traffic level, this is the tool for you.

Download SearchStatus here

By doing so, I’ll have an OS to fall back to in case my Windows Vista installation goes horribly wrong. But I didn’t have a choice, I would have to make Vista works and I am glad it did.

This method works if you have a PC running Windows XP and you want to install Windows Vista from its installation DVD to have both OS dual boot.

For those who don’t know, dual boot is the ability to boot your computer using one of two different operating systems.

First Thing First

Like everything that has to do with hard drive repartitioning, it’s a risky business. You could end up with a corrupted hard drive that will render your data unusable. So it goes without saying that first thing you should do is to backup, I repeat BACKUP your data.

This is paramount especially if you are, like me, who’s crazy enough to perform the partitioning on my production PC.

For that I am using a 300GB external hard drive attached to my PC via USB 2.0 to backup my data.

Use anything you like as long as you back up all your important data.

Partition Your Hard Drive

There’s no built-in tool in XP that could help you partition your hard drive without wiping out your data. If you happen to have Norton’s Partition Magic laying around, you could use that.

I found another way to do this for free using GParted Live CD. It’s a free partition manager available as a live CD that can be run directly from your CD Rom drive. It could create, resize, delete your hard drive partitions as well as its non free counterpart.

Here’s a good introduction to GParted Live CD from Linux.com

Now create a new primary partition with at least 20 GB in size to install Windows Vista on. Since I’ve a large empty space, I’ve created a 110 GB partition for this purpose.

Keep in mind that reducing your main XP partition size won’t create a new working partition automatically. You’ll have to set the unassigned space as a ‘New’ primary partition and format it as NTFS filesystem.

Play around with the interface first before committing with the changes.

Time to Install Vista

Do not run the Vista installation DVD while XP is running, you’ll end up installing it on top of your existing XP installation.

What you should do is insert the Vista DVD and restart your PC. The system will boot from the DVD and just point your newly created partition as the installation destination when prompted.

Your PC will restart at various stages during installation. It should take less than 30 minutes to complete.

Now It’s The Fun Part

Once the installation completed, the system will restart. You’ll be able to select whether to boot to XP or Vista from Windows Boot Manager.

Windows XP is described as ‘An Earlier Version of Windows’. Select ‘Microsoft Windows Vista’ and have fun.

I managed to grab an OEM copy for RM680 after shopping around at Karamunsing Complex in Kota Kinabalu.

Getting Ready For Vista

I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor, an application that helps Windows XP users identify which edition of Vista meets their needs and whether their PCs are ready for an upgrade and I passed with flying colours.

Vista Upgrade Advisor recommended Windows Vista Business edition but I thought I could benefit from the extra features offered by Vista Ultimate so I bought that edition instead.

If your PC is less than two years old, chances are good that you can run Windows Vista. I bought mine in October 2004, so it’s just over two years old but I still manage to run Vista without much hiccups.

Here’s my PC specs

Pentium 4 3.2 GHz
1 GB of RAM (upgraded to 3 GB)
250 GB Hard drive (added an external 300 GB recently)
128MB Radeon X800SE graphic card.
Dual 17 inch LCD screen

Now if you have a PC with less than 3.0 GHz processor, I would recommend purchasing a new system altogether. One that’s equipped with a dual core processor should fit the task nicely.  In the memory department, I would recommend having at least 2GB of RAM to ensure the smooth running of Vista. Your graphic card is also important if you want to experience the Windows Aero and all the eye candy Vista has to offer. In addition, you’ll need to have a DVD ROM drive in order to install Vista.

If you find your system struggling and isn’t responsive after installing Vista, check your Windows Experience Index to see what holding you back. More often than not, the problem may be attributed to your hardware inability to keep up with Vista’s resource demand.

Mine is my processor which is the main limiting factor. But with a score of 4.1, all Windows Vista features run quite well nonetheless. The highest base score you can get is 5.9. Base scores of 6.0 and higher are not defined yet.

Installation and Compatibility Issues

Installing Vista was a breeze and it actually much quicker that of XP. I was up and running in less than 30 minutes top. I did a clean install instead of upgrading my existing XP installation which I recommend everyone upgrading to Vista should do.

I heard of horror stories where people were swamp with software and hardware incompatibility problems after installing Vista on top of their existing XP installation – or even fresh installation of Vista for that matter.

Contrary to what some people may expect, nearly everything works like a charm on the first try for me. My hardware works as if they were made for Vista, however to be on the safer side and current, I downloaded the latest drivers from their manufacturer’s website later..

The only problem I encountered was when I tried plugging in a rather old digital camera and it wasn’t auto detected. Quicken 2005 was having problem running but this was fixed after I installed the latest upgrade. My favourite game, Starcraft (old game I know), was not displayed correctly when setting up a game, but the problem went away during a game play.

To be fair though, it’still too early to conclude whether all my software and hardware will work seamlessly because I haven’t installed and test everything yet. But the initial prognosis looks good and I expect fewer problems down the road.

Running Vista & My First Impression

OK my first impression after login into Vista – it’s a modern looking interface with shiny gadgets everywhere. Everything looks good in Vista, even Internet Explorer looks prettier.

I enjoy the changes that remove a lot of the little annoyances that have been plaguing previous version of Windows. The combination of thousands of little improvements, better usability, better navigation, better dialogs, better speed and so on make using Vista a much better experience.

You can switch between open applications using the new "Windows-Tab" key combination .

You can start searching just about everywhere in Vista. The Start menu equipped with a search box. As you type in the box, Vista starts showing the data that matches your search term: application names, files and even emails.

The new Start Menu with a search textbox at the bottom.

The Siderbar, running along the edge of your desktop give quick access to all sorts of mini-applications. These are what I need to give up Google Desktop Search.

Image of the new Windows Sidebar

Windows Explorer is fully revamped to make it easier to navigate your hard drive. The favourite links on the left pane is especially useful because it doesn’t change no matter where you are within Windows Explorer.

Microsoft has also introduced a nifty feature which is a clickable trail of directories a user has followed to get to the current location. So a user can get anywhere within a trail with a single click instead of several clicks to go up or down the directory tree.

Picture showing the Favorite Links on the left pane and clickable Breadcrump (trail of directories)

Performance & Stability

I was surprise things actually work faster in Windows Vista compare to in XP.

Most applications launch a few seconds faster. This is probably due to the SuperFetch feature which is introduced in Vista. It prioritises the programs you’re currently using and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use frequently, at what times of day that programs are used and intelligently preloading these into memory. Good thing that I upgraded my RAM to 3GB before installing vista.

I also noticed I can start launching programs right away while Vista is still loading all the start up programs such as Norton Internet Security and so on when starting Vista. In XP I usually have to wait a minute or longer to allow everything loaded up before I could even start using Outlook or Firefox.

At some points I noticed Internet Explorer retrieving pages from the Internet at a faster speed than when in XP but I doubt Vista actually improves my overall Internet speed. In addition, I noticed IE consumes low memory footprint.

Everything isn’t perfect though, random CPU outage occurs at random intervals which freezes Vista for a few seconds. I wonder if this incident will become more frequent as I install more applications in the coming days.

In term of stability, it looks like the I/O hangs is now a thing of the past. Terminating rough processes via Windows Task Manger really kills the processes right away. Unlike in XP where it sometimes needs a few minutes to kill a process, or does not terminate at all.

When one program crashes, it does not bring down the whole system, that’s really a reality in Vista.

As far as I can tell, this is the most stable version of the Windows operating systems.

Windows Vista Security

One of XP’s biggest security problems is that it promotes everybody who wants the ability to run a vast number of programs and conduct common activities as an Administrator. As a result anybody, including a malicious program that has the admin privileges is able to wreak havoc and exploit your system.

Vista ’s User Account Control solves this problem by creating a Standard account which is not as powerful as the Admin account but it still allows the widest possible range of activity, even an Administrator runs at Standard level. A warning is displayed when elevated privilege is required. This warning dialogs can be a nuisance but you can’t have both as far as convenience and security are concern. There has to be a compromise and obviously you haven’t used Linux before.

Microsoft has made great strides in improving its security features and this change should be welcomed.

Should you upgrade?

While there are goodies to be had in Vista, if you are happy with Windows XP and it gets the job done, there’s no need to upgrade.

If you are concern whether your PC can cope with Vista’s resource demand, don’t upgrade, just buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed instead.

As a software developer, I need to test my software compatibility with Vista so upgrading is a must. While most of the new features and eye candy are bonuses for me, I appreciate the improved security and specific features that can help me become more productive.

And if you are like me who feels some trepidation about installing a completely new OS on your main computer, fret not, you can always make Vista coexist with XP like what I am doing.

Vista is installed on a separate partition in my hard disk and I am slowly migrating my data from XP to Vista. If something goes wrong, I can always go back to XP.

I’ll write a tutorial in my next post on how to make Vista coexist with your current OS.

I decide to upgrade not because I can afford to or because I have a Vista Premium Ready PC but because I need to. As a software developer for the Windows platform, there’s no escaping for me to ensure that my software are compatible with the latest OS in the market.

I was asked several times by my customers if my software is compatible with Vista . While I expect them run without problem, the only way for me to know for sure is to test them on Vista myself

However, instead of replacing my Windows XP installation, I am considering to install Vista on a separate partition allowing both Vista and XP to coexist. This setup will allow me to select which OS to run while the PC is booting.

This will also give me ample time to play with Vista before migrating all the data from XP partition and finally make it as my default operating system. I believe there’s a tool in Vista that simplifies data migration between the two operating systems.

Besides the necessity to get Vista as I mentioned above, there are several other advantages that one could enjoy for upgrading. The obvious advantage most people have heard of are enhanced security, cool Aero interface, built-in instant search – like what you get from Google Desktop – and several others.

However, most have not heard of the internal advantages such as SuperFetch, protected processes, cache management, resistance to system hangs on I/O, and the multithreaded kernel.

Windows Vista Advantages

SuperFetch prioritizes the programs you’re currently using and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use frequently, at what times of day that programs are used and intelligently preloading these into memory.

So what so great about this you ask. If your computer is struggling to accommodate other tasks while your antivirus or backup utility or even Photoshop image processing is running, just plug in a USB 2.0 thumb drive to boost the memory and you can literally enjoy a performance boost instantly.

If you are using a laptop, SuperFetch will lengthen your battery life too because your hard disk spin less frequently which translates to less power consumption.

As for me, the reason I upgraded my desktop RAM to 3GB recently is to take advantage of this feature.

Those I/O hangs will be a thing of the past as Vista is engineered to avoid them and the interference from rouge processes. Yes no more system hanging and pressing the reboot button finally.

From the security department, one of XP’s biggest security problem is that it promotes everybody who wants the ability to run a vast number of programs and conduct common activities as an Administrator. As a result anybody, including a malicious program that has the admin privileges is able to wreak havoc and exploit your system.

Vista ‘s User Account Control solves this problem by creating a Standard account which is not as powerful as the Admin account but it still allows the widest possible range of activity. Now, even an Administrator run at Standard level. A warning is displayed when elevated privilege is required.

Another cool feature of Vista is the ability recovers previous versions of overwritten files with a click of a mouse.

The multithreaded kernel feature is made for multicore processors. Unfortunately, this is one area that my PC can’t take advantage of because it’s a single core machine. If you have multicore processors or dual core system, you’ll notice a significant improvement in performance when running applications that support multithreading.

There are many other advantages Vista’s has over XP. One can always say other OS such as Linux has been supporting multithreading and better user management so why bother with Vista? You don’t have to if are happy with what you got and it gets the job done for you.

But me, I want BOTH.

A Self-Sufficient & Competent Linux Server Administrator

I am quite excited actually with the thought of learning another new operating system along side Vista. I got another machine on my home LAN running Windows 2000 where I plan to install Fedora Core 6, one of the freely available open source Red Hat Linux variants.

The computer will be setup to simulate a production server where I hope to learn the ins and outs of Linux administration. There’ll be no fancy interface there, just the dreaded command line interface which I find quite interesting actually as a programmer.

This will be helpful as I am making the transition from the owner of a managed server to managing an unmanaged one. Actually I’ve been on unmanaged server before for five years. I know the basic Linux commands and basic server administration but that’s not enough for me. I survived with that server because I sourced out the complicated tasks such as server hardening and optimization to a third party.

To help me learn, I am going to buy these books from Amazon.com.

Linux System Administration

Linux Administration: A Beginner’s Guide

Obviously there’s some money to be saved when moving from a managed to an unmanaged server. By doing everything myself, the saving it brings will allow me to rent a more power server. How cool is that.

BTW, the migrations of my accounts from the current server to the new one are doing fine. That’s only after tech support fixed a problem which prevented me from continuing with the transfer. I am getting tired of this old server dying on a daily basic, sometimes several times per day as you may have noticed.

I hope to complete the transfer before the end of next week.