EdgeCrafting - giving you an Edge !

Image via WikipediaJust installed latest version of PDFCreator which creates PDF prints from any Windows program.

Use it like a normal printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application. I normally use it for receipts and other stuff I might need as reference material later.

PDFCreator is hosted at sourceforge.net a good place to find free open source tools, another good option is code.google.com

I've been planning theme based posting for a while so here we go,
first theme PC maintenance

If you use your PC regularly you will sooner or later end up with a bunch of programs, utilities, drivers that needs updating.

Recently I thought I would step up on my PC-maintenance, considering how much I use it - so a years subscription to versiontracker for $29.95 seems a bargain.

Versiontracker are supposed to keep your alerted and help you update drivers and software installed on your PC.

Short version - versiontracker is not worth it's price

My expectations were

• Ability to be alerted about drivers to be updated
  
  Works partly, some of the driverlinks listed in versiontracker did not work or in one case the drivers were for wrong version (vista only and not XP)
  

  I strongly suspect that quite some drivers were not identified at all ... see next item
  

• Ability to be alerted about updates to my software
  
  Works less than partly, less than 50% of software installed were recognised (I did not spend time calculating the exact figure - but versiontracker missed a lot of my installation).
  

Basic expectations from the claims made on the site, but even worse I find the lack of support and attention to feedback.

• I alerted versiontracker that they link to a scamsite for the excellent freeware EasyCleaner, scamsite is a total ripoff the original site trying to charge money for the software - no reaction or update to links from versiontracker a month later.
  
  You find the real free EasyCleaner website here (tool for cleaning up registry, unnecessary files and more)
  
  
• Some version are listed incorrect by versiontracker, either wrongly identified on PC or newer version available - again, it appear versiontracker pay no or very slow attention to feedback.
  
  I acknowledge it can be difficult to identify correct version all the time, but response to feedback should be better.
  

The new version 4.0 might be better, but as it crashed on first scan of my PC I had to revert back to version 3.6.1.

Apparently I'm not alone about being disappointed, feedback and review on versiontracker site for versiontracker are in the very low end !

My recommendation

Grab the free download of versiontracker with a one time scan of PC included - update what versiontracker happens to find and move on ....

To bad - better executed the software and service could be a huge success

BTW, better executed means

1. Recognise more of installed software
2. Detect versions better
3. React to feedback !, update version and links, might even consider a "thank you" mail and "update done" mail too !
4. Ability to ignore beta version as a global option or for a specific software installation

Version Tracker Review verdict: 2 out of 5

So little time - so many sites which need a password when you (have to) register yourself.

Admit it, you use the same password for different sites - don't you ?!, and if possible the same (set of) user-id's

Well, same password on different sites are not a good idea, each time you register yourself there's an increasing possibility the security on one of the sites will be comprised and a hacker obtain access to your password and user-id ......... and with those leaked there's free access to try them out everywhere else.

PwdHash - a password encryption plugin from Standford security lab solves this problem

PwdHash takes your password combines it with url for the website and generates a unique hashed password for each website from the same master password.

With PwdHash you can use the same initial password for different sites and let pwdHash generate the final unique password

"PwdHash is an browser extension that transparently converts a user's password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF)."

It's not a solve all solution - your master password must not be given out, otherwise it would be possible for another person to use the PwdHash algoritm and compute the hashed password

I guess a simple solution and improvement to PwdHash would be to add a user configuration for PwdHash, with the option to provide a unique randomizing factor to the algoritm, e.g. a string (sentence) entered by the user at installation time.

Final advice; Don't use only one master password - use a minimum of 2 or 3

1. One password + PwdHash for newsletter and website registration
   
2. Another password + PwdHash for website that have your creditcard on detail (e.g. amazon, phonecompany etc.)
   
3. A third password + PwdHash for the most critical places (e.g bank account, paypal etc.)

Idea is to differentiate between websites without financial info (class 1) and those with financial info (class 2 and 3).
For websites belonging to class 2 and 3 you do not use auto-login or remember password features and even more carefully about the master password.

Hey, that's only 2 or 3 password to remember !

Get PwdHash - the password encryption plugin from Standford security lab

Review verdict: 4 keyholes out of 5

It works !, though missing the ability to add an individual hashing factor to the algoritm

May your password(s) be with you !

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Liked this post ?! - check out other post about extensions

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Lorem Ipsum
Originally uploaded by hjortholm

Ever wondered about the Lorem Ipsum text used in templates and demo's ?!

Lorem Ipsum is simply the dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry, the purpose is to provide a text acting as pure place holder, demonstrating the graphical elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography and layout without distracting attention from the overall look and feel.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged .......

You find a good Lorem Ipsum generator at www.lipsum.com together with some interesting background information about Lorem Ipsum you can impress your diner date with (or maybe not).

Lorem Ipsum comes from a book about the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC.

Anyway, the Lorem Ipsum webservice above uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable - ready to grab and copy into your web template.

well, at least I hope

After seeing this TED talk by Hans Rosling on "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen" - I would love to get access to this kind of visualisation tool.

Gapminder's Trendalyzer software and team got acquired by google in march 2007 - I think they made a very wise investment there.

Update march 2008: Gapminder Trendanalyzer availabe in limited form in Google docs (spreadsheets) and as a gadget - check this updated post about Gapminder's Trendanalyzer in Google clothing.

Found Yslow via Yahoo developer network;

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you:

• Performance report card
• HTTP/HTML summary
• List of components in the page
• Tools including JSLint

Yslow takes the guessing out of the performance equation, help you optimize the overall performance for your website and reduce page load time.

sigh, lot of stuff to do with a new blog;

Added feedburner and feedflare to the customizations, together with google analytics I think this should cover the basics regarding subscriptions and statistics - do like Google more and more with all the free stuff available

Note: adding tag admin trivia to these post, should make it easy to do a catch up post later describing all the basic steps for a new blog