How Strong Is Your Password?

Hackosis has a Brute Force Calculator which can tell you how long it would take a modern PC to crack your password. Some example results:

6 lower case letters 2 numbers 1 special character Your password is 9 characters long and has 988,530,483,200 combinations. It takes 3.60 hours or 0.15 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour. This is based on a typical PC processor in 2008 and that the processor is under 10% load.

and

6 lower case letters 8 numbers 1 special character Your password is 15 characters long and has 988,530,483,200,000,000 combinations. It takes 3,596,252.95 hours or 149,843.87 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour. This is based on a typical PC processor in 2008 and that the processor is under 10% load.

Top 11 Ways to Scare a Geek

BBspot has a new Top 11 List - Top 11 Ways to Scare a Geek. My favorites are numbers 10 and 7:

10. Spray fried motherboard scented Air Freshener. 7. Make IE their default browser.

Visual Studio 2010 Pre-Beta CTP is Now Live

The pre-beta, Visual Studio 2010 bits are now available for download. You can get them here:

• Main download page.
• The VS 2010 download files page.

The C# compiler team samples are also available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 mark the next generation of developer tools from Microsoft. Designed to address the latest needs of developers, Visual Studio delivers key innovations in the following pillars: Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management, Enabling emerging trends, Inspiring developer delight and Riding the next generation platform wave. For more information, check out the Overview of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0

MeetWay Lets You Meet in the Middle

MeetWays is a Google Maps mashup with one simple but useful goal in mind: to help you find the perfect meetup point. In use it's simple—just enter the your address and the address of the person you're meeting with, then specify what sort of meeting place you'd like to find (e.g., coffee, pizza, library). MeetWays finds and marks the halfway point, then drops pins in the nearest businesses matching your search.

How Many Cigarettes Do You Smoke?

I quit smoking about ten years ago, but it still amazes me how many cigarettes I smoked (or could have smoked if I didn't quit). SmokeCount shows you, in a fun and entertaining way, how many cigarettes you've smoked (or could have smoked). It also has tools to help you quit smoking (or, if you want to continue to smoke, they have tools to help you do that, too ;) SmokeCount And remember, smoking could be good for the economy, because we all need to buy, buy, buy (hint, that was sarcasm).

Call Yourself to Politely Escape Social Situations

Fake Call is a quick and easy way to "call yourself" in order to politely escape social situations. While pretending to receive a phone call is possible without any special software, this usually takes too many awkward key presses and fumbling. Fake Call makes it as easy as pressing 1 button, and provides an extremely realistic incoming call experience. It also includes powerful scheduling and personalization features in a simple, unobtrusive user interface. Fake Call Features * Schedule a Fake Call in advance, or generate one on demand. * Simple, touch-friendly user interface to quickly schedule a call using predefined intervals (5 minutes to 1 hour). * Select a caller from your phone's Contacts. The selected contacts photo and phone number appear when the phone rings. * Totally realistic incoming call experience using your phone's default ringtone and profile settings. * Fast, small and optimized for Windows Mobile using native C++ code. Does its job and gets out of your way quickly. Fake Call For Windows Mobile Phones

Trapster Maps and Alerts You About Speed Traps

Trapster maps speed traps on roads near you, and offers mobile phone applications that will alert you when you're coming up on one as you drive. Trapster's trap maps are all user-generated—as one Trapster user drives down the freeway and spots a trap, she hits a button on her mobile phone's Trapster app to report it. When you approach the same area running Trapster on your phone, you get an alert, and then you can confirm that the trap is indeed in that area. Trapster offers cellphone apps for Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry, the Nokia N95 and other S60 smart phones, and an iPhone 3G app is forthcoming. www.trapster.com

How Much is Your Digg Worth?

Ever wondered how much your Digg is worth? Maximum PC wondered, too. In their article, Secrets of the Digg Economy Unveiled, they list out details of experiments they performed to understand how much value a click can bring to a site. According to the formula (see below), a Digg is worth about $15 if you Digg an upcoming story that hits the front page. Once a story is on the front page of Digg, further Diggs are worth about $2. Why? When most stories hit the front page, the result is a kind of pile-on effect, where thousands of people read the story and agree that it deserves recognition, which they affirm by Digging the story themselves. Because of this dynamic, the very first 100 to 200 Diggs that it takes to reach the front page are infinitely more valuable than the 1200 or 1800 that follow. Without the first 100 to 200 Diggs, the article would not have the additional 1000+ followup Diggs. The formula Maximum PC used for calculating the value of a Digg: D^y is the value of a single Digg. V^d is the page views referred by (that is, generated by ) Digg. R^v is the revenue generated per page view. And D is the total number of Diggs a story has received. Du is the value of every Digg that is applied before a story hits the front page, and is found by replacing D with 150, which seems to be the average number of Diggs necessary for a story to hit the front page these days.

Write Your Novel at WEbook

For those writers hoping to hit the big-time with their book ideas, new social publishing company WEbook wants to recreate for books what Digg did for internet articles. Submit your work to WEbook and collaborate and vote on which writing is the best.

Shelve the notion of a solitary writer toiling alone for years in a dimly lit attic. WEbook.com is a place for lively writing groups, groundbreaking titles, and a chance for an engaged and creative community to find unrecognized talent and select the very best written works for publication as books, eBooks, and Audiobooks.

At WEbook, writers can get immediate feedback on their work. Reviewers can tear apart bad writing and make it better and everyone gets a chance to vote. If WEbook users vote your project as one of the best, WEbook will publish it, in print or electronic form, too.

WEbook

Find Out Where a Username is Already Registered

When you think up that perfect new handle for storming social networks and other registration-only sites across the web, run it through UserNameCheck.com first. This webapp's purpose is simple: to tell you whether or not that name is already in use at a pretty impressive list of sites, from Delicious and Digg to eBay and Xbox Live. The developer explains:

This site is a quick and dirty solution to a question that I often lay awake at night worrying about. Do I have my username registered across every site that I should? What if the next internet humiliation meme just happens to share the username I've been using for years, and suddenly people are emailing me asking "hey, is this you ???". The site is simple. I have a stack of webapp urls, the application pings the site using the username you want to check, if it returns a "no user name" error we return that.

The list of checks can take some time, so grab a cup of coffee or browse the news in another tab while UserNameCheck does its thing.

Where is Your Username Registered?

Source: LifeHacker

Can You Sue for a Backlink?

Here's an interesting idea... suppose someone creates a link to your site, but you don't want that link pointing to your site? There is nothing, inherently wrong with link (for example, it won't affect your SEO), you just don't like the site or company the link comes from. What do you do? In case of a Sheboygan woman, the city of Sheboygan sent a "cease and desist" letter to have the links removed. The woman, Jennifer Reisinger, says she felt intimidated by the city, so removed the links. Reisinger alleges her First Amendment rights were violated by the city. She seeks $250,000 in compensatory damages, unspecified punitive damages and unspecified declaratory relief. After reading the article, I gotta say I agree with Ms. Reisinger. It seems to me like the mayor and his staff were trying to retaliate against her because of her (failed) effort to have the mayor recalled. I'm very interested to see how this turns out. Read the full story: Sheboygan women files landmark case over Web links