I was recently introduced to the program called LastPass by my good friend Matt (Dragon). The program it’s self is basically an online password manager. It stores all your passwords in one area, which can sync across browsers. The program can generate on the fly passwords and save them, best of all you can view the passwords as well. It’s viewable on their website and as a plugin for browsers.
If you’re using the browser plugin it can communicate with the forms and auto fill information for you and even auto log you into the website. They also have on-screen keyboards for when there could be key loggers etc. Which makes this program safe to use on computers you don’t know the security off. For me LastPass has been a great help in organising those long passwords used for sensitive things like PayPal, server logins etc. LastPass also has a built-in password strength meter and you can check how secure your passwords are. Overall I think it’s a nice product that I have deployed at home and work.
Best of all LastPass is free but they also offer a Premium Version for $1 a month, which offers a program for mobiles, no adverts, and authentication from a USB Key!
A friend of mine asked me “How do I change the Modified Date Of a File?” In this case the Modified Date was showing way older than the Creation Date, which was causing some file to not open. So I went on a search for some way of changing these, as Windows 7 will not let you change these values. In the end I finally came across a wonderful tool called FileTouch.
According to the developer this is the use for their software:
When developing or testing software, there are times when you need to reset a file’s date and time created, last modified, and/or last accessed.
FileTouch is Freeware, and a single .exe program which does not need installing. The only requirement is that you have .NET Framework 3.5 installed.
So my phone contract which I have had for the last 18 months from 02 is up for renew really soon, halfway through this month. I am quite happy with my provider and I suppose will be staying with them, mostly because of the discounts I get, thanks to a good friend of mine called Matt!
The phone I currently own is a HTC TouchPro. I’m really rather happy with it. It currently runs a rom that I personally cooked for it. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 along with Sence 2.1 interface, as Windows Mobile 6.5 with Sence 2.1 runs slow on it. I have also added other tweaks which improve performance and added small features.
The HTC TouchPro is by far the best phone I have had to date, I have seen and used a wide range of phones as well. But the main selling point for this phone for me was the full pull out mini hard keyboard. I just like the feel of a physical keyboard. However the way phones are going now is all touchscreen, and those phones all seem to have better hardware etc and those with keyboards.
Anyway, taking a look at the current line of phones:
Palm
Blackberry
Iphone
Android
Windows Mobile
I think I’m going to stay away from palm, mostly because everyone I know who has one has had a few issues with it. The blackberry is a lovely phone, they even do one with fixed keyboards etc, however apparently their push email/IMAP is a bit sketchy, and quite frankly I don’t want to have to pay to use BES. But I really do like Blackberrys, after seeing and using one.
Then we move onto Googles Android, it’s a awesome bit of kit. The phone I was looking around that run’s Android would be a HTC Desire or similar HTC device, mostly because I’m very happy with HTC phones. If I’m to get a Windows Mobile phone, I will be waiting till around final quater of 2010 because I want to get a Windows Phone 7 device. No point getting the old one when there’s a newer better version comming out soon. That and I have no idea what devices there are for it yet, although you can bet HTC will have one.
Now the only device that’s left is the Iphone 4G. When the IPhone came out I was rather unimpressed with it. It lacked half the things even the basic Windows Mobile devices had and even some Symbian phones. Most of all it lacked features I needed at the time of getting my HTC Touch Pro. However Apple have slowly but surely evolved the device into something that is really useful and more competitive. The 4G seems a really good device. The specs seem good. However i don’t like being restricted as such, and Iphone tethering is kind of locked down I think.
Lot’s of choices I suppose. However if it looks like I may have to move away from hard keyboard phones 
On 16th of March Microsoft released a Developer Preview (DP) of Internet Explorer 9 at MIX 2010.
Now when every website designer thinks of IE they think of the days when IE6/IE7 was around. Those days where hell. Then IE8 came along which basically brought IE up to scratch with a few standards mostly ACID2, but of course a few qwerks.
But then IE9 was released. They have basically rewritten parts of the rendering engine. The whole JavaScript part has been rewritten. It’s insanely fast and they have not even finished tweaking it etc! It’s currently just slower than Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2! Anyway under IE9′s hood they have added GPU rendering and SVG support. Gone are the day of Windows XP Support! Internet Explorer Platform Preview requires Windows 7 (x86 or x64) or Windows Vista SP2 (x86 or x64).
Below is some Sunspider JavaScript Test results.
It looks like Microsoft is paying more attention to standards, as they are supporting HTML5 and CSS3, while also improving rendering speeds. IE8 Scored 20 points on the ACID3 test, and now IE9 scores 55 on the ACID3 test.
Overall IE9 is a massive improvement on IE8 and we can expect these results to improve! As this is only a Developer Preview, which is basically like an Alpha.
Note: This early Platform Preview is not intended for production use and is released without support.
So it finally came to happen, I ended up forgetting the MYSQL Linux root password. DOH! So I began thinking to myself whats the best way for doing this. I don’t fancy doing a full MYSQL reinstall as I don’t want to risk loosing data etc. I finally found out how to do it, it’s rather simple as well.
Basically you SSH into your server, in my case you SSH as a normal user, as i have direct root log in disabled. Next you SU to root. This way we can do everything we need to.
The reason we need root is because we are going to be doing changes to some parts that only a system admin can do.
We start off by shutting down MYSQL
pkill mysqld - kills the daemon, if it is running.
Now that the MYSQL daemon is shutdown we can then enter MYSQL safe mode, while skipping grant tables
mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
Next we log in to MYSQL using root with no password because we are in safe mode
mysql -u root mysql
Next we are going to UPDATE the MYSQL database where the user is root. As we are now going to set the new password
UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD("passwordhere") WHERE user="root"; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;Once done we need to shutdown safe mode
pkill mysqld_safe
Then it’s a case of just starting MYSQL again
/etc/init.d/mysql start
There we go MYSQL root password reset done!
