He's Fallen In The Water

I was going to write about something else, but opening my LJ client, it came up with a box telling me that my password is too easy to guess. This happened on Neopets a few weeks ago, and it forced me to change it to something that had numbers and/or symbols in it. I admit that when I first started on Neopets, I used one of my easier-to-guess passwords(it would've turned up in a Spanish dictionary, for one thing), because I didn't know how interested I would get in the site.

I admit that most of my passwords are monocase, all letters. I like to be able to type them quickly, and if I have one capitalized letter, then I will have to type it slowly or make mistakes--I have a heavy finger on the shift key and often capitalize two letters by mistake. However, these passwords are mostly ten letters or longer, and tend to be both easy for me to reconstruct and yet hard to guess by manipulating word lists. I admit that I do sometimes reuse passwords on the Net, because there's only so many I can remember at a time--I've got eight Nationstates nations, each with their own passwords, Neopets, LJ, Wikipedia, Concord, Amazon, NaNoWriMo, and others I'm not remembering or deliberately omitting.

I used to run "crack", back when I was sysadmin at an ISP and was trying to guard against weak passwords. I used a Perl script for password checking that wouldn't allow people to change their password to something weak. And all my passwords would have passed that one.

Has Moore's Law brought the available processing power up to the point where 26^15 possible letter combinations is something worth trying? That's still 1.6e21 combinations, and that doesn't count all the shorter words, either. Or are people just panicking because of people who are picking crappy passwords, and think a simple heuristic involving "no all-lowercase passwords" will force people to pick something better?

I may change mine, or I may not. It's none of your business.

Hang On To Your Ego

Okay, what I was going to post about...

I got a raise recently at work. Which is nice, and quite welcome right now. Maybe now I'll be able to put some money towards a new computer. Or a second car that doesn't guzzle gas. Or a new house.

I also got a new parkade spot, in a mostly unrelated move. I work in an office building which is next door to another office building. Ours is taller but narrower, so our parkade is smaller. Most of our parking is thus under the neighbouring building. My first spot under there was in the absolute worst spot--#182, which was at the bottom in the back corner, requiring some backing-up skills and ingenuity to get into and out of. It was unassigned for a long time, so the first few days I often came down to the bottom level and found it already occupied by some squatter, so I had to drive back out, park on the street(three blocks away)and then complain to the administration.

After a couple of months of that, a better spot became available, #118, so I took it. That one was two levels down, but not too bad--not in the corners, easy to find. Then they decided to repaint the floors, with each section off limits for a few days at a time, so they went to scramble parking, where nobody had an assigned stall. That worked so well that they kept it up after the painting stopped, and I rarely even had to park as far down as #118.

But anyway, the parkade still had its shortcomings. It required a plastic key-card thing for entrance, which involved pulling up within a couple of feet of the scanner on the wall(though some people seemed to have some kind of key they could use from further away). I lost the key card once, and it was a pain to deal with, being too thick for a wallet and too big for a keychain. And then there was the fact that I had to walk outside to get to work, which I preferred to avoid. Okay, I admit, it wasn't that great an inconvenience, even in the coldest days, to walk a few meters and climb up a staircase, but it's the principle of the thing.

Now, though, I'm in stall #22 under our actual building. Right on the first level, so it's easy to find. This parkade, which used to be mostly public parking, has been turned into private parking, and it opens from the outside with an electric eye instead of a silly keycard. And all I have to do is climb up one flight of stairs and I'm on the main floor of the building.

All I need now is a real garage instead of just a carport, and I'll never had to go outside during the week. Sweet.