adoption curve dot net

I’ve lost count of the number of user accounts that I have to remember passwords for – so like most of the rest of the human race, I have a tendency to use the same password for everything. Simple to remember, which is great – but the need for a strong password is even more critical if you’re going to take risks like this.

Unfortunately strong passwords are difficult to remember, because the best ones are effectively random strings of characters – and we humans crave patterns. So here’s a quick technique to help create seemingly-random passwords that are easier to remember.

Take a phrase or saying, or perhaps a line from a song that you can remember readily, then type the first letter of each word as you say it to yourself. So if you find that you can easily remember “The Grand Old Duke Of York, He Had Ten Thousand Men”, you’d end up typing “tgodoyhhttm”. To the casual onlooker, that’s pretty random!

You can make it even more secure by throwing in a few number / character substitutions – zeros for the letter ‘o’, for example. So now our password becomes ‘tg0d0yhhttm’ – and if we used some other arbitrary switches – say ‘$’ for ‘h’ – we’ve got ‘thg0d0y$$ttm’, which looks even worse, but is still easy to remember once you’ve typed it a couple of times.

Try this next time your password expires instead of dog names and children’s birthdays, and you’ll be surprised how quickly it becomes second nature…

If you’re suffering from the distraction of the web when you’re meant to be doing something else, here’s a neat trick courtesy of Mark Wieczorek at MarkTAW.com:

The Internet is a vast repository of Time Wasters, and if you’re like me, the activity that signals that I’m about to lose focus is opening the web browser. So I created a simple web page with the words “Get Back to Work” in big, bold letters on top and set it as my homepage.

Simple, but highly effective!

Getting around to saying something coherent about Basecamp (we’re impressed by it) is on the list of things to do, but the people behind Basecamp are not making things any easier by coming up with still more net-based goodness – this time, it’s a service I could use for that list of to-dos…

Ta-da Lists is one of those ideas that I wish I’d had – blindingly simple, incredibly effective, and done by someone else before I had a chance to think of it. Basically, it’s online to-do lists – but with the twist that they can be shared with others, and subscribed to via RSS.

To-do lists themselves are hardly revolutionary, and shared lists aren’t exactly new either – but what Ta-da Lists does is to make the sharing process simple and flexible. You can open your list to the world, giving everyone read access, or allow selected colleagues the ability to see and change the items on the list. And every list has an automatic RSS feed that you can use to keep up-to-date in your newsreader of choice. This is a great way of sharing simple task lists with other members of a project team that don’t need (or are frightened by) access to a full-blown PM system such as Basecamp, or simply sharing lists around – between friends, family members and so on. We’ve been using wikis for this for a while now, but Ta-da Lists makes the whole process very much more straight forward.

The use of RSS for distributing this sort of semi-structured information is perhaps the most intriguing aspect, and it’s something that we’ve been looking at in several contexts for a while now. Over the next couple of days I’ll post some more details about what we’ve been doing, and some ideas for how RSS can help get the right information to the right people at the right time.