themorgue.org

Now that I’m living in Oklahoma I thought it might be fun to try to organize a Python User Group. My friend Blaine has been running a dynamic language user group for a while now in Omaha, NE and it sounds like a lot of fun. I thought about doing something similar, but pretty much everyone that contacted here in Norman was only interested in Python. That’s fine with me since Python is my language of choice (although I do enjoy a bit of Javascript from time to time). Anyway, I met up with some people at the National Weather Center who had an interest, and it looks like it’s a go! We’ve set up a web site and we’re working on getting our very own python.org mailing list. So if you live in the central Oklahoma area and are interested in Python at all, keep an eye on our web site for meeting details.

I’ve been doing a lot of security work on my web server and email this past week and decided to update all of the passwords on my accounts in the process. I have to admit, that I’m really bad at coming up with good passwords. I guess that’s why password generators were invented. I did a quick search on the internet to find about 11,000,000 matches for the phrase “password generator.” Then I remembered something from a couple of weeks ago. I was adding a new account to my Mac and there was a little application that popped up next to the password field that generated passwords for you. I’ve been using OS X for years, and it’s probably been there all along, but I never paid much attention until now.

The window that pops up calls it the Password Assistant. It allows you to select from different types of passwords such as “Memorable”, “Letters & Numbers”, “Numbers Only”, “Random”, and “FIPS-181 compliant.” This is really cool, because some accounts limit the types of characters that you can use. The Password Assistant also lets you select the length of the password. It does this all while showing you a nice little gauge of how strong the password really is. Ok, maybe I’m getting a little carried away just for a freebie password utility, but I have to say that it has made coming up with new passwords much more enjoyable.