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Tools & Tips…

Well, I’m going to try to divulge more of my development experiance to others. Starting with some ‘Tools & Tips‘.

Let me know if there are any topics/questions from all forms of development PHP, Java, .NET .. and management (people & projects) aspects of the IT world too!

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Creating good passwords…

Recently I was reviewing the security practices for my users…

I like to get them to change their windows login regularly as it’s used via LDAP etc etc in some cases for loggin into web applications…

Anyway… all the passwords I keep getting from them are very poor, and so I put some guide-lines together for them and thought it’d be fun to share.

I suggest – actually force them – to include characters from all 5 of these rows in passwords…

0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
@#$%^&*()-_+=
~`[]{}|\:;'<>,.?/

Doing this will increase the time it takes to get cracked… Now… if you want a really really great password do the above and include an alt-character or two! Here is a table of them:

ALT-Characters

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Music from your iPod…

If like me you manually add to your iPod, then it can be a real pain when iTunes decides it doesn’t want to recognise your iPod anymore, or you decide to get a new one or just want to get a song off there!

I recently came across EphPod (Win/Linux)…. and since I also have a MacBook Pro found iLinkPod.

I am not going to describe how to use it as I did find a good tutorial here. If you insist … here is a very quick ‘How-To’ for EphPod: find the music you want using the search boxes at the top, or the grid at the bottom for individual songs, and then Right Click and select ‘Copy Songs to Directory’, or alternatively press Ctrl + Alt + C. Holding Ctrl while selecting will allow you to choose more than one song/album/whatever at once.

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iMovie ’08 and iDVD…

OK, so I’ve been using my Mac for a while now… and I must admit it has grown on me hugely over the time I have used it – I was sceptical about using a Mac, but I do slightly prefere it now. Due to software I use for development I’ll always be a dual user just some things I need the PC for – anwayway… I’m here to talk about iMovie ’08.

I’ve done some video editing in the past on the PC, and Mac using professional stuff… however I was viewing my growing pile of MiniDV tapes for my camcorder and decided I should get them to video/dvd. Not wanting to spend hours/days editing I decided to try iMovie. I’ve never used it so I went in cold and was surprised and very happy with my end product – between iMovie and iDVD that is.

First step was to import my video, which was very easy and ‘quick’ though i did have to watch it play in realtime as it imported – perhaps there is a way to do it quicker?

After that was done, it was pretty simple to move my clips to edit them and compose them … it is very simple and as a result there is obviously a loss of control if you are used to Final Cut or similar on the PC… but if it’s just to get that holiday footage tided up and onto dvd then it’s probably more than sufficient.

After some resizing of clips, I became adventurous and – gasp – added titles and transitions (though not too much of these as I decided they were a bit corny) … next I added some music to liven it up.

So to create my wee video of a recent trip to Dubai, took (excluding importing time) just a little over an hour to compose, and a matter of moments in iDVD.

Burning the DVD in iDVD was quick and painless too… pick a theme, drop the movie in, give it a title and click a button and that was it really.

I was paranoid about quality… video on a computer in my past experiance was never that great. So I tentativley shoved it in the DVD player and was very happy with the resulting video. If anyone knows a good FREE resoource to upload video too I may upload some later.

One of the odd things in iMove is there is no need to save, but it does indeed save as you go – I quit a few times to test it!

iMovie