By Jin Nan Goto

The difficulty with choosing a strong, secure password is remembering that password in the future. Many people overcome the difficulty and inconvenience of remembering by choosing short and easy passwords.  It’s not all that surprising that the most commonly used passwords are ‘123456’ and ‘password’.  Other bad passwords include simple patterns ‘qwerty’, names ‘michael’, common words ‘monkey’ and sports team names ‘redskins’. Before choosing a password you may want to consider checking the list linked below to make sure your password is not one of the “500 worst passwords”. Note: some people think they are very clever when picking crude and inappropriate words as their bad passwords, so don’t follow the link if you are offended by that kind of language.

http://www.whatsmypass.com/category/password-info

The second thing people do to overcome the inconvenience of remembering long passwords is to reuse the password for multiple sites. If your password is compromised on one site, then it is compromised on every other site the password is used.  One of the key vulnerablilties in the recent twitter hack was a actually not a “hack” but a Twitter employee who reused their password.

The Solution:

“It’s ok to write down your passwords”. While you can simply keep a text file with all your passwords on your computer, there is also software that can remember those super-strong passwords for you.  They range from the open source keepass (http://keepass.info/) to commercial solutions such as RoboForm (http://www.roboform.com/) and every modern browser will offer to remember passwords.

By Jin Nan Goto

One of the Great advantages Mozilla Firefox has are all the plug-ins and extensions.  Firefox extensions and plug-ins can greatly enhance its abilities. TableTools is a nice gem that solves a big problem with HTML tables.  It is difficult to extract the table from the webpage without breaking the table.  If you cut and paste a table into Mircosoft Excel, the table will all be stuffed within a single cell.  Moving tables from the web to a spreadsheet application is a very time consuming process.

TableTools is a Firefox Extension that gives you greater abilities to manipulate data stored in tables on the Web.  Currently in version 0.26, You can sort and run filters on the data from within the browser.  While the filters and sorting abilities by themselves can be useful, What Is really great about TableTools is that it lets you quickly and easily copy tables from the web into your favorite spreadsheet application.  Simply copy the contents of the table as tab-delimited text (right click anywhere on the table and select “copy as Tab-delimited” from the menu item “Other table operations”) and then you can paste the copied data into a spreadsheet for use offline.  You can get TableTools at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2637

By Jin Nan Goto

Licensing is a very complicated aspect of today’s technology.  When you buy software at the store you are not actually buying the software, but rather the license to use the software.  Because of that; the licenses, product keys, and registration codes are actually more important than the physical disks.  But, too often, people are much better at protecting the physical CDs and DVDs than the licenses, and this causes problems if the software key is lost.

Multiple copies is essential when backing up anything. When you buy software from a store you generally get a physical label that contains the key or the license.  For example the product key for windows is often placed on a label on the underside of you laptop or on the back of the computer.  This is the only copy most people have of their product keys.  But what happens if you lose the CD case containing the label with the product key.  Even if you still kept the original CD you wouldn’t be able to reinstall it without either buying  the software again in order to obtain a new license or obtaining an illegitimate cracked version of the software.

For cases like this you should take the time to document all your product keys and what computers are using them and record it somewhere separate from the Original CD  so that if you lose the CD you won’t lose your product key along with it.  Large companies often use special software to keep track of all this license information, but you can use a simple  text file or spreadsheet to store this information. Another idea is that you can use your digital camera to take a picture of the label and archive the image. Also, if you are concerned about keeping this data secure, you can easily encrypt it using free tools such as truecrypt.

Ensuring that you have redundant copies kept separate from your computer will protect you from catastrophic situations. Storing a copy of the data online is a very good solution. Then you won’t have to worry about losing your data if your laptop is stolen or if you have a hardware failure.  Sending a copy of the text file or spreadsheet, containing your license information, to your webmail account (not to your POP mail as this is also stored on your computer) is all you really need to do in order to save a copy on the internet. I use a web service called Evernote to store my license information.  While Evernote is a online notetaking service it is very flexible and is useful because it lets you upload notes by email. I can also archive the various web accounts that I’m subscribed to by forwarding them to my Evernote account.

By Jin Nan Goto

Today a great deal of communication takes place by email, but a surprising number of people are really bad at writing email.  Most mistakes are overlooked when sending emails out to friends and family, but when you send email to coworkers, clients, and you employer (bosses) you need to convey a sense a professionalism.  Here are some dos and do nots for writing email.

Do Not:

• Do Not, under any circumstances, compose your entire email using all capital letters.  All Caps is a way to convey shouting and should be avoided.  Often people capitalize words they want to EMPHASIZE, but it’s not acceptable in many situations.  If you can, bold any words you wish to emphasize (can only do this if your email client accepts Rich Text).
• Do not use a lot of Abbreviations.  Besides the fact that the recipient may not understand your message, abbreviated words reflect poorly on your (and/or your company’s ) professionalism.  You should instead take time and spell out words completely.   Emoticons :-) should also be avoided.
• Do not go overboard with the goofy fonts and colors.  Just because you can change the color of every third word doesn’t mean that you should.  excessive use of colors and fonts tend to distract from the message.
• Do not use “web beacons” to track the receipt of email.  Many users utilize third party services that will notify you when someone opens your email message.  Often this is a transparent one pixel image that tracks the user as the image is being loaded.  This is often done without the knowledge of the user opening the message.  It is a favorite tool of spammers and is a huge privacy issue.   There are other less invasive, although more annoying, ways of finding out if your message was read.
• Do not send any attachments unless you know the recipient and they are expecting an attachment.  Because of the threat of malware in email attachments, most users will not open them.  Try sending as much as you can in the body of the email.  If you need to send an invoice to a client, type it in the body of the email rather than on a Word document or a PDF.  If you need to send something as an attachment make sure that the recipient knows that you are sending it, and know what it is.

Dos:

• Check your spelling and grammar.   Reread your email and make sure that it makes sense and that it says what you mean.  Spending a little time looking after the little things can really add a lot to your email.
• Use a neutral tone.  Joking and sarcasm does not translate well in the written word, and avoiding those devices helps eliminate a lot of misunderstandings.
• Use the Cc field when sending copies of the email to others rather than placing all the addresses in the To field.  Also make it clear to whom you are writing to.   That way there is no confusion over who needs to respond to the email.
• Be clear and concise.  Try and place the most important information in the first paragraph and all the extra details in the subsequent paragraphs.  That way people do not need to read a long rambling email before they can get to the important information.
• Close your email and talk to the person on the phone or face to face (if possible) whenever it is appropriate rather than sending emails.  Emails can be very impersonal and if you always stick to writing email you may miss out on opportunities to get to know your coworkers.  This is especially important (although very difficult to do) if you telecommute or work from home.

References:

http://careerplanning.about.com/od/communication/a/email_etiquette.htm
http://iwillfollow.com/email.htm
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012054101033.aspx

By Jin Nan Goto

Firefox 2 introduced Inline spellchecking for the browser.  This alerts the user of misspelled words and offers suggestions for correcting spelling mistakes.  However the worlds most popular browser (Internet Explorer) does not offer this feature.

The lack of any type of spell-checking for form fields in IE is crazy, especially considering that Microsoft has included an Inline spell-check feature in Microsoft Office for years.  Since IE doesn’t have this feature natively, you need to use a plug-in to get it.  IE7Pro is a very good plug-in for IE that adds a spell-check feature as well as other useful functionality.  For instance, ad blocking for instance.  While the name includes IE7, it also supports IE6.

Here are instructions for downloading and installing IE7pro.

http://wiki.ie7pro.com/index.php/Download_and_Install_IE7Pro

Screenshot of a form using IE7pro:

The spell-checker works quite well.  The performance of IE7Pro doesn’t quite seem as snappy as the spellchecker in Firefox.  Although,Firefox supports the inline spell-check natively and not through a plug-in.  However if you have to enter a lot of text in IE then it is a very valuable tool.

The first time I ran Microsoft Office 2007 I experienced somewhat of a shock.  “Where the heck was everything”.  While innovative; the ribbon menu of Office 2007 was a dramatic change from the menu system of prior versions of Office.  I suddenly have to relearn how to do simple things such as print the document.  I really missed the icons on the toolbar that allowed me to do common tasks with the click of a mouse.  You can do this in Office 2007, but you will need to do some configuration.  The steps I’m showing are for Word 2007 but Excel and PowerPoint have similar steps.

Step 1. Open Word Options

First you need to click on the “Microsoft Office Button” (The Microsoft Office logo that is actually a button) and select “Word Options”.  Because it is detached from the rest of the menu, many users overlook the Word Options button.  However Word Options is very useful.

Step 2.  Choose Customize

The next step is rather easy you simply choose Customize in the menu.  From this menu you can access many useful settings for office.  For example, If you choose Save in the menu you can change the default format to save files from docx to Word 97-2003 files.  If you select Proofing you can change the settings for the Spelling and Grammar Checker.

Step 3. Customize you Quick Access Toolbar

You can select items from among the various commands and add them to your Quick Access Toolbar using the Add button.  You can add <Separator>(s) for organization and printing is once again a mouse click away.

Most users will never reinstall Windows on their computer.  The Internet is awash with programs such as registry cleanup tools and utilities that tune up the performance of the PC.  Some of them work better than others (or not at all), but all have the same goal.  To keep the PC running smoothly as long as possible.

However there are several scenarios where there are real benefits to reinstall your operating system.

1.) Your PC is experiencing major software problems and you need to go back to the factory settings to fix them.

2.) Your PC has been infected by spyware, adware, or any other form of malicious critters.

3.) Your PC is getting older and the OS isn’t running like it used to.  You can reinstall the OS to get it back to its original performance.

4.)You have just bought a new PC.  Excited; you take it out of the box, plug it in, and boot it up for the first time.

XP is several years old and out of the box its not quite ready to go out in the world.  So I’m including my tips for getting it ready.  All the software that I am recommending is free.  Although some of it may require that you have a legitimate non-pirated version of Windows.  I am making that assumption, and I assume there are workarounds for those not using legitimate copies of windows.  But I’m not covering those here.  People will also notice that I am not including an Office suite even though its an important thing to install on your system.  However because I want to recommend free stuff that I use personally (and I don’t use openoffice.org) but rather an expensive bit of software produced by the same company that makes Windows.

Installing Windows XP, Brings back memories of 2001

Important – Install all updates

After you finish your installation, this is the single most important step in making your version of windows ready to survive out in the wild.  Its pretty well known that unpatched Windows are easily infected by malware unless you run all the security updates.  The first thing you do after the installation is to run Windows update and get the most current updates.  Be prepared this will take a long time, but it is very much worth it.

If you want to speed up this step here are some links to the XPSP2 and SP3 download.  You can download them on another computer while you are installing windows and move them on to the new computer with a 1 or 2 GB usb flash drive.

XP Service Pack 2

XP Service Pack 3

Take out the trash

After the 100+ updates to get the machine current, The most annoying thing about reinstalling your OS is all the trialware, useless utilities, and desktop Icons that come pre-installed on your system.  Use The PC Decrapifier to get rid of a lot of that junk.

http://pcdecrapifier.com/

Web Surfing changed since 01

Windows XP generally comes with Internet Explorer 6, which does not have a very good security track record.  So the next step is to replace it with one that is more capable.  When installing all the updates you will be asked if you want to install the new version of Internet Explorer IE7.  Download it, it is much better.  If you didn’t get it on windows update you can get it here.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx

In addition to IE7 I recommend that you also get the latest version of Mozilla Firefox.  Firefox is very customizable and is widely supported on the net.  Its always good to have a second browser.

http://getfirefox.com

Security Software

The next thing you are going to need is anti-virus and anti-spyware software.  Microsoft’s Windows Defender is a decent anti-spyware and it integrates with Windows Security Center (which comes with SP2) very well.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx

AVG is a good free anti-virus.  There is also a commercial version and Grisoft tries really hard to get users to download the pay version, but there is a link for the free version.

http://free.avg.com/

Other stuff to download

Lastly you should get the most recent version of some of the webs most common applications.

Newest version of Windows Media Player

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.mspx

Adobe Flash Player

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

Adobe Reader

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html