As part of moving customers from one hosting system to another, we are setting up their email accounts with the same password they are currently using. Based on what I’ve seen so far, here’s some tips for guessing email passwords:
- Try using the left hand side of the email address. This seems to be common for role accounts (e.g. sales@example.com has a password ’sales’).
- Try using the domain name (w/out the TLD). Try part of the domain if it is two separate words.
- Want to get in to a coworker’s email? If your domain admin assigns you a generic password when they create your account you can be pretty sure they use the same password for every one they set up and that hardly anyone has changed theirs.
- Do you know the person’s hobby? Try that. Or just guess on some common hobbies and the associated noun (e.g. running and runner).
- Try ‘password’. Yeah, you’d be surprised…
- Try the person’s first name, last name, first and last concatenated, etc.
- Do you know the person’s role in a company? Try that. e.g. ’sales’, ‘marketing’, ’shipping’, etc.
Anyone have any other tips?
The inaugural meetup of the Orlando Python Users Group was held Wednesday at Stardust. By all accounts (well, mine and Josh’s so far), it was a success. Since our experienced Pythonistas weren’t able to make it, it was a bit of a noob night and discussions turned to Django and also what the heck to do for future meetups. Josh had some good thoughts and put them on the mailing list.
I’m just getting started with Python due to Django so I’m in learning mode but I also want to use the meetups to force me to get my shit together and learn more so I can share w/the group. If you’re interested in OPUG, here’s the relevant links:
Last night, I decided to reload OS X on my MacBook. Contrary to most expert opinions, I upgraded to Leopard instead of doing a clean install. Since my performance has seemingly gotten progressively worse over the past six months, I figured a clean install was the way to go. Here’s what I did:
- Did a full backup to an external USB drive using SuperDuper.
- Did the above again to another drive just in case…
- Left the USB drive attached and rebooted my MacBook while holding down the
Option key to get the boot menu and chose to boot from the USB drive just to make sure everything was backed up.
- Did the above again with the other drive just in case…
- Disconnected the USB drive, inserted the Leopard DVD and rebooted while holding down the
Option key again and chose to boot from the DVD.
- Did the installation and customized the options to remove print drivers and language translations I don’t use.
- Created the primary account on the new install the same as my current account.
- Ran
Software Update and rebooted until all updates were installed.
- Enabled the
root user.
- Logged in as the root user and ran the
Migration Utility.
- Plugged the USB drive in and chose the option to migrate my data from a mountable volume and chose the USB drive and my user account. Chose the option to overwrite the current account.
- Read a few chapters of a book while this copied.
- Unmounted the USB drive and rebooted.
- Logged in as my normal user account and verified everything still worked. It did.
You could probably skip having to enable the root user by creating a temporary user account during the installation and then telling the Migration Utility to just copy your account over since that wouldn’t require replacing the current account which requires you to be logged in as root.
I’m very impressed with how easy this was and that everything “just works” after the restore. If you’ve done this before and have any feedback, let me know in the comments.
Yes, that’s the best title I could come up with for my latest project Followinger. The idea is simple: follow the followinger user and then you can d followinger with a Twitter username and you’ll receive a d back with all kinds of fun stats:
- when their account was created
- how many people they are following
- how many people are following them (friends)
- the ratio of following to friends
The idea is that when you want to make a follow decision these stats are good to know. If you see that the account was just created or they follow way more people than follow them, you may want to think twice about following them back. This tool gives you a way to get this info in a Twitter reply.
Feedback welcome.
We just finished moving a few apps from .Net Framework 1.1 to 3.5. One of the problems we ran into was this exception when using some symmetric encryption code. When we decrypted the value from the DB, this was being thrown.
From what I can tell, it looks like in 1.1 passing null data to the decryption worked (or at least silently failed) and likely returned null back (well, a blank string in our case due to type conversion). However, in 3.5 this exception gets thrown.
An easy fix but one of those little things that took a while to track down so hope this helps someone.
So why are you reading this? Go register!
For a new site, I wanted to have a DIV’s background image be dependent on the online status of an AIM user. jQuery and the AIM Presence API make it easy.
First, the code:
$.getJSON("http://api.oscar.aol.com/presence/get?k=key&f=json&t=aimuser&c=?",
function(result){
if (result.response.data.users[0].state == ‘online’) {
   $("#status").css("background-image", "url(’online.jpg’)");
      }
   }
);
Using the getJSON() method of jQuery, we pass in the URL of the AIM Presence service with the parameters needed.
The f parameter tells the service what format to return the results in–JSON in our case. The c parameter specifies the JSON callback to use–this is important! The k and t parameters specify the AIM key to authorize the request and the user to query the prescense for. Note that key and aimuser need to be replaced with your AIM key and the user you want to query if you’re playing along at home.
The second parameter we pass in to getJSON() is the function we want to use to process the JSON data that gets returned. In this case, my CSS rule for the #status DIV specifies the background image used by default which is the offline status. This way, if there is a problem with the service or API, we default to it being offline. So, the function here just checks the first member of the returned users array in the response and compares their state to the string 'online'. We only need to worry about the first user returned since we’re querying the status for only one user.
The important part of this is setting c=? in the parameters passed to the AIM Presence service. This tells jQuery to replace the ? with the correct method name to call and passes it in to the service. Without this, you’ll get 'invalid label' errors in Firefox and it just won’t work in other browsers. The jQuery getJSON() docs note this but it wasn’t clear to me from the example at first how to use it.
That’s all there is to it. One more reason to love jQuery!
I’ve updated my Switch Scrollwheel Behavior (catchy name, huh?) plugin to work with Firefox 3. No changes were made to the plugin other than updating the manifest to specify version 3.0+ as the max.
You can download it here. You’ll have to save it and do an install manually since I’m too lazy to mess w/the xpi install javascript.
What the plugin does is toggle the value of mousewheel.withnokey.action between zero and one to switch between scrolling one screen or one line at a time when using mouse scrolling. The quickest way to invoke it is from the context menu (right-click) on a page.
Don’t want to leave the house today to get good deals? Check out Amazon’s Black Friday deals. Every hour between 6AM and 6PM Pacific time, they’ll have a new deal. Scroll down on that page to find more ongoing deals in various categories.
I have a feeling that between this and my Prime membership, I’ll be greeting the UPS guy on Monday.
Technorati Tags: black friday, amazon
