Stupid Password Policies

23. November 2009

In last few weeks, I have suffered from stupid imagepassword policies. One of them was a bank.

They have strange password policies, they require numbers, capital letter and a small letter in the password, and they limit their password to be 6 chars long.

The other one is for ETS GRE. Recently, they opened up a new web site through which you can learn your GRE scores and order test score submission. Once again, I forgot my password. This time, I tried the “Forgotten password” option and appearently, they failed providing a reliable system here. I entered everything right, and came to password change screen. When I submitted, I got “technical error occured”. After 3rd or 4th time, it now says “account locked”. Now I have to make international phone calls to order my GRE scores.

I just don’t remember this kind of passwords that have silly requirements. I had a password in mind that I use for my mail which is around 30 chars long, and it is strong enough for me. If I need to ensure security, i specialize them in a way that i remember. I don’t need your stupid policies to ensure my security. If you want your inexperienced users to have secure password, that is fine, but please don’t restrict me or have a reliable forgotten password system..

Feature Request For Visual Studio 2010: Local Revision History

19. November 2009

This feature is a life saver. I was working on my school project, and I was drawing UML Diagram with an Eclipse plugin. All of a sudden, the diagram went off, and all I saw was a screen with blank class boxes. I was going crazy, trying to find differences between a valid document and a buggy one with my eyes etc. Then i remembered a feature that Eclipse had: Local Revisions.

Every time you modify a file, Eclipse saves a copy of the old one in .metadata folder of the project. I was unable to reach the history in the IDE, but i can see the changes in the history folder.

image

The last version that worked was somewhere around 10 PM, and I manually copied the contents of that time period.

And now I can see my diagrams.

 

Admittedly, this is what SCM is for, but think of it that way: you wouldn’t commit a diagram until it is not near complete. You also wouldn’t want to waste 1 hour just to redraw the diagram.

My request is that they incorporate this small feature into VS 2010, or perhaps some good soul can do this as a free plugin into R# or directly into VS.