Walker Software Weblog

I was playing around with an idea today and wrote a little utility to create harder to break passwords based on normal passwords. The strength column is just a relative amount of time it might take a hypothetical brute-force algorithm to crack the password. It’s packaged as jar file, which means on a Mac (or a windows-box with Java 1.4.2 or above installed) you can double click on the jar file to start the app. You can grab the jar file here.

*Update*
I’ve setup a page for it. Click the Password Creator link under Pages on the left.

I’ve been testing some assumptions we have always held about moving data using EJBs (and RMI) and what I’ve found is not exactly what I expected. In the places I have worked, we held the belief that Serializable, by default, sent too much information over the wire and that it was slow. This seems to be a mixed case.
(Continued)

Clutter by Sprote Rsrch. is pretty cool interface for grabbing album art and a different way to use iTunes. Mac Only.

Growl is a global notification system for Mac OS X. If you come a windows background, you are used to little balloons popping up all the time, and knowing that there are ten thousand places to check to find the one checkbox you need to turn off the most annoying ones.

Growl provides APIs for developer to provide notification of actions to users. Users, in turn, get one place in the System Preferences to enable and disable these notifications. Growl also supports a few skins and options (like sound effects) for notifications.

The system is only on version 0.5 at time of writing so installation is a bit tedious, but that is largely because you will need to download and install plugins for various apps to use Growl. All-in-all it is a very good idea, and if I still used Windows, I would demand MS do something similar, seeing how they are the worst offenders. I think this just underscores one of the Mac’s guiding principals — your computer is your tool to do your work.

I’ve been working on a framework for real-world swing apps (business apps). While there are some existing forms libs, they are mostly layout managers. there aren’t many projects focusing on making real swing apps easy to write by taking care of moving data between objects and widgets, providing standard dialog templates, etc. I’m working on a framework that does those things. It is evolving with code I’m writing for a client, once it settles down a bit, I’ll open-source it. I’m also trying to incorporate as many swing best-practices as I’m can find. So far, I using trampolines, and ExceptionListeners to name a few.

The Eyetoy: Antigrav is pretty addictive and is good at getting my large rear-end out of a chair.