Quite a week it has been for USC football. First Pete taking off. Now Lane coming in. A good thing? I don’t know.

Pat Forde from ESPN summed it up quite nicely. “At this rate, Lane Kiffin is an 8-5 season at USC away from a $50 million contract to coach Peyton Manning and the Colts.”

I was really impressed with Lane and Sarkisian while they were at USC. Since then however Lane has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, mostly his big mouth/ego. His coaching skills seem far from perfect. Not sure how excited I am about fall 2010.

How cool is this. Now if only we humans could evolve to be something like this and solve our climate chaos.

Gaining insight into people thoughts is hard, almost impossible. However, Google stores searches and uses this to predict what others might search for. This is an incredible tool. Here are a couple of examples of the kind of this to expect.

Here are screenshots from Google for what girlfriend expect from their boyfriends and vice-versa.

Another example is how people look for depending on where you are on the world. The first is an example of US searches. The second for searches in India.

Interesting huh?

I’ve been comparing V’s iPhone to my G1 for a while now. If you are wondering who wins, its my old Sony Ericsson dumbphone. If you need a phone that does everything that a phone should do, it does it better than these smarter guys.

The iPhone looks great. You can’t beat how even the worst apps look so good. However, if you want a smart computer in your hands, this isn’t it. Sure you can check email and browse but you can’t background apps, everything is tightly controlled by Apple making it very frustrating for a tech buff like me to appreciate.

The G1 shine in these areas. However, it’s also its pitfall. I’m running cyanogen’s modified ROM. It gives me the latest and greatest in Android releases which I cannot get officially. But I also get random crashes, extreme slowness at times and other quirks that make the phone unusable at times. You could argue I could stick with the standard Google ROM. But then I’m running software that is a year old. Also, by running the official ROM, it does resolve all my issues. I can still run multiple apps in the background. This still makes the 500Mhz processor crawl to a halt at times. Since Android cannot control what apps are good or bad, or how much processing times each app takes up, it ends up making the phone unusable. If I stop all backgrounding apps, the phone is useful again but then, its just the iPhone.

So does iPhone have it right then. Yes and no. The ‘closed’ Apple policy has advantages. It can control things like user experience by blocking on not providing certain features (ie backgrounding, full bluetooth control etc). Users end up with a phone that works well under most circumstances and with ample battery life.

Android provides users with the platform ‘openness’. However, this leads users frustrated with a phone that could potentially run terribly slow or drain the battery within hours of use.

I think Android has the right approach. A lot of the problems are limitations of hardware. A faster processor, better battery can go a long way to alleviate the current issues. The openness is a more important aspect to maintain. Early adopters will feel the pain.

In the meantime, if someone has an old SE phone, I’d love to have it.

Fascinating post about how evolution is beyond us.

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15125173

The open sesame post describes a way for password management that is quite effective. However, there are some shortcomings. One, you need software which means when you don’t have it, you don’t have your password. While this isn’t a problem for most of us who are always online, it’s hard when I’m traveling in India and the concept is free wifi isn’t as common. Another problem is security. Supergenpass, it seems, can get access to your root password if executed on malicious sites. Lastpass stores all your passwords online (encrypted using a root password of your choice) making the prospect uncomfortable for some.

Here is an alternate solution to strong passwords. Come up with a small strong password that is easy to remember. Let say your root password phrase is ‘camelot’. Now come up with a consistent ciphering algorithm.
For example, replace all A’s with @ or all O’s with zeros etc. Capitalize every third letter.

Now, your root password becomes something like ‘c@Mel0t’. Now for each site either prefix or suffix the site name and apply the same ciphering algorithm.

So, if you visit www.google.com, you end up with a password like ‘g00glEc@Mel0t’.

Use this approach to create more replacements or change to rules so you come up with your own. One thing a lot of people might point out though is someone who has access to one password now knows your root password and hence can guess the passwords to all sites. This isn’t entirely true. A lot depends on your scheme. For example, if I need a yahoo password using the scheme above, it becomes ‘y@H00C@mEl0T’. Since the rule was to capitalize every third letter, the root password differs from the google one. Also, since you come up with the rules, you can make them as complicated as you need. For example, capitalize the 3rd letter, if the 3rd letter matches your cipher don’t go the cipher. Using this rule. Your google password becomes ‘g0OglEc@MelOt’ and yahoo becomes ‘y@H00C@mEl0T’. The your google password now starts with ‘g-zero-caps o’ as opposed to ‘g-zero-zero’.

Lets hear your innovate ways to password management sans software.

Online maps and directions are great. However, how does something like this work in India where most streets don’t have names (they probably do) but more importantly most people haven’t the faintest idea what they are.

Well, here is the solution. And it is of course from Google.

http://knol.google.com/k/frank-w-sweet/why-are-europeans-white-e1/k16kl3c2f2au/14#

Anisha was born Dec 6th 17:50pm. Check out her pics. Hopefully, I’ll have time to keep it updated.

Having different passwords for different sites is impossible to remember. One password for all site is a security nightmare. Here is my solution to this.

I use SuperGenPass. This cool little javascript is a bookmarklet that can be run on any site you visit to generate a unique password. It uses a combination of a user provided password and the site domain name to generate a strong unique password.

One advantage is that I only need to remember one password to generate unique passwords for any site. Also, the unique password is the same throughout the domain. Another advantage is that I don’t need internet access to generate the password since the javascript is run locally rather than remotely. So I have access to my passwords even if I am not online.

There are some shortcomings as well. One quite serious issue is that it currently does not use special characters to generate passwords. Special characters in passwords make it exponentially harder to break rather than just using letters and numbers. Another problem is that certain sites have limitation on passwords; ie. no longer than 8 characters or disallow certain characters etc. This means that the generated password will need to be modified to work for the site which makes it harder for you the remember it when you revisit. This really is a site issue and not a supergenpass issue. Sites should not restrict passwords, especially strong passwords. It also seems like it is possible for a site to get access to your private password even though the javascript is run locally. You can read about that particular issue here

A combination of SuperGenPass and Lastpass is possibly the ideal solution. Run supergenpass on a site you trust to generate your password. Enter the password on the desired site and sign up. Let lastpass remember that password for future use.