Nic Wolff:

I hate passwords. I mean, I don’t mind having really important ones be made-up and memorized but what about all those e-commerce and community sites that want me to create accounts? I end up using the same password at all of them and then I feel stupid knowing that one SQL Server exploit or disgruntled admin could cost me my whole identity.

So, this is a little Javascript program that will concatenate two fields and MD5 them. The idea is that you choose one master password to secure all your others, and then generate passwords for each site, server, router, &c. by putting a completely obvious name for that resource in the “Site name” field.

Here’s a bookmarklet version, which is pretty neat and works now on both http and https sites.

Infoworld’s Jon Udell has posted a cool movie showing how the generator works in practice.

Here’s someone else’s version that uses base64 encoding instead of hex to fit more chaos into 8 characters.

If you are like most people, you have one password for every login account you use. Easy to remember, right? Also easy to steal your stuff (if someone cracks your password open).

Gina Trapani has some good advice on how to choose and remember multiple passwords.

Gina Trapani:

If anything can be said about Windows Vista, it’s that it’s real pretty. I’ve been running the Beta Preview for several weeks, and now that we’ve got the pixellage to do so, a screengrab tour of Vista is in order. [Click the picture below], come admire, mock and critique the Vistage in all its high-resolution glory.

Click the image above to take the tour.