Jamas

Ottawa Restaurants

If you are in Ottawa or are coming for a visit there is a good collection of restaurants to choose from.  Some of my favourites are Beckta – very fine dinning and Sitar – yummy Indian food.

I have been accused of being too positive in my reviews of things so if you want expert advice then check out Anne DesBrisay’s Ottawa restaurant review site capitaldining.ca.  Anne – besides being my cousin – has been the Ottawa Citizen restaurant critic for over 10 years.  Her site offers a collection of her most recent reviews and a few interesting news items about the Ottawa food scene.

Free Collector Cards From Mint.ca

Every once in a while the Canadian Mint comes out with a nice collector card to a circulation coin set they are about to release.  There are limited numbers so you have to act quick if you here about it.  Right now it is the Vacouver 2010 card but there are none left. Regardless here is the link for future reference.

Mint.ca

Picking a good password

Security and privacy of information on the Internet is all over the news these days.  Yet I am still amazed at how little the general public knows about selecting a good password.  So if you have an online email account (Google, Hotmail) or a social networking page (Facebook, MySpace) then please take a moment to look at the list of things you should do to make a secure password.

  • First off please don’t use your middle name, street name, city, favourite spot, dog, cat, kids, etc.  This are easy for people you know to guess.  Some of the informaiton can also be found online, like you address on Canada411.
  • A common trick is to pick a phrase you like and use the first letter of each work to create a password.  For example, from the movie Austin Powers “Why must I be surrounded by frickin’ idiots“, would give you the password WmIbsfi.
  • Mix up the cases.  Notice in the example above I used a capital “W” and “I” in the password.
  • Add some number to the beginning or end.  Like your weight or shoe size.  Now the example password is  WmIbsfi11.
  • Finally if the site you are using lets you add one or two special characters in.  You can do this by adding something at the end or beginning.  Better yet replace certain letters with a special character.  For example make an “s” a “$” and an “a” a “@”,  the example password is now WmIb$fi11.

So simple and now you have something that would be next to impossible to guess.

I know remembering several passwords can be a tax so people will often have a favourite that they use for everything.  Can I at least suggest creating two good passwords.  Use one for all your ultra secure needs like banking and Paypal, basically anything that will cost you money or severe headache if someone gets into it.  Use the other for all your fun stuff like Facebook or Hotmail.  This way you aren’t likely to accidently give some web page access to your money.

Final thing (I have been told I write too much), if you are saving passwords on your home machine via Firefox then please go enable the Master Password.  It will stop someone who uses you machine from being able to login to your accounts.  To set up a Master Password goto Tools->Options… then in the pop up window pick Security tab.  Hit the checkbox for Use a master password.  It will prompt you to enter a Master Password.  Make it a good one!  Now everytime you first start your browser up and go to a site for which you have a saved password then it will prompt you for your Master Password.  Just remember that if you then leave your computer with the browser running anyone can access to saved password sites.

Firefox 3 is here

Well sadly this post should have been made several weeks back, but summer is here in Canada which means sitting in front of a computer is the last thing on my mind.

So if you missed it Firefox 3 is out.  If you are running Firefox 2 at the moment, check Help->About Mozilla Firefox, then you need to upgrade.  Sorry this is not something that Firefox will do on its own.  So go here to get the latest version.

There are many new features in version 3 that I am sure you will like.  By far my favourite has been the changes to the URL bar, now called the Smart Location Bar.  This is the bar that displays the current sites URL.

In the past you could use the URL bar to jump to a page that you had already been to by starting to enter the sites URL.  This was ok but I rarely used it and often it was hard to remember the sites URL, even with the browser trying to guess based on what you had entered.

Well in version 3 the URL bar has become my most oftened used interface to find a site.  I rarley have to got to my bookmarks or into my history to find my most often used sites.  Instead of matching on the URL of the site the locaiton bar matches on the page title and other meta information from the site.  So you type “news” and up comes the list of all the news sites you visit.  It also learns by what in the list you click on.  Your most common choices will be at the top of the list.  Very cool.

Other features to try:

  • One click bookmarking just click the star on the end of the location bar.  Fast!
  • You can also tag your bookmarks to make finding them in the location bar faster.
  • Smart bookmark folders, if you are familiar with iTunes Smart Playlists then this is the same idea, by default the new version has Most Visited as an example.

There are a lot more but that should get you started.  I am looking forward to Thunderbird 3!