Category: Technology

Web based password manager

Does anyone know of a good web based password manager? I’m inclinced to hack up my own, but I wanted to dig around a little bit first.

Password management has always been an issue with me — there are just way too many passwords to remember, and even though I’m usually lazy and end up using one of 2-3 passwords in most places, I still need to remember login names (why can’t websites explicitly mention that they use email addresses as logins). And sometimes I do create new passwords, which are just impossible to remember.

I’m sure someday we will move away from text based encryption schemes and have some funky audio/visual passwords which won’t require me to remember arbitrary strings of text. But that day is not today, and so I need some solution. Traditionally I’ve been using applications on my desktop to keep track of my passwords (my own Starfish, Revelation etc) and that has scaled nicely so far.

But now its getting out of hand. With all the Web2 hype, new and interesting startups come up on a daily basis. All of them need your email address and password. I have more than 5 GMail accounts. Several bugzilla accounts. Credit cards. Insurance companies. Banks. Airlines. Portals. Passwords, passwords and more passwords. Thanks to spam, now you need some kind of authentication mechanism to get to anything useful on the web. So my list of usernames and passwords is becoming unmanageably long.

Starfish and Revelation were fine, but I would have to sync my password files across systems. But when I was travelling without my laptop, I’d be stuck — so I do need a web front end. Besides, this seems to me the kind of web-app almost everyone needs. So how come I haven’t seen a cool AJAX-ified web based password management tool yet?

Any takers?

test docuwiki


DokuWiki supports **bold**, //italic//, __underlined__ and ”monospaced” texts.

DokuWiki supports multiple ways of creating links. External links are recognized
automagically: http://www.google.com or simply www.google.com – You can set
Linknames, too: [[http://www.google.com|This Link points to google]].

* This is a list
* The second item
* You may have different levels
* Another item

– The same list but ordered
– Another item
– Just use indention for deeper levels
– That’s it

| ^ Heading 1 ^ Heading 2 ^
^ Heading 3 | Row 1 Col 2 | Row 1 Col 3 |
^ Heading 4 | no colspan this time | |
^ Heading 5 | Row 2 Col 2 | Row 2 Col 3 |

-> <- <-> => <= <=> >> << -- --- 640x480 (c) (tm) (r)
"He thought 'It's a man's world'..."

Why beamer?


I finally got around to writing [[http://floatingsun.net/articles/why-latex-beamer.html|another article]] in my “Why?� series—in this one, I talk about why I make all my presentations using [[http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/|LaTeX Beamer]].

iPod Shuffle sucks

Hey I’m not saying it, but I saw it myself.

Ragesh bought an iPod Shuffle, and got it two days back. Poor fellow, he was so excited in his anticipation, but it turned out to be the greated anti-climax. Beat this — he has not been able to use Shuffle with his laptop yet!

It seems that the Shuffle has not really been designed to run in a plug-n-play fashion with all laptops. And Ragesh’s is a very regular laptop — a Dell Inspiron 8600 running good old Windows XP. The problem? Nothing happens when he puts in the Shuffle, nothing at all! Hell even my laptop (running Debian) recognizes it as an iPod and automatically mounts it as a storage device. But his Windows just sits there, as if nothing had happened.

And its not just his laptop. First we thought maybe something was wrong with his USB or something. But then we tried it with my old laptop too, and same result — no recognition. And bear in mind that all this is after spending 15 minutes installing all of the iPod software and rebooting twice in the process. (for comparison, on my laptop, it worked out of the box. And it seems the latest version of gtkpod and gnupod-tools are going to support Shuffle)

Eventually, Ragesh had to go to a friend and use his Mac to the damn thing working. So now he has uploaded some songs, but he has to keep listening to those same few songs over and over again (which perfectly suits him by the way) until he goes to some Mac again; or finds a better solution. Oh, and did I mention: the first time Shuffle didn’t work, we thought it was broken and so Ragesh went to the Apple store and got it replaced, and even they didn’t have a clue!

Bottomline: iPod Shuffle sucks!