Scientific Computing: Useful tool.

"Wolfram Alpha is an astonishingly powerful piece of software that helps you find nearly any piece of factual information you could want" (read more at: http://www.businessinsider.com/wolfram-alpha-2011-10). It can be used to answer many different types of problems ranging from what temperature the weather is in Timbuktu to your Calculus homework. However, it is still a work in progress as it is not smart enough to answer any questions you ask it because of the enormous difficulty involved in interpreting the text a user enters into it. However, there is no need to be upset when Wolfram Alpha says that it does not understand your question as Wolfram Alpha has an example page: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ for this purpose.

And so if we wanted to find the format we need to use for double integrals problems we can click on the 'Calculus' link beneath the 'Mathematics' text and image. From there we can click on the 'Integrals >>' button. Once there we can do a simple search in our web browser to find the format we need for a double integral problem which is:

int (x^2 y^2 + x y^3) dx dy, x=-2 to 2, y=-2 to 2

which gives us an answer of:

256/9

And then we can compare use Wolfram Alpha to solve one that we did by hand to make sure that we got the right answer in the case that we are working on is in a textbook that only has answers to the odd numbered problems.

Computer Graphics: How you are helping out.

The above image is a figure I'm sure most of us are familiar with as we have to fill them out in sites to make accounts or post comments. And whenever I see one I get a little worked up as I know I'm probably going to fail entering the correct values on the first try for whatever reason. In any case it is a good system as it stops spammers from spamming webpages since computer software is currently not smart enough to be able to decipher the above image as text. And that's because of the nature of how text is written without any consistency due to text being spaced differently for any number of reasons. On the other hand, there is consistency in the letters you are reading right now since each letter is exactly the same as the previous version due to the way computer programs display the letters we type.

And to go further into what the above image is, it is "reCAPTCHA [which] is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows." (read more at: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore). And what this means is that by solving these CAPTCHAs you are helping out programs in their conversion process of images into text so that all books can be available online in the future so that we do not lose them as in the case of the burning of the Library of Alexandria in which a considerably amount of knowledge was lost due to a lack of additional copies of works.

Communications and Security: How to make good passwords.

Coming up with good passwords is the best way to keep your files secure. But what makes a good password? The first link on a Google search  for "how to make a good password" gave me: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-strong-password-forget/ which suggests what a lot of websites I've made accounts for in the past suggested for making my password a strong one. And some suggestions for making a strong password that makeuseof lists is that your password should "contain special characters and numbers", "a mix of upper and lower case letters", and the use of random mixing in your substitution of letters like "B", or "b" for "8". And this advice seems rock solid since so many different sites regurgitate (and enforce) that these tips make your passwords strong.

But in reality these kinds of passwords are terrible because they are hard to remember. So you will most likely resort to writing down your password down on a piece of a paper so that you can log on to any of  your various accounts. This is bad because if you lose that piece of paper you will lose access to all of your accounts since you can't remember any of them due to all the mixing and matching of letters.

xkcd: Password Strength Comic

So what actually makes a good password? Good passwords are the ones that are long and easy to remember like 'correctbatteryhorsestaple' from http://xkcd.com/936/. These kinds of passwords are strong since they have a large number of characters which means that a cracker's password program will have to guess more characters combinations to get access into your accounts. However, many crackers probably employ dictionary attacks with random combinations of 3 or 4 words to guess your passwords, so it's probably still a good idea to mix up some of the letters you use  in your password to give yourself some extra security.