Recent news point that Facebook will be adding QRCodes to user profiles, which means that QRCodes may *finally* go mainstream in the US, almost 8 years later than Japan.

Since that is really such a big deal for the future of the interwebs, I thought I'd pull out from my trunk of 'I'm not sure why I did this, but maybe someone out there finds it useful'.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you QRType . Yes! You can now generate QRcodes, as you type. Isn't that amazing?

Props go to Kazuhiko Arase, for the great QRcode Library that my dumb implementation uses.

Having just discovered that my car actually had a little black, data-recording box, an On-board diagnostics, computer, that logs a ton of info about engine performance, I decided I'd take a little time to do a little research and see how could I tap on that data. Not that I want to go race my car anywhere - considering my friends call me 'grandma' whenever I get on the road - that'd probably be the last thing I'd ever think about doing.

I'm actually interested in

1. Being more aware on how everything is going under the hood
2. Maximizing fuel economy.

Pwdmkr is a simple and safe password generator. If you are conscious about the huge danger of using the same username and password throughout different services on the web, never knowing how or where your passwords are stored, pwdmkr is for you.

In most cases passwords are actually stored in cleartext, meaning if one of those services database gets compromised, or if you happen to give your password to a sketchy website, you are, pretty much... hosed. The hacker, or admin with bad intentions will simply try your username and password in a series of other services, and once someone gains access to your email, it's bye bye to your online identity. (and all the other stuff you stored throughout the web).

pwdmkr is not the ultimate solution to passwords, however, it adds an extra layer of security to keep your online stuff safe. Generated passwords are secure, using a good combination of characters that makes brute force attacks many times harder. It also generates a unique password for each website you require one, meaning if that website gets hacked and your password compromised, you don't risk all your other accounts dominoing down.

This is not a unique or novel idea, many have already built similar stuff. I just took this a step further and focused on making it Simple, and usable, while making sure that, none of the info you use to create a password is cached or stored in memory in absolutely no way.

Hope you find it useful!

Visit the app over at pwdmkr

Blueprint is a plugin for Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Flash Builder 4 that allows users to query for Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash code examples found on the Web directly inside of the development environment.

Blueprint is the result of just a fraction of all the research work of Joel Brandt, Ph.D. candidate at Stanford's HCI group. Joel came in to Adobe as an intern last year, the idea for this project was born. Only in the very last bits of his research a couple of months ago we actually started coding it. I worked on the Design, engineering and front end development of the plugin. Of course, this project could not have been done without the immense help of Mira Dontcheva and Ivan Cavero Belaunde.

Read about this project in this technical report on Blueprint (PDF Link) and learn more about Stanford's HCI group work on Opportunistic Programming.

Get Blueprint

QueryBox allows you to easily create a Live Search Input form that lets users search and refine a query while continuously showing all valid results as they type.