Worst Passwords for 2011

Mashable compiled this list of the most commonly used passwords on the Internet for 2011. Do any of them look familiar to you? :P

1. password
2. 123456
3.12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1
10. dragon
11. baseball
12. 111111
13. iloveyou
14. master
15. sunshine
16. ashley
17. bailey
18. passw0rd
19. shadow
20. 123123
21. 654321
22. superman
23. qazwsx
24. michael
25. football

11.11.11

Numerologists and geeks today are having a field day today. This will be the only 11/11/11 that we will have in our lifetime (the next one will be 2111 already).

On a bright note, Gmail is back to "normal". For several months, most of my outbound mail has been bouncing back to me. The Gmail filters seem to think I'm a spammer for some reason. It has rendered my Gmail account almost useless and I had to install Thunderbird just so I can send out email via Mozcom's SMTP. Thank goodness somebody there must have fixed something.

But on a sad note, Google announced that they will be shutting down Google Notebook by year-end. Its not exactly a popular app, but next to Gmail, its my most-used Google product! Its kinda like Microsoft One-Note. Its like notepad and is great for unstructured data. Now Google will be migrating all Google Notebook content into Google Docs (which I'm actually not that big of a fan).

Toothache

I've been suffering from a really bad toothache in my inner left molar the past couple of days.  Since its a national holiday today in observance of a Muslim celebration, I went to see the dentist beside Ilene's nail space at QC.

When I got there, she confirmed my worst fear -- I needed to get a root canal!  However, since its currently inflamed, she cannot perform the procedure yet.  The infection need to subside first.  She cracked the cap covering that tooth and bore holes onto the damaged tooth to let it "singaw".  I didn't realize rotten tooth can smell so bad.  The stink permeated the entire room.

Once the pressure has been relieved by the removal of the cap, I finally feel a whole lot better.  But I'm not exactly looking forward at the inevitable root canal procedure itself.

Steve Jobs

Much have already been said about the recent death of Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder. I don't really have much to add. I admire him for what he has done for the tech industry, movies (Pixar), music (iTunes, iPod), typography (fonts), telecommunications (iPhone), etc. Young and Simon's iCon is one of the best biographies I've ever read.

But strangely -- I've never been an Apple fan. I've bought an iPod for Cols before, but that's it. I don't personally own any Apple product myself. I have never lusted for an iPhone. I bought a Samsung Galaxy Android phone instead. I have no plans of getting an iPad, but a Galaxy Tab is in my shopping list this month-end at Singapore. I do love Pixar movies though.

I cannot deny the fact though that products like the Android phones or the Galaxy Tab would not have seen the light of the day were it not for Steve Jobs' creations.

Database Mishap

My database file has been growing big making backups rather slow. I decided to delete old records but things took an unexpected downward turn when I punched in the wrong query. What I wanted was:

delete from table1 where (cond1 or cond2) and cond3;

But the problem was I did not include the parenthesis and that completely changed the logic:

delete from table1 where cond1 or cond2 and cond3;

Crap! Had to spent the whole day restoring lost records. Luckily, my daily backups actually work. I was able to restore all data as of 2am. Just had to reconstruct the last few hundred records from 2am to around 11am when the disaster happened.

Thank goodness too for FBExport which significantly helped in the reconstruction. I should look more into this tool for doing incremental backups. The default gbak utility does not have that capability making backups of large Firebird files over-the-network really slow.

GMail Sucks

I never thought the day would come when I would say this, but -- I hate GMail! It seems that the GMail guys recently made lots of adjustments on their system to prevent spammers from taking advantage of their resources. But in the process, it has affected a lot of users including myself.

For the past 3 days, almost all my outgoing mail is being tagged as spam and is bounced back to me. I can receive incoming email without problems, but I can hardly reply to any of them. And the worst part is, after so many failed attempts in a day, my account got locked up for 24 hours!

So now I installed Mozilla Thunderbird and just configured it for IMAP with my GMail account. Then for my SMTP server, I just pointed it to Mozcom's SMTP so I can send out email. Its taking forever to synchronize the mailboxes though since I've been using GMail for years.

More Philippine Bank Codes

I tried to do an online fund transfer today from my Unionbank account to a client's HSBC account. When I checked the dropdown list, there was no HSBC but there was a "Hongkong Bank". Since I was not sure if it was one and the same, I called up Unionbank's Customer Service hotline. The phone rep put me on hold for a couple of minutes while she verified the info. She came back and told me that they are not the same.

I looked at the HTML code of the Unionbank Retail Internet Banking fund transfer page and it shows the different bank codes assigned to each item. I noticed that Hongkong Bank has a code of 010060014. I blogged a couple of years back about the possible bank codes that can be used when withdrawing money from PayPal to a bank account. I noted in that blog entry that based on Citibank's fund transfer page, code 010060014 belongs to HSBC.

Still not convinced, I decided to call a friend who works at HSBC and he confirmed that, a long time ago, HSBC was known simply as Hongkong Bank in the Philippines. So it seems that the Unionbank lady is mistaken.

Here's the bank code listing I got from Unionbank's page:

010770074 --- ABN AMRO
010320013 --- Allied Bank
010700015 --- ANZ Bank
011020011 --- Asia United Bank
010530667 --- Banco de Oro
010760013 --- Banco Santander Phil.Inc
010030015 --- Bangko Sentral
010670019 --- Bangkok Bank
010120019 --- Bank of America
011140014 --- Bank Of China (Manila)
010440016 --- Bank of Commerce
010040018 --- Bank of the Philippine Islands
010460012 --- Bank of Tokyo
010720011 --- Chase Manhattan Bank
010100013 --- China Bank
010690015 --- Chinatrust Commercial Bank
010070017 --- Citibank, N.A.
010650013 --- Deutsche Bank
010590018 --- Development Bank of the Phils.
010620014 --- East-West Bank
010130012 --- Equitable-PCI Bank
010860010 --- Export and Industry Bank
010169999 --- First E-Bank Corporation
010640010 --- Fuji Bank
010509999 --- Global Bank
010060014 --- Hongkong Bank
010560019 --- Intl Comml Bank of China
010660016 --- Intle Nederlanden Bank
010710018 --- Korea Exchange Bank
010350025 --- Land Bank
010220016 --- Maybank Philippines, Inc.
010269996 --- MetroBank
010110016 --- Phil. Bank of Communication
010080010 --- Philippine National Bank
010090039 --- PhilTrust Bank
010150018 --- Prudential Bank
010280014 --- RCBC
010140015 --- Security Bank
010050011 --- Standard Chartered Bank
010299995 --- UCPB
010270189 --- United Overseas Bank Phils.
010330016 --- Veterans Bank