Calculating a Password’s Strength

Password entropy predicts how difficult a given password would be to crack through guessing, brute force cracking, dictionary attacks or other common methods. Entropy essentially measures how many guesses an attacker will need to make to guess your password. As computing power increases, the amount of time required to guess passwords decreases, in many cases significantly especially…

The Bubble Sort

The Bubble Sort is one of the simplest sorts you can write, from a developer’s perspective. Unfortunately, it is one of the slowest to run from the computer’s perspective. A bubble sort works on the following idea. Given a list of values, start at the top value and look at the next value. If the…

Binary Search

If our data is pre-sorted then a binary search starts to make a lot of sense. It is like the guessing game we mentioned earlier where you need to find a number between 1 and 100. No one asks for 1, then 2, then 3… until they find it. Instead we ask for the mid…

Brute Force Searching

Now in some cases, we’ll use a brute force method of searching. This is slow and inefficient from a run-time perspective. However, it is relatively fast to write. With a brute force search, you scan through every item in a list until you find the element. Why use Brute Force As you can imagine, scanning…

Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions, often called RegEx, is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern to run against another string of data. This is often used to perform a find and replace or check for validation. Different languages apply regular expressions differently. The strictest use the full range of special characters and commands, while others…

Problems with XML

XML was designed to be a be-all end-all data format. However there have been issues that have arisen from its use. Strict Implementations I’ve seen more than once where companies requesting data be sent via XML were really just text parsing a file. They’d require nodes that were not being used, and not having the…