2008-11-15

Password Composer Mini

For many years, Password Composer has simplified the web immensely for me. It's a nice little bookmarklet/user script/firefox extension that lets you have unique passwords on all sites, while only requiring you to remember a single master password. It does its magic by concatenating your master password with the domain name of the site, and using the first 8 hex chars of the MD5 sum of that string as the password for that site.

From time to time, I have had the need for it on computers where I can't readily install it (e.g. some friend's machine), and sometimes on computers (e.g. hotel lobby PCs) that I distrust enough that I don't even want to enter my master password on the static form version available on the Password Composer website. For those occasions, I've writtena little J2ME thingie I call Password Composer Mini that does the same.

It's one of the first J2ME apps I've completed, and the code is entirely uninteresting, apart from the MD5 implementation that I pilfered from the J2ME version of Fast MD5. The interesting parts were writing a Makefile for building J2ME code and learning enough of Bazaar to do release management with it. This will serve useful for more interesting things to come later...