Carl Mercier’s blog

One of the things I’ve been missing a lot since I switched to OS X is an easy way to find files on my hard drive based on certain criterias. HoudahSpotHoudahSpot does just that, and does it well! I highly recommend it!

MacZOT.com is having a great promo for HoudahSpot right now, so check it out! You might get it for free.

Here’s a great article by one of my favorite writers, Guy Kawasaki, about how to reproduce what Silicon Valley is. I think Guy’s article, along with “How to be Silicon Valley” by Paul Graham pretty much sums it up.

So… why isn’t Montreal like Silicon Valley. To me, it’s fairly obvious:

• People are not driven. Nobody wants or even thinks about taking the risk of starting a company (and possibly failing). Quebecers like this 9 to 5 job, and they fear entrepreneurship. (Note that I said they and not -we- since I think I belong to the entrepreneur category!)
• There’s no elite engineering school. None. Nada. Every engineering school is average or plain bad compared to MIT or Stanford (or to most good American colleges).
• Success is not recognized in Quebec. Not only ain’t it recognized, rich and successful people are automatically believed to be crooks. “How could this guy buy this BMW? He must have ripped off someone off real bad or he must be selling crack!” As weird as it might sound, thats exactly how it is here.

I believe the first logical step would be to educate people about this thing called “entrepreneurship” and not to fear success. This alone won’t make Montreal the next Valley, but it sure won’t hurt.

One of the things I missed the most since I moved to OS X from XP was RoboForm. For those of you who don’t know what RoboForm is, it’s an advanced password manager for Internet Explorer and Firefox. It saves (and encrypts) your passwords on disk, handles multiple accounts per website and so on. (Yes, it is -much- better than what’s built in Firefox!) Having account at so many websites, RoboForm is something I could barely live without. Unfortunately, RoboForm is for Windows only and they have no plan for a Mac version anytime soon.

Life was hard until the day I found out about a new Mac application called 1passwd. It is similar to RoboForm, but SO MUCH BETTER! First of all, it is very lightweight (ie: not bloated) and extremely easy to use. However, the best thing about 1passwd is surely the team behind it. They quickly reply to e-mail inquiries, and take user suggestions very seriously. In fact, they implemented -all- my suggestions within one week! That’s including the most important one, being able to import my Roboform “Passcards”.
1passwd seemlessly integrates with OS X’s keychain and currently supports Safari and Firefox. It also comes with a standalone software to manage your different accounts at different websites. Another great thing about it is that it can generate random passwords for you.

Even if they are still in Beta (everbody is, I guess), their product is seems very reliable. I do not hesitate to recommend it to anyone serious about keeping their passwords safe. If you download the beta now, they’ll even give you a discount code for purchasing the final version! So, there’s no reason not to try it out (and not to switch to OS X )!