2014 is "The Year of Code"

In the United Kingdom, the government has named 2014 the “Year of Code” and has started a campaign to prepare all schools in the country to start teaching children to program computers from the start of the next school year in September 2014. Prior to then, all teachers have to ensure they have the right training themselves to be able to teach computer programming.  Extra money has been promised from central government to support this initiative.

The UK government is responsible for setting out a national curriculum, which most schools have to follow when devising their lesson plans for the year.  In September 2014 coding will be introduced to the UK school timetable for every child aged 5-16 years old, making the UK the first major G20 economy in the world to implement this on a national level. This is a landmark policy change that will arm a generation of school-leavers with the skills for the 21st century, and “Year of Code” wants them to make the most of this first class opportunity.

“Year of Code” is an independent, non-profit campaign to encourage people across the country to get coding for the first time in 2014. Through code, people can discover the power of computer science, changing the way they think about, and get the most out of, the world around them.

The campaign will be banging the drum for all the fantastic coding initiatives taking place over the course of year and wants to help many more people engage with technology and access important training opportunities.

Over the course of the year the “Year of Code” website will signpost national and community tech events, crowdsource funding to help parents, pupils and educational organisations. It will commission detailed polling and analysis on how to take coding far and wide.

More on this campaign can be found at: www.yearofcode.org

What do you think of this? Do you feel that more schools should be teaching our children how to program computers? Why do you think this might be important?

This is an example of a youngster who taught himself to program and made a lot of money from his skills.

British teenager Nick D’Aloisio, taught himself to code at the age of 12, and created an application program called Summly while revising for his mock GCSEs in 2011. He made $30 million from selling it to Yahoo! in March 2013. At the age of 18, D'Aloisio is now a product manager at Yahoo! The app has been rebranded Yahoo! News Digest. The new app will give users news summaries twice a day. Each summary is comprised of nine stories, with each article constructed from multiple sources, which will feature tweets, videos and maps.

Here is another example of a youngster with big ideas.

Jack Kim learned to write HTML code at school and immediately decided to create Benelab, a search engine that earns money for charity.  His company only employs youngsters, all staff members are aged 17, and it has already donated thousands of dollars to numerous charities. Kim aspires to donate $100,000 before graduation.

This isn’t to say that everyone will have great business success simply because they can code, but it does open up opportunities that you might not otherwise have had.

Why you need a safe password and how to create one

How easy is it for you to remember your computer’s Windows logon password? Does it even have one? How about the password you use for your online bank account? Are the two passwords the same or are they different? And how many online services do you use? How many have unique passwords? If you are like most people, who have trouble remembering their phone numbers, how (you might ask) are you supposed to remember all of your different passwords? Why not use the same password everywhere?

The main problem with using the same password for everything is that if someone finds out what your password is, they can potentially log in to your email account as you, and your banking service as you.

What security consultants recommend is that you use a unique password every time you create an account that requires a password to keep it secure. AND DON’T WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORDS

ANYWHERE! This is all very well, but when I worked as a PC support guy in a bank, I had to support 40 different systems. It took me a long time to successfully remember the password for each one.  Until I had an idea.

A safe password strategy

How DO you set about creating a safe, memorable but unique password for every service you use? A safe password needs to have these features:

• It should be a mixture of lower and upper case letters
• It should contain one or more numbers
• It should contain a punctuation character

First of all, think of a phrase that you can easily remember. Example: “Barney and Paul are my two kids’ names” – you need your own phrase not this one!

Secondly, take the first letter of each word in that phrase. Example: BaPamtkn

Thirdly, substitute an ampersand for any use of the word “and”. Example: B&Pamtkn

Now, change to a numeric each number in the phrase or add a number on the end. Example: B&Pam2kn

This is the “base” of your future passwords. Whenever you need a password for a service, start it off with the “base” and then add two letters from the name of the service you are using. Always choose the same two letters for each service, either the first two letters of the name or the first letter of each word in the name.

Examples: American Express might be “AE” or “AM”, Google Mail might be “Go” or “GM”. How you choose which letters is important as that is the only difference between your passwords.

So in our examples, the full password might be B&Pam2knAE and B&Pam2knGo.  How long would it take someone to guess those?

The beauty of this system is that you only have to remember your easily-remembered phrase and you can have a unique password for everything. The qualifier, or suffix you add on the end, is taken from the name of the service you are logging in to. So easy, so unbreakable.

Why not give this a go for yourself and see how easy it is?