I recently stumbled across a useful site for increasing security awareness. The Password Strength Checker evaluates the submitted password. The use is intuitive.

Sure, when a password is declared as strong, then it is strong. I played a little bit with. I discovered that my Firefox master key was 74%, my account password was 70%, and my password for this blog was only 30%!

When examining the poor result of this last password (rather long), I find that I was not in total agreement with the rationales of the penalties. Consecutive upper case letters, lower case letters or numbers are “penalized”. Intuitively, I would think that systematically you recommend to avoid consecutive upper case, lower case or numbers would give an advantage in brute force. If I select a upper case, then in brute forcing next character, I would avoid to use an upper case. It reduces (slightly) the space of passwords.

Nevertheless, a nice useful tool.