From consumerist.com comes this article which goes into a full review of the changes and value of purchasing the Geek Squad PC Optimization package when you purchase a new computer at Best Buy. The article describes the steps taken and the results compared to buying an un-optimized computer.

It's kind-of a long read, but the detail it provides is rather eye opening.

I came across Last.fm last week or so. It allows you to play music for free. There are apps for iPhone and Android so you can listen via those devices also. But you define your favorite artists across different genres and Last.fm will provide recommendations of music you might like. For example, if you make one of your preferred artists say Trace Adkins, there is a link called "Listen to Trace Adkins Radio" and that will play music from Trace Adkins and also other artists like Trace Adkins. It's very cool and allows you to find music you otherwise wasn't aware of. As tracks are played you have the option of purchasing the track, tagging it, sharing it or send a ringtone to your cell phone. As you listen to different tracks they are added to your Library which you can then listen to.

There are way too many features of Last.fm to describe here plus I don't know what a lot of the features are for, but the whole premise is that as you listen to music, comment, tag, mark and search tracks everything is kept track of and the options seem to grow over time and use. The best part about all of this is the price, it's free! So, if you like to listen to music and don't feel like using iTunes or some other tool running locally on your PC or you're just tired of your music collection then Last.fm is probably for you.

While looking to see if I could find some kind of emulator for mobile browsers I came across BrowserShots.org. This is a tool which allows you to select browser versions to test your website with. Once the test is done screen shots of the results are published on a web page that you can look at and then download all the screen shots. It takes a little while to run, but it seems to do what it advertises. Best of all, it's a free service!

Today Bob Balfe posted about his top 10 Open Source developer tools, so I thought I would follow suit. Here are my top 10 open source developer tools not in any particular order:

• Eclipse - This is a great open source programming tool. With it's many plug-ins you can develop in just about any language. I use it for Java, PHP, HTML, CSS and SQL programming. As Bob mentioned there are several commercial applications built on top of Eclipse and I thought I would mention another such as XMind
• TextWrangler - This is a feature rich text editor which has formatting capabilities for most web languages. It's a great tool to just look at something real quick when you don't need a full on IDE
• XMind - This is a great Mac OS X mind mapping package. While any mind mapping software is very useful for laying out the goals, requirements and steps needed to produce an application, I showcase XMind because it is for the Mac
• Ditto - This is an application that runs in the background and captures everything you copy to the clip board. No more need to open a text editor to paste the things you copy so you don't loose it. I find this tool invaluable and use it daily. Not to mention, it's great to copy something I'm changing and then if I screw it up I've got a backup readily at hand, but this one is Windows only. For Mac the only one I've found that's worth anything is QuickSilver but it's kind of heavy duty just for the clip board manager, I never could get into all the keyboard shortcuts
• The Gimp - This is an outstanding image editor. If you don't want to fork out the cash for Photoshop, the Gimp is the best alternative
• WinMerge - This is a differencing and merging tool for windows. It allows you to compare the text of 2 different sources. This is an invaluable tool for finding the difference between two Text, PHP, Java or HTML files. However, this one is Windows only. For Mac take a look at DiffMerge
• Firefox - An outstanding open source browser, combine it with Fire Bug and the Web Developer plugin and you've got a very powerful web development tool
• Balsamiq Mockups - This is a great low fidelity prototyping tool. While this isn't really open source I'm listing it here because you can use the web based version or the trial. It doesn't allow you to do some things, but it will work
• DimDim Web Conferencing - While not really on par with GoToMeeting it will work for screen sharing. You can't take control of a remote machine with it, but for getting several people together to look at a computer screen it's hard to beat. You can also setup your own DimDim server, however the support for this is very much lacking, I never could get it to work as I tried just for something to do one rainy weekend
• Google - This is an invaluable tool for finding solutions to problems, inducing ideas and finding new techniques to try

Some honorable mentions that may/may not be open source:

• All the Elgugi Software Products - These are great tools for a development shop, driving ideas, features, collaboration and community knowledge
• W3Schools.com - A very good reference for CSS, HTML and Javascript
• ColourLovers - A good resource for coming up with appealing color palettes
• Apple Time Machine - A great backup utility. Can't say how many times it's saved an image or PHP file I screwed up

I know some of the things I listed aren't really open source but may just be free or just great tools that are worth the money. But all of these things I've listed get used a lot on all of my computers and are some of the first things I install on a new computer. So, I hope you enjoy these tools and while you're here, share your "can't do without" tools.

In an LA Times article Google states

We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites

We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.

I know that they say they will continue to support Gears so that it doesn't break applications, but for how long? I don't personally use Gears nor have I written any applications using Gears but I do know some of the Lotus Bubble bloggers have.

I downloaded the Chrome OS image the other day and started playing around with Chrome OS. I installed the image into Virtual Box and it runs fine, I wasn't so lucky with Parallels. So far, the OS is very minimal, not really a whole lot to play with. It's basically just the Chrome browser running everything. If you close all the browser tabs, it relaunches the browser. The OS itself is very clean looking and minimalistic, which seeing as how it's from Google, would you expect anything else? As for the apps, seems that they are only links to web applications but the ability to add more has been disabled, at least from the application menu. I tried adding an icon to the application menu to no avail. There are no right-click contextual menus except your normal browser/web page menu options. As for the speed of the OS, it boots up really fast. I would say only about 5 to 7 seconds from the time I turn on the Virtual Machine until a login screen is presented. Once you login with a google account maybe only another 1 to 3 seconds before you're in the browser ready to work. That kind of start up speed is very impressive and I hope will set the standard for other OSes to follow suit.

There really isn't a whole lot to talk about at this point in time concerning Chrome OS other than I will be following the progress closely as I'm a fan of the Google line of products. But without further ado, here's some screen shots I captured:

[Edit 12/04/2009 - Moved images. Click Read More for images]
Continue Reading...

From Lifehacker today they outline the new Google Maps with turn by turn navigation which will be available on all Android powered phones. This is really cool and should help me find my way quite nicely. If it works as well as shown in the video then it'll be better than the built in GPS in my Wife's vehicle, as long as you stay in a service area for your phone I assume. Hopefully this was thought of when developing it to at least keep giving directions while disconnected by storing the data on your phone somewhere.

From LifeHacker :

Over the weekend someone stumbled onto a Chrome browser build for Chrome OS on Google's servers. We've seen several false-alarm looks at Chrome OS, and while it is only the browser, it provides a glimpse into the direction Google's going.

the Chrome browser would likely be the main, basic windowing system for Chrome OS.

Here's the link for the entire post. I thought this was interesting, plus I think what is said about Google Chrome being the basic windowing system for Chrome OS is a new approach, though I'm not sure how well it would work if you needed to do something that you couldn't/wouldn't normally do on the web. I guess for your basic household chores of paying bills online, reading your online email and basic document editing, Chrome OS would be fine, if the statement above is accurate. But I guess that's probably a big IF.

While working on a request for a customer the other day he had the need for a drop down menu in one of the products I developed for him. Now, I've attempted to do these menus before without much success. I can get it to work in Firefox, Opera and Safari with no problems, but can never get it to work in IE. So, I started searching the web and came across the CSS Menu Generator. This is a very cool tool to use to come up with a CSS driven drop down menu. You pick your template by clicking the customize link underneath the menu you desire to modify and a UI comes up that will allow you to change everything about the menu and even include some pretty cool effects.

For people like me, this is a great tool and cuts out all the crap about trying to get all this to work with IE.

I had been looking for a different software keyboard for my new Android powered phone I spoke about the other day. As I mentioned, the delete key was giving me some problems, actually all the keys along the edge of the screen were giving me issues, which is why I was looking for a replacement keyboard. I just happened across TouchPal while browsing the market and I started reading about it. All the reviews I read were positive so I decided to give it a try. I've been playing with the differences between TouchPal and the default keyboard and I must say that the TouchPal soft keyboard is great. It's predicative word engine is excellent and knows the correct context, plus you can misspell an entire word and it'll still pick up what the word should be. Also, you can choose between 3 different keyboard layouts and many different languages.

Some other features.... You can change the keyboard layout while typing by just doing a horizontal swipe across the keyboard. On the keyboard itself all of the keys also have a symbol underneath the letter/number of which when you press that letter and swipe down, it will enter the alternate symbol or swipe up to capitalize the letter, which is way cool. If you're like me and work with a lot of acronyms you can turn off the dictionary which will allow you to enter those acronyms without the predicative dictionary changing them. If you're not like me and know many different languages, you can switch languages mid sentence with ease, which is also cool.

TouchPal is currently on version 1.0 for Android, but it seems this app has been around a while on palm and windows based devices and is currently in version 4.0 for those devices. This caused me a little bit of confusion at first because I was reading about version 4.0 and the version I had was 1.0. TouchPal is supposed to be free until 9/30/2009, that was yesterday, however as of a few hours ago the app was still free. How long it will be like that is anybody's guess, but if you're interested in this sort of thing you might want to take a look rather quickly. Also if you want to see it in action visit this YouTube video demoing all the features.

My wife got me a T-Mobile myTouch Saturday night as my Blackberry Pearl was starting to show it's age (Thanks Baby!). You know, buttons not working intermittently, loose buttons, been dropped and had a cracked screen on the very edge, etc. Not to mention that since I now work from my home I really have no need for for a blackberry anymore, most of my phone usage now is based on just having a phone with a little bit of fun thrown in now and again. I had been wanting to get an iPhone but really didn't want to deal with AT&T plus we like the service we get from T-Mobile, so I was wanting something comparable to the iPhone. I had done some research on the myTouch and I found mostly favorable reviews and it fit the requirements (i.e. touch screen, good selection of free applications, internet, bluetooth capable and wi-fi capable). I also like the fact that the OS is powered by Google Android and not Palm or Microsoft.

So, my first 24 hours with the myTouch have been very favorable. There are many theme apps available for customizing this phone that are free, of course there are also some pay apps but the price is very reasonable. As for other apps, there are MANY to choose from with most of them being free. The screen is big enough and very clear, but it does wash out and is difficult/impossible to see in bright sunlight (my biggest complaint). I was worried about using the software keyboard also, but that seems to work very nicely with the only issues on the "del" key as it is sometimes hard to get it to recognize a touch. The phone comes with a 4GB Mini-SD memory card, which is a bonus and it being an OS by Google, Gmail (my main email) support is built right in and works wonderfully. Setup was easy and straight forward, since I already had a Gmail account, all I had to do was provide it my login credentials. As for widgets to place on the home screen.... well, I started putting some on the home screen but noticed the more I added the slower the phone operated, so now I only have 2 widgets on the home screen, the Google search widget and a weather widget, as all of my play time is based on what the weather is doing and the Google search widget just makes it really handy for looking up something.

My overall impression with this phone is that I really like it. It meets all of my needs, has a beautiful display, works very well and is very geeky (like me). A bonus to the geeky part of the phone is, none of my other family members want to figure out how to use it . I do see the UI as being a little cumbersome, but like I said, geeky. It is certainly geared towards a technical person, at least that's how it feels but I guess as long as it works for me, that's all that counts. So, if you're in the market for a new phone, check out the T-Mobile myTouch, I bet you'll like it too.

The other day while looking for a Mind Manager replacement I stumbled across XMind. This is an Eclipse based application that has all the features I frequently used in Mind Manager. I had tried using Mind Meister but I just couldn't get past the way you modify your mind map, it just took too long.

But the feature set for XMind is great, it includes many features that you only find in the "pay for" apps. Best of all it's Open Source. Some of the features I've found most useful in starting to migrate to XMind are:

• Import of Mindjet Mind Manager maps, among others
• Using the "Summary" connector - This allows you to group entries with a "}" and add some text to it
• Double-Clicking a connection gives you a text box to provide a description of the connection
• The User Interface is great and easy to use
• Maps are defined as work books which you can add multiple sheets to
• Easy to add custom graphics
• Attach any type of file to the workbook
• It's easy to customize the look and feel of your map
• Floating topics with their own style

Now I know you're saying that this isn't anything new really, and you're probably right. But to find something of this calibur that runs natively on Mac OSX thats also Open Source, to me that's a big deal. But I got to looking and there are versions that run on virtually every operating system out there. But my mind wanders and starts to imagine that since this is Eclipse based, could it possibly be included as a Composite app within Lotus Notes? That may be something that is doable, but I just don't have the time at the moment to investigate it, but I think could be something pretty cool.

My overall impression of XMind is a good one, it's Eclipse based, has a great UI, a rich feature set and is Open Source. So check it out, it's a good tool that fits the bill for a Mind Manager.

The below chat came across my screen stating that it isn't spam. Let's see, it's from someone I don't know and who isn't in my contact list, I didn't ask for the interruption and it's trying to get me to try a product. I would classify this as spam. Some people.

Another cool site pointed out by LifeHacker today. We've got CometDocs. This site will allow you to upload a document in just about any format and convert it to just about any format. Once you upload the document you want to convert and pick the format you want to convert it to it will email a link for you to download the converted document from. It took about 5 minutes after I submitted my conversion (The Lotus Domino 7 Development redbook) to receive the email. Pretty cool!

Cometdocs is a one of its kinds free online document conversion interface that offers a large set of document conversions that can't be found anywhere else online. Its unique features include on the fly OCR conversion capabilities, over 50 different conversion options and proprietary XPS and PDF conversion abilities that retains formatting, images and text in the selected output format. And best of all for users -> it is available free of charge.

Lifehacker pointed me to a cool website this morning that has kind-of been the topic to my last few posts about the Mac. But the website is AlternativeTo.net. It really reminds me of IdeaJam the way it's laid out and operates. But the object of the site is to give alternatives to common software.

AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you're not satisfied with. And the "blog posts" are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.

So, go check it out, it's pretty cool.

I created a class for building the URL for a Google Chart. It's kind-of a simple little class and is only for Line charts, Bar charts and Pie Charts. While the properties will support multiple data sets, the function that builds the actual URL doesn't currently support multiple datasets. Hopefully this will be a future enhancement. I got the initial idea from a post over on Jack Dausman's site after seeing that Google Charts now supports gif images.

But you can find the class in the downloads section of the website over there on the left. Let me know what you think and if you encounter any issues.

EDIT:
Seems I added the wrong .lss file, it didn't include the title and legend stuff. I apologize about that, but the version that was there is functional

OK, we've had the Mac now for exactly a week and since my wife drives into the office I have been using it for my day to day work and I'm still impressed with how well it runs and multitasks. I've made myself an account on the machine so I can install the tools I need, customize the desktop, setup a virtual machine to run Domino 8.5 in, etc. and not affect her OS experience. I'm still having to fight with the keyboard (doesn't have the 10 key keypad) and the Control, Option/alt, fn and Command keys. For those readers that may have just moved to a Mac and can't figure out some of the keys I've come up with this little chart for use in Lotus Notes (running in a terminal window):

Windows Key	Mac Key
Ctrl-Shift	Control-Option-Shift
Home	fn-left arrow
End	fn-right arrow
F9	Can't seem to get any of the F keys to function in Lotus Notes
ctrl-c	Control-c
ctrl-x	Control-x
ctrl-break	??? Someone???
shift-end	fn-shift-right arrow
shift-home	fn-shift-left arrow

I have found some pretty cool tools that I've installed and find useful that work the way they are advertised to work:

• Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 - This lets you connect to a PC running terminal services
• GeekTool - Put text and images on your desktop that refreshes how-ever often you tell it to
• Open Office - The OpenOffice productivity suite
• And of course Firefox - The Firefox browser

I'm also looking for a screen capture program somewhere along the lines of SnagIt and an Image editing program. I was looking at The Gimp but it requires X11 and I'm not sure it's installed or how to use it on the Mac, but I may delve into that at a later date. Are there any apps (preferably Open Source) that you can't do without on your Mac?

After using the huge 24" screen on the Mac it's hard to go back to my 17" dual monitor setup. My monitors are getting old and just aren't as bright and clear as the Mac, not to mention I like all the realestate of the 24" monitor. Working on the Mac, I really want one for myself now...

This past weekend my wife purchased her/our first Mac! She got the 24" 2.66Ghz iMac. Being the tech savy (sic) guy I am I of course had to set it all up to work the way she works, install parallels, boot camp, our network stuff, etc. I must say my initial reaction to the Mac is that I'm very impressed. The screen is huge, bright and everything looks great!

After going through the very short setup routine on first boot, it found all the network servers and workstations on the network. I did have to point it to our network printer, but it automatically selected the proper driver for our device once I put in the IP Address While configuring everything the learning curve wasn't too steep, especially compared to if you were moving to linux from windows. I guess I had the most problems getting used to the universal menu at the top depending on what application you have in the foreground. Talking about whatever application... this thing is a multitasking dream. It just begs you to open up and do several things at once, scatter things all over the desktop and all the while it doesn't skip a beat.

I setup Parallels, installed Windows on it and then had a question on whether or not you could use the same activation key between the Parallels version and Boot Camp version of windows, so I filled out the form to speak to an Apple Expert, once I clicked the submit button my phone rang (before the form could finish submitting), after a hold of about 2 minutes (maybe) I had someone on the line. I asked my question and he walked me through the Boot Camp setup, which took about 40 minutes. He answered all of my questions and showed me a couple of other things. The support I received is second to none that I've ever encountered. As for using the same activation key, I just used the Boot Camp partition as the Parallels drive, no activation required once windows is activated in one place or the other

I also installed Firefox with no problems, except that .dmg file. I couldn't figure out why it kept showing a mount on the desktop whenever I launched Firefox. So, after some messing around I figured out that I wasn't supposed to run Firefox from the .dmg file. So, I deleted that .dmg file, went through the installation process again and used the little "Copy to Applications" dialog widget that pops up and that solved that problem. Same thing for Open Office. Now I'm pretty sure that I didn't have to go through the download of firefox again, but I just didn't know any other way to start over, guess it's part of being a Mac newbie. I've probably got 2 versions of Firefox stashed away somewhere now and just don't realize it :-/

We also purchased a 1TB external Seagate drive to be her Time Machine drive. This was very easy to setup once I hooked it to the iMac. I was wanting to use it as a Network Storage Area by connecting it to my router, but upon trying to set that up I found out the utility that you must use to use the drive, the manufacturer doesn't make a version of it for Mac, not to mention that only one machine can use it at once, so I just connected it right to the iMac

I also imported all of our pictures into iPhoto which went off without a hitch and it kept the folder names as the album names. We haven't had a chance to mess with the pictures in iPhoto yet, but we'll have plenty of time in the future to mess with that. As for importing stuff, I was also able to move all of my wifes's old "My Documents" contents over with no problems, I just can't figure out how to move her bookmarks over, she doesn't keep that many so we may just have to recreate those manually.

Overall, my impression of the Mac is a good one. I'm wanting one for myself now but that'll have to wait a while. Everything I've tried to do, I've been able to figure it out without much help or having to lookup too many things. I did have to lookup how to mount an external partition at login, but that's not too difficult. I guess my biggest difficulty is getting used to the keyboard. The hot keys I'm used to using for windows (copy, cut, paste) seem to be there for the most part, but it just figuring out the difference in terminology on the keys (Command, Option, Control, Fn). From my initial experience I'm thinking this was a great buy, the prices have come down enough for a much better machine that cost about the same amount as a middle of the road PC based laptop, which she doesn't travel for business and doesn't really need a laptop, so this fits the bill. Now, I just need to find an excuse to go play with it some more

Yesterday while poking around on LifeHacker I found this tool. It's called Texter and is pretty cool. From the Texter Homepage:

Windows only: Text substitution app Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define.

For example, lets say you start a new LotusScript agent or something. You start every agent with:
Dim s as New NotesSession
Dim db as NotesDatabase

Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

Well, you can define that as a Hot String and assign it a name like newAgent. Now, create a new LotusScript agent and where you want the above code string type "newAgent" and press the Tab key (or whatever hot key you designate) and the text newAgent is removed and replaced with the above code. Pretty cool!

Was just looking around over on the LifeHacker website and found this article about Zoho Writer 2.0. Other than it appears to be competing with Google Docs I think it looks a lot like Lotus Notes 8.x. Kinda cool.

I don't remember where I read about Balsamiq Mockups this past weekend, but we purchased it and I've been playing with it since. I must say this is a very cool tool that really fits the bill for coming up with a user interface that the customer can modify, criticize or totally revamp to their preference and not feel bad about it.

I've been fighting with a customer on the UI of a certain application and this tool totally fits the bill for showing the consequences of certain changes without having to actually change what I already did. It shows that it's a compromise between looks, function and fit (i.e. screen real estate). There have been several postings about Balsamiq Mockups around the blogosphere that I've mainly overlooked when I read it wasn't free (I know, cheap skate right?). But, after digging on the Balsamiq website, I saw that a desktop license is only $79. That's a great price for such a good tool, especially one geared towards developers because these types of tools are usually very expensive.

I went and downloaded the free version, which does have a nag every 10 minutes and you can't save or export the mockup you do, and was very pleased. If you don't mind the nag you can still save your work as an XML file and then just import the XML the next time you want to make changes to what you were working on, which really isn't all that bad if you can't afford the $79. But let's face it, for such a good tool that will end up saving you time and in some cases money in the long run you would be crazy not to pay the $79.

I think the main benefit of this tool is that what you and the customer come up with can be included in the requirements documentation for whatever it is you're developing. This leaves the customer feeling they played a part in the development and also fosters a sense of ownership. Another big plus is that the customer is completely aware of what they are getting, which in my book is a very big part of customer satisfaction (setting customer expectations).

Go checkout Balsamiq Mockups , I bet you'll be pleasantly surprised by the product

Well, after working with activities for the day, using it to keep track of what I need to do today and tomorrow I really like it. However I have noticed some quirks on both the web side and Notes client side. First the Notes client side:

• Dragging and dropping To-Dos and other items is kind-of flakey
• Right click an email and pick Add To Activity, pick the activity, pick an item within the activity and then clicking OK. This doesn't always work, as a matter of fact was only able to get it to work one time.
• The terminology between the web client and notes client don't match. For example an "Entry" on the web side is a "Message" on the Notes client side
• The To-Do listing checkboxes, you can't just click them to mark them as checked. You have to use the menu item for that

And on the web side:

• Dragging and dropping To-Dos and other items is kind-of flakey
• If you put a To-Do in the wrong spot and that To-Do is within an "Entry" or other "To-Do" then you can't move it. This probably goes to the Dragging and Dropping flakiness

So, I guess looking at things the web interface is much more refined than the notes interface. However, it's still awful handy to have that list at your fingertips in the notes client. Now if I could only get my team mates to use it and we could attempt to track an entire project. In my eyes, this alone would be worth the cost of purchasing and installing Lotus Connections. You can have all your correspondence in one place, be able to add notes documents and emails, discuss items within the activities and keep a constant eye on the progress of things. Heck, this don't even start to cover the benefit of it being easier to find people either.

Last night I started playing around with LotusLive and I must say it's pretty cool. I added Activities to my Notes client and was able to see, edit and work with the activity I added right from my Notes Client. I can see that this is a real game changer for showcasing Lotus Connections, especially in comparison to Microsoft Share Point. The Share Point sites I've seen are no where near this refined or easy to work with. Not to mention all the other products you have to purchase to support Share Point.

Now I imagine that the Bleed Yellow site also has the same functionality that LotusLive is providing seeing as how it's built on Lotus Connections also. Bleed Yellow also seems to have more "social" type features that is serving a larger community and seems to be geared more towards the "personal" side of the Lotus Community where LotusLive is geared more towards small business, as I guess it should be really.

I created an "Activity Template" for deploying an e-commerce website which seemed to be fairly intuitive. Within an activity you have the Activity itself, then Entries which seem to be like categories to me, then sections which gives you a method of splitting up the tasks and finally To-Do items. You can add To-Do items to all of these things and they will fall under that item. The only problem I had creating this Activity Template was moving a To-Do item within an Entry. I still haven't figured out how to do that yet without the To-Do item moving to the parent item of the Entry.

I haven't really had a chance to mess with much of the other stuff, so I can't really comment on the other features. I did add some of the people I know to my contacts list just to see what that was all about and how it worked. I also added the sametime community to my sametime client but don't know the group name to add to see everyone, maybe it just goes off of who is in your network? But I'll mess with that later.

All in all I think LotusLive is a cool app and I'm sure I will find a use for some of the features. You should go check it out. If you would like to add me as a contact, here's a link to my profile.

OK, so I woke up Monday morning and my old router was in fact dead. No one was able to work, so I didn't actually fix my problem. So, we went and returned the new router purchased Saturday and got a D-Link DIR-628 Wireless Rangeplus N router. So far I am very pleased with this router. Everything I've asked from it it has done perfectly. It also has a more robust feature set than the Linksys I purchased and replaced, which is pretty cool.

This Christmas has been a very hectic one. I've got a project with a pretty tight deadline looming so I've been working late to take care of that along with one of my customers trying to re-do his server. With the Christmas season being hectic in general, the looming deadline of my day job along with trying to shop, cook, attend school functions and clean things up around the house I think my customer isn't very happy with me right now. Which I apologize for, he knows who he is.

With the weather today being around 70 degrees it doesn't feel very much like Christmas. Everyone has their lights going, including us, the presents are around the tree, the tree is lit up and the kids are home anticipating tomorrows festivities. So with that I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Quanza or insert tiding here and a Happy New Year. May your families be blessed and be safe this holiday season.

This past weekend has been a frustrating one at best. Saturday it seemed that my old Linksys WRT54G router finally died, or so it seemed. So, we went out and purchased a new router. I've always had Linksys routers so that's the brand I purchased. The new router is/was a Linksys WRT110 and from my experience this weekend is good for nothing other than a frisbee.

My first experience was I couldn't get any of our wireless connections to actually connect. It seems you have to disable IEEE authentication on the connections. OK, fine I did that after a long call with Linksys tech support and everyone was happy. But the router was acting kind-of funny. It took a very long time to load the web pages it serves up for the configuration of the router. I thought no biggie, must just be something with my pc.

Since I now work from home the next task was to ensure that I could actually work. Surprise, surprise Lotus Notes was reporting that my employers servers were down, and so were the Prominic servers. Doubtful as my website was up and functioning. So, after another long call with Linksys tech support I got that to working, or so I thought. I had to enter the required ports in the port triggering section of the routers configuration. After fighting with unusually long wait times waiting on the router to load, save and refresh each page it seems to have worked. But I was still experiencing problems with the routers configuration web pages.

OK, so my workstations can now connect wirelessly, Lotus Notes is working as it should along with the stuff my wife requires to work from home. Now, I host a website for work related documentation so I needed to setup the port forwarding part for that. Well, it doesn't work. I also had to add port 80 to the port triggering section along with the port forwarding for port 80. I never did get this to work properly, also, now Lotus Notes and various other apps weren't working properly, at least this time. The next time I tried them they worked fine, just nothing consistent.

So, out of frustration I tried reinstalling my old router, well it seems that it's now working fine and everything else is now functioning as it should. Tomorrow morning I will be returning the WRT110 for a refund and I must say I am very disappointed with the route that Linksys is starting to take. I've been setting up networks and recommending Linksys products for years. I have a couple of how-tos on this website on setting up your home based website using a linksys router, so I'm very familiar with the Linksys product. But how is someone that doesn't really know anything about setting up a home network supposed to use this product? After all my frustration, I'm thinking I may need to re-think my loyalties to Linksys, which regardless to say is regrettable. But how can I recommend something to a customer that I don't believe in or have confidence in? Linksys, you need to get it together and change the route you're taking, especially if you are to keep me as a customer.

On a positive note, the support I received from Linksys was top notch. The people I talked to, while I suspect were in India or some other country, did provide good courteous service and I didn't have a long wait to talk to someone. I'm just not happy with the product and it will be returned tomorrow.

I found an interesting article about Ray Ozzie over on wired.com. It talks about his vision for collaborative software and how his career has progressed to where he is now the CSA at Microsoft. One of the more interesting quotes in the whole thing:

At that point, Ozzie unveils the new products that he's been laboring over for more than two years: a top-secret set of initiatives designed to make Microsoft as dominant in the cloud era as it was in the days of the desktop. First up is a new operating system for Web-based applications, codenamed Red Dog—it's Windows for the cloud. (See Editor's update below.) Then comes a demonstration of Live Mesh, which will allow people to seamlessly synchronize all their information with as many people and places as they want, across as many devices (computer, phone, camera) as they want. Finally, another engineer demonstrates how Microsoft will make even its legacy apps accessible via the cloud. It's a shocker. After years of Microsoft insisting that the desktop is the only proper place for its crown-jewel applications—the venerable Office suite—it appears that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will levitate from the desktop and become services as well. In this demo, an Excel spreadsheet is running in the cloud with almost all its functionality intact, including features like auto-complete and auto-formatting as well as built-in collaboration and a way to link the spreadsheet results to emails and Web pages.

The problem here is that even with these forward steps Microsoft will still be behind the curve. Writely was doing this long ago and has since been purchased by Google and thus spawned Google Docs and there are a couple of others that are doing similar things.

Now I do like the statement of built-in collaboration. But with it being Microsoft, how versatile will it be? Can I chat with my friends from AOL, GTalk, IRC, Yahoo!, etc. or will I be limited to the Microsoft Instant Messenger client? What about other collaboration tools like twitter, forums, wikis and such?

Also, what can I do with an OS that is only for Web-based applications and services? Can't I get that functionality currently in the form of a browser? Do I really need an OS geared towards my internet activities? How will this change the way I work today? Of course the Red Dog OS could be geared mainly towards people who just read email, surf the web and keep track of friends and family via the internet. If so, most of those types of people would be well served by an OS that was geared for those things.

I think the very long article was interesting to read and does provide some insight to the future of Microsoft but I believe it's going to be very difficult for them to get away from the Vista flub and win back customers. We've already decided as a household that come time for new PCs we're going to start purchasing Macs. I know a lot of other people have also made this decision. So, will Ray Ozzie's vision save Microsoft or will it be too little, too late?

I forgot where I saw this tool but I believe it was on one of the Lotus community blogs. I've been using WinMerge now for quite a few months and I think it is a great tool. It allows you to compare 2 text files with each other and it highlights the differences between the 2 files and allows you to merge the differences. Pretty cool! Now I'm sure it probably does more, but this is the main feature I use it for.

If you get a chance you should check out WinMerge as I'm to the point now that I don't know how I ever got along without it.

I came in this morning to some weirdness with FeedDemon 2.6. It seems to be showing 7 pages of feeds from "N/A" with "N/A" in the body. Kinda weird. I'm wondering if leaving it up all the time causes it to freak out a little bit. Don't get me wrong here, I've been extremly happy with FeedDemon with the exception that you can't use a browser other than IE with it, that's really my only complaint. I think it's a great reader, not to mention that now it's FREE, so you certainly can't beat the price

Looks like Lotus911 has a hit on their hands with the Bleed Yellow website which went live yesterday. I know I'm late on catching this and you've already read about it on other blogs. But poking around a little bit within the site it's very cool. You can search profiles for tags, blog, browse and share dogears (links), create and join communities and participate in activities. Very cool indeed and it appears to be built on Lotus Connections.

Idea Jam is getting better and better every time I look at it. Today I noticed they've added a "Blog or Embed this idea" script. I've included an example in this post. Idea Jam was released on the 20th of this month (sorry for being late). I found this post over on Chris Linfoot 's site which I assume is a press release but I couldn't find it anywhere else. But a quote from that post I found interesting

The development team used the ideas entered by beta testers to improve Idea Jam’s features and functionality. We used the system to build the system,” says Bruce Elgort, President of Elguji Software.

That is just too cool, like a vault I saw built in a federal bank, it was built from the TOP DOWN, not the other way around.

I've been using Firefox for quite a while now. During this time I've found quite a few extensions that I really don't know what I would do without. So, without further ado here's my favorite extensions:

• Cooliris Previews - When you hover over a link a little icon appears, put your mouse on that icon and a fully functional pop-up browser appears showing the link you hovered over.
• ColorZilla - ColorZilla is an advanced eye dropper that allows you to choose colors on a web page. It'll show you the hexadecimal number along with the RGB value of whatever color you click on.
• Web Developer - Web Developer is an awesome extension that allows you to see the CSS of a web page (at least this is what I use it the most for), outline tables and table cells, see image details and more, a must have for anyone who does any web development
• Firebug - Another awesome extension that is a must have for web developers. This is basically a DOM inspector that allows you to monitor or edit any web element live
• Foxmarks Bookmark Syncronizer - This extension allows you to syncronize all your bookmarks across various machines
• Google Toolbar - Kinda self-explanatory
• Download Status Bar - Gets rid of the anoying download window and replaces it with a small bar at the bottom of the browser that shows the status of downloads, very handy.
• IE Tab - And finally, this extension allows you to change rendering engines of a web site to the IE rendering engine, another very handy extension.

There are a couple of others that I use, but for the most part the above extensions get installed on every machine I use regardless. I've also recently discovered Greasemonkey but I mainly just use the LDDMonkey script with it. I've also just recently started using the Adblock Plus extension but it does little bit too good of a job on blocking ads and makes me think things on my website aren't working

So, what extensions can't you live without?

I've posted an idea over on idea jam. Go check it out and promote or demote the idea. Keith

I've recently started messing around with idea jam. My initial feeling of this site is that it's a great idea. The look and feel of the site is excellent and quite intuitive. Looking at the Completed ideas shows that the experiment works and is useful for communicating the legitimacy of ideas with a set group of people.

While browsing the different ideas I followed a link to another site called jyte. This seems to be a very similar idea with the exception that it is not targeted to a set group of people but to everyone. This results in ideas or "claims" that are based on peoples racism and bigotry (example, first claim I saw was titled "I hate gay people" ). If you ask me, this sort of thing just diminishes the overall validity of the site and it's purpose. But, the user interface is similar in the regards of the visual cues and the flow of an idea/claim.

After looking at idea jam and jyte together I feel that idea jam is a solution, not a novelty, to the issues that developers normally encounter with their applications, which is finding out what people really want in the application and then a vote on if that idea is legitimate or not. I think this sort of functionality would be of great benefit in the corporate realm to determine what users would like to see in a new or existing application and then keeping track of those requests that bubble up as a result of positive votes.

So, I think Bruce and team certainly have another hit on their hands and have done an excellent job with idea jam and it should be of great benefit to the Lotus community. Thanks Bruce.

Keith

Powered by ScribeFire.

A while back I was really into hosting my own email server. My preferred beast was XMail using Courier IMAP and SquirrelMail as the web interface. I even wrote a how-to on how to set all this up and get it functioning properly.

Well today I was looking at the referring sites in Google Analytics and found a forum post talking about setting up IMAP for using web mail. In one of the responses it mentioned RoundCube which is another open source web mail application which uses IMAP. Out of curiosity I got to looking at the screen shots of the user interface and it looks great, especially compared to SquirrelMail. Now, SquirrelMail has been around for quite some time and is a mature application, it does do everything it says it does and there are some great add ons for SquirrelMail. But, come on, for a product that's been around so long surely they could do something about the stock user interface? I've personally never used RoundCube, but from first impressions it appears to be a good web mail solution, but I may be wrong. It certainly has the nice looks, especially when compared to SquirrelMail.

Don't get me wrong here, since I haven't used RoundCube ever or SquirrelMail for about 2 years I really am in no situation to make comparisons of their current releases, but by just looking at the two packages I would rather use RoundCube. With the number of users that SquirrelMail has you would think someone would step up to revamp the UI, at least make it a little bit nicer? When I was running my own mail server, SquirrelMail filled my needs for a web mail client nicely and I don't want to take away from their reputation, but why not bring it into the current trend of nice UIs?

But take a look at the 2 screen shots and you decide which one you would rather work in.

Keith

I've added a Google Custom Search Engine over on the left. It includes most of the Lotus Notes Community bloggers and the ND 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 forums and Technorati SnTT listings. There's been a lot of times I've been looking for something I know I saw on a blog and couldn't find it, so this should make it easier to find whatever blog item you're looking for. Hopefully we'll find this useful.

Keith

Yesterday I got my Cable modem and self install kit from Comcast. I just got it installed and I must say it's MUCH faster than DSL. I was able to connect to Prominic with the Lotus Notes Administrator client and things moved along at a steady clip. Now we'll just have to see how dependable it is over the long run. Our cable hardly ever goes out, so I think it'll be OK. I just wish I had done it a long time ago...

Keith

I was poking around Google this morning and came across Google Apps. This looks pretty interesting and of course the price for the standard edition is free. Here is what Google describes Google Apps as:

Google Apps will let your members communicate and work together online, all for free. Google Apps lets you offer email, instant messaging, and calendar accounts on your own domain name (for example, jsmith@your-group.com), to keep your group close and build its online identity.

This is really cool and provides a means for small companies to have an awesome, web based email system for free! They don't have to maintain their own email server and IT guy to support that server, which is always a bonus when a small company can save money. In the past small business had several choices for email which hardly any of them are free. You can use a Linux based solution, the software is free but you'll need to pay someone to set it all up for you and then to maintain it. Then of course there is MS Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, Novell Groupware along with all the other pay email clients. Or you could use the client and services provided by your ISP. All of these solutions require you to do your own spam and virus management and maintain your own server with the exception of using your ISP for your email. Which will probably eventually be ate up with spam and be a nuisance to the users. Or, you can use Google Aps and have a pretty much Spam free email experience for your users which results in more productivity in the long run.

Now I suppose that someone will try and compete with Google in this space as it really steps on quite a few toes that are well submerged in the email industry, including IBM. But with a monster like Google behind this, the quality of the tools offered and the amount of disk space offered it will be hard for the big corporations to compete and be successful. I may be wrong and hopefully I am as I want to see the IBM market share grow, but with this sort of offering from Google I think it will make things more difficult.

Keith

I came across an article/blurb/paragraph/whatever in CPU Magazine talking about Windows Home Server being in beta 2 version. Now, I have quite a few PCs at home and encounter all the same issues that a small business might encounter, so, this kind-of interests me. I haven't had a chance to read too much about it but here's what the Windows Home Server Blog says:

One of the key features of Windows Home Server will be to allow users to easily connect to their home server when they are away from home.

Once connected to your home server, you will be greeted with a straightforward user interface lets you do the following:

• Download 1 or more files or folders from the Shared Folders that you have access to on the home server.
• Upload 1 or more files to a Shared Folder
• Remotely connect to your home PCs so you can use them to run applications  as if you were sitting in front of them
• Run the Windows Home Server Console to check or change the settings of your home server

This sounds very interesting to me. I'm sure you can do the same thing with some VPN software of some kind, and of course I know there are a couple of OpenSource VPNs available for Linux (I can't recall them off the top of my head) so I don't think this is anything new, but it may be easier to setup and manage. I guess my biggest worry would be security. If it's not secure, that would be a serious issue. Maybe you could setup an SSL tunnel to handle the communications tasks, but that's for some other time. I may see if I can participate in the beta and give it a go. If I do, I'm sure it'll give me content to blog about for quite a while

Keith

UPDATE: here is the Windows Home Server official website.

I just purchased a new Logitech Harmony 670 universal remote for our Home Entertainment system. Of all the high end remotes I’ve purchased and returned I must say that this one is the best I’ve ever experienced. The remote is setup via a USB connection to your computer using the Harmony Remote software (See the screenshot). No more punching codes into the remote to try and find the right code to control the TV, Cable Box, Audio System and DVD player. The software makes setup of the remote extremely simple.

• Install the software
• Define the manufacturer and model number to all your devices
• Setup actions

This is all done via a wizard, which covers everything pretty well. Once everything is setup you pick what you want to do, Watch TV, Watch a Movie, etc. and the remote does everything else for you, like pick the correct TV input, turn the DVD player on or whatever peripheral is required for the action you selected. My wife can even use the remote. Which is great as she always complains about all the different remotes and having to know which input to select and so on. Overall my impression of this remote is great! It has all the buttons to do what we normally do, and they work in the correct context. Not to mention it’s very simple to use. I highly recommend this remote.

Keith

UPDATE 2/26/2007:

Today I found that you can also edit all your activities and devices online (see screenshot belot). This is way cool. Now, once I make my changes online, I just have to connect my remote to my PC via the provided USB cable and update the remote, which I’ve got it setup to do automatically when I connect the remote. You can also change the way the buttons react on this website. For example, when you watch TV and you push the “Pic” button on the remote, this brings up the Picture-in-Picture stuff for the TV, I want it to bring up the Picture Size instead, just go into the “More Options” menu on the website, pick the “Pic” key for the remote, define which device it’s going to control and then pick from a drop down list of all the buttons on the original TV remote which button you want the Harmony remote to mimic. Pretty simple. I’ll post more about this remote as I find more new and cool features.

Continue Reading...

I found this search engine as pointed out to me by a guy I work with. It’s pretty cool. While it may be extremely slow, the entertainment factor kinda makes up for it. I haven’t really messed around with it that much, but my initial reaction is that it’s kinda cool.

Keith

I came across this plugin called Browster. It works in both IE and Firefox. The way it works is, when you do a search, say on Google, it puts a little lightning bolt next to the link for the page, you hover your mouse over the lightning bolt and a fully functional browser window opens up to show you the web page. Once you move your mouse out of the pop-up browser the window closes and allows you to move to the next link. Pretty cool. Also, any link on a page, you can set the program where it will show you a lightning bolt, you hover over the bolt and it’ll show you the preview. I know today while searching on notes.net Lotus Developer Domain Developer Works it was quite useful, instead of clicking on each link I was able to just hover over them and see if it’s what I was looking for.

Give it a try, I think you’ll like it. It’ll certainly speed up your searching.

Keith

Browster

When you get some time visit desktoptwo.com. It’s a website that emulates a desktop with an e-mail application, rss reader, Open Office, an address book and some others. Once you register you’ll have a virtual hard drive and you can upload files and documents and then access those files and documents from anywhere you may have internet connectivity. It’s a pretty cool concept and I can see where it would be useful.

But when you double-click a .doc, .xls, .ppt file you uploaded to your virtual hard drive, it asks if you want to use a remote program to open the document. Click the “Remote Program” dialog and it’ll kick off a remote instance of Open Office. You must have the Java plugin installed for this to work, and you can then modify, edit and save the file. Pretty cool.

I haven’t taken a lot of time to mess with the site but my first impressions are very good. All of the applications are in beta, as is the whole site I think, but I believe it’s a glimpse of what’s to come. I guess someday everything will be online and we’ll just have our dummy terminals to use. But in the mean time give Desktoptwo a look and see what you think about it.
Keith

Desktoptwo

I’ve just stumbled upon the Zamzar website which is super cool. They will convert files from one format to another for free. Their reported mission is:

To provide high quality file conversion for as many file formats as possible

As a test I converted a .avi file to a .gif file. It took a couple of minutes to fill out the form, upload the file and wait for them to send me an e-mail saying the conversion was completed. In the e-mail a link is included to download the converted file. This is very cool indeed.

Keith

I recently read an article concerning product usability. In that article (sorry, don’t have a link) it discussed studies of different products and how people reacted while using the product. For example, on a gas pump, before you could pump your gas you had to key in your zip code and press enter. The only problem was that the instructions never mentioned that you had to press enter, so, people would key in their zip code several times without hitting enter, get frustrated and leave without getting the gas that they initially pulled into the station for. In that article, it also spoke of the things to look at when creating a new product. Is it easy to use? Does it cause frustration or stress? Does it work the way you would expect it to work without carefully reading the instructions?

After some thought I came to the conclusion that we should be using these same theories and concepts when developing our applications. On an application I inherited, I had the opportunity to watch some of the users complete the main form of the application. This is an application that runs locally as when the user fills the form out they are usually in a place with no network coverage, once they complete this form they connect their blackberry to a tablet pc, connect to the corporate network and replicate their changes.

The problem with the form is that there is a button that says “Send Assessment”, now once the user completes the form they instictively click this button thinking it will send the form to the server. Not so, and this ends up being a point of frustration for the user. The fact is that the “Send Assessment” button doesn’t do anything except run validation routines and save the form. Also, clicking the save button does the exact same thing. So, why
the two different ways of doing the same thing with one way being a source of frustration for the user? Some suggested that clicking the “Send Assessment” button should also replicate. The problem with this is that the user’s blackberry isn’t currently connected, so it would not replicate and cause errors along with more frustration and probably anger. After some discussion this “Send Assessment” button will be going away. It’s existence is impracticle and a source of frustration for the users.

But back to the product usability stuff I started with… I think we as developers are sometimes isolated from actually watching users use our applications. When we are testing our own applications we are biased, we check the functionality that we have just been working on and this leads us to miss things that would stand out to a normal user. As with product usability a lot of testing and research go into getting a product to market to ensure that it has the best chance possible to succeed. I think we need to do what we’ve been doing when testing an application plus actually WATCH people use our application to judge their reactions, how they think it should work, how using the application makes them feel, not just the basic functionality, which will have an effect on the previously listed items. I think following these types of guidelines will help us make better user interfaces and applications that work more intuitivley (sp?) and not just the way we as Lotus professionals have gotten used to Lotus applications looking, feeling and working and have come to the conclusion, or bad habit, that that’s just the way a Lotus application works.

Keith

I’ve recently started using a few new tools for reading and posting blogs that I really like. I was using Mozilla Thunderbird to read the various Blogs and News sites I keep up with. However, the RSS Reader is So-So in quality but it does work and is in a convenient place for keeping up on everything. But I was looking for a more robust solution that was capable of categorizing, reading the comments or opening the site to the page in order to see everything. The reader I found is an RSS News Reader called RSS Bandit. It seems to be pretty robust and highly configurable. It also allows you to post comments from right within the reader window. If you like you can also open the post you’re reading in a built in web-browser which uses the same engine as Mozilla Firefox. I’ve been using RSS Bandit now for a few days and like it much better than using the Thunderbird one.

I’m also trying w.bloggar for the first time. I ran a quick test and it seems to work as advertised but I can’t figure out how to post to a site that you have to login to in order to see it. w.bloggar has quite a list of supported blog software that has the ability to use this tool. One of them being Lotus Domino Blog API. I think that’s awesome for Domino to have support in such a widely used tool. It shows that Domino may finally be starting to move towards the mainstream. I like the idea of using w.bloggar that way I don’t have to open the browser, login to the website and navigate to the posting area of WordPress which is kinda deep in the XOOPS admin menu. I’m not sure yet just what all I can do with w.bloggar but I guess I’ll learn.

Once I get a little more experience using these tools I’ll post a couple of reviews about them as I haven’t posted any reviews in quite some time, plus I imagine some of those reviews are a little out of date. So, until then…

Keith

Julian Robichaux and Bruce Elgort have put together a podcast which addresses various topics with Lotus Notes/Domino. I think this is a great idea. Today I started playing with podcasts and just stumbled across the Taking Notes podcast in iTunes. I subscribed and will start listening. I’m especially interested in the Web Services stuff.

I went to the Taking Notes Website and browsed around there. I also made a request for an interview with Jake Howett. I have learned so much from Jake just from him putting his findings and techniques on the web. I think that an interview with Jake would be very informative.

I look forward to these podcasts and will continue to subscribe.

Keith

podcast

This may have been available for quite some time. But today while just surfing I came across the Windows Vista Ready PC Hardware Guidelines. After looking through these requirements I’ve come to the conclusion that these requirements are pretty useless. Here’s an example of what I mean:

• CPU - PC systems should have a modern CPU.
• RAM - PC systems should have 512MB of memory or more.
• GPU - PC systems should have a graphics processor that will support Windows Vista Display Driver Model.

So exactly what is a modern CPU? When they say modern, does it mean modern by today’s standards or modern by tomorrow’s standards (tomorrow being whenever Windows Vista is released)? Also, for GPU, says it should support the Windows Vista Display Driver model, I can’t find much about this, why can’t they give us a list of the current GPUs which have this type of support or will be updated (firmware/driver) to include this support. I understand that it’s pretty early in the game for all this information, but at least give us a little more detail.

So, determined to find out if the new PC I’ve purchased will run Windows Vista I looked at the Enterprise Planning Guidelines for Windows Vista PCs and did find a few lists. I have posted them below so you can check if your hardware is ready for Windows Vista.

• Intel CPUs
• AMD CPUs
• Intel GPUs
• ATI GPUs
• nVidia GPUs

Now all of these links point to the relative company’s website. This is a little better but with the advent of RSS, XML, etc. why can’t these lists be published on Microsoft’s website for Windows Vista? Would it really be that difficult? Are there that many legal ramifications to do that? I would think it would be to those vendors best interest to make that possible in order to help people who are purchasing new PCs to make a decision on which hardware they want to purchase to ensure that they will be able to run Windows Vista.

Maybe I’m just overthinking/overreacting to this. I’m not sure, but with all the hype about Windows Vista I would think there would be more information about it and the hardware which will be required to run it. Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that way, but if it attracted my attention I’m sure it attracted the attention of a few million other people.

Keith

I’ve been following a set of articles that Chris Linfoot pointed out on his blog called Follow the Bouncing Malware. It’s a good read and explains just how malicious sites put spyware on your PC and make it do what they want instead of what you want.

In my years of messing with PCs I’ve been fairly aware of these type of threats so I’ve been able to avoid most of them (not all of them). Several family members however, they will remain un-named, have not. They do exactly what is explained in the first installment of Follow the Bouncing Malware and thus encounter all sorts of nasty bugs which I then have to attempt to clean.

With all this activity I’ve become pretty well versed in cleaning up the mess. Sometimes though a machine is just too far gone and it has to be formatted and re-installed with all the headaches which come with that sort of activity. One very good tool I came across this year (I think) is Microsoft Antispyware. Now far be it for me to recommend a Microsoft product, but this one actually does what it says it does and it does it very well. I’ve even seen this tool remove the cool web search issue which usually a daunting task. This is certainly a bonus.

Another good tool is a “mainline” virus scanner. One that get’s updated on a regular basis and is dependable. Yes, actually go out and purchase one of these packages. With these two tools you have in your possession the ability to clean up most (not all) spyware which may be lurking on your machine. You also have the ability to take back control of your Microsoft browser (ack) from all the different attacks (i.e. Home page, search page, etc.).

I have come across one tactic that has me baffled and I can’t seem to change it. I don’t know the name of it but it takes over your hosts file and puts in there the popular virus scanning sites and redirects them to 127.0.1.1. I can’t quite figure this one out. I’ve tried several different tools to fix it, but I can’t seem to get it to give me back the hosts file. I’ve even deleted, edited and renamed the hosts file to no avail.

If you can provide some insight on how to get rid of this particular attack some advice would be great.

Keith

A while back I posted about wanting to put a Captcha for posting comments. Lorelle commented that I should try Spam Karma 2 (SK2) to control comment spam. I installed SK2 and it’s been running for awhile now. I was looking over my SK2 logs and I found only 1 thing that was marked as a false positive and a couple hundred things marked correctly as spam. I must say that this plugin for WordPress is awesome!! I pretty much forgot about installing it and then today while just messing around I saw the little tab it puts in the WordPress Options menu. I went looking and was amazed at how much it blocked (all spam except for 1 track back) and what it let through (all legit). This is just great technology and should be ported to work on other CMS packages which allow commenting, as in my experience, the “comment spam preventers” that come with the package usually aren’t worth anything. They may stop some spam but not nearly as much or as well as SK2.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, check out that plugin, I think it’s a must have. If you’re not using WordPress, contact the author and see if he/she can port it to your particular choice of CMS app as I think this technology would make a nice dent in the number of people who participate in comment spam if only it were available for everyone who runs a blog or interactive website.

Keith

Yesterday I got a new PC. It’s a Compaq Presario pc with an AMD Sempron 3400 processor (2.0 ghz), 1600 MHZ System Bus, 512 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard drive, DVD-RW drive and a 9-in-1 media reader. I went ahead and upgraded the video card to a PNY GeForce 6600 PCIe with 256 MB DDR Memory. In the near future I will add another 512MB RAM to the system just to be well rounded .

This machine isn’t a beast by no means, but, it is enough machine to do whatever I want. I mainly use it for website maintenance, e-mail, internet, Office documents, Notes development and some gaming. So this machine should fit the bill and hopefully be able to run Windows Vista when it comes out. So, why didn’t I just build one, you ask? Well, it is now cheaper to just go pick one off the shelf and upgrade it to your specifications instead of buying all the pieces parts and assembling them yourself. But I must say, one of the things I hate most about a PC purchased off the shelf is all the stickers that come on the thing. It’s ridiculous. I’ve already purchased the PC, it was in a box so I couldn’t see it until I got it home and it’s got all this advertising material in the form of stickers on the front of the PC . So, after spending 10 minutes peeling the stickers off and then removing the resulting goo left behind, the PC came up pretty smoothly and didn’t play 10,000 questions as when I helped my Mom setup her Dell PC.

So far this has been a pretty good experience, it’s the first “Off the Shelf” PC I’ve purchased for myself in about 12 years, I normally build them myself. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how good of a PC this will be, I have confidence that it’ll be a good one and hopefully last for several years.

Keith

Apple has Widgets but Windows has Konfabulator. This is a free software package that has many “widgets” to put on your desktop. It comes with some already installed.

I really like “The Weather” widget. It has some good eye candy to represent the current weather conditions in your area or wherever you configure it for. I also use a widget called Google, this puts a Google search bar on your desktop and when you enter your search terms and hit enter it opens a new web page to Google with your search results. Kinda cool.

You can also download other widgets which do various things, some useful, some with no apparent use at all. There are about 1500 to 2000 different widgets you can download. So if you’ve got some time to waste, go check it out.

Keith

You know, it’s amazing how far we’ve come in the last 106 years as a species. Just think, we’ve been here on earth 10,000 years or more, for the most part not a whole lot had changed, especially our lifespan and means of transportation. We travelled mostly via animals and of course sailing ships, didn’t have the basic things prevalent today such as indoor plumbing, electricity, automobiles, basic healthcare needs and easy communication over long distances. Then, since 1900 we’ve advanced enough to put electricity in every home, our lifespan has doubled, which in and of itself is a technological advance so amazing that it’s hard to comprehend. Most everyone owns an automobile, has indoor plumbing and communication is as simple as sitting at your desk and typing a blog post which people around the world will read.

Just with medical advances alone, it’s amazing. Since the introduction of penicillin we are able to combat usually fatal diseases and conditions that were once considered untreatable. We’ve totally erradicated some diseases and we’re able to perform complicated surgeries to keep people alive. Heck, we can even forcefully keep people alive by breathing for them and ensuring their heart keeps beating.

Now, with all these technological advances, it seems we should be able to come up with a better means of fueling our automobiles and tools and heating our homes. While I think that oil and natural gas played an extremely large role in advancing us as a species, it has now outlived it’s usefulness. I’m not saying that these things aren’t useful, they are, but at what cost does something need to be rethought? At what cost will society as a whole stand up and demand a different solution? The way people travel from place to place really hasn’t changed that much in the past 80 years or so. Why? Yes our automobiles are safer, faster, more luxurious and more efficient, but it’s still 4 tires rotated via an internal combustion engine. We’re one step from a horse and buggy for the most part.

On the whole public transporation hasn’t changed either. Sure, we have bullet trains which travel hundreds of miles per hour, but how many people actually have one close enough to be useful, heck I’m not even sure one exists in the United States. Here in Atlanta, Georgia for instance. For me to take public transportation to work I would have to drive for about 45 minutes to the closest Marta train station. Ride to downtown Atlanta, change trains, ride to the farthest northern destination, take a bus to wherever I can get on a CCT bus, change busses a couple times and then walk about half a mile. That trip alone would take more than 2 hours. Heck, I can be at work by driving for an hour, so why would I spend all that extra time to take public transportation? This needs to be improved. I would use public transportation if it were practical to do so.

With technological advances happening in most every part of our lives at a very fast pace, transportation really hasn’t changed that much in the last 106 years. I know people have thought of and actually invented different means of transportation that basically revolve around the same means as today, they just use a different fuel. We really need another very large advance in transporation. I know people are out there trying, but maybe we need more people involved and not the big car companies. What’s to say they wouldn’t just purchase the solution and put it on a shelf because it would hurt their bottom line, which is another rant altogether and I’m sure that has happened at some point.

So I think it’s time to demand another solution, give us something affordable and practical, come up with a better means of moving people or of people moving themselves. I think it’s time for a change. I just wish I was smart enough to do it.

Keith

We finally broke down and purchased a Tivo. This thing is cool. I had been debating about building a PC to run MythTV as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) because I could share the things I recorded from TV to any computer in the house, along with my music and pictures. MythTV would also allow me to schedule things to record via the internet. Well, Tivo has come out with the Tivo Series 2. This allows you to do all the same things that you can do with MythTV. Now of course it’s the same as MythTV as in you have to have a Tivo box at any TV that you want to watch recorded programs on. This isn’t that big of a deal as the Tivo costs $199 US with a $100 mail in rebate. So it’s very affordable. For MythTV the TV Tuner card I was wanting to use was $250 and that doesn’t include the rest of the PC. So, Tivo is a very affordable alternative.

I was also saying that you can watch your recorded programs on any PC on your network. You just need to download and install Tivo ToGo in order to be able to do this. Which isn’t that big of a deal and it doesn’t cost anything extra.

The only thing I don’t like about the Tivo is that when it’s downloading the guide, extra programs, etc. from the Tivo site over the phone it would knock out my Internet Service. This really sucks as when it did this of course keithstric.com was down. So if you tried to get to keithstric.com the last few days and it was down, this is why. I have since installed a wireless network card to the Tivo and it now gets all of it’s updates over the network and doesn’t knock out my internet connection. So that’s a bonus.

All in all I really like it. My wife has recorded Montel every day and watches the ones that interest her. We also recorded a few other things that played during the day that we wanted to watch. Not that we’ve had the chance to watch them, but we have recorded them. So after this experience I would recommend the Tivo to anyone in the market for an HTPC as it’s a much cheaper alternative with basically the same features.

Keith

UPDATE: See the Read More link

Correction:

you have to have a Tivo box at any TV that you want to watch recorded programs on

Now, this isn’t true to some extent, you can watch anything you record on your Tivo at any other TV with a Tivo box, but, you can also watch anything you record on your Tivo at any computer on your network. You just have to install the Tivo ToGo software on the PCs you want to watch recorded programs on.

You can also share music on your computers between all the Tivo boxes on your network also. This also requires you to install the Tivo ToGo software on the computer you wish to share music from. When I first started playing with this I thought it was storing the music on the Tivo. This isn’t so, it streams it from the PC. So, this is cool as you’re not using twice the storage space to store the same music.

Now while watching TV I’ve noticed that the Tivo asks you if you want to record what a commercial is advertising if it meets the conditions of your “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” picks. This is really cool. It can also show you more of that sort of thing if you so choose.

So after playing with this thing for a week, I still really like it. I keep seeing new little things that it does as time goes by. Now the next thing they need to add to the Tivo is the ability to stream your home movies to the Tivo so you can watch them from your computer. Hopefully this type of functionality will arrive soon.

I read this article in eWEEK. It’s pretty interesting and talks about how NLD could be a good replacement for Windows desktops in the corporate environment. It goes on to state that if your company is dependent on Windows only applications that this may not be a good fit unless you deliver them via a citrix server or Terminal Services. NLD comes with both clients.

Now this is interesting to me. With these types of clients don’t you think that maybe a company would want to almost go with dummy terminals? I know, the talk about dummy terminals has come and gone, but, from the point of view that the bottom line is everything, why wouldn’t this be a viable option? Is it because of end user outrage of loosing the freedom of using a PC? Even if the user has most of the same options available to them via a dummy terminal that a PC has (i.e. Hard-drive space to save documents and such, Internet browser, etc.). Now I’m not saying a dummy terminal would match all user’s jobs, it certainly wouldn’t match mine as I have to install software, test it, modify it, install it again, etc. Not to mention I’m on call and need a PC I can take home.

Now with System Security Policies I have seen some people’s laptops turned into a glorified dummy terminal. They can’t go to a command prompt, they can’t install anything, they can’t customize much of the look of the desktop and the list goes on and on. So wouldn’t a dummy terminal be good for these people? Not to mention that most people use the same 2 or 3 applications all day long every day.

Now don’t get me wrong. I would be upset if I had to use a dummy terminal. I’m not saying that this is a solution for all employees. But wouldn’t it make sense to at least maybe try it on a select few groups of people? Especially at a large company? Certainly this would save some money somewhere on licensing fees, maintenance costs, etc. Especially for people who work entirely in a main frame terminal, these people would be an excellent choice to start with.

Just some food for thought…

Keith

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I posted a new review on the HP Photosmart 8450 Printer. Go check it out and enjoy.

Keith

My wife purchased me a new camera this past weekend. I’ve been playing with it trying to figure out all the functions. It’s a Minolta DiMAGE Z2. It’s a really nice camera. I really like the 10x optical zoom, ability to do continous drive mode (just hold the button down and it takes pictures until you release the button), the customizability of taking pictures and the diopter adjustment.

This camera also has a very fast auto-focus feature that seems to work really well. It also has a 4x digital zoom so you can zoom to the “40th power” when used in conjunction to the optical zoom.

We bought it from Wolf Camera. Wolf Camera also included a packet with 18 free photography classes. Which is really cool, I’ll have to go to it. All different kinds of sample paper, some coupons and 15 free digital development pictures.

So, I think I’m ready to take some pictures for Christmas morning and get rid of the ole duct tape camera which I’ve had for about 6 years. I don’t know how it happened but the door that holds the batteries in my old camera was broken off. So, for the camera to work I had to duct tape the door shut. I know, pretty pathetic, but it does work.

Keith

I received an e-mail from Jay Jacobson, the founder of Edgeos the other day thanking me for the mention of their website and putting their RSS feed up. He offered me a free trial of their External Assesment service which I accepted and tried out.

It seemed to work really well and pointed out a few things that I probably should look at. The biggest thing it pointed out was that I’m using phpNuke. Here is what it says about phpNuke:

Given the insecurity history of this package, the Nessus
team recommends that you do not use it but
use something else instead, as security was clearly
not in the mind of the persons who wrote it.

Now the out-of-the-tar file version of phpNuke I would somewhat agree as it’s prone to SQL Injection attacks. But Nuke Fixes has a patched series of phpNuke which seems to address this issue. There are also several security modules which address this and other security flaws.

But back to Edgeos. The report that the External Assesment service produced is top notch and explains what the scan found in much detail including links to the specific security threats, steps for fixing the security hole, graphs detailing the security hole, a checklist so you can track your progress of fixing the security issues and much more. You can see a sample report here. You can also pick to view the report as an html or pdf document. The report I received has much more detail than that of the sample along with suggested fixes.

So, if the External Assesment has this much detail I’m sure that some of the other tools will also and be much more customizable for presenting to managers and the like at a company. All in all I think that this is a good service that does what it says. So, give them a try and tell them that Keith sent ya.

Oh yeah, I also wrote a review about their external assesment service. So check it out!

Keith

I’ve recently started looking at a Mac to replace my windows box. I’ve messed around with most operating systems during my career except a Mac. I went to CompUSA today to look at their selection and spoke with the Apple representative who gave me a little demo of the G5. I must say, what little I saw of it and messed with I reallly like it. It appears that it will do everything that I need my Windoze machine for and then a whole lot more. About the only thing I didn’t like was the price tag on it. The last time I paid $1200 for a PC was when I was first starting out and didn’t know any better. I understand that you get a lot more for your money and from what I saw and what I’ve read it’s a rock solid machine. But I’m just not sure. I’ll have to purchase my games again which would really suck but everything else I use is OpenSource, so I think that would be the only thing I would loose.

So, I’m not really sure, but I will keep on researching the issue and see what I come up with.

Keith