not my blog

Wordpress 1.5 has hit the ‘net. Figures, just as I was getting around to completing my Netflix movie plugin and planning on getting the whole iTunes thing going, they go and release a new version. Hopefully it will all work with the code as it currently is, but you never know. I probably won’t be able to get around to the upgrade till mid-week at the earliest, seeing as how tomorrow is my birthday, so massive alcohol consumption is in the plans, and Tuesday I’m going to a meeting after work with the Corporate office.

After my day on Saturday I seriously think I am going to start removing DSL and Cable modems from the homes of those I deem too stupid to be on the internet. Went over to my in-laws and had to completely reconfigure their DSL setup even after I told them earlier in the week when the called me to call Verizon and have them walk them through “setting up your router to handle the PPPoE authentication”. Of course, God forbid anyone ever does what I tell them. My brother-in-law wanted to setup his Xbox for Xbox Live and they couldn’t get it working and of course they called me. I told them what to do, seeing as how they are paying Verizon for tech support, and hoped it would be all that I was needed to be involved. Yes, I realize I was asking too much, but one can hope.

This is the first time I had been there since they had gotten their new computer, and I almost cried. Dell Dimension 2400, 256MB and tons of Spyware and virii. Not to mention P2P apps and the like. I had warned them before they ever got their new computer that if they engaged in said activities I would NEVER provide support for their computer. So I used it just long enough to reconfigure the router and left it at that, and smiled and told them “I will tell you now, a month from now that computer will be unusable”. Once that was done, I redid the Xbox and left. I hate it when people think you need to be their free tech support for life just because you happen to be related.

Well, to those two people that are reading, have a good one, and next time I post, we’ll be at version 1.5! YA!

More and more the antispyware vendors fall into the pit of darkness. First it was Aluria, no both Pest Patrol and Ad-aware have given in to the “pressures” of WhenU. That’s right, both programs have suddenly removed all reference to WhenU from their databases as well as removing the definitions from their programs. For those that don’t know, here is an excerpt from Symantec’s database:

Once Adware.WhenU is executed, it monitors your Web-browsing habits and displays targeted advertisements when you go to Web pages that are relevant to the advertisement in question.

Adware.WhenU can update itself without your knowledge.

This adware program must be manually installed. However, there are several known programs that have Adware.WhenU within them and that install it as the program itself is installed.

What makes this even worse is that Lavasoft is attempting to cover this up and is deleting every post in their forums that even metions this! Everyday that Mac Mini looks better and better.

I spent most of the day today wasting space on the couch staring at the boob tube. Nothing interesting on, but I had no desire to really accomplish anything for the day. Of course that didn’t stop the 30 minute infomercials from attempting to suck the very life from my poor weary body as I slouched there on the couch. For the very low sum of $100 I could be the next Donal Trump! If it were really that easy everyone would have money and there would be no poor. What specific infomercials did I see today? Well let’s see:

• Carlton Sheets - No Money Down Real Estate
• Russ Whitney - No Money Down Real Estate
• Winning in the Cash Flow Business
• Wizetrade
• One of those Ron Popeil gadgets (not a get rich thing, but just as annoying)
• Like 30 of those www.()money.com commercials

Man what a waste of my brain power. Of course if people weren’t purchasing this drivel we wouldn’t be seeing it on TV 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Of course, I’m sure 90%+ of the people that purchase these courses never ever do anything with them. Now, if someone were to give me a few hundred bucks, but only if I bought a few of these courses, I wouldn’t say no. But I’m a silly person like that. Using someone elses money to buy the packages to test them out doesn’t sound so bad to me. Especially when you wife is chewing your ear off about buying a new car.

And not just any new car, seems she suddenly wants a sporty car. For the longest time she wanted something “safe and sensible” and now she wants sporty. Here current three top choices are the Subaru WRX STi, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, and a Ford Mustang GT (god help me). I for one would rather die than plunk my butt down in the seat of a Mustang, but if she really wants one, well I guess I’ll just have to get it for her. *sighs*

Personally I would take either the STi or the Evo, and I would mind a RX-8 either. After all, no matter what, the car would have to have four seats. Got to have room for the kiddies. Of course, I still have my luxury side that would like a BMW M3 or Lexus IS300, but both of those are decidedly out of our price range at this point. Now if price were no object, well let’s just say a Porsche Carrera GT or Ferrari 575M Maranello would be in the cards. Ok, maybe I’d settle for a Acura NSX if I was feeling poor that day (after all it’s still pretty).

Now, if any car manufacturers just happen to be reading this blog and have one of the above mentioned cars that they would be willing to donate to a poor young couple, we’d be more than happy to accept their generous offer. =D

All of the leads up to the fact that I still need to teach my wife how to drive a manual transmission. DOH!

Recently a new technology “news” site hit the scene and has been heavily promoted by some tech celebrities. This site, known as digg, takes the approach of being an unmoderated forum for people to post technology news (among other items) and gives the sites readership the “editorial” power to bring the interests of the collective to the front page. Granted that this isn’t a brand new idea (giving editorial power to the readers), but it is quite possibly the most effective implementation of the format that I have come across.

When referring to the site, I use the word news loosely due to the high amount of “not quite news” that makes its way onto the site. I would like to think of it more as the tech related land of wonder. Postings range everywhere from “Latest Tech News Of The Day”, to “200GB Maxtor SATA Hard Drive $59.99″, with the remainder being everything in between. For example, as of the time of the writing of this post there are currently five posts on the unfiltered section that are either simply links to the “deal of the day” or “go download this file” links. Granted, currently there is only a single deal link that has made it to the front page, so the democratic style of rule on the site does work most of the time.

This democratic style of editing content is in stark contrast to some of the most popular technology websites, with probably the most notable being Slashdot. The idea of both digg and Slashdot being that the readership of the site submits content and the editors bring it to the front page for the masses to consume. But that is where the similarities end. Slashdot has its own collection of private editors that decide what is worthy of being posted on the front page, while digg has its entire readership available as an editor to decide what is considered the most important stories of the moment. Even though both sites allow you to look through non-front page worthy stories, I have found that digg’s subsections and diggall fuctions to be more usable than those features that Slashdot provides to it’s readership to consume the non-front page worthy items. The importance of the front page is probably the second most striking difference between digg and Slashdot. With Slashdot, it’s all or nothing, front page exposure and the death of your website for a day, while digg gives every story equal opportunity to be viewed by the readership. Currently their is no such thing as the digg effect, unlike the well documented effect of reaching the front page of Slashdot, which can bring 30,000 or more hits to your website in a single day above your normal traffic.

With that being said, digg offers those willing to take the time to search for their news a wealth of stories that might have easily been missed as they have been tucked away in some dark corner of the internet. Time is the secret of using digg, with the more time you spend exploring the diggall section, the more likely you are to encounter that specific tidbit of news that will effect your day dramatically. The diggall function is essential to the experience of the website as it helps to remove the reliance of “what is important to others” factor that can clog the homepage. That also being the downfall of digg, with those stories that reach the front page, become even more popular than those that become pushed further and further down the submitted stories list (being as how it is date dependant).

The site’s readership also seems somewhat slow at interacting using comments for the stories that are submitted. The average number of comments of a post that reaches the front page can easily top the total combined posts of every post from the last 24 hours that did not reach the front page. This lack of interaction can be a bit of a detraction to the overall community feel of the website, yet can also be a boon as it helps force the focus of towards the sites true focus, news and information. Comments have long ago become the place of trolls and spammers, so a site that has a quality readership that can discect the postings without hundreds of pages of pointless post can be a refreshing experience.

The only major detraction I have from the usability of digg is the repetition that can reach it’s pages on a regular basis. It seems that anytime there is a major news story for a day at least three or more posts reach the pages, all pointing to the same news story. It seems that at some point in the development process of the site, the report feature that was available in earlier versions of the website was removed from the individual story sections of the website. Granted it is still available from the diggall section, but it is not the as easy as it might be to report a bad story. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to digg the news, and seeing three seperate posts out of ten that are referring to the same news story. But with any site with a fully democratic style of rule this is an expected side effect and does not currently run rampant troughout the site, so as not to destroy the experience of visiting the website.

Where it really counts though is where is digg currently in my daily consumption of technology news? Currently I use it as my fourth source of news for the day, behind Slashdot, News.com, and BroadbandReports. Given the site’s young age and still developing process, I have too look forward to seeing how it handles the demands of it’s growing readership base and the stress they will put on its editorial style. Does digg have a point of saturation where its democratic processes will cause it to drown? Only time will tell, and in the mean time I will still visit it every morning, coffee in hand, and every evening, beer in hand, right after I check Slashdot, and News.com, and BroadbandReports.

Over the past 18 months I have come to realize that the average person knows less about using their computers than they do about maintaining cars. Take for example my customer from earlier this week (which is an amazing exemplar for the average customer), who had a 2 year old Dell running Windows XP. Nothing unusual about their computer, 1.8Ghz P4, 128MB Ram (I still want to know how any manufacturer can sell that with an XP box in good conscious), connected through a Comcast cable connection to the internet. Of course, the next part is where the fun begins:

• No firewall (Even the XP firewall was turned off)
• McAfee AV installed with definitions from 5/2003
• Kazaa
• Morpheus
• No anti-spyware of any sort

This machine litterally took between twenty and thiry minutes to boot from the time you hit the power button to the time a desktop would load. Granted that this was partly from the lack of RAM, but my customer had stated too me that they had been having problems like this for almost six months before they called me out to take care of it for them. Six months? Your computer has been unusable for nearly six months and you just now decided to call me out to take care of this for you?!?!

Wanting to see how bad this really was, I booted to my GeekCD and ran HijackThis! to see what came up. I ended up removing 184 items with HijackThis! and just stared at the computer in amazement. I knew it was bad before that, but I seriously was shocked that this computer booted, ever. I kindly explained to my customer that the machine needed some serious TLC and I could bring it back the next day all fixed (I had to take it offsite as the customer was a heavy chainsmoker, extremely allergic) and that we were going to upgrade the RAM to something more acceptable than 128MB. This customer was very price sensitive, so they were looking for any free programs that I could use to keep cost down.

Step 1: Install 256MB PC2100. Much Better, actually boots under 10 minutes now.
Step 2: Cleanup (BartPE)

• Quick manual registry editing (Approx 20 keys)
• Virus removal: 247 virii (mostly trojans/downloaders)
• Spyware removal
• Ad-aware: 1249 registry keys, 333 files
• Spy Sweeper: 1174 registry keys, 871 files

Step 3: Boot to Windows and install/run Microsoft’s Antispyware (removed another 13 threats)
Step 4: Install SP2 and post-SP2 Windows Updates
Step 5: Install Firefox
Step 6: Install latest version of Sun Java
Step 7: Install Zonealarm free version
Step 8: Install Avast! Anti-virus
Step 9: Crack a beer and relax
Step 10: Prepare for the next battle

Come back the next day, drop off computer and present customer with bill. Customer is ecstatic that machine works, while I am satisfied that another genius learns that you can’t just do anything you want on the internet and not have issues if you don’t take any steps to protect yourself. If nothing else, the more people we can touch and explain the evils of spyware and how to prevent it from ever reaching their machine the safer the internet will become for all.

The entire time I worked on this computer, and those like it, I just keep thinking how dumbfounded most people are when they are informed that they are riddled with spyware and viruses. They never seem to understand how those file sharing programs or all the porn they are looking at could ever possibly cause any problems, after all they have Norton installed (with definitions from 2004 and the real-time scanner disabled due to a virus). It’s amazing how a big repair bill can open peoples eyes and get them to understand how the things they do on the internet can dramatically affect the performance of their PC.

One of my favorite questions came from a lady I met one day while working on her daughter’s computer that was little with CWS-NS3 among other things. Her question was very innoccent, but very disturbing:

“If my grandkids come over and use AOL (by logging on as a guest, the woman doesn’t have her own internet access) can my computer get infected by this stuff?”

Obviously, my answer was yes. After which she basically told me that she has no Anti-virus, no firewall, nothing to protect her from even the most base threat. It is days like those that make me feel like some lone warrior, armed with the weapons of the greatest blacksmiths of the land, fighting the endless horde till the day I die. Something needs to be done about the general lack of computer knowledge possessed by John and Jane Doe, simply because it is their general lack of basic computer security that is proliferating the rapid growth of spyware and viruses to the point that the internet simply isn’t enjoyable anymore. How to go about disseminatingthat iformation? Well that is a different topic for a different time.