Les Jones

Artificial unintelligence

Friday, October 16th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Bruce Schneier: “During a daring bank robbery in Sweden that involved a helicopter, the criminals disabled a police helicopter by placing a package with the word “bomb” near the helicopter hangar, thus engaging the full caution/evacuation procedure while they escaped.”

Court rules no expectation of privacy using company email system

Monday, October 12th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Electronic Discovery Law - No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy for Emails Transmitted through Employer’s Server and thus, No Privilege:

In this case, the court overruled the determination of the special master and held that defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy as to emails transmitted through plaintiff’s server and thus, no attorney-client privilege as to those communications.

Not good. I’m hoping this case doesn’t stand on appeal. Between attorney-client confidentiality and the ownership rights of the employer I’m hoping attorney-client privilege wins. Meanwhile, get thee to Gmail and set thy preferences to https secure email.

Via Bill Dean.

Tags: gmail, privacy

Mozy finished backing up 63.1 GB

Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Elapsed time since signup - eight days. Not bad.

Previously

• I signed up for Mozy’s online backup service

Tags: mozy

I signed up for Mozy’s online backup service

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

I had considered Mozy before and Adrian spoke highly of it yesterday, so I’m in.

I’ve got local backups with the Western Digital Media Center. I’ve got offsite backups with a USB enclosure hard drive and DVD backups of iTunes and Picasa. Thing is, my offsite backup discipline is pretty lackadaisical. I don’t think I’ve updated my offsite backups in six months. Mozy works automatically so I don’t have to think about it.

If your hard drive goes down you call Mozy or go to their Web site and order backups mailed to your house on DVD. You can download your backups, too. For individual files that’s handy. For a total hard drive backup that could take weeks, so the DVD option is good to have. Cost is $5/month for unlimited backup space for one computer. All of the data is encrypted with your choice of their key or theirs.

Previously

• Online backup FAIL
• Online backup followup: Carbonite responds
• Doing the Backup Thing

Tags: mozy

Be safe out there on that Internet

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

I was surfing this morning and got the Trojan warning above. AVast is free anti-malware. Why not download it?

Tags: i like free stuff

High school yearbook for major Web sites

Friday, September 4th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

How 20 popular websites looked when they launched.

I think they must have have made a mistake on the Drudge Report, though. That screenshot looks pretty much the way Drudge looks now.

Tags: this is me being sarcastic

Use a caps lock key, go to jail

Monday, August 31st, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Or get fired anyway.

Sushi Mayhem for iPhone

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 | A&E, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

From a U.S. Internet bud:

My latest game, Sushi Mayhem, just went live in the iTunes App Store. As I’m sure a lot of you have heard me nag before that the first day of sales are the most important and give you the best chance of hitting the top 100. Because of the (flawed) way the app store works if an app gets in the top 100 it will usually stay there for a while and be self sustaining… so PLEASE go pick it up asap. I’m looking at you Arlene/Joe Sera/Scott! I don’t want to have to find a real job. It costs less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks and if you hate it I’ll give you the $2 back and count it as a marketing expense 8). If you know anyone with an iPhone let them know too.

Sushi Mayhem mini-site.

Here’s the link to the iTunes store. I’ve never done an itms:// link before, but when I click it I go to iTunes. Pretty neat.

Build your own tinyurl-style URL shortener

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Mashable tells you how. You can also use Google Apps.

Tags: google

Google Maps is now a real estate search engine

Monday, August 10th, 2009 | Economics, Misc, Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Just visit Google Maps and select “Real Estate” instead of “All Results.”

Tags: google

Online backup followup: Carbonite responds

Friday, August 7th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | 3 Comments |

I received this email in response to an earlier post about a reported online backup failure with Carbonite:

Les:

I read your post referring to Michael Krigsman’s post. The bug that Michael encountered was not with Carbonite backup, but with a new service called Remote Access that allows you to download files from your backup to any PC with just a browser. The product was still in beta at the time Michael encountered this bug and the bug itself was fixed long ago. It’s a very popular feature with Carbonite, and I used it myself recently on a trip to Asia when I forgot my powerpoint presentation. I think if you wrote to Michael today he’d tell you that everything is fine with his Carbonite subscription. BTW, statistically, Carbonite is far more reliable than an external hard drive. Our RAID servers have triple redundancy and are several million times less likely to lose data due to hard drive failures than a typical external drive. External hard drives fail at a rate of 3-5% per year if used continuously.

David Friend,
Carbonite Chairman & CEO

Online backup FAIL

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | 3 Comments |

I’ve got a backup strategy that I like, but the offsite part is weak (because I’m too lazy to bring home my offsite backup and update it every often). Online backup seems like a great way to fill in that gap.

Thing is, this story from TechRepublic on their experience with Mozy and Carbonite isn’t too reassuring. (Hat tip to Bill Dean.)

Anyone using online backup? Talk to me.

Tags: mozy

Neat Firefox 3.5 tip

Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

I accidentally discovered you can point to the tab strip and use your mouse’s scrollwheel to scroll the tabs.

The other day one of the new 3.5 features saved me. Starting with 3.0 you can open closed tabs. I had read that with 3.5 you can open entire windows that you’ve closed. That saved me a bunch of time when I accidentally closed a window with several dozen open tabs. Firefox is good stuff.

Texting while driving

Monday, July 13th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Tennessee recently passed a law outlawing texting while driving. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Then last week I was in a car when the person with the steering wheel was texting while driving down the road.

HFS.

That’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen. I tried to think of something more dangerous. Like maybe if your cell phone had a video camera and instead of driving while texting you were driving while doing interpretive dance. Or if you were John Dillinger and you were having a running and gunning shootout with the FBI using Tommy guns while fleeing the scene of a bank robbery and blowing a 0.15 on a Breathalyzer. That might be more dangerous. Maybe.

The “Disarmed” label on Gmail means the tracking Web bug was removed

Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | E-commerce, Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

In June I started noticing that some emails on Gmail had “{Disarmed}” in the subject line. Now I realize what that means. {Disarmed} means the Web bug in the email has been de-activated.

What’s a Web bug?

A Web bug is an image online marketers used to determine if you’ve opened an email.

Say you’ve got 100,000 subscribers to your newsletter. Your newsletter software will include an image in the email for tracking purposes. The file name or pathname for that image will include a unique code tied to each person on the mailing list. In the simplest case, the first person will have a code of 1, the second person 2, etc.

Here’s what happens next. You send the emails. When people open them their email software loads the images from your Web server. When your Web server sees that someone requested the image associated with person number 1, you know that person number 1 opened the email.

This is all assuming that the person’s email software automatically loads images. Some do and some don’t. In some cases they don’t, but the user can choose to load the images. In Microsoft Outlook you can right click and load images. In Gmail you click “Display Images Below.” But now Gmail is even smarter and will load the other images, but not the Web bugs it detects.

P.S. Marketers can also tell if you’ve clicked on a link in the email. Instead of the links going directly to the Web site they go to a redirection script that includes a unique code tied to your identity. When you click on the link your click is recorded and you’re redirected to the Web page you wanted. Most email marketing software software will give reports on open rates and click-through rates.

A 13 year old tries a Walkman

Monday, June 29th, 2009 | A&E, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Via Tam, Giving up my iPod for a Walkman:

“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

Any media that has to be turned over is just begging for replacement.

Old fart memory from the 20th century alert!

I remember a Rolling Stone review of some album in the early days of the CD. I want to say it was by Sting. Whoever it was took advantage of the greater space available on a CD to deliver more than the 40 minutes of music that was typical of the LP and cassette era.

That turned out to be a downside for cassette listeners. The extra time meant that the album had to ship as a double cassette. The reviewer noted that the album was best listened to on a CD, because when the longish CD was stretched across four cassette sides you were constantly flipping tapes. With the CD you could push play once and hear the whole thing. What a concept!

Take Web screengrabs with aviary.com

Monday, June 29th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

I take screenshots all the time for work and the blog. I use the ScreenGrab plug-in for Firefox, but here’s a 100% Web-based solution that’s pretty cool.

Take any url and put aviary.com/ in front of it. Aviary will take a screengrab and open it in a Web-based editor. From there you can host the image online or save it to your desktop in PNG format. Pretty neat.

Via Mashable, which is my new source for social media news.

You first

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | Blogging, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

WordPress 2.8 is out. Announcement and full feature list. There are more features and it’s supposed to be faster. I’ll probably wait a bit to let some of the inevitable new release bugs get worked out.

I just upgraded to 2.7.1 a few weeks ago when I moved to a new server. It turns out that wasn’t a wasted effort. Beginning with 2.7 you can upgrade to new versions automatically without re-installing.

Automatic updates over the Internet are one of the best changes in tech in the last 10 years for productivity and security. Good stuff.

P.S. Here’s a cool WordPress widgets/Google hack: Add Custom Search to any site in two minutes. I’ve added it to my sidebar to see if I like it (and it actually took less than two minutes). Looks like I need to play around with the formatting for long titles.

Tags: google, wordpress

“Make money at home” weasel busted

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

His story of Google zillions is probably as authentic as his picture, which is a stock photo also seen on a BBQ grill package at Costco. Shades of Libertarian Girl.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Tags: dumbass, HA HA, scammers

Interested in cloud computing/software as a service?

Monday, June 8th, 2009 | E-commerce, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

The IT industry continues to evolve business models. Software licenses have shifted towards appliances that have the software pre-installed. Permanent licenses have shifted to annual subscriptions that include the software, updates, and support contract.

Now there’s a push for software as a service, in which the software resides on a server on the Internet. You don’t install any software or use up any rack space. You don’t need an administrator for the software (or if you already have an administrator, you’re not adding to his workload). Configuration is often done through a Web interface.

A couple of the manufacturers we sell for have moved in the SaaS direction. I’m keeping tabs on the software as a service model by following the SaaS blog CloudAve.com.

CSI: Macville

Saturday, May 9th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Katherine Coble’s husband’s invention was featured in a plot of CSI. Neat.

The invention is the Griffin Navigate for iPod. I remember Griffin from way back in my earliest Mac days and was aware back then they were in the Nasvhille area. They had a Mac to VGA video adapter that was all the rage. We sold tons of them back when I worked at MacSoftwareHouse in Farragut. It’s cool that they’re still in business and still making new products.

Bleg: childproofing Windows XP?

Friday, May 8th, 2009 | Dear Lazyweb, Tech | Permalink | 8 Comments |

Dear Lazyweb,

My mom got Katie a LeapFrog computer last year. Now she wants to use our real computers.

We’re thrilled that she wants to learn about computers, but obviously I don’t want her deleting files. A few months ago I thought she had wiped out all of my photos in Picasa. It turned out to be a false alarm, but after that I configured the screensaver to lock the computer after 3 minutes of inactivity and to require a login password.

What’s a good way to make our XP computers easy for her to use and secure enough that she can’t delete our files or crucial system files?

I Googled and found free Microsoft’s SteadyState. Anyone used it?

Any other advice for configuring an XP machine for a four year old? We want this to be fun and educational for her, and stress-free for us.

LATER: I installed SteadyState and I like it. I configured restrictions on Windows and Internet access and blocked access to Picasa. Click to embiggen the screenshot.

Is anyone accessing LesJones.com from a mobile device?

Saturday, April 11th, 2009 | Blogging, Tech | Permalink | 5 Comments |

I ask because the MobilePress plug-in is using hella database time.

The blog is still accessible without it. With the MobilePress plug-in you get a list of the most recent posts. Without it you get the front page, more or less, with the title and text of the post.

Output is from the WP-Tuner plug-in for WordPress.

Tags: wordpress

Kill your television - watch Hulu.com

Saturday, April 11th, 2009 | A&E, Tech | Permalink | 5 Comments |

I just watched my first TV show on Hulu.com. That worked way better than I would have ever guessed. There were a few pauses, but the quality was amazing - light years beyond YouTube and approaching HD - and there many fewer commercials than on regular TV. These aren’t YouTube-style clips. This is the entire show, in this case an episode of the Simpsons from a few weeks ago.

If it was just me in the house I’d drop TiVo and cable TV and watch the TV shows I wanted on the Internet. Savings: about sixty bucks a month even with my basic cable plan.

Someone explain to me how this won’t hurt cable and satellite TV. I’m not saying 100% of Americans will watch 100% of their shows online. That won’t happen.

What I am saying is that if I could only afford either cable TV or cable Internet I’d choose cable Internet, no question. Internet TV options like Hulu make that same choice easier for many more people. I can definitely imagine young people with lots of technical savvy and not much money foregoing cable TV and satellite TV in favor of Internet TV.

Tags: hulu, youtube

Tech bleg update: WiFi problem solved

Friday, April 10th, 2009 | Dear Lazyweb, Tech | Permalink | 2 Comments |

A month ago I wrote about my WiFi problem. The laptops connected fine, but the desktop in the back bedroom would no longer get a usable signal. That desktop is in a cubby under the desk, with its antenna about eight inches off the floor.

I took the advise of several people and bought an Eforcity external antenna for the WiFi PCI card. I unscrewed the original stub antenna, screwed in the Eforcity’s cable, and placed the Eforcity antenna on top of the desk.

Problem solved. Best $6.45 I ever spent. I still don’t know why the desktop’s WiFi suddenly stopped getting a good signal after working fine for six months, but it works now.

Thanks for the advice, all.