Author Archive

This Thursday, March 31st is World Backup Day, a day to make sure your data is being backed up correctly, your backups are in good shape and that you can restore from backup if and when it’s needed.

It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of *when* it will fail. Hard drive life is rated in MTBF or mean time between failures which basically means that your hard drive will only run for so long before mechanical breakdown or physical damage will render your computer and your data unusable. Professional data recovery companies can charge several thousands of dollars to recover data from a failed drive and even if you make sure to use new drives and replace them frequently a fire, flood or theft can wipe all your data out in a heartbeat.  What can you do about this?

continue

Dear Rovio,

I really wanted to love you, I did.  Your wifi enabled webcam, your omni-directional steering, your programmable web interface.  You were going to be my little remote sentry to keep an eye on my lair and keep me company on a long winter’s night.  Alas, it just wasn’t meant to be…

(hit “read more” for the rest of the story)

continue

Sooner or later disaster strikes, it is inevitable. If you work on computers, at some point you will lose data. The best way to get around this is to have backups. I’m a bit more paranoid about certain things ( like my pictures) that I can not replace. Those aforementioned things are backed up in 3 places, and one of the places also has redundancy built in. Recovery of data off of drives in not cheap, we are talking $1000 just to start. The prices can easily double.

So how do I get started backing up my stuff? Here are 3 programs that I recommend.

Bonkey
JaBackup
NasBackup

continue

Security is always a huge concern in the IT community.  We make huge efforts to maintain firewalls, encryption via SSL, VPNs, encrypted wifi signals, program and operating system updates but the biggest security vulnerability time and time again are the passwords that people choose.

There is an article that I recently came across written from the perspective someone trying to break into a secure system.  The top 10 most used passwords list reads like a list of lazy choices from people that just don’t want to think about security:

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

continue

Droid vs. iPhone, is there a winner, can there be a winner? I have the luxury of both phones, which I use daily both for personal things and for work. This will not be a whose carrier is better comparison. If I was to do that I would just say AT&T is the worst provider I have ever had to use in Manhattan and that would be the end of it, oh look I did I said it anyway.

Getting back to the heart of the matter: what is bad about the Droid and what is bad about the iPhone. You may be asking yourself why just the bad stuff? I think if you want fanboys to fawn over either device you have a lot of sites extolling their values all over the internet. So lets start.

iPhone: No removable battery Battery life Closed source architecture No tethering * Single carrier Lack of Google Voice

continue

There’s been a lot of talk about Windows 7 since it’s launch, most everything has been positive (which certainly wasn’t the case after Windows Vista launched).  In this tough economic client people are asking themselves, “Why should I upgrade and what benefits will I see if you do?”  I’ve been running Windows 7 since August with their Release Candidate and installed the full version as soon as Technet offered it and I’ve found many improvements over previous versions.

(Be warned, this is a long post.  I wanted to get as much information in as possible.  The short story is if you’re getting a new computer definitely get it with Windows 7, if your computer is less than 2 or 3 years old I would recommend the upgrade).

continue

The other day I came across a site that I haven’t visited in quite some time. I’m actually very grateful for the site since some one took the time and effort to write out guides for default services settings in different windows programs.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/registry.htm

Generally if you like to tweak with your services and/or registry , you can sometimes forget to set them back. Or if things really go off kilter , you can just set them right back. Of course you are making backups of anything you change first …right? Generally I have used it when a computer has been hit by a Trojan. The new ones will disable as much as possible , creating havoc  for any administrator to get the system back up and running. I am also of the mindset that formatting is not necessary …..most of the time.

What is the registry-

continue

continue

continue

Microsoft put out a series of patches today for all versions of Internet Explorer from 5 to 8 for every operating system from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 to address a huge security vulnerability .

The vulnerability was used in the cyber attacks against Google, yahoo and others over the last couple weeks. If you’re running any versions of Internet Explorer please install any updates from Windows Update that are pending on your system or grab the update manually from Microsoft’s site.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002 – Critical