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January 22, 2009

default is your password?

The computer press are reporting on the Conficker Worm with mainstream press and even abc radio not too far behind. Woody Leohard in the Windows Secrets newsletter writes clearly about the exploits of this computer malware. Do have a quick read, it’s worthwhile. One part of this blended threat malware is the autorun.inf vector riding on the insertion of USB Flash and other devices. I groaned about this vector in a previous post, auto not run and at the forum (which has been updated with discussion).

This worm also door knocks. It tries a range of passwords that people might use when they are too lazy to think of a password, and guess what, amongst them, “default”, “password” and “8888”. (see the Analysis tab on this Microsoft info page). Guess, we’ll have to think up another dummy password, eh?

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Posted by Anandasim at 05:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Whitehouse has Changed

From my last post you can see that I basically pulled an all nighter to watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. I wanted to watch this historic event live as over the years I like many have been asked, "Where were you when JFK was shot?" or "Where were you when man landed on the moon?" and the response is always "I'm not that old, all before my time.". Now in the years to come I will have an answer when asked “Where were you when Barack Obama became POTUS?”.

The above was my primary motivation and my second was to interact with people around the globe as the day evolved and it more than lived up to my expectations. My words will never convey how much I feel on this historic occasion and I shall leave that for the wordsmiths of this world. I wasn’t there but I could not have been any closer without  flying to Washington DC.

Throughout the night & early morning watching Twitter, Flickr, TV and Internet the amount of emotion, joy & happiness was endless. 

Flickr has ~8,500 photo’s in the Inauguration 2009 group pool and ~5,000 public photo’s tagged with #inaug09.

• Shel Israel - Nice to see so many languages being posted at #inaug09 
• HuffingtonPost.com - At one minute after Noon, the Obama version of http://www.whitehouse.gov/ will go live.
• Creative Commons - Whitehouse.gov mandates 3rd-party content under CC-BY: http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/

The Whitehouse Blog - Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.

Tim O'Reilly - Inauguration Moments and Links

I loved the promise on the new whitehouse.gov to "publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Twitter Stats

We saw 5x normal tweets-per-second and about 4x tweets-per-minute as this chart illustrates. Overall, Twitter sailed smoothly through the inauguration but at the peak, some folks did experience a 2-5 minute delay receiving updates.

CNN Live & Facebook (Techcrunch)

Update 2: As of 10:15 AM PST/1:15 EST today, Facebook reports:

-600,000 status updates have been posted so far through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed

-There were an average of 4,000 status updates every minute during the broadcast

-There were 8,500 status updates the minute Obama began his speech

-Obama’s page on Facebook has more than 4 million fans and more than 500,000 wall posts

-Millions of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

And CNN served more than 18.8 million live streams between 6 AM and 1 PM EST, with a peak of 1.3 million streams just before Obama began his speech.

Update 3: Make that 21.3 million streams on CNN.com as of 3:30 PM EST and 136 million pageviews.

Posted by Stephen at 12:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 21, 2009

DUN – Ah I remember it well…

Stephen has this encyclopaedic memory when it comes to things IT. He’s helpful as ever, helping resolve a Dial Up Networking problem. I was just saying, I Remember It Well, the times looking at the modem diagnostic dialog, listening to the screech of the 33.6k modem, cursing when half way through a download, the phone would hang up because there was a call waiting tone….

Posted by Anandasim at 06:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 20, 2009

Barack Obama Inauguration

I thought I would write a quick link happy post regarding Barack Obama’s Inauguration as the 44th President of United States.

The main event locally here in Australia kick’s of around 3:30am EDT with all but SBS covering the event live. ABC1 3:25am – 5:00am, CH7 3:00am – 6:00am, CH9 10:55pm – 5:30am, CH10 1:30am – 6:00am and SBS will have a special report at 12:30pm.

The US media links ABC, CBS, FOX, MSNBC, PBS, C-Span, Wall Street Journal, New York Times & Washington Post wrap up the main links I want to get started with on mainstream media as such.

What the above websites will stream I have no idea so here are a few more that I know will be streaming live video:- Presidential Inaugural Committee , Joost, uStream & Current.

You should be able to find some YouTube here & here and a bit of Flickr here, here and the Flickr Group Inauguration 2009.

Aside from most likely being tuned into ABC1 on the ‘box’ here at this odd hour of 3:30am in the morning the remainder of my multitasking efforts will revolve around Twitter and finding great people to follow the conversation with. I will kick it off with Andy Carvin who is the Social Media Guy for NPR and the NPR team have done some great work making websites and the tools for NPR to give it’s all on this momentous day in history.

To simply track what is going on over at Twitter without worrying exactly what Twitter is and or can do simply use the search engine and with these ‘tags’:- #inaug09, Obama, Inauguration & #Current and you should come upon some great links and conversations from people all over the world who are watching any of the above links live talking about the event.

CNN who I left off the above list are also going down a slightly different track and have teamed up with Facebook for CNN.com Live and have also teamed up with the Microsoft Photosynth to Capture The Moment of Oath of Office.

You can find me here on Twitter or Facebook if you are hooked into one of these sites and just add me and I will see you a bit later.

Posted by Stephen at 09:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 17, 2009

Taking down that note, m’dear

I’m coming to the conclusion that people don’t think. Or thinking, note-taking software products have limited persistence. Evernote, a really useful note taking product morphed into half cloud, multi-platform, part desktop. I’ve been using Evernote for a long while. It started off as a Microsoft OneNote competitor. What I liked about Evernote 2.0 was that it could be portable (on a USB stick), it was free (with an opt-in payment) and it did not have lots of install baggage.

 

I used it as the electronic equivalent of the large white desktop pad we used to see people have – you know, you would place your writing and stuff on top of it, once in a while, you would reveal a column and scribble quick to-dos and action items as you worked, then tick them off within the hour as you did them. You then had a transcript of what went through your mind. Simple, non high tech, worked. Only problem was archiving – the paper became dog eared and dirty easily and you seldom kept more than a few day’s  worth.

So Evernote came along and with writing, programming, multi-tasking on the computer, I would not write my to-dos and scraps on paper. I I would use Evernote as the dump box, the super Clip-To box. Evernote (the company) needs to move on and make money – so they have cloudified the app, targeted the ubiquitous portable devices (iPhone, Windows Mobile) so that your notes can be “anywhere” and “everywhere”. But version 3.0 – I just don’t “get it” – it aims to do more, it carries more baggage, and it’s not as simple.

Now, when I wanted to cloudify my notes, I would Google Notes it. Guess what? Google has decided to shelve Notes.

Bah!

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Posted by Anandasim at 10:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 14, 2009

Help! Pedophiles on the loose

Thank God for Senator Conroy. Just when all those anti-Internet filter cranks appeared to be getting the upper hand, it looks like those pedophiles that our Minister for Morally Sound Communications wants to filter out have infiltrated the highest level of the US Government.

What else are we to make of the report by a high-profile task force appointed by 49 US attorneys-general to research the problem of sexual solicitation of children online, which claims that - can you believe this? - the problem doesn't exist? Obviously, they're part of the international ring of pedophiles that Senator Conroy plans to smite with one blow. Can there be any doubt now, that Senator Conroy is right, and our children's little eyes and minds are at dreadful risk?

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force which the law authorities set up to examine the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, declared that widespread fears that older adults were using these popular sites to deceive and prey on children constitiuted a "moral panic". It found that children and teenagers are very unlikely to be propositioned by adults online, which we all know can't possibly be true, or else, why would Senator Conroy be so concerned?

Obviously we're going to have to block any links to the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and possibly arrest any Australian who tries to look at their site. And of course we'll have to filter out all the material on those sites that are being run by those wicked attorneys-general. Maybe we should just include the entire US government? And possibly the entire US?

Wouldn't it be easier to, you know, just stop any Australians from going online at all? Or possibly restrict Web access to decent sites like Family First? Come on, Senator Conroy. You can do it. We must act now!

Posted by cw at 08:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 13, 2009

Windows – reading the tea leaves

Funny how when you say “reading tea leaves” – it means looking into the future. And yet, you’re looking at the past of spent tea leaves…..

Seems a few of our forum regulars are now tasting Windows 7 Beta. I haven’t been able to get a steady start, but this morning, the registration process and download is now working.

I was listening to one of the episodes of Twit, not sure which one when one of the Twits said that Windows Vista was like building a skyscraper in .NET and as they got up to the upper floors, the building became unstable so they had to start again. Hence the current Windows Vista is a mess of unfulfilled aspirations, mechanisms that were supposed to work better but don’t work as planned…

My perspective

Microsoft has been on the .NET gig for a long time now, .NET is version 3.5. .NET is a big and encompassing framework for clientside and serverside functions to support the "computing in the cloud" trend. Microsoft amassed a broad array of veteran and young talent, counting amongst them, distinguished people lik Anders Hejlsberg - the guy behind classic Borland's technologies of Turbo-Pascal, Delphi and so on.

Looking back however, was once Microsoft was very pragmatic and workmanlike programming with lean and mean successful end user products. Here comes Borland saying that they could build a spreadsheet (Quattro), databases (Paradox and dBase for Windows) very quickly if they used the most brilliant object oriented tech. Which they did successfully in Quattro but Paradox for Windows and dBase for Windows were abysmal bloated monsters. (There were other management, people and business issues with Borland and these products are not even mentioned in conversation anymore.) The point to take away here, is how, at that time, Bill Gates avoided object oriented programming as a goal, saying that it was product that mattered, not the underlying programming concept - if you did use the latest tech, well and good, but at the end of the day, the crunch is in having to ship quality product not disjoint examples of programming brilliance. I think Microsoft lost the lesson when they embraced .NET - they would hold the programming library up first and show that they could produce a better Windows as a result.

Well, Windows Vista is a model of unfulfilled aspirations, things that think brilliant but don’t work brilliant and a shadow of it’s original design spec.

Hopefully, they have learnt from the Vista debacle and moved on with Windows 7. Certainly, they have Steven Sinofsky at the Windows helm (notice how Microsoft Office is distinctly and stubbornly COM based, VBA extended and non .NET in it’s core – this was Sinofsky’s earlier charge) and he will bring some practicality to the cloud of comp sci nerds on the Microsoft campuses.

There is this new factor of Ray Ozzie though. He is new to the Microsoft empire. He created TK Solver! (hands up y’all who know and remember it) – a product I played with that had genius but was ahead of it’s time (Mathematica etc… are the descendants in a way), Lotus Notes (genius again, but not so since Ray’s disconnect from it), Lotus Symphony classic (pragmatic and workmanlike, under appreciated). He is supposed to be the Messiah to lead Microsoft into the cloud (courtesy of his work in Groove).

Will Ray add to pragmatic good product ideas (like debundle-ing non system apps – mail client, photo gallery manager, desktop search from the operating system) or will he add to the woes of getting on with making a solid, reliable operating system. Time will tell.

Feel free to come to the Forum discussion topic on Windows 7.

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Posted by Anandasim at 10:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 10, 2009

Waiting for Windows 7

Well, we heard that Microsoft would release Windows 7 to the great unwashed. And the usual Microsoft Downloads site or the Windows 7 official site didn’t seem to say anything. Lifehacker’s got a lead. Seems Microsoft didn’t figure on the level of interest (maybe they thought it would be as popular as Vista retail sales). Looks like free and new is always good. Oops. Did I say “free” and “Microsoft” in the same paragraph? You didn’t know? Lots of Live apps are free. For the moment.

Update: Microsoft Extends Windows 7 Beta Availability Until January 24th

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Posted by Anandasim at 12:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 08, 2009

Presenting Thirst

I was looking up some details for a project and thought Slideshare would fit the bill and came upon Slideshare's Zeitgeist and the most popular presentation for 2008 was Thirst by jbrenman so here it is. This should make you think before you create your next PowerPoint slide deck.

Posted by Stephen at 07:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 07, 2009

Elucidating Errors

As a programmer, one appreciates straightforward, linear program execution. It’s the IF…THEN…ELSE that makes life interesting and incurs exceptions. Errors are generally internally handled but from time to time, you have to wake up the person at the keyboard to the fact that something has gone pear shaped. I’ve come across a range of error dialogs in my time and inflicted my own on people. This morning though, Movable Type’s giving me a nice one to rest my CASE.

Posted by Anandasim at 09:27 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 02, 2009

So, what did you get for Christmas, are getting in January?

Christmas is over and the heady 1st of Jan is over. Sigh! Went too soon. But retailers in Oz are still keeping doors open, often not even taking down the Boxing Day banners in the shops. So, what did you get that was geeky, nerdy, computery or camera-iy? I helped someone into a new 13 inch Aluminium  Macbook. Another friend got an MSI Wind Netbook. Got a bug – one painful and one a toy. There’s this Logitech Wave that’s gesturing at me more than an IBM click clack ever did. Stephen might be impressed – the keys have a high level of comfort and then there’s that huge task switch button near the little left pinky – would be useful in switching between virtual machine sessions. It’s a lot more sensible that those huge Microsoft Natural Keyboard models of old. Before Christmas, I kitted up with a Nokia E-71 – finally giving the clunky O2 xda II a rest – it’s now serving time being used for Eggstreme which the wife loves (actually the classic game, not Yolk’s Revenge). Symbian has grown up a lot since I was winging it on the Nokia 6800.

So, c’mon share your experiences – it may wean us off the itchy wallet syndrome given the doom and gloom supposedly round the corner.

 

Posted by Anandasim at 05:20 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack