RSS
 

Archive for May, 2010

The Zuckerberg Conundrum – A Facebook Apology

25 May

The Joy of Tech - click for full cartoon

It must be tough being CEO of one of the largest internet properties around and still having to prepare a sincere heartfelt apology each year. Facebook has been in the news due to an uproar over its privacy settings – not a surprise since it is time for the annual, since 2006, Facebook Privacy Uproar and Media Circus Event.

Until today’s Washington Post column by Zuckerberg came out, I wasn’t going to write anything about the company or lack of privacy because at the end of the day, Facebook users by and large don’t care about
privacy issues. Facebook is only publishing the information that it has been provided and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that something you want to remain private probably should not be published on the internet – in any form – ever.

So in the same spirit of the ridiculous that this new Facebook Privacy Media Event has created my post is called “The Zuckerberg apology”.

I’ve compiled some of the great Zuckerberg mea culpa’s of the past so that you can compare them to today’s Zuckerberg opus. You decide what factors make a given apology your personal best (honesty, timeliness, stated course of action etc) and then if you feel like it, post your decision as a comment to this post – I’ll tally them up or something down the road and add the results to the end of this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
4 Comments

Posted in Just Business

 

The John Cleese Theory: Applied Project Management

24 May

This post is a little different because it has videos! Actually Youtube has the videos and I'm merely linking to them but through the magic of the internet they sort of magically show-up in the context of this post. I haven't addressed any project management topics recently and after watching a Monty Python special on PBS, I started thinking about some of the John Cleese skits that I've seen over the years and realized that a lot of them had either a "business" or "government service" theme to them even back then.  Of course, if you are a Monty Python, Fawlty Towers or James Bond "Q" fan then you already know who John Cleese is, but there is also a side to John Cleese that you may not know. John Cleese the businessman and co-founder of a video production company, Video Arts, responsible for making entertaining (and now classic) training videos. The videos have been a staple in corporate management training departments for years. With a "Project Management" theme in mind, I did a search for some of the skits that I remembered and then found some more along the way and now you have my "John Cleese Theory: Applied Project Management" post so sit back and enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

 
Comments Off

Posted in Just Business, Project management

 

OOMA on the move

18 May

OOMA may be starting to consolidate its position in the market – which is a good thing.  I started  to take the company to task in a post a couple of weeks ago  but over on tmcnet Rich Tehrani has been making some announcements that show the OOMA Bluetooth adapter - Rich Tehrani imagecompany may be back on the move and certainly still in the game.

 
Comments Off

Posted in Just Business, Observations

 

HTML5 giving birth by committee

17 May

HTML5 is (almost) here and the warring camps are lined up for battle. Google, possibly one of the first players out of the gate with its Google Wave application service has been demonstrating some of the improved HTML5 features in Wave like dragging and dropping of photos.  The photo effect did require a helper application, Google gears, because the HTML5 support is not quite ready yet.

Next we have the iPad, where Steve Jobs is pushing an Apple ‘standards’ based HTML5 approach over Flash which he won’t support on anything outside of Macs.  Unfortunately, in the real world, HTML5 has not yet specified a codec standard for the HTML5 video support and while Jobs and Microsoft (strange days indeed) are backing H.264, Google and Mozilla are into OGG Theora, while Adobe and lots of satisfied users of course want flash/SWF to remain as an option (Nasa blog: Whywe went with Flash) and there are probably another half – dozen video codec standard contenders out there .

This kind of “survival of the fittest” technology contest happens time and time again. XHTML, an XML variant was slated at one point to become the next HTML version. The attempt to bring XML style structure to HTML was both well-intentioned and strongly positioned to become HTML version 5.  XHTML  just failed to gain widespread support by the mainstream browsers or by anyone outside of the development and standards communities. XML itself, introduced as a means to simplify the complex SGML markup standard has itself, ironically, become far more convoluted and and complex than SGML ever was.

So, for a brief moment, HTML5 does have a very promising future. It can, as Google Wave has shown, break the barriers between the traditional desktop based application, web application and mobile computing – a process which, has been underway for maybe 10 years now.

I really hope that HTML5 doesn’t end up institutionalized like XML or balkanized by warring factions like Apple and Adobe because HTML5 has been in labor for about five years with no birth, which is kind of what happens when delivery is by committee.

Related Articles:

 
1 Comment

Posted in Observations, Web Services

 

Scam through the mail: Be careful out there

14 May

We read all the time about investment fraud, internet phishing schemes, identity theft and other scams and usually it happens to other people  but occasionally it hits closer to home. 

This is a departure from my usual posts and I am putting it online just so that if anyone searches for any of this information they will realize, hopefully before they get taken, that they are being scammed.  My mother got this letter in the mail and at least she is now listening to her sons and not responding to every pitch that comes into her mailbox so she showed this to me.
I have scanned the letter and check so that you can see the details. You can click on the images to enlarge them but essentially the scam says that she has won $450,000.00 and that enclosed is a check (made out in her name and with her address) for $4990.00 to cover Canadian taxes of $4500.00 which must be wired before payment can be made. So the scenario is as follows:

  • American Family Publishing sweepstakes win.
  • Canadian Taxes must be paid (on an American Publishing Sweepstakes win).
  • The notification is from a (supposedly) U.K. company First Security Corporation PLC (and U.K address).
  • The check to be deposited is from the New York Yankees and a Florida Bank (don’t ask how the Yankees got involved).
  • The Contact Agent is in the U.S (an 866 number).
  • The Wire Transfer (to supposedly pay for Canadian taxes) is going to a U.K destination.

Yeah that all looks amazingly legitimate so far:

Of course, the way the scam works is that once you deposit that $4990.00 check (which is phony and/or stolen) you are now out-of-pocket for your banks bounced check fee even if the bank doesn’t come after you for handling stolen checks.  If you proceeded to withdraw and send $4500.00 via Western Union anywhere then you are out of that money too because the wire transfer of your money is real and can’t be reversed whereas the deposited check can be, and will be reversed by your bank in days or even weeks after the deposit has been made and the check supposedly cleared.  By the way the $4990.00 figure is not accidental, that amount is just under the (usual) $5,000.00 radar where a bank teller generally has to get a Supervisor’s approval for deposit and additional verification must be made,  verification tests that might immediately expose that check as phony or stolen.

So if a Steve Crouch at 1-866-890-005 is sending you money – maybe you should just tear up the check and in the words of the old “Hill Street Blues” TV show: “Be careful out there”.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Observations, Security

 

Taming WordPress revision control

13 May

          Great tip that came from the socialcmsbuzz site. If you are running a WordPress blog like this one then you’ve probably noticed the revision control and tracking features. Each time you make a change a new version is created and WordPress keeps track of what changed between versions. If you accidentally delete a post, get hit by a virus or are just terminally cranky, you can go back to find and redo/undo your revisions and changes. 

             However, the WordPress implementation (2.9.1) appears to keep unlimited (or at least just limited by available space) revisions and these can take up a lot of space. Fortunately there are plugins to help.  I am using the WordPress Revision Control Plugin which helps you setup how many revisions you want to keep by post and or page – going forward. I am also using the Delete Revisions plugin which enables you to go in and clean up (i.e delete) past revisions that have already been stored – even on my relatively small blog, there were hundreds (of course I do revise a lot).

 
Comments Off

Posted in Observations

 

Troubleshooting a NetBIOS Network Mapping problem

10 May

This post is a write-up of a networking problem that I just helped to resolve. The name of the sysadmin has been changed and the messages which actually span a 10 day period, have been condensed and edited to fit into this post. This was an interesting experience for several reasons: the network is some 3400 miles away; I never actually logged on to the network; I didn’t know Markel, the sysadmin, before we started troubleshooting the problem network.

Markel: We’ve just upgraded from a Windows 2003 to a Windows 2008 domain. After the upgrade, a number of applications using the network neighborhood services stopped working. There are two sites involved: computers in SITE_A can only locate and work with computers and servers in SITE_A; computers and servers in SITE_B can only locate and work with computers and servers in SITE_B.

Winston: This sounds like it might be a NetBIOS browsing problem as you haven’t mentioned  problems with login, authentication or permissions issues which might have pointed to an Active Directory problem and you haven’t mentioned any internet access problems which might have pointed to DNS configuration issues. Can you verify that all of the Windows services that should be running, are actually running?

Markel: All of the services appear to be running correctly I added a WINS server on each site when I first saw the problem and I have WINS replication going between both sites. Read the rest of this entry »

 
1 Comment

Posted in Technology

 

Browstat – NetBIOS troubleshooting secret weapon

10 May

Browstat.exe is a microsoft command line tool that was originally provided as part of the Windowss 2000 support tools. Browstat.exe is the secret weapon that Windows sysadmins use to troubleshoot NetBIOS browsing problems. While it is no longer supported by Microsoft on current windows platforms it still works and if you have NetBIOS on your network you should make sure that you have a copy. NetBIOS is a ubiquitous part of the windows networking realm – any programs that allow users to browse the network for printers or computers or map drives, are generally using NetBIOS browsing.  Browstat.exe lets the system and/or network administrator quickly determine the primary cause of a browsing problem.

Microsoft example

Microsoft has an excellent write-up and examples of how to use Browstat.exe on its support site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/188305/, so I am not going to reproduce how to install, configure and test the installation in this post.  Actually for most windows environments there is no need to install anything, just extract browstat.exe from the cab file and run it. You should have at least some basic knowledge of how NetBIOS browsing works in order to use this effectively. This is not a tool for everyday use but when you have a network browsing problem this tool is your single best  opportunity to quickly resolve the problem.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Technology

 

Netbios – A Twisted History

10 May

NetBIOS is a relic from the early days of computer networking. While the internet existed when personal computers first started to become networked. Microsoft, with a severe case of NIH syndrome and urged on by computer manufacturers wanting to sell more (proprietary) hardware, took a look TCP/IP networking and rolled its own twisted version. The DNS HOSTS file became LMHOSTS; DNS became WINS and Netbios became the protocol for LAN’s instead of TCP/IP (or that IPX/SPX stuff that the upstart Novell was pushing). Of course the internet became even bigger and ethernet along with TCP/IP replaced Token ring, Arcnet, DecNet, SNA and other forgettable protocols. Microsoft of course responded by putting Netbios on top of TCP/IP (so there) and we still live with this today.

You’ve got to give Microsoft some credit for persistence – where Apple just says the new world is X and forget your Appletalk. Microsoft says the new world is 7 (but no worries we’ll still run your 1980 era LanManger if you insist). We thus, wind up with DNS, WINS, HOSTS, LMHOSTS, domains, workgroups, Browse-Master and so on all trying to co-exist and even interact with each other. When they don’t interact we find that we can ping a computer but not map a drive or we can map a drive or access a server using UNC (\comptername ), but cannnot browse the network using network neighborhood: Even when things work reasonably well in a LAN environment remember that Netbios is at heart a LAN protocol whereas TCP/IP had its origins as a WAN protocol.

NetBIOS well known ports
137:   NetBIOS name resolution (name service), WINS
138 and 139:   NetBIOS datagram (browsing)

When you throw things like NAT addressing into the mix (as 99percent of LAN’s do) then Netbios does not always work – its protocols are often blocked at the firewall (network_ discovery_LAN = GOOD;  network_discovery_internet = BAD) and routers and firewalls have not always had a good track record of translating NAT IP addresses inside Netbios packets (NBT) and are more likely to break.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Technology

 

Review: Inaugural post – objective

04 May

I decided to add a review section to my notebook because there are a lot of good products that I use and that I think is worth a mention from time to time. Since this section will cover products that I use, then by definition, products that I don’t use because I have no need for them, or don’t use because they are junk, will in general not be reviewed because they are not being used. I haven’t worked out a formal template for these posts yet, but I expect to use something like the following:
Name of Application/Service/Product:
Type of Application: (WebAPP, WebService, Iphone App, Windows App, Mac OS/X App, Hardware [category])
Platform: Windows, Mac, Iphone, Linux
Company Name:
URL:
Description: What it does
Usage: What I am doing with it, how well it works, good points and bad etc.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Review

 
« Older Entries