May 2008 Archives

There's something to be said about antispam technologies. Especially on blogs. And so far, I'm liking the fact that Six Apart came out with their own.

Believe me. A lot of people have a love-hate relationship with Akismet. I've had my own issues dating with it on and off for the past couple years. So when there's an option out of Akismet crappy false positives, I'll take a look.

So far, TypePad AntiSpam has already caught a couple things since being installed on lux and 888 Society. The bad thing about this is that it's still automated with no user interface. There should still be some way to set up a local whitelist and/or commit to a national blacklist. I don't see why these services don't set up something similar to Spamhaus but niche towards blogs.

In any case, TypePad AntiSpam is built into TypePad, and there are plugins for WordPress and Movable Type. Nothing like a little extra protection.

Okay. Yes, I did sit and watch all two and a half hours of it. But believe me, I went in thinking it was much worse than it was. First off, it was produced and directed by Uwe Boll. No offense to the guy, but he puts out some pretty ugly movies based on games. I've yet to see one of them that really just shined.

But I will give some credit to this movie, since there was enough of a decent cast to actually hold it together for a slightly better than B-rated fantasy flick. The script wasn't as typical as usual for Boll's films, and with Statham holding down the fort as the protagonist and beautiful Forlani carrying the damsel in distress role, it actually worked out somewhat.

I will say that the ending was pretty cheesy, but that's pretty typical. There was also a lot of influence it seemed from Lord of the Rings. Right off the bat, not only the helicopter shots of ridge walking, to the main battle scenes, all reminded of Two Towers on a lesser scale.

In the Name of the King - A Dungeon Siege Tale actually surprised me. The tale was a bit long, could have been a bit more exciting, but the overall Boll cheese factor was lessened which is a dramatic improvement based on historical trends. Now if only the name wasn't so friggin' long...

Soon, conference calls will be a thing of the past. The cooperative project between Musion Systems and Cisco Networks created the Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience where the holographic systems of Musion were integrated with Cisco TelePresence.

What's extremely interesting about this is that with cameras and IP networks, you actually have people that are not only standing on a stage across from each other, but they can also see the audience. It's practically like the movies where you have virtual meetings at a board room where, everyone is sitting there, even though they're not physically there.

Similarly, this technology allows you to not only be there, but interact. That way, not only voice inflection is conveyed, but also body language. This takes communications to a whole new level. Can't wait to see this out in real working environments.

One of the easiest ways to troubleshoot hung processes is trace it to the source. This works for cpu intensive things also, when dealing with a *nix based system. So if you look at the process ids, there are always a parent process id that's associated with it.

It's usually always in this format:

So if you just trade those ppids as the pid, you can eventually find out what script or tool is dragging your entire system down. Basics of troubleshooting processes, but you'd be surprised how many people do not understand it.

If the process is eventually owned by root (or pid of 1) then it's been zombied meaning the parent dropped out and tossed the reins to the root process. Zombie processes sometimes can actually never go away until they're killed and just sit there taxing resources from your system.

You can do this in any operating system that allows you to do bash shell scripting, but if you know a little about shell scripting, then all you need to know is that you can do:

ftp -i << **

After you put this in the script, this will allow you to login and password to whatever is set in your .netrc. If you don't have one, then you should set it before starting off a script like this.

All the commands after this line will be your usual ftp commands. When you're done, then do a:

bye

**

Everything outside of this line will be back on your bash scripting syntax.

Under the same management company as Mucc, this band has been around 2003. Although they're billed as a visual kei band, they dress more like American or European goth, and their music has the style of more hard rock, or metal. There's more of an edge in their latest album, Girugamesh and by their own accord, they are inspired by western bands such as System of the Down and Slipknot.

The first time I listened to the little bit that you're given on , I was hooked.

They have a harder sound, but it's really good and definitely good rock sound. Going strong since 2003, and they've gained another fan. Nothing the artists under Gan-shin, I think they're in good company. Most of the bigger artists listed there have international recognition already..

Adding WPA support in Ubuntu is extremely easy. All you have to do is add the wpasupplicant package. Then, just reboot the system. The next time around, if your card is configured for WPA, it'll actually automatically detect. So far, I've tested this with D-Link, Orinoco, SMC, and Senao cards. They all work off automatic detection.

This is actually a brilliant thing that Ubuntu has done since this brings this distribution that much closer as a integrated solution that's pretty newbie resilient.

The entire plug-and-play platform actually works fairly well and I didn't have to configure anything. Gone are the days where you had to go around tweaking the drivers. Just click the Network link in the status bar, and choose your connection. You'll be prompted for passwords and such if there is need. Brilliant.

Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, has made an absolute clause. And in the world of security, you never make absolute clauses.

"Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

I can tell you that this statement is just asking for trouble. Most things don't need prodding to get enthusiastic people get jump on and start trying to break it. In fact, there will be those people already. But stating any fact like this, is absolutely preposterous.

Why? Even the SHA algorithm has been broken. Truecrypt? Broken. There are pretty much ways around every single type of algorithm unless you use some obscure and totally huge seed that can only be brute forced. And even so, there are many researchers that will attempt to find weaknesses in algorithms. But, let's dig a bit deeper. The way Truecrypt was broken was because the password had to be stored in RAM for just a fraction of time. Yet, if you froze the RAM, that data could be extracted. Similarly, any sort of password at a low level has to be stored and decrypted somewhere at some point. This also has to be stored. Thus, there's always a weakness to the strategies of password protection.

Knowing what TPM does, I can't say that it's not a strong encryption mechanism (although it is vulnerable to cold boot attacks). But I do know however that I was taught at a very young age, "Never say never." In this case? "Never say absolutely."

Photo Credit: (diebmx)

The cool thing of getting a nice litter box like the ScoopFree LB2 Ultra Litter Box is that there's a lot less poopie and peepee smell.

And less poopie and peepee smell is definitely a good thing. The difference between the latest model and the LB1 is that the LB1 doesn't include a hood (which helps with smell) and the LB2 has an adjustable timer versus a fixed. Otherwise, they're pretty much the same litter box.

One thing to be wary about is that this litter box was made for crystal litter. That stuff basically sucks up moisture like pee and such. I assume it does with the poop too. Kind of like the silicate packets that come in a lot of packaging to keep moisture out of the product. Well, crystal litter is great and all, but you have to change the entire stuff out every so often.

ScoopFree actually sells replacement cartridges, which will run you about fifteen dollars a piece. This is okay and all, but I would recommend getting a Forever Litter Tray (yes, I did purchase one). These are permanent trays that you basically replace the litter and can save you a bunch of money in the long run. They are a custom product but so far, I haven't had an issue with them and they are guaranteed against leaking and such.

Altogether, the entire litter box combo will run you somewhere a bit over the two hundred mark but it's well worth it when you account for the times you have to clean kitty stuff and instead spend that time to play with them!

There are many ways to shutdown a Windows system, including the usual CLI and using shutdown.exe itself. But did you know that it has a built-in GUI?

shutdown.exe -i will launch to GUI itself. This allows you to set timers, warn users, and even log events. You can even send administrator messages to your users when you're on your way to launching a reboot or shutdown of their system. This is available on Windows XP, Vista, and Server editions.

Sitting on many nonprofit type boards and running my own nonprofit, I've changed some ways of thinking in the past six months.

You see, anyone that has been paying attention to the financial sector, and world markets would understand that the economy seems to have taken a turn here in the States. It's hard for anyone not to see that actually with gas prices running sky high (technically that's another story altogether, but we'll visit that sometime else).

So what happens to nonprofits? The ones like my own do not carry salary for its staff and thus are purely volunteer based and non-fund driven. There really isn't anything that you must do since we do this because we wish to do it. But there is another type of nonprofit. Those that actually work in the sector and is their livelihood. What about them?

Well, first we need to understand how most nonprofits operate. For the most part, nonprofits are either supporter driven, or foundation money driven, or a combination of the two. Unfortunately, if your nonprofit serves a pretty distinct niche, then either or both of those sources of funding can dry up very quickly when times are tough. And believe me, the whole grant writing, and asking money from foundations thing is a weary act.

That's why nonprofits need to quit thinking in the old school fashion of holding out the hand and asking for money, and instead start thinking like businesses structures. Yes, the budget is tight, but think of grant funding as your VC or seed capital. Once it's gone, you can definitely go back for a second or third round, but the idea is to use it to drive a recurring business, not one that is a one pop wonder.

Think about it. If you had grant money that was used purely for a project by project basis, then you would have to operate like my own nonprofit (pure volunteer). But if you could create recurring business from the initial funding? Then not only are you creating a recurring income, but you're also abiding by your mission. This also frees up foundation money that you would have been going back for, so that the foundations can give to some other charitable organization. Let's be frank, there are more charitable organizations out there than actual money givers.

There are a lot of reasons why operating like an actual business can pull a nonprofit through the hard times. Heck, most of these nonprofits already have a Board and instead of a CEO, you have an Executive Director. But either way, most of the planning and actual management team is already in place. There just needs to be a change in the school of thought.

Believe me, when times are good, it's not such a bad thing to just ask for the green. But when times are tough? It's more prudent to batter down the hatches and hold out until the storm is over. And nonprofits usually are one of those ships that are thrown wildly in the storm.

Photo Credit: (dbking)

With finances tightening these days for most of the middle class due to gas prices soaring, any little bit of savings can help relieve some of the financial pressure.

If you've never actually looked at this or thought about it, it's time that we did a little bit of education in how to buy groceries (and really anything else you can pick up at a retail superstore).

On the tags themselves, most people usually pay attention to the price itself. But there's another smaller number there. A unit price. This means that if broken down by unit, this item would cost X amount per unit. Sometimes, the "sales" or even larger item doesn't save you any money than buying the smaller amounts of the same item. In fact, just recently, I found regularly priced toothpaste in a larger tube costing less than the "sale" double-pack of the same large tube of toothpaste. Meaning, if I bought two of the regular price toothpaste, it would be less than the double-pack.

That's the trick to unit pricing. Not really so much of a trick, than observation. With a little bit of forethought, you can save yourself some of those pennies. And a penny saved is a penny earned, as they used to say.

Photo Credit: (ninjapoodles)

The Sync Kolab extension for the Thunderbird email client allows you to set up synchronization with imap servers for both calendar and address books.

This is extremely helpful for those that are looking for portability and when it comes to working on email from multiple different points of entry. Now this allows not only your server-side to be at any point, but your local ends also to be synchronized in case you lose connectivity or something. And using iCal's calendar format is pretty spectacular, since that's basically the one thing that Outlook had on open-source type software.

I'm really not surprised that this is happening. Not one bit.

For text messaging, being charged for incoming messages that you have no way of setting a white list, or block unknowns, or ways of controlling incoming messages means that anything that is incoming is out of your control. And if you can't control it, you shouldn't have to pay for it.

I haven't the slightest clue what the carriers will try to defend with, since outside of the perspective of trying to get people to get on the ten to fifteen dollar extra a month, unlimited text messaging plans, there isn't a good technical solution that does the above.

From a legal perspective though, I'd be curious if you target incorrectly towards certain carriers if that absolves all named in suit from liability (since it's pointing the finger at the group). The reason for this is because, US Cellular (which is named in the lawsuit) doesn't charge for incoming text messages. Sprint and apparently AT&T allow you to turn off text messaging completely (I definitely know for Sprint since I've done it for my parents).

Whether or not this lawsuit comes to fruition, it does bring up a great point though. Why does the consumer have to pay for incoming text messages? The carrier might answer that it's similar to the delivery of a cellular call, but it isn't. First, you don't need to answer your phone. Second, while everyone believes that SMS is a two-way communication, it technically isn't. 2-way designates that you actually get a receipt upon delivery so that you're guaranteed that the packets have gone to their destination. Instant messaging is 2-way. Internet chatting is 2-way. Phone calls are 2-way. But not SMS. Ever have a text message that never got to the person you were sending it to? Just went into the void, didn't it. 1-way communication.

In fact, most of the time, people assume that SMS is a timely communication form, but that isn't true either. In all technicality, you can queue up SMS messages and burst them. If the person's mobile can't be found on a home system, there's a good chance that it could be delayed messaging. Anyone with texting experience should have experienced this also in probably the first month of going at it.

Either way? I'm curious as to how the carriers pull this one off. It will probably reach settlement and most people will get 500 text messages plans for a year or something since I seriously doubt they'll go and change the internals to do text messaging policing unless forced to by the courts. Should be interesting to watch.

Photo Credit: (pouwerkerk)

UltimateDefrag is definitely a pretty awesome defrag utility. You can defrag down to the file folder, or even file itself. And you can specify performance level for that particular file or folders and use different types of defragmentation algorithms.

However, if you're not into doing all that work and you just want to defrag your hard drive like every other utility, UltimateDefrag can do that too. Just set it to auto, and it's fast and reliable (although not as performance driven as if you were hand-tweaking it). All this for 1.7M physical footprint. That's pretty dang sweet. And you know it's freeware, right? Supported on everything from WIndows NT to Vista. Now why couldn't other people write Windows software efficiently like this?

The story of
American Gangster revolves around a real-life drug lord during the Vietnam War era, named Frank Lucas (Washington). He had seen what went down in Harlem working for Bumpy, and learned the tricks of the trade. He smuggled heroin in and started to running the purest drug trafficking there called Blue Magic. Unfortunately, Jersey detective Richie Roberts (Crowe) is on his case.

Interesting little tidbit, but Frank Lucas actually grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Yes, the mobster was a local boy. Sounded like it was a very tough time too, but seems like he went all the way from where he stood in his youth with petty crime to the big time, and then back to nothing again after the feds took him down.

I have to say that this film is definitely one of my all-time favorite gangster films now. Not quite a rich history as the Sicilians in Godfather but definitely interesting enough to actually watch mainly because the script was great, the location (shot in New York City), and the actors. Worth your while to spend some time with this one. For sure.

Everyone's seen this commercial. CEO of LifeLock, Todd Davis, places his social security number on the side of a truck. I always thought it was entirely silly since the three credit bureaus are the ones that actually track this information and no one can stop ID theft before it happens. Good pitch, but let's live in the real world.

Well, it seems that the CEO himself got ID thefted. The fact of the matter is that LifeLock in itself is just an alert service that I can tell. That in itself doesn't make it bad. In fact, I actually use one myself being that I make online purchases. But the part where they protect you directly from identity theft?

Sorry, but you can do everything you can to minimize risk, but risk is always there. It's part of life. I believe that's what a lot of people are not happy about being that the commercial seems to claim to be a protection service. Guess everything has to be defined, eh?

Unfortunately, while I don't use their product, I think that LifeLock is getting the short end of the stick also being that customers need to do the homework and understand what services they're signing on. It's like buying pet insurance when you don't own a pet.

Eh.

If you're paranoid about people collecting every single little piece of data from you, then you'll definitely need RefControl. The RefControl add-on extension for Firefox, basically allows you to spoof the referrer information on a site-by-site basis. This means that the sites that you designate not to know where you came from.

You can choose to send it based on site, or based on third-party requests which makes it a lot more functional than your regular referrer spoofer.

As crude trades at $130+USD on the exchange, everyone is getting hit hard.

Except the oil corporations. And as it starts effecting larger industries such as travel, it could send airlines into a circular problem that they won't be able to dig themselves out.

With the news of the high crude trade, American Airlines has said that they'll cut thousands of jobs and retire up to 85 jets in an effort to combat fuel costs. The British Airways CEO, Willie Walsh, announced on CNBC yesterday that last year they spent $4 billion in fuel and this year is projected to be at $6 billion. Even while the industry is trying everything in its power to cut costs, including add a few minutes onto the flight by slowing down.

Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky as British Airways posting a $1.7 billion profit, and as shown, Northwest and Delta are merging while there are rumors of United looking for a partner. But with job loss, and everyone buckling down, you wonder about who's actually following the old adage of having to 'spend money to make money'.

Let's be frank. Regular consumers will not be taking as many flights unless there are perks to sway them and costs are kept low enough to be worthwhile. While the shipping industry has shifted on the world market from boat to plane, there could be a reversal if costs keep up.

My thoughts? While hunkering down for the storm where no end is in sight yet, airline executives need to make very strategic plays to keep the passengers flowing. Being that a lot of travel is discretionary and not so much necessity, they'll be hit the hardest, especially as we begin the summer season of vacation and travel. Investments like what British Airways is doing is probably key for the short term, but these high oil prices are going to be a constant pain in their side until someone develops a new type of airplane fuel.

Photo Credit: (bfraz)

CNN actually has a bunch of RSS news feeds. And by their terms of service, you too can have it on your blog.

So in any case, all you have to do with WordPress is to install the CNN News plugin and go with the flow. If you want to make it prettier and such, you definitely can take it and skin it with css, and you can also call it as a widget. As of this post, it supports multiple CNN feeds, shortcodes, and uses the internal WordPress feed and caching systems.

Pretty impressive if you ask me. Definitely worth your while to take a looksie.

I'm sitting here in disbelief.

Seriously. What does it take to deliver an office chair? About three weeks ago, I ordered this office chair. Nice thing, but they didn't have it it in the store. So they ordered one for me and told me that shipping was free and they could deliver it straight to me.

What a deal, right? Two weeks later, I'm doing some billing and I noticed that a charge was made to the card. Wait a second, I didn't receive a chair.

So I called. They said that the order was on its way back to the warehouse since UPS couldn't deliver to the address. Strange, so I had them repeat the address. They put in an extra digit. Now, how you do that, considering I had the carbon copy in front of me and it was neatly printed, is beyond me... but let's just call it a mistake. No big deal.

The CSR assured me that someone would call me Monday and latest Tuesday on a replacement order. Guess what? It's Wednesday. Called OfficeMax. They claim no such replacement was made. On top of it, they said that they've credited my card, but I don't see anything yet.

I guess I'll wait until the end of the week to make sure that they've actually given my money back. Never thought it'd be this much hassle just to get an office chair. Three weeks without a product? And I'm willingly trying to give them my money. On the last call, the lady actually asked me if I wanted to re-order the chair. No thanks. It might turn into another three week ordeal. Next time, maybe I should just order it from Amazon.

All I can say is that this band is rocking my world. Rocking it hard.

This band is a mixture of punk rock, and death metal and everything in between. They're so versatile that this album even has a song that reminds me some of 1950s music mixed with current rock.

The opening and closing songs that were used in the second season of the anime television series, Death Note are both on here which actually reminded me of the American group, Linkin Park. But then there are some songs on there that have a heavier feel like P.O.D..

Nawo, the drummer, brings a softer feel to some of the songs, and actually the craziness of this group really works well together. They usually pose with the fist of rock, which is pretty awesome too.

They mix a lot of English, and Japanese words spoken quickly that sound very much like English. So a lot of it is pretty interesting since it takes some getting used to on what the lyrics are. It probably doesn't help that some of their songs have some really quick lyrics that rattle off like an auctioneer. I'm not sure I could speak that fast, let alone sing that quickly.

This import Bu Ikikaesu will run you about fifty bucks unfortunately being that it's not available via iTunes yet. But this latest album is still worth every penny.

If you're looking for a batch renamer for MacOSX, Name Mangler is definitely worth your while.

You can set your extension, rename with sequential numbers, use regular expressions, and do a whole bunch of other types of things to the files themselves. There are even more advanced features like drag-n-drop task based renaming, nested counters, and a whole lot more. Donationware for MacOSX.

ICANN apparently released an advisory back in late 2007 that they would be moving one of the root servers (one of twelve) to another IP address.

Unfortunately, most system administrators have missed this tip, since not everyone pays attention to ICANN advisories (I'll admit that I sure don't). This means that suddenly one of your root servers will go which will wreak havoc on your DNS. It also means that if someone were to rogue server the old IP address, then there could be DNS poisoning.

The older IP is 198.32.64.12 whereas the new IP address is 199.7.83.42.

So if your DNS servers need to be updated, do a quick check and make the change.

Usually, I'm not too fond of Windows driven devices. Especially ones that are handling my money. While embedded Windows runs a lot better than your average PC, it still does blue screen every so often and that's not exactly what you want.

Even so? I still love Bank of America's new ATMs. Due strictly to their deposit functionality.

See, I've been dealing strictly with ATMs since 1995 or so when I opened an account up with SeaFirst which eventually got bought out by BAC. What's interesting is that the account I had was free checking because you only dealt with ATMs. No matter. Deposits were simple enough since you could just drop a check in a deposit form and have it looked at later on.

But now?? NOW?? This is where I get excited.

Deposit envelopes? Who needs that? You insert your money or check directly into a feeder and it basically scans it and shows it on the screen. It even has OCR and reads the amount deposited to help you determine if the amount deposited is correct. After you're done, the receipt even has a print-out of the scanned check just so you know that everything is fine and dandy.

Bank of America might be this juggernaut in the banking industry but they have done some pretty fantastic things that I'm really happy about. Yes, one of them happens to be those new ATMs.

Photo Credit: (The Consumerist)

Mapack for .NET is a great library for linear algebra computations.

It basically covers pretty much most of the linear algebra type functionality and gives you a library that you can plug and play if you happen to need those types of mathematics in your application. I can't say that I've ever needed linear algebra in any of my applications, but then again, never needed to write engineering applications.

I love Google Browser Sync. In fact, I run this for every Firefox instance on any system that I own. There's just something about using your Gmail to store the current pages/tabs that you're reading and the ability to restore when the browser crashes that makes it one of those absolutely needed plugins. It also stores all of your history and bookmarks, browser passwords, and persistent cookies. Basically everything.

But there are a few things that drive me nuts still. One is that you can't initiate a manual sync. There's no way to actually just tell it to sync up to Google so that you know that there is a copy. There was a number of times where the automated sync didn't kick in and I had to restore an older copy. Bleh.

But that's not all. It'd also be nice to store different versions of backup. There also has been a number of times where Firefox crashed on restoring the pages. Well, since Browser Sync decided to kick in and sync up the "non-opened" pages, basically lost the tabs.

This plugin just has a little ways to go to be fully mature but it's just a smidgeon off. Until then, I'll just keep using it and getting annoyed I suppose. Probably nothing stopping me from tearing up Google's extension and making it better, but you'd think that they'd take the initiative. Ah well. Can't have everything your way, I suppose. It's not like Google is Burger King.

If you're looking for a quick WYSIWYG editor for html, then Writer for .NET might be for you.

It your regular editor with your usual cut/copy/paste functionality but it can also manage formatting, hyperlinks, and text layout. Just think something like Word editor for HTML but with a smaller footprint, and you'd probably be pretty close to this. Nice thing is that the source code is open so you can basically edit it to your heart's desire and make it better if you wish. Who said Windows doesn't have open source?

30 Days Of Night is one of the more gory but very interesting plot lines for vampire movies.

Barrow, Alaska is basically under darkness for thirty days at a time (compared to about sixty-seven days for real). Also, the movie basically has it set with no outside contact during this "night" time, even though obviously in reality they do have flights coming in and out.

The movie itself while has a bit too much blood and guts for my tastes, was actually a more unique plot and gave the vampires an ancient language that is subtitled. They're a lot more like intelligent but animalistic creatures. The entirety of the movie is surrounding the fact that the vampires want the entire town taken for themselves and that the residents have nowhere to turn except to wait for the sun to come out again. And little by little the citizens of Barrow are picked off one by one.

Being that guns don't work on the vampires, there is a lot of decapitation scenes of the vampires, and thus make it a lot more gory than it had to be. But it also follows the mini comic series pretty well and it actually was not a cheesy movie unlike many vampire movies these days.

Overall, it was worth the rental and definitely caught my attention throughout the entire film. From a horror perspective, it really didn't grab me as much as a gore fest which to me is a different type of genre than horror. Otherwise, worth your time to at least see once.

The metastat command is very useful if you have meta devices and or what is known as a hot spare pool. This command basically shows the status of your meta device (basically, a software RAID, or volume) and lets you know if there is a need to do maintenance on any of the drives or what not.

Great tool to have handy, especially if you've set up a software RAID. Makes it extremely useful to not only do spot-checks, but see how each physical device is doing within the meta device.

CommandBar for .NET is basically a class library that allows you to easily set up the command bar.

In fact, it's not just that... there's the Cool Bar, Re Bar, an bitmapped menu controls. It's just a really useful library that allows you to set up a Windows application when writing it. And libraries like this just make things that much easier.

In competition with Google Sky, this application allows you to take a look at the stars through multiple images of constellations and what not.

Pretty much think Virtual Earth, but for the sky and you basically have it figured out. It's actually a pretty interface, and seems to work decently as long as you fulfill the Windows requirements. Bravo by Microsoft Research for this product. I'm not so sure if this product would make me cry though.

Despite Scoble push, I did find that not having any screenshots or even videos for those that are on non-Windows operating systems slightly disappointing. Outside of that, the interface itself is worthwhile as a tool to teach astronomy. Take a look if you find some time.

One of the best commands during audits without tearing open a physical Solaris box is iostat. What I usually use it for is the finding out size of drives and type:

iostat -En command will give you the size of the devices that are connected via the io interface.

So everything from hard drives to optical drives. It gives you not only the size of the drive, but it also tells you the vendor, and serial numbers. This makes it extremely easy to find out how many drives are connected in your system and the total space there. It also allows you to see if there are drives that are failing with errors so you know if you have to replace anything.

Got to love friendly commands like this which are the difference between servers and workstations.

In one of the audits I had to do for work, there was a need to figure out what processors were running in the Sun boxes. Since it's really just not cost effective to go to each of the multiple switches and tear open the box to see physically, there had to be a way to see if there is indeed X number of processors and at what clock speed they are currently performing.

psrinfo -v will provide this information.

What's interesting is that in later Solaris versions, (I'm not definite on 9, but definitely in version 10), prtdiag will give a much better looking output including memory and slots.

Unfortunately, with a stock Solaris installation, you need to take what comes with the system and this will assist you in cpu proc auditing.

When you're in .NET, sometimes there are resource binaries and XML file formats used within the platform. The goal of this tool is to allow you to edit those binaries and give you the ability to not only edit names, string pairs, and import bitmaps and icons, but also allow you to merge multiple resource files together from different sources.

Resourcer for .NET is basically a resource editor for .NET. Another great third party development tool that is free for Windows.

Reflector for .NET is a tool that most .NET programmers know about. It's actually one of the few freeware tools that is invaluable in a coder's arsenal.

What's it do? Well, it decompiles any binaries that are assembled in .NET so that you can read it in the .NET languages (C#, VB, IL). It allows you to view the classes, has an explorer function, and allows you to navigate through the source code and such. This is one of the few tools that have been used to find malicious code written into .NET binaries and how some programmers were stealing not only credit card information but also identities.

At a recent dinner meeting for digital media executives, they asked me several questions about social networking, and how I viewed the digital medium. I explained my views on advertising and subscribers but then we got into social networking.

Don't get me wrong, social networking is great. It fits a niche and helps drive different types of advertising. But the question is more of, is social networking right for your product? Let's take the powerhouse Facebook for example since currently they're one of the social kings. Have you ever noticed that they've never ever offered to take more detailed personal information in a survey form? Perhaps incentives to get you to give it up? Why not? They advertise, but they blanket advertise. To me, that's just a waste, especially in a social medium.

When given a social medium, you're already grouping your audiences together by whatever. For example, college alumni will be parts of alumni groups. Thus, this information is invaluable for those vendors that sell school products or even discounted plane tickets to X,Y,Z game. There are all sorts of ways to target your audience in a social medium, especially in such a clean interface as FaceBook.

Another question you must ask is, is social networking right for your product?