LUX.ET.UMBRA

Image via CrunchBase

I’m really disappointed. So far, I’ve been tracking the entire deal for all sorts of cities on and off for the past week on “Google’s Infrastructure for Communities” venture. Amusingly, I had actually applied for the city of Winston-Salem long before Greensboro even knew about this venture. And with all of the cities, including Greensboro, no one has once bothered to mention that this product is specifically last mile driven. It’s to the homes of consumers. That’s right, it’s basically the same as Wilson’s Greenlight project.

FTTH – (fiber to the home).

It’s documented right there in the RFI, but everyone is trying this gimmick and that gimmick to try to get Google to come. Why not analyze what their business model has been and will continue to be? Why not actually look and see whether or not they have actually purchased dark fiber around your area? That’s information that is vital and crucial to your cause. Those that have dark fiber that has been purchased close to your locale will probably stand a better chance of becoming the venture’s pet project.

What journalists need to focus on, is not whether or not businesses or research institutions have access to high speed Internet. That’s just entirely irrelevant. So what if Google puts in FTTH. That would not effect a school, nor a law firm, or even a medical facility. What people need to find out is what sort of applications could be coming across a high speed connection to your home. Would you discontinue your cable service? Would you go with fiber based HDTV? What if Google was your provider and controlled the line and access points? Why would this be good for what they do?

I think there are many people that are not asking the right questions. Google doesn’t ever do anything for free (yes, Google does mine your Gmail. It’s in your terms of service). And it’s not like the Dell fiasco with the manufacturing plant since any job creation would be very much infrastructure related. Would your city become an instant techburg? Of course. But at what price, and do you have what it takes to do this?

Personally? I think they’re after the television content. Youtube is perhaps only the first step in the long line of things, but having been a shareholder and analyzed their corporation for a number of years, I can say that I can see many ways that they could monetize the information gathered by using similar techniques as their current search but applied in the high-definition medium.

Google is a great company and I would love for them to become a major corporate player in the Triad. But so far, what I’ve seen has been more of the whole … who can throw the biggest party and have the best food for when Google comes. Sorry, Topeka. Just. Not. Impressed. And that just doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes right down to it.

Tags: Google, Internet, Local, Observation, Opinion by darkmoon
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If there’s one thing that I despise, it’s when sites move slowly. Like they drag. And when it comes to blogging software, these usually are hella draggers. But fortunately there are a few ways to speed things up without actually giving up as much. The biggest one that you can ever focus on is caching.

Caching basically means that instead of telling the server to dynamically process something, it has a statically saved copy somewhere that it basically reads off. That shaves ticks off the seconds when you don’t have to ask the CPU to figure out what some variable is saying. And with most database driven applications, there are two methods to do this.

DB Cache: This is less well known but is actually an entirely brilliant design. Basically, it makes the assumption that you’re going to be querying your database a lot, and thus it saves those queries statically and can shave off seconds for you if you have large queries to make. This basically means that it’ll be slow the first time around, but not so much the next if you happen to repeat things a lot. Very useful in that sense.

WP Super Cache: WP-Super Cache is one of the most well-known in the WordPress community. It allows you to cache the pages themselves after the first time they’re built into static calls. This means that instead of reading directly from the database and generating the page, it creates the page the first time and doesn’t change out that copy until there’s a new one to change with. This basically allows the first person to read it to have a bit of slowness, but after that the page is already kept around.

As you can see, there are at least two different caching methods that you can implement to improve the quality and decrease the time latency. And in the web world, time latency is everything.

Tags: Blogging, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Google came out with their social network tool called Google Buzz just a day or so ago.

While it’s actually a fascinating tool and definitely could give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money, it really is a little too noisy for me. Mainly because of the integration with Gmail. When I logged in, I expect to see my emails since I have to respond to many of them and they’re usually something important even though they’re of personal nature. But with Buzz, it’s really just a noise floor to keep up with what’s going on in the world. I usually have another tab open for those types of things so I don’t have to pay attention to them unless I want to pay attention.

In any case, this isn’t a well-known thing so to turn off Google Buzz:

• Scroll to the bottom of the Gmail screen
• Click “turn off buzz” in the footer.

And that’s it. It’s pretty easy and straight forward, although you’d never think to do it in the footer since there’s a Settings tab for your account. In any case, there have been some other friends that have been seeking this information since it got too noisy in their lives too so obviously it’s not just a personal occurrence. Either way, if you’re looking to turn off Buzz, there ya go.

Tags: Google, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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So I was voting for the 2010 Bloggies since 8Asians has been nominated again this year and this time for Best Group Blog. I was done with my choices that I wanted to vote for and I scrolled to the end and was amused by the random captcha done by ReCaptcha. I mean, what are the chances that they would pick those two words? Sounds like the name of a new blog in fact… hmm… Amusing.

Tags: Humor, Internet by darkmoon
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If you do a lot of online banking and you happen to use Bank of America, you probably have SafePass activated.

Unfortunately for you, there isn’t a very published method on how to fix your SafePass and gain entry back into your online banking if you have recently switched cellular carriers but have kept the same number. If you’ve changed numbers completely, you’ll have to call customer service to deactivate your old number and sign up your new one. But with an existing number that has been ported from another carrier? Seems like you’re up a creek since the SafePass won’t send to the phone.

What you do is, you take the mobile, and text to: 73981. In the body of the text, just text “help” without the quotes and hit send.

Then you wait about 24 hours because their systems don’t update but once a day I suppose. In any case, if you come back and try your SafePass again, it seems to actually work. Now, there apparently has been this issue on and off with iPhones and the like, but with my Droid, that seemed to do the trick in changing out the carriers.

Tags: Cellular, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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If you have a smartphone, I urge you to check out Waze.

The Android client is a bit new and they’re still working on it, but this is one thing that can totally get you to learn the area you live. Or at least drive it. Waze is basically a social geolocation game where you collect points on the streets you drive, and help map the environment by “road munching” new roads. Basically, you think of it as a real-life Pac Man meets Wikipedia mapping. The more users there are, the better it is and what’s interesting is that you can report hazards, speed traps, police, and all sorts of other things.

While based on the economy, I’m not inclined to drive all over jeebus to road munch, but I have to admit that there are a lot of people that are out there that are doing it.

What’s even more interesting is that you can see the business model and where this could really be fruitful. Garmin or Tomtom anyone? This not only makes cartography a lot easier as far as mistakes go, but it also allows you to not have to wait for a company to come out with the next version of whatever software to actually get the right road name (nudge at Garmin for spelling Raleigh – “Raliegh” on the I-40 Eastbound). It’s like Wikipedia but for maps and the more people that use it, the more fun it is.

Not having touched the iPhone app, I’m curious as far as if it’s better and more user friendly than the one for Android. Overall, the map editor on the web, and Android clients are a little clunky, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed easily. It’s the thought process behind this that counts. And if Waze just happens to give out free things for random driving events like their Christmas event? Then you can entirely count on a lot more users playing this game. I mean, everyone loves free stuff.

Oh. And it does integrate with Foursquare, so you can check-in at your local coffee shop easily from the app itself without having to exit. Or Tweet your location, or what not. Facebook anyone? There’s just so much that can be done with this, that I’m excited just thinking about it. Now if only they could make the client a little less laggy…

Tags: Cellular, Internet, Life, Technology by darkmoon
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If you have set up your SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record but you haven’t tested it, then here’s an easy method of checking if it works. Send off an email to:

spf-test@openspf.org

If you get a response where it says that it has passed, then you’re good to go. Otherwise, you’ll have to do some more testing to see why it’s not working. OpenSPF is a great place to start as far as finding the right tools and how to do setups for SPF records.

Tags: Email, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Annoyingly, email from Google Apps will fail to some recipients if you do not set up the SPF (Send Policy Framework) record for your domain. And while Google Apps tells you how to do it with a TXT record, the way GoDaddy does it is a little bit different:

• Go to Total DNS Control Panel.
  
• Under the TXT section: click Add SPF Record.
  
• Select An ISP or other mail provider: click OK.
  
• Select Outsourced tab: put “aspmx.googlemail.com” (no quotes) in the field and click OK.
  
• Click OK again when GoDaddy sets up a SPF record.

And then you can wait a little bit for that to propagate to all of the DNS servers. Once that’s done? You’ll have your SPF Record set.

Tags: Email, Google, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Over the weekend, it seems that there was a compromise with Hotmail accounts. Five figures worth of accounts apparently. Now, the first thought would be that someone actually took action against Microsoft and busted through. But in this case, it was apparently ill-gotten from phishing scams. The password list was posted on Pastebin which is a place where developers share snippets of code to get more eyes on it. They have taken down the offending accounts and taken the necessary precautions.

Either way, Microsoft has identified this issue and has apparently locked down the compromised accounts. If you were compromised and are locked out, there is an email form that Microsoft Live has set up for you to reclaim your account. I took a look at it, and it asks for some serious private information.

All of this should teach you (the end user) something. Lesson here is that you don’t click on anything ever in emails or otherwise, when you can go directly to the site itself and look for it. One of the reasons I have always hated HTML emails since it stupefies the entire security aspect and makes it a more difficult problem since you go against human nature. Thus? You’ll never see me prefer text over HTML any day of the week. You can dump links there, but I can read them.

Tags: Email, Microsoft, Security, phishing by darkmoon
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Ever wonder how to get rid of the spammers on Twitter? TwitBlock is a great way to find the ones that have followed you and whether or not they could be the same spammers.

Using a special algorithm, it calculates out whether or not a person is potentially a spammer and gives them a score. Based on whether or not TwitBlock users have marked the user as a spammer, the effect of the scoring goes up or down. It’s actually a pretty interesting method since most of the ways of detection are common sense things.

I would probably say that most people that have more than a thousand followers probably have quite a few bots and such on there, but at least there’s a way to somewhat detect these now instead of going through your followers one by one.

If you’re curious about it, definitely run this every so often on your account. It uses OAUTH so you actually never give it your password and such which is a great thing from a security standpoint of a third party application. Give it a whirl.

Tags: Tips and Tricks, Twitter, spam by darkmoon
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