Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

A FIELD GUIDE TO HIRING PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS - Joel Spolsky lays it out.

Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you. So this section will serve as a kind of field guide to [recruiting]developers: what they’re looking for, what they like and dislike in a workplace, and what it’s going to take to be a top choice for top developers.

I can confirm that after having worked on two side-by-side 20″ inch plasma displays at my previous job, the little 15″ LCD I now labor over seems like torture.

But what the heck, I’m just a contractor so the advice doesn’t really apply to me anyway. Even this tech tip from Computer Geeks TechTips leaves programmers off the list of those who can most benefit from the increasingly more economical configuration, citing the typical user, gamers, engineers, and business people like stock brokers and such. But not the lowly computer programmer who makes all that stuff possible.

Is that typical? Would a real computer geek leave himself off the list of those who would most benefit from a cool display ugrade. The CEO probably works in a cube over there Computer Geeks.

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Whoever is in charge of the Surf Cam at Surfside, which has been featured in my sidebar since the inception of EI, is really letting the place go to hell. The site is pretty much static for the most part so does not really require much maintenance, or creativity for that matter; the main attraction being regurlarly updated still shots of the beach conditions and a semi-regurlarly updated surf outlook.

The surf cam photo up right now is eleven days old. Pathetic. I bet Gary Koerner is rolling in his grave, unless of course he was cremated. Then that would be pretty much impossible.

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I don’t think I mentioned this before but this past spring I taught beginning and advanced Flash animation, as well as some other computer courses, at the Brazosport College CE center. I am scheduled to teach the Flash advanced course this August. As an intro to the course I will definitely be using this clever piece of Flash animation creayed by Alan Becker as a demonstration of what someone with a bit of imagination and a lot of extra time on their hands can do with Flash.

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Microsoft Launches Security for Windows

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I NEVER COULD QUITE UDERSTAND the mentality of people who fall for the fake emails requesting private information, aka phishing. Well, here is some insight to why that technique is so successful.

I came across this story at F-Secure. If you run Windows or get on the internet at all, you should check out F-Secure. Currently, at the top of their blog page they have a poll for what anti-virus is being used most. You will probably be surprised by the results.

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I tell you what, something is phishy in Denmark.

I don’t understand the mentality of enforcing dope pushing laws in one place but not in another. Same with fraud and deception laws. My private email box, which I own and pay the costs to run, is like the worst corner in the the worst neighborhood you can imagine–minus the violence. The point being, they are pushing dope and running scams in both places.

At the least, spamming my email box with offers of ten different kinds of dope from ten different outfits is malicious mishchief. But to me, it amounts to pushing dope. And then you have the eBay and CitiBank security verification requests or the fucking Nigerian who needs my help getting some money in country.

It’s not me I am so worried about, I can take care of myself. It’s the children. I am worried for the children. I demand the police, local state and federal, put a stop to it all. I want my streets, and my email box, cleaned up. And I want them cleaned up now.

Anywhere else and the narcotics teams and vice squads would be all over it. RICO and all that. Serious charges and serious jail time.

On the internet, the perps operate with impunity. Why? Because the respective police powers can’t stop them, that’s why. That’s how much we rely on police power to make people act right.

It is for the same reason that some neighborhoods in the real world are runnng rampant with crime and others aren’t. If the people refuse to obey the laws and the police aren;t willing to go in with violent police force, the laws are ignored. Laws are only for the suckers who obey laws.

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[Editor’s note: To limit the hateful comments and the hate mail, the victim’s name has been elided from this post.]

I was Googling to see if there has been any new information on [a certain] murder case I wrote about involving the young pregnant woman who was shot in the head while riding a motorcycle last Sunday. So I start with the simplest search using the victim’s name. On that search, my friend Trench over at News of Doom is #1.

After clicking through several pages of results, I notice first that only a couple of the entries on the first page had anything to do with story. But then I notice that my site is not included in the fist five pages. That is not a good sign for my PageRank. So I do a little more checking. I do a search for ‘[Victim’s name] shot’, no quotes.

Pretty much the same results. Trench is at the top, then ABC news, then the random combinations of the victims first name and last name begin. Hmm. I’ll try the “[victim’s name] shot”, using the quotes to limit results to only the victim. Only five listings and my site is not among them. Now I’m pissed.

I click on the Google message at the bottom saying some similar sites were left out but by clicking you can see the omitted results. There I am at number three. I was culled by Google. Rastards.

And, by the way, there has been no recent coverage of the investigation into this tragic case, if there even is an investigation.

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You heard it here a two years ago and several times since. It has been slow in coming but check out this article about a rock band making it big without backing from a big record company.

What makes Arctic Monkeys remarkable is that they are an indie band on an independent label, and that they achieved their sudden success almost entirely through grassroots promotion on the web.

The foursome got together in 2002. They started playing shows around Sheffield and passing out free CDs at gigs. They encouraged their fans to trade the tunes online and to post them to websites and P2P networks. Yes, they encouraged file trading. Eventually, more and more people found them on MySpace or on their website via word-of-mouth, and their reach started to widen. Fans started booking them in venues farther and farther away from their hometown. Wherever they played, everyone in the crowd knew the words to the songs. This is all before they even signed to a record label.

Curiously, after achieving phenomenal success on their own, they contracted with a record company. A better deal, I think, would have been cut with Wal-Mart. Heh, a distribution deal with Wal-Mart is better than a deal with one of the powerful RIAA members. The kicker is that all it cost Wal-Mart to provide the service is some disk space and a few minutes of a webmaster’s time. Maybe $150 bucks.

I wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Wal-Mart open low-cost, state-of-the-art recording facilitiesLocated in regions like Austin, Memphis, L.A., New York–wherever this is a robust music scene–for use by artists with whom they have distribution deals.

The main reason the RIAA are so vicious in protecting their copyrights is because they know that in the very near future that music is all they will have the rights to sell. They are not worried about the future because they rightly figure they are not in it. The musicians will finally wake up and small the java realizing that the web is the only place they need to be. Then they will realize that they don’t need a big record company with expensive production equipment and media contacts to do it. They just need a good web strategy and a good web development team.

My previous articles on the demise of the big recording companies and RIAA :

• One Artist, One label
• Recording industry boo boo
• SCO suffers setbacks, retreats
• EZ-Jackster

(I saw this article over a t Digg, a cool tech news aggregator)

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I am sitting here on Sunday morning sipping a cup of joe, surfing through the channels, and on Bravo I find a television show called Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos that has a narrator running the audience through clips that you can find at any number of sites on the internet. Here are a few of the viral video clips featured:

• Cheney’s Got a Gun
• John Ashcroft singing
• Buzz Aldrich punching a guy
• Brittney’s baby riding in the lap gaffe
• Cartoon of Bill O’Riley talking dirty on the phone
• Howard Dean’s infamous Yeearrgh!!!
• A big fat guy got a running start and hurled himself into snack machine, vertical belly-flop style, smashing the front glass to smithereens.
• The Trunk Monkey vehicle security system, for when just getting your car back isn’t enough
• And finally, The Mercury Mistress

Bet you’ve seen some of ‘em. As a matter of fact, I bet that half of everyone with broadband has seen at least one of the clips featured. But I bet very few people with dial-up connections has seen any of them at all. Curiously, I don’t recall any high-speed internet commercials during the show.

They teased the video clip of the week over at Bravo.com. Gotta spread the traffic around. Pretty smart application of media convergence. Soon the blurring lines between the wired net and the broadcast net will not exist at all.

Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos would have been way better than surfing for the clips if it weren’t for all the same stupid commercials that viewers are constantly bombarded with on television. But the show was still pretty good relative to everything else on the dial because I didn’t have to look at a lot of bad clips to find the few really good ones. It doesn’t take a lot of time to download just a few clips, but it does take a lot of time to download a dozen or two, most of which are not worth the effort.

The people programming the television channels don’t “get it” and therefore bombard their customer’s with repetitive, asinine commercial interruptions. Maybe the majority of people aren’t bothered by the interruptions but I will rarely endure them, preferring to watch my entertainment uninterrupted.

The networks are in desperate need of a better way to present advertisement. Until they figure that out, the network’s will continue to bleed customers and television bandwidth will be all about delivering the best of the internet to their remaining customers who do not yet have access to high-speed internet.

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It has been several weeks now since getting any major referral spam. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve deleted a single blatant Texas-hold-em referral in two weeks. It’s weird actually. Not that I am complaining.

Not to worry, I just trashed about half a dozen. I had no illusions that the spammers were gone for good. But, still, I like to see the spam patterns change every now and then so I’ll have some bit of comfort knowing that someone is dishing it back to the spammers. Nothing like a full dose of the FBI to fuckin ruin your day.

I hope somebody’s on it. The same technology used to pump out spam can be used to clog the entire Internet, literally bringing the WWW down.

If spam can be stopped then it should be. If spam can not be stopped, there may be a security problem.

The Russians seem to be on to something with their anti-spam measures.

• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

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Some crazy kid had an idea for an internet ad gimmick called Million dollar website. It paid off.

Here is the million dollar site. Here is a site of a wannabe who is trying the same gimmick.

Who knows, maybe lightening can strike twice. But I doubt it.

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Ever since I rolled an old company 401K plan over into a Fidelity IRA a couple of months ago, my inbox has been loaded down with investment spam. I am pretty pissed about it too.

I know, I know. Spam is a fact of life. Everybody should be used to it by now. Well here is what really burns my ass. I used my personal email address that I host at my domain, doncallaway.org, when I performed the rollover transaction. You know which account I am talking baout. It’s the special email address that you rarely give out. The one you give to your friends and such. The one you never use for purposes like free newsletters, myspace, jmeeting, job bulletin boards, chat, and all the other online crap that requires an email account.

For all the online crap, I use a throw-away email account. When a throw away account is to the point that I have to delete 100 messages for every one I read, I consider that account burned and I throw it away and replace it with another throw-away account. The nice thing about gmail is that I can forward the throwaways to my personal account. When the throwaway is burned, I just create another one and forward it to my real account.

Several years ago when I owned Overnight Recovery, a financial services company, I went through a dozen variations of Overnight##@hotmail.com, where ## was 20, 40, 60, 80, etc. Then the spammers got clever and for every base word, like ‘overnight’, for example, they would just stick on infinite suffix and prefixes. Maybe one out of a thousand variations would hit a valid email. What did the spammers care, they weren’t uing their computers to do the work.

Anyway, with the spam filters that hotmail and the other outfits have implemented over the years the problem is not near as bad as it used to be. The majority of spam ends up filtered out and then deleted, never to be seen by human eyes. Now you can go years with just a few throwaway email accounts. But still, an account can get burned if it winds up on the wrong spammer’s list.

This is where I think don at doncallaway dot org is at with the fucking investment scam spammers. Thanks a lot Fidelity. Obviously I expected more from such a supposedly prestigious organization. If I had known Fidelity was in league with the spammers, I would have given them a throw down email address. Or more likely, I would have chosen a different investment company with whom to do business.

Oh, and Fidelity, don’t try to deny you sold my email address and don’t say I agreed to it. The coincidence is too great and I am suspicious of even tiny ones. Furthermore, I have never, ever knowingly agreed to having my email address shared so other affiliated companies can send me ‘valuable’ information. So if I did agree it was because you scammed me.

Other stories on this site related to spam:

• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

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From the Web 2.0 article written by Tim O’Reilly that I mentioned in an earlier post, the author makes the following point:

A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.

On the other hand, as “participants”, aka, consumers, begin to realize the value of having control over content they create in the form of comments and reviews, we may see heightened attempts by the consumer to recieve reciprocal remuneration for supplying valuable content.

Maybe thinking such as that will not be widespread until Web 3.0, but I’m already there.

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I just read this long but very interesting, well-written in-depth discussion by Tim O’Reilley that slices smoothly through all the hype about “Web 2.0″.

The article provides a little table of Web 1.0 technologies and the Web 2.0 compliment for each.

Summary of philosophies that earmark a Web 2.0 organization:

Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies

In exploring the seven principles above, we’ve highlighted some of the principal features of Web 2.0. Each of the examples we’ve explored demonstrates one or more of those key principles, but may miss others. Let’s close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

If you are not in to reading long technology columns, you might just want to check out page 3 where O’Reilly discusses the personal websites transition to blogging.

If your have any interest or need to know about current technology trends and how those trends will be shaping the business models of successful interent companies of the future, I recommend reading the whole thing.

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Hugh Hewitt writing over at the Daily Standard is trumpeting the end of old media due to the bloggers draining off the advertising dollars.

It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing–or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly. Other new aggregators are in the works, and the revenue flowing into new media will further strengthen and expand its reach.

He is, of course, correct.

I have been on this soap box for over a year and just wrote about it in a post two weeks ago.

Remember, it was just a few short years ago that the Internet bubble burst. The Internet advertising revenue model was all but doomed. Non-Internet ready concerns who were scrambling to catch up, which included many in the mainstream media, breathed a collective sigh of relief. Saved by the bell. However, it quickly became obvious that the technology bust did not dissuade the marketers from the Internet. Just because large brick-and-mortar concerns cum Internet businesses went belly up didn’t mean that the almighty consumer quit the web. The consumer was still very active on the Internet. Where there are consumers, there will be advertising.

. . .

Newspapers, like everyone else in the news media, make money from advertising. Advertising dollars follow the consumer. The newspapers have always wrongly assumed that they had high-paying advertisers simply because they were the established newspapers. Because they were the elite. Wrong. They had advertisers because they had an audience of consumers. Period. End of story.

While conventional wisdom always seemed to think the Blogosphere would take over as a counter to media bias, I always thought it would be because the money moved. Seems people are starting to come around to my way of thinking.

Although the Instapundit was way ahead of me. Natch.

More…

Tapscott also has a nice analysis of what the heck is going on and why

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The Russian people at least are taking the problem as serious as it really is:

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

I am telling ya, people are tired of spam. Spam, which is a nice name for virus, threatens the viability of the internet for all serious purposes, except for maybe porn. And it needs to be stopped. Not that I am advocating lynch mobs or anything like that, but the people of Russia get it, even if the government does not.

Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for.

Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S.

Hey, Kushnir, guess what a Louisville Slugger is for.

The people of Russia would not have to beat spammers to death if the government of Russia would do it for them, errr, well, at least put the spammers in jail for a long, long time.

The risk of spamming must meet or exceed the sometimes huge rewards of spamming or spam will never go away.

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The 2nd most popular web browser bumped its market share to 8.71%

Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5% and 1%, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer, according to NetApplications.com, which compiles its browser usage data from more than 40,000 Web sites monitored by its HitsLink.com service.

Hey, works for me.

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Why in the f–k did I not buy some Google stock?

Oh yeah, I didn’t have any disposable income.

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And he is one lucky bastard in my opinion.

Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, Minn., will serve his time at a low-security prison and must perform 10 months of community service. He had faced up to 10 years in prison, but the judge took pity on the teen, saying his neglectful parents were to blame for the psychological troubles that led to his actions.

“(The Internet) has created a dark hole, a dungeon if you will, for people who have mental illnesses or people who are lonely,” U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said. “I didn’t see any parent standing there saying, ‘It’s not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.’”

Woe be to this little prick had I been in charge his punishment. He would have gotten far worse than what those at Abu Ghraib received. A little more heavy on the torture than on the beating off, though. This guy probably already does plenty of that. Damn wanker.

Seriously though. The only thing that is going to curb the malicious hackers and spammers is severe deterrance in the way of stiff punishment. And I dont mean that kind of stiff punishment.

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The article about computer counter-measures on the internet that I mentioned in a recent entry is very interesting, like I said, and Mr. Paco Nathan (a chief officer for Symbiot Security) has obviously been doing some thinking on this topic. From the article though it is unclear whether one issue was overlooked or not mentioned by choice.

In any internet security scheme where there is such a thing as counter-measures, it is going to be an absolute necessity and absolute certainty that the consumer will have access to such tools as well. Just as in our society today we do not allow guns to be outlawed so tyranny will always find an inhospitable host, so will we find it necessary for the people to be able to defend their personal property rights and freedom in the virtual world.

Unfortunately, I can envision the day when internet travel is limited just as travel is today. We will only be able to go where we are welcome and where we are provided protection by the United States military or the police. Hostile states and neighborhoods provide no protection from computer attack and may even pro-actively attack any unauthorized entry. You may get mugged for your credit card information in certain “neighborhoods”.

Nathan certainly mentions the rights of internet users in his article, but it seems he focuses primarily on the context of consumer protection. I think these rights are to be protected by policies instituted by those who offer consumer services.

Over the course of the next few years there will be a major shift in the thinking around how the Internet is managed. The engineering details of that shift have far more to do with the advanced mathematics used by financial analysts and the protocols used by military operations than most of today’s computer programmers and network administrators may imagine. The end result, however, will be readily familiar to the consumer: It will be an on-line world where privacy and freedoms are protected, and risk is managed by the rules of credit cards and shopping.

I believe we have found over and over again that power corrupts. Corporate organizations certainly have not been exempt from this maxim. Personally, I don’t want my internet experience regulated by credit card rules unless I happen to be using a credit card.

The ability to hamper me from effectively using my computing resources would be a serious blow to my ability to provide for my family, regardless of who is doing the hampering. I dont want a credit card company hampering my abilty to use the internet any more than I do the the credit card thief. Threatening one’s livelihood can get you shot in Texas. Similarly, I want the ability, as a law abiding citizen, to be able to “shoot” someone who is threatening my livelihood on the internet. Especially when they already have the ability to “shoot” me.

Boiled down, when it comes to our computers, our constitutional rights must apply. In the virtual world the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms equates to the right to acquire and implement counter-measures.

From a seperate interview with the chief officers of Symbiot, who developes counter-measure solutions, Tim Mullins is linked with a comment that sums up my point of view well:

“The moment that I begin to incur costs, or the integrity of services that I pay for is reduced by any degree, is the moment that I have the right to do something about it.”

Sign me up!

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