I have a dirty secret to share with you all today: until recently, I didn't have a very good strategy for keeping track of my various Web site passwords and logins. Near my desk is a worn set of stapled sheets of paper with various notations about which username, email address, and password I have used to authenticate to its services. Luckily, I work alone, but still it bothers me that if someone were to break into my office, those special pieces of paper would probably be the most important thing to find. I know some of you use PostIt notes for this purpose, and keep them where no one would look, such as under your keyboards.
There is a better way, and I will get to it in a moment, but first I want to take you through what some of the other solutions that I have tried and rejected. Since I do most of my work on my laptop, why not just automate the credentials inside my browser? That is good for some of the sites that I use most frequently, but it isn't very secure should someone get a hold of my laptop.
Another idea is OpenID.net, which is an open-source collection of Web sites that federates your identity, including Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, and others. OpenID sounds really good, until you start to peek under the covers, and realize that if a phisher ever got ahold of just one authentication of yours at one site, they could pretty much gain access to the rest of your OpenID sites. This is more 'phederated ID' and a hacker's paradise. The problem is that once you authenticate properly on one Web site, you can use your OpenID URL to gain access to anything else.
I have mentioned in previous missives Ping.fm and Quub.com that attempt to consolidate all of your social networking logins in one place, and be able to update your status messages across the board. But it is troubling when I get emails from Quub mentioning that they have upgraded their system and "had to clear everyone's existing credentials that were encrypted with the old algorithm. Please re-enter your credentials under Settings …"
RoboForm is another solution, which basically automates the credentials and saves it in an encrypted spot on your hard drive. That is great, but what happens if you are using a different PC?
Another way is to use some form of two-factor authentication, so called because it uses something that you – and only you – have on your possession, such as a special and unique SecurID token. I have one for my PayPal account, it cost $5 and is well worth the added protection that it offers. Basically, no one else can use my account unless they use the token to sign in.
http://tinyurl.com/paypalkey
But the issue with these tokens is that you need one for each of your accounts. There are some vendors who are trying to get around this issue by using one's cell phone as a second factor authentication tool including Phonefactor.com and FireID.com. Both require some integration of their tools into your applications, which isn't very good if you want to apply them universally to all of your Web authentications. FireID's solution involves using a special server that sits on my network, while PhoneFactor requires software agents to download to your desktop or to integrate into your Web applications.
So what else can you do? The service that I am trying out now is from Tricipher and called MyOneLogin.com. It costs $30 a year per user, and everything is done via their hosted service so there is nothing to download, other than an optional Firefox or IE browser plug-in to handle some tasks. You set up a special Web portal for your company, and then add your credentials to the various sites. It comes with hundreds of pre-set applications and works with either special knowledge questions (what was the name of your third-grade teacher) or with your cell phone. The good thing about MyOneLogin is that you can set it up and forget your passwords, because no matter where you are you can login to the portal and then to your applications. You can mix and match Web and internal apps, such as your VPN login, too, without any programming or installing any servers. And it is also a great solution if a company wants to keep control of these credentials to these sites, so when you leave you can't take your logins with you.
Look for one of my WebInformant.tv screencast video demos in the near future that will show you more about the service. And you can try it out for 30 days for free if you are interested. Maybe now I can finally toss those special pieces of paper – but first I will have to make sure to shred them!
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
When to defriend and defollow
When I was growing up as a nerdy teen on Long Island, needless to say I wasn't one of the Popular Kids. Back then we called it Junior High rather than the current appellation Middle School and now nerds are now the new cool kids. In my youth, we didn't have reality shows where beauties met their geeks, Bill Gates hadn't yet gone to, let alone dropped out of college, and the Steves were still eating fruits rather than making Macs. We didn't even have computers, phones still had dials on them, and we all watched one of three network TV channels and read newspapers that came in the afternoon. And all of our parents bought American-made cars.
Ok, enough nostalgia. I give this as background, to explain my own behavior when I started getting involved in social networks. My first thought was to collect as many "friends" as I could, to grow my network quickly and add just about everyone that I had an email address for. Now that I have accumulated a bunch of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plaxo, I have a different strategy.
I want quality rather than quantity. As my networks have grown – and they still aren't as large as my college-age daughter (see, it is that underdog feeling again) – I have seen the "feed" streams that are produced from all these people just burying me in the details and status updates of their lives. I try to dip into this vast, deep flow of information on a daily basis, but it quickly overwhelms me. I run back to the relative comfort of my email inbox, where at least I can hit the delete key and pare things down to a reasonable single screen of to-do and action items and people that I have to return messages to.
Burger King ran a promotion not too long ago where they asked people to defriend 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free burger. They were swamped with thousands of requests, thereby establishing the value of a friend at somewhere around a quarter. That is pretty depressing. I always thought a friend was worth at least a couple of bucks, if not more.
I also want to grow my networks slower, because like anything else on the Internet, I am concerned about customer retention and my networks are my customers. You are the people that will (hopefully soon, puh-lease) pay me money to speak at a conference, write an article or white paper, produce a screencast video, or do some custom product consulting. So I don't want to just spam you with needless updates about what I had for breakfast or insights about my pets or family vacations, although I did get some interesting feedback when I mention the books that I read in my last missive.
So I have gotten pickier about who I add to my various networks. And while I don't want to be as snobby as that Jr. High clique of popular kids, I do think we all need to take a step back and consider what our friending – and more importantly defriending –policies will be going forward.
Over at Twitter (where my network is still "just" a few hundred followers), there is a lot of activity around third-party apps that will automatically increase your network with all sorts of tricks. This is a bad thing, because those networks become less valuable as their feeds become larger. You will be adding more noise to the signal, and as a result, miss out on the important stuff.
I am still figuring out Twitter, to say the least. But I can tell you that my Twitter activities have saved me a grand total of $140, which is the overdraft fee that Bank of America initially charged me when I deposited a check to the wrong account. Through the miracle of social networks, I was able to tweet my bank, email them the information and get them to call me and correct the problem, and probably keep me as a customer.
Now, I don't have all the answers here. Or even some of them. And I am glad that I don't have to deal with the hyper social strata that are Middle School today. But I can take some small comfort that none of my 20-something children have Twitter accounts, at least not yet.
Ok, enough nostalgia. I give this as background, to explain my own behavior when I started getting involved in social networks. My first thought was to collect as many "friends" as I could, to grow my network quickly and add just about everyone that I had an email address for. Now that I have accumulated a bunch of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plaxo, I have a different strategy.
I want quality rather than quantity. As my networks have grown – and they still aren't as large as my college-age daughter (see, it is that underdog feeling again) – I have seen the "feed" streams that are produced from all these people just burying me in the details and status updates of their lives. I try to dip into this vast, deep flow of information on a daily basis, but it quickly overwhelms me. I run back to the relative comfort of my email inbox, where at least I can hit the delete key and pare things down to a reasonable single screen of to-do and action items and people that I have to return messages to.
Burger King ran a promotion not too long ago where they asked people to defriend 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free burger. They were swamped with thousands of requests, thereby establishing the value of a friend at somewhere around a quarter. That is pretty depressing. I always thought a friend was worth at least a couple of bucks, if not more.
I also want to grow my networks slower, because like anything else on the Internet, I am concerned about customer retention and my networks are my customers. You are the people that will (hopefully soon, puh-lease) pay me money to speak at a conference, write an article or white paper, produce a screencast video, or do some custom product consulting. So I don't want to just spam you with needless updates about what I had for breakfast or insights about my pets or family vacations, although I did get some interesting feedback when I mention the books that I read in my last missive.
So I have gotten pickier about who I add to my various networks. And while I don't want to be as snobby as that Jr. High clique of popular kids, I do think we all need to take a step back and consider what our friending – and more importantly defriending –policies will be going forward.
Over at Twitter (where my network is still "just" a few hundred followers), there is a lot of activity around third-party apps that will automatically increase your network with all sorts of tricks. This is a bad thing, because those networks become less valuable as their feeds become larger. You will be adding more noise to the signal, and as a result, miss out on the important stuff.
I am still figuring out Twitter, to say the least. But I can tell you that my Twitter activities have saved me a grand total of $140, which is the overdraft fee that Bank of America initially charged me when I deposited a check to the wrong account. Through the miracle of social networks, I was able to tweet my bank, email them the information and get them to call me and correct the problem, and probably keep me as a customer.
Now, I don't have all the answers here. Or even some of them. And I am glad that I don't have to deal with the hyper social strata that are Middle School today. But I can take some small comfort that none of my 20-something children have Twitter accounts, at least not yet.
Monday, May 4, 2009
The new breed of eReaders
The New York Times has a story today about progress that is expected on the next generation of eBook readers, but I have already seen this future thanks to a long-time correspondent and independent software developer Hank Mishkoff. The Times story can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/technology/companies/04reader.html
The Times piece talks about the main supplier to the Amazon Kindle and Sony reader, E Ink, and a new entry to the scene PlasticLogic.com who is also mentioned in last month's Technology Review here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22490/
I don't have a Kindle, but have borrowed a couple of friends' units for a few minutes. It has its own broadband modem that does the selecting and downloading of content and that is why the initial price of the device is so high (around $350). Instead, I have read several books on my iPhone using the Kindle app. You need to go to Amazon's Website using a standard browser and select and pay for which books you want to receive on your phone, and then the download happens relatively quickly once you bring up the app on your phone. I found the iPhone app to be very satisfying for the pulp fiction trash novels that I like to read on planes and other fill-in time when I don't want to drag around my laptop. It is nice to have a book to read "automatically" – without having to carry something else.
But the Kindle and its ilk only do monochrome and static text. They aren't well suited to the hyperlinked world of the Web, and they require specially formatted books for each device – the version that you download for the Kindle will work on both the device itself and the iPhone, but that is about as cross-platform as you get. These books won't work on the Sony reader. And the books aren't free, although Amazon at any specific time has a lot of sales going on, and indeed I found a new series of thrillers by Lee Childs that I have quickly become a fan of, since one of them was available free on Amazon's store. (Great marketing idea, by the way, and yet another way for authors to seed their content to early adoperts.)
So what about Mishkoff's idea? He calls it the "xBook" and incorporates video, full color pictures, and hyperlinks into his reader. The idea being that an inquisitive reader would want to do the same sorts of explorations and Web surfing expeditions that someone who is used to a browser would perform. He has cobbled together a video that demonstrates his idea here:
http://www.WebFeats.com/xBook/
Note that the xBook is still very much a concept and far from an actual product. Mishkoff wants to try to get someone to help fund a project to build a device, or at least some software that will work with existing platforms.
As many of you know, I am a pretty voracious reader and I welcome these experiments. I still buy lots of books and don't think that will change, even with the Kindle et al. coming of age. And do contact Mishkoff (his information is on his Web site) if you are interested in following up with him further.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/technology/companies/04reader.html
The Times piece talks about the main supplier to the Amazon Kindle and Sony reader, E Ink, and a new entry to the scene PlasticLogic.com who is also mentioned in last month's Technology Review here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22490/
I don't have a Kindle, but have borrowed a couple of friends' units for a few minutes. It has its own broadband modem that does the selecting and downloading of content and that is why the initial price of the device is so high (around $350). Instead, I have read several books on my iPhone using the Kindle app. You need to go to Amazon's Website using a standard browser and select and pay for which books you want to receive on your phone, and then the download happens relatively quickly once you bring up the app on your phone. I found the iPhone app to be very satisfying for the pulp fiction trash novels that I like to read on planes and other fill-in time when I don't want to drag around my laptop. It is nice to have a book to read "automatically" – without having to carry something else.
But the Kindle and its ilk only do monochrome and static text. They aren't well suited to the hyperlinked world of the Web, and they require specially formatted books for each device – the version that you download for the Kindle will work on both the device itself and the iPhone, but that is about as cross-platform as you get. These books won't work on the Sony reader. And the books aren't free, although Amazon at any specific time has a lot of sales going on, and indeed I found a new series of thrillers by Lee Childs that I have quickly become a fan of, since one of them was available free on Amazon's store. (Great marketing idea, by the way, and yet another way for authors to seed their content to early adoperts.)
So what about Mishkoff's idea? He calls it the "xBook" and incorporates video, full color pictures, and hyperlinks into his reader. The idea being that an inquisitive reader would want to do the same sorts of explorations and Web surfing expeditions that someone who is used to a browser would perform. He has cobbled together a video that demonstrates his idea here:
http://www.WebFeats.com/xBook/
Note that the xBook is still very much a concept and far from an actual product. Mishkoff wants to try to get someone to help fund a project to build a device, or at least some software that will work with existing platforms.
As many of you know, I am a pretty voracious reader and I welcome these experiments. I still buy lots of books and don't think that will change, even with the Kindle et al. coming of age. And do contact Mishkoff (his information is on his Web site) if you are interested in following up with him further.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Five tips to being more professional on social networks
As more 30- and 40-somethings login to Facebook, begin to Tweet, add their credentials to LinkedIn and post pictures of their family vacations to Flickr, it becomes harder to separate your work and personal personae. And as more employers begin to use these social networking sites to vet their new hires – assuming that people will start to have new hires at some point in the future once this miserable economy turns around – the situation is only going to get worse.
What got me started thinking more about this was that I am giving a speech next week to show people how to make the most of LinkedIn, one of the leading social sites that is used by a wide variety of professionals to look for work and polish your resume, qualifications and recommendations from previous employers. Granted, this is not a new topic – people have been having problems with what they say online for years. Heather Armstrong, who's Web site dooce.com created the verb that is used when someone is fired over their blog, was fired over her blog many years ago (her new book is a real treat and a collection of some of her writings that is a true joy to read). Now dooce.com generates thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. That is taking lemons and turning them into not just lemonade, but Absolut Lemon, or maybe even Absolut Gold.
So here are some recommendations for those of you that are new to this whole Internet thing, to pass along to your less-clueful friends and relatives.
First, keep sex, politics, religion, and family out of your online life to the extent that you can. If you feel that you have to tell the world about these things, think about how a potential future employer might react to seeing this stuff in your profile. No one really wants to know that you are a member of the "Republican Party of the Virgin Islands" (as one of my Facebookers put it), whatever that means. Another friend is in a committed relationship with his dog, again, not something I really want to find out the details. And those married folks that indicate that they would enjoy having relations with a third party are just too icky for me. Leave some blanks spaces in your profile in these areas. Too much information!
Second, tell the truth. If you are single and looking for love, then by all means go online and do your thing and misrepresent yourself however you see fit or whatever you think will attract potential partners. But when it comes to talking about your professional accomplishments, don't exaggerate, invent new job titles, degrees, or whatever other credentials that you don't have. It isn't worth it, and eventually it will come back to hurt you or prevent you from getting that plum job that you covet. There is also no need to document every waking and sober moment since college either: just hit the most recent highlights for now. And when it comes to those non-sober moments, leave that info on the cutting room floor. No one really wants to see your expertise with using beer bongs.
Third, if you are one of the unfortunate ones who are presently between jobs, make LinkedIn and other sites part of a daily ritual. Whether you spend a few minutes or hours isn't all that important, just so that you spend some regular time updating your profile and seeking out to expand your network.
Fourth, decide on what your "friending" policy is going to be and be consistent, at least for inside each social site that you frequent. For example, I am most stringent with the people that want to network with me on LinkedIn, and only accept connections with people that I have actually met face to face, or who have been long-time email correspondents. I also routinely refuse connections from headhunters and HR people, because I am not interested in enriching their businesses with my connections. But on Facebook, I have a more liberal friending policy, just because.
Finally, spend some time thinking about how you acquired your existing professional friends: do you like to meet and greet at industry conferences? Are you more of a small group or large group socializer? Do you prefer one-on-one situations? Did you ever co-author anything and enjoy/detest the experience? Do you tend to keep work colleagues around for many years that last past the time on the job? Were you popular in junior high or peaked in sophmore year? Do you still stay in touch with your frat brothers or sorority sisters?
Remember that most of us are still pretty new at MyBook and Friendspace and that even Oprah did her first Tweet in ALL CAPS. Do experiment and try different strategies, and feel free to share what works for you if that is appropriate. Just don't send me any links to those toga party pix.
What got me started thinking more about this was that I am giving a speech next week to show people how to make the most of LinkedIn, one of the leading social sites that is used by a wide variety of professionals to look for work and polish your resume, qualifications and recommendations from previous employers. Granted, this is not a new topic – people have been having problems with what they say online for years. Heather Armstrong, who's Web site dooce.com created the verb that is used when someone is fired over their blog, was fired over her blog many years ago (her new book is a real treat and a collection of some of her writings that is a true joy to read). Now dooce.com generates thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. That is taking lemons and turning them into not just lemonade, but Absolut Lemon, or maybe even Absolut Gold.
So here are some recommendations for those of you that are new to this whole Internet thing, to pass along to your less-clueful friends and relatives.
First, keep sex, politics, religion, and family out of your online life to the extent that you can. If you feel that you have to tell the world about these things, think about how a potential future employer might react to seeing this stuff in your profile. No one really wants to know that you are a member of the "Republican Party of the Virgin Islands" (as one of my Facebookers put it), whatever that means. Another friend is in a committed relationship with his dog, again, not something I really want to find out the details. And those married folks that indicate that they would enjoy having relations with a third party are just too icky for me. Leave some blanks spaces in your profile in these areas. Too much information!
Second, tell the truth. If you are single and looking for love, then by all means go online and do your thing and misrepresent yourself however you see fit or whatever you think will attract potential partners. But when it comes to talking about your professional accomplishments, don't exaggerate, invent new job titles, degrees, or whatever other credentials that you don't have. It isn't worth it, and eventually it will come back to hurt you or prevent you from getting that plum job that you covet. There is also no need to document every waking and sober moment since college either: just hit the most recent highlights for now. And when it comes to those non-sober moments, leave that info on the cutting room floor. No one really wants to see your expertise with using beer bongs.
Third, if you are one of the unfortunate ones who are presently between jobs, make LinkedIn and other sites part of a daily ritual. Whether you spend a few minutes or hours isn't all that important, just so that you spend some regular time updating your profile and seeking out to expand your network.
Fourth, decide on what your "friending" policy is going to be and be consistent, at least for inside each social site that you frequent. For example, I am most stringent with the people that want to network with me on LinkedIn, and only accept connections with people that I have actually met face to face, or who have been long-time email correspondents. I also routinely refuse connections from headhunters and HR people, because I am not interested in enriching their businesses with my connections. But on Facebook, I have a more liberal friending policy, just because.
Finally, spend some time thinking about how you acquired your existing professional friends: do you like to meet and greet at industry conferences? Are you more of a small group or large group socializer? Do you prefer one-on-one situations? Did you ever co-author anything and enjoy/detest the experience? Do you tend to keep work colleagues around for many years that last past the time on the job? Were you popular in junior high or peaked in sophmore year? Do you still stay in touch with your frat brothers or sorority sisters?
Remember that most of us are still pretty new at MyBook and Friendspace and that even Oprah did her first Tweet in ALL CAPS. Do experiment and try different strategies, and feel free to share what works for you if that is appropriate. Just don't send me any links to those toga party pix.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Buying a cheap 8 GB PC
What is the cheapest PC you can buy that can sport 8GB of RAM? You would think this was a simple question, and within a few minutes of online shopping you could figure it out. Alas, this has turned into Yet Another Project, and I am nowhere near the answer.
Why would anyone want such a machine? Any 32-bit version of Windows can't use much beyond 3 GB of memory. If you are going to effectively use 8 gigs of memory, you need a 64-bit operating system. I actually have one that I am using right now – my Mac OS. But getting a Mac with all that memory means getting their pricier Mac Pro desktop. And while you can save some money by getting a used Mac Pro, by the time you bulk it up with enough RAM and disk, it isn't much of a bargain anymore.
My reason for all this RAM is to host a collection of virtual machines for testing purposes. VMs consume a lot of RAM, and there are situations where I want to be able to run more than one VM at a time for testing networking products. I have been using the desktop VMware Workstation along with Fusion on my Mac, and have quite a collection of VMs now that I use in my tests. But my Windows PCs only have 2 GB of RAM, so I can't really run more than one VM at a time. I needed something more powerful. A few months I had a client that sent me a DVD with seven different VMs on it to use for a series of tests.
So I thought to contact a system builder friend of mine and I ask him to spec out for me what I called a "white box ESX PC" – ESX is VMware's virtual server operating system, and it is designed for this purpose, to run a lot of VMs on a single physical piece of hardware. And while ESX technically isn't 64-bit, it can run very effectively with lots of memory.
But getting the right configuration was tricky, because it is also not designed to run its VMs on an ordinary hard disk that you would find in your average desktop. There are some discussion forums on this topic, but we were in uncharted territory.
To see what I was getting myself into, HP loaned me one of their Proliant servers that comes with ESX pre-installed. (Most of the major PC server makers have a selection of pre-installed machines with either ESX or Citrix' Xenserver, but these are not low-end machines.) It took me weeks of effort to get the right licensed software from VMware to operate it and put the VMs on the box. I realized that ESX wasn't going to work for me --there was just too much overhead. And while VMware gives away a freebie version called ESXi, I was too fed up at this point to try that route. If you want to learn more, check out this article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1901
So then I went online and starting poking around to see if I could order a desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM and be satisfied running the 64-bit Vista OS. I first went to Dell, mainly because I buy a lot of Dells and can find my way around their Web site. Back in the day when megabytes were a lot of RAM, Dell was one of the first vendors to sell PCs with 4 MB installed. But despite this history and familiarity, it wasn't easy to search their Web site for an 8 gig PC. Lenovo has one line, the ThinkCentre M58, which sells for about $1200. HP has none that I could find on their Web site, which is odd because when I went to Newegg's Web site I could find more than 20 configurations, some of which were pretty capable HP machines, all for around $1000.
The other issue with running a lot of VMs besides RAM is that you want the right CPU inside your PC, one that supports the virtualization extensions called Intel-VT or AMD-V. Neither company makes it very clear which of its Dual Core Duo this or that processor actually supports these extensions. Check out this discussion here:
http://communities.intel.com/message/9687#9687
What I do know is the aging Dell desktop that I bought three years ago doesn't have this support. Sigh. Here is a link to a discussion forum on Anandtech that goes into more details:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2117719
So meanwhile I haven't bought anything yet. If you have any advice, you know where to find me.
Why would anyone want such a machine? Any 32-bit version of Windows can't use much beyond 3 GB of memory. If you are going to effectively use 8 gigs of memory, you need a 64-bit operating system. I actually have one that I am using right now – my Mac OS. But getting a Mac with all that memory means getting their pricier Mac Pro desktop. And while you can save some money by getting a used Mac Pro, by the time you bulk it up with enough RAM and disk, it isn't much of a bargain anymore.
My reason for all this RAM is to host a collection of virtual machines for testing purposes. VMs consume a lot of RAM, and there are situations where I want to be able to run more than one VM at a time for testing networking products. I have been using the desktop VMware Workstation along with Fusion on my Mac, and have quite a collection of VMs now that I use in my tests. But my Windows PCs only have 2 GB of RAM, so I can't really run more than one VM at a time. I needed something more powerful. A few months I had a client that sent me a DVD with seven different VMs on it to use for a series of tests.
So I thought to contact a system builder friend of mine and I ask him to spec out for me what I called a "white box ESX PC" – ESX is VMware's virtual server operating system, and it is designed for this purpose, to run a lot of VMs on a single physical piece of hardware. And while ESX technically isn't 64-bit, it can run very effectively with lots of memory.
But getting the right configuration was tricky, because it is also not designed to run its VMs on an ordinary hard disk that you would find in your average desktop. There are some discussion forums on this topic, but we were in uncharted territory.
To see what I was getting myself into, HP loaned me one of their Proliant servers that comes with ESX pre-installed. (Most of the major PC server makers have a selection of pre-installed machines with either ESX or Citrix' Xenserver, but these are not low-end machines.) It took me weeks of effort to get the right licensed software from VMware to operate it and put the VMs on the box. I realized that ESX wasn't going to work for me --there was just too much overhead. And while VMware gives away a freebie version called ESXi, I was too fed up at this point to try that route. If you want to learn more, check out this article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1901
So then I went online and starting poking around to see if I could order a desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM and be satisfied running the 64-bit Vista OS. I first went to Dell, mainly because I buy a lot of Dells and can find my way around their Web site. Back in the day when megabytes were a lot of RAM, Dell was one of the first vendors to sell PCs with 4 MB installed. But despite this history and familiarity, it wasn't easy to search their Web site for an 8 gig PC. Lenovo has one line, the ThinkCentre M58, which sells for about $1200. HP has none that I could find on their Web site, which is odd because when I went to Newegg's Web site I could find more than 20 configurations, some of which were pretty capable HP machines, all for around $1000.
The other issue with running a lot of VMs besides RAM is that you want the right CPU inside your PC, one that supports the virtualization extensions called Intel-VT or AMD-V. Neither company makes it very clear which of its Dual Core Duo this or that processor actually supports these extensions. Check out this discussion here:
http://communities.intel.com/message/9687#9687
What I do know is the aging Dell desktop that I bought three years ago doesn't have this support. Sigh. Here is a link to a discussion forum on Anandtech that goes into more details:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2117719
So meanwhile I haven't bought anything yet. If you have any advice, you know where to find me.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Cheap choices for Web hosting
These days, it doesn't make sense to pay a lot of dough to host your Web site. I am going to give you three alternatives that won't cost you more than $5 a month. All three are great for people who don't have a lot of HTML coding expertise and don't want to shell out the big bucks to pay for graphic designers and programmers. I have built sites using all three methods and while they do have their limitations, they are all acceptable for handling the basics, and in some cases will do a lot more advanced things as well.
Let's start off with GoDaddy. First, we choose whatever dotcom name your little heart desires, and hopefully is still available.. Next, we take a look at what GoDaddy offers for its own Web hosting plans. If you go to their sign-up page online, you will see lots of choices. Pick the Economy Plan for Linux. If you want to host more than one domain from the same server, you would pick the Deluxe Plan. You can get a better deal for two-year contracts if you call their customer support line rather than signing up online. Still, it works out to $5 a month, on top of the registrar fee to register your domain.
Why Linux? Because we will be using their Wordpress..org installation, and that works better on Linux. You don't need to know anything about Linux to run your site, you get the same great features of having a world-class blogging platform that you have with a Wordpress.com hosted site, and you can do a lot more with it as well.
Included in the GoDaddy hosting account are a ton of free applications. Besides Wordpress, you can install Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PostNuke, various shopping cart applications, phpBB, and dozens more. The Wordpress install is very straightforward and takes a few minutes, and once that is done you can use your Web browser to run just about everything that you require.
Using GoDaddy-hosted Wordpress is great if your content can work within the blogging format, if you want better control over your pages than you would get with Wordpress.com-hosting, and if you want to add ads and analytics to your site but don't want to build your pages from scratch. One thing that the self-hosted Wordpress isn't as good as the dotcom hosted is the ability to stream video content. You are better off using the dotcom hosting and buying the 5GB space upgrade and running your videos there.
Let's move on to the second method, using Microsoft's OfficeLive Small Business hosting account. What I like about OfficeLive SB is that you can buy your domain name through Microsoft, although if you plan on moving it to some other provider later on, that might be difficult. Microsoft also doesn't charge you for the first year that you have the domain, and then $15 a year thereafter. You can't beat that price. You go to the following page to sign up:
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/pricing
The Microsoft plan is great if you have Windows and a relatively recent version of IE (v6 or later, running on XP or Vista) that you are going to use to build your site. They give you some simple templates for your page design, and if your site is going to be composed of a few static pages, then this is a really fast way to assemble a site and the price is rock-bottom. They will also hide your domain registration from public whois queries as part of the deal.
What about the third method? Check out the site Weebly.com. They offer free web site hosting, ties into Gmail and Register.com for domain registration as part of their package. I don't care for Register.com because they charge $35 a year for registering your domain where GoDaddy and others charge less than $10, but what is appealing about Weebly is that you have a lot of control over page design and widgets and templates as well as integration into Google's Gmail for your domain. The basic service is free, but if you want more than the freebie site – such as password-protected pages, audio players and support, it will cost the same as a more capable GoDaddy account, about $4 a month.
All three will give you more email addresses than you know what to do with, and all are good starting places for your own exploration for other hosting providers, which are overwhelming. Feel free to share your own recommendations here.
Let's start off with GoDaddy. First, we choose whatever dotcom name your little heart desires, and hopefully is still available.. Next, we take a look at what GoDaddy offers for its own Web hosting plans. If you go to their sign-up page online, you will see lots of choices. Pick the Economy Plan for Linux. If you want to host more than one domain from the same server, you would pick the Deluxe Plan. You can get a better deal for two-year contracts if you call their customer support line rather than signing up online. Still, it works out to $5 a month, on top of the registrar fee to register your domain.
Why Linux? Because we will be using their Wordpress..org installation, and that works better on Linux. You don't need to know anything about Linux to run your site, you get the same great features of having a world-class blogging platform that you have with a Wordpress.com hosted site, and you can do a lot more with it as well.
Included in the GoDaddy hosting account are a ton of free applications. Besides Wordpress, you can install Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PostNuke, various shopping cart applications, phpBB, and dozens more. The Wordpress install is very straightforward and takes a few minutes, and once that is done you can use your Web browser to run just about everything that you require.
Using GoDaddy-hosted Wordpress is great if your content can work within the blogging format, if you want better control over your pages than you would get with Wordpress.com-hosting, and if you want to add ads and analytics to your site but don't want to build your pages from scratch. One thing that the self-hosted Wordpress isn't as good as the dotcom hosted is the ability to stream video content. You are better off using the dotcom hosting and buying the 5GB space upgrade and running your videos there.
Let's move on to the second method, using Microsoft's OfficeLive Small Business hosting account. What I like about OfficeLive SB is that you can buy your domain name through Microsoft, although if you plan on moving it to some other provider later on, that might be difficult. Microsoft also doesn't charge you for the first year that you have the domain, and then $15 a year thereafter. You can't beat that price. You go to the following page to sign up:
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/pricing
The Microsoft plan is great if you have Windows and a relatively recent version of IE (v6 or later, running on XP or Vista) that you are going to use to build your site. They give you some simple templates for your page design, and if your site is going to be composed of a few static pages, then this is a really fast way to assemble a site and the price is rock-bottom. They will also hide your domain registration from public whois queries as part of the deal.
What about the third method? Check out the site Weebly.com. They offer free web site hosting, ties into Gmail and Register.com for domain registration as part of their package. I don't care for Register.com because they charge $35 a year for registering your domain where GoDaddy and others charge less than $10, but what is appealing about Weebly is that you have a lot of control over page design and widgets and templates as well as integration into Google's Gmail for your domain. The basic service is free, but if you want more than the freebie site – such as password-protected pages, audio players and support, it will cost the same as a more capable GoDaddy account, about $4 a month.
All three will give you more email addresses than you know what to do with, and all are good starting places for your own exploration for other hosting providers, which are overwhelming. Feel free to share your own recommendations here.
Monday, April 6, 2009
How to search for airline travel using Optifly.com
You gotta like someone who can reel off the three-letter airport codes for such obscure places as Reykjavik Iceland (actually they have two airports, KEF and RKV), the Congo (BZV) and Colima Mexico (CLQ). Then perhaps it is no surprise that Bryan Cooley's latest invention, Optifly.com, is a nice service that figures out which airlines fly between any two city pairs around the world.
Those of us who are frequent flyers know that any business or leisure travel journey begins with the first step of a Web search of potential airlines that can carry our tired and cramped bodies squished into a coach middle seat. And while Expedia, Orbitz and their ilk are reasonably good at computing fares, they don't do as good a job of incorporating the low-cost carriers like Southwest, RyanAir, EasyJet, and others that have cropped up over the past decade. Even Kayak.com, which is one of my favorite sites to narrow down a search of which airlines offer service, isn't as good as Optifly in identifying the various routing paths that are available.
The site, which will launch "real soon now" according to Cooley, is the essence of simplicity. You type in your two cities that you want to travel, and it produces a Google map (or Earth) mashup showing you the connection points. "Most international trips require at least two or three flight segments," says Cooley, and this means it can get complicated. His service will also show you nearby airports too. The site still has some small bugs but works well.
But behind its simplicity lies some very sophisticated search algorithms, and as someone who studied optimization theory in grad school I can appreciate this. Cooley tells me "When you consider there over 40,000 unique flight paths, there are in excess of 100 billion route possibilities to consider for a few hops, and we can handle routes with as many as 10 hops, something that the flight booking services can't even begin to deal with."
What the site doesn't do at all is optimize for costs, but based on its route visualization and transfer points, you can do that research using the usual travel booking sites. Once you find a connection city that will work for you, you can do a better job narrowing down how you are going to book your ticket and probably get a better fare as a result. Cooley says it has saved his early beta users hundreds of dollars in ticketing fees, which is a good thing we can all agree in these penurious times.
Optifly's challenge is to stay on top of the many airline routing changes that are posted each day – while most of these are individual flights they still do change their routing and frequency of service. The site will show you which flights aren't available on certain days of the week, which gets complicated especially when you fly across transpacific and you arrive almost before you depart, or skip a day depending on which direction you fly. Once upon a time I skipped my birthday going to a speaking engagement in Tokyo – that wasn't a fun trip. Another time I celebrated my birthday on a flight to Taipei with a co-worker on our way out to Computex.
Those of us who are frequent flyers know that any business or leisure travel journey begins with the first step of a Web search of potential airlines that can carry our tired and cramped bodies squished into a coach middle seat. And while Expedia, Orbitz and their ilk are reasonably good at computing fares, they don't do as good a job of incorporating the low-cost carriers like Southwest, RyanAir, EasyJet, and others that have cropped up over the past decade. Even Kayak.com, which is one of my favorite sites to narrow down a search of which airlines offer service, isn't as good as Optifly in identifying the various routing paths that are available.
The site, which will launch "real soon now" according to Cooley, is the essence of simplicity. You type in your two cities that you want to travel, and it produces a Google map (or Earth) mashup showing you the connection points. "Most international trips require at least two or three flight segments," says Cooley, and this means it can get complicated. His service will also show you nearby airports too. The site still has some small bugs but works well.
But behind its simplicity lies some very sophisticated search algorithms, and as someone who studied optimization theory in grad school I can appreciate this. Cooley tells me "When you consider there over 40,000 unique flight paths, there are in excess of 100 billion route possibilities to consider for a few hops, and we can handle routes with as many as 10 hops, something that the flight booking services can't even begin to deal with."
What the site doesn't do at all is optimize for costs, but based on its route visualization and transfer points, you can do that research using the usual travel booking sites. Once you find a connection city that will work for you, you can do a better job narrowing down how you are going to book your ticket and probably get a better fare as a result. Cooley says it has saved his early beta users hundreds of dollars in ticketing fees, which is a good thing we can all agree in these penurious times.
Optifly's challenge is to stay on top of the many airline routing changes that are posted each day – while most of these are individual flights they still do change their routing and frequency of service. The site will show you which flights aren't available on certain days of the week, which gets complicated especially when you fly across transpacific and you arrive almost before you depart, or skip a day depending on which direction you fly. Once upon a time I skipped my birthday going to a speaking engagement in Tokyo – that wasn't a fun trip. Another time I celebrated my birthday on a flight to Taipei with a co-worker on our way out to Computex.
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About Me
- David Strom
- David Strom has looked at hundreds of computer products over a more than 20 year career in IT and computer journalism. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine, and now writes for Baseline, Information Security, Tom's Hardware, and the New York Times.