Dave’s Guide to the Best of the Web

    My real job is as a network engineer for Collages.Net Inc. As anyone who works in the industry will know the field of knowledge is vast and the challenges continuous. How does one deal with the continuous expansion of knowledge and challenges? One way is by subscribing to Informit’s Safari Tech Books Online.

Safari is an online bookshelf with hundreds of titles from many of the most renowned publishers (O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Sams, Que, Cisco, Microsoft) and authors (Gary McGraw, Michael Miller, Jesse Liberty) in the industry. Topics covered include applied sciences, artificial intelligence, technical certifications (e.g. A+, CCNA, MCSE), computer science, databases, desktop publishing, desktop applications, e-business/e-commerce, enterprise computing, internet, programming, multimedia, networking, and security amongst others.

Here is a quick sampling of the sort of volumes you can expect from Safari:

• Programming Collective Intelligence, Toby Segaran (Artificial Intelligence).
• Cisco ASA, PIX, and FWSM Firewall Handbook by David Hucaby  (Networking/Security).
• Beautiful Code by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (Computer Science).
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed by Ray Rankins, & co. (Databases).
• Java in a Nutshell by David Flanagan (Programming).

Okay, those are some pretty technical volumes, but for those just getting started there are some excellent volumes as well. Whether you need to learn basic web design, how to edit multimedia files, it management skills, or any of dozens of areas of expertise - Safari InformIT can help.

It does cost money - but the cost is reasonable. Technical volumes don’t sell many copies (how many people want to read about low-level kernel details?) so authors and publishers have to make up for this lack in readership by increasing the price of volumes. A good technical volume can oftentimes run $50 or more at a traditional bookstore. With Safari InformIT you can read several books at a time for $9.95 per month, or get even more at a higher price. You really can’t argue with the price.

Apple’s iPhone is a pretty sweet device from all reports, but by no means perfect. While many consumers enjoy the device for its own qualities, many open source advocates and other strange geeks (I’m talking about myself, so I feel qualified to make fun of myself) look upon the iPhone not so much as a gigantic step forward as an actual device, but rather as what it represents - a push for more innovation and a challenge to the incumbent cell phone carriers to offer more.

But what if everything Apple is offering and will offer will in the long-term be considered only a footnote in history? I think that there is a grand possibility that this will happen. Why? Because of a small company called OpenMoko which is building upon the revolutionary concepts of open source.

Open Source rebels against the traditional concepts of capitalism in some senses. I have talked to many who embrace that traditional concept and when explaining to them the options they have from open source I often find them responding with befuddled expressions indicating their confusion as to how anything that is really free can also be really profitable. If you aren’t a geek (yeah, with big glasses and never having met a girl in your life) you might not be aware of open source - but its real and revolutionary. You would probably recognize some of its successes such as Linux (an operating system and the grand-daddy of successful open source software), Mozilla Firefox (the web browser), or OpenOffice.Org (the office suite).

Open source is spreading itself throughout society. While initially operating mainly within the confines of computer software it has spread to the furthest reaches of the imagination - including cell phones. OpenMoko has recently released to the public (though asking that only developers purchase them) the Neo1973. This phone is expected to become widely available according to The Economist in November 2007. OpenMoko is an open source phone. It provides most of the features hardware wise you could hope for in a phone and then leaves the phone open for innovation by developers and users. Developers can write applications for it, users can connect to it on any of a variety of carriers. No longer is one locked into a mandatory (and unnecessary) set of applications or to a certain carrier - rather the phone is designed to allow anyone to design applications for it and to be utilized by any carrier that will allow it.

So, take a look at the OpenMoko sites. They are attractive, the phone is attractive, and the concept is attractive. While OpenMoko’s Neo1973 isn’t the phone to buy just yet, I expect it to begin chopping up market share like crazy in the near future. OpenMoko has two sites - the first is for the public consumption of the phone, the second is for developers (or those interested in weird things) to view and assist in the creation/editing/maintenance of the code base/featureset for OpenMoko’s cell phones.

Bookmark OpenMoko. They aren’t anybody just yet - but they will be.

Note: I am aware that Ubuntu is not “Linux” in its most technical and basic conception, but it is one of the best distributions of Linux available and I chose it as a representative of the whole.

There are many types of malicious applications that can run on a computer…And many people have them installed without even being aware of it. These malicious applications have many negative side-effects including: slowing down your system, stealing financial information, utilizing your computer for illegal activities, damaging or deleting your software, or popping up annoying and intrusive advertising. In this post we will look at one application that is free and helps battle these unwelcome intruders, its called Spybot - Search and Destroy (Spybot-S&D for short).

In previous years most anti-virus programs offered no anti-malware protection. This is where applications like Patrick Kolla’s Spybot, Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, and Webroot’s SpySweeper came into play. These applications worked specifically on targeting malware. These days most anti-virus applications (at least good ones) offer more well-rounded anti-malware functionality - including protecting you against spyware, adware, etc. Still, it doesn’t hurt to install an application like Spybot to double check what your antivirus application is saying - and applications like Spybot play more friendly with antivirus applciations than installing two antivirus applications side-by-side.

Spybot is a free application available from the safer-networking.org website. It performs traditional signature-based analysis of your computer. This means, it looks for known spyware/adware applications on your computer. It also has options to lock down your computer - preventing applications from installing themselves on your computer without your explicit permission. Unfortunately, I have always found these restrictions a bit too aggressive.

Spybot also offers a number of general system tweaks which allow you to better optimize your system. They aren’t quite as good as CCleaner, but that isn’t their focus.

In conclusion, take five minutes to download and run Spybot. Make sure you grab the updates first, otherwise you won’t catch all the latest spyware. If your system is clean - great. If not, use Spybot to clean out those nasty little applications. And if you don’t know if your system even has antivirus, Spybot can help but look forward to a soon upcoming post on anti-virus vendors that will point you towards some of the better options currently available.

The question is never if your hard drive will fail, but when. Every hard drive will eventually fail. Are you prepared? Oftentimes, creating a backup copy of our files is a smart thing to do - but something that we put off. It takes so much work to back them up onto a CD, floppy disks, or an external drive. Thankfully, technology has been rapidly simplifying this task using online backup. Online backup has two distinct advantages over traditional methodologies: (a) it is simple and automatic and (b) it is off-site, meaning even in the case of theft, fire, or flood your data will still be safe.

One of the best companies currently offering online backup is Berkeley Data Systems. They offer two services - Mozy and Mozy Pro. While the services are very similar, the one is aimed at consumers and at the other at commercial uses (e.g. businesses). We won’t spend time focusing on the commercial version (Mozy Pro) other than to note that it includes advanced management capabilities that allow you to oversee a large number of computers being backed up at the same time.

Mozy is a small software application. You download the application onto your computer and tell it the files you want to backup. It is also fairly intelligent and allows you to just tell it what types of files you want to backup (e.g. text documents, spreadsheets, photos, or music). Once it knows what you want to backup it will create an initial backup of all your selected files. Then, as your files change it will upload those changes to their servers. This has results in two nice features. First, they only upload the changes in your files - not the whole file each time. This means after the initial upload following uploads are much quicker. Secondly, they keep multiple versions of your file and you can select not just the latest revision of your file but also revisions from earlier dates.

Mozy is generally a set it and forget it type of application. For those who need 2 GB or less of space (most consumers who are storing just documents and not music or pictures) its free. For those who have greater storage needs, unlimited storage is available for $4.95/mo. Not bad.

The internet was designed with a limited number of IP addresses. These addresses are essentially phone numbers by which computers can locate and communicate with each other. Because of this limited number of IP addresses most home users, and many business users, have what are known as dynamic IP addresses. This means that there IP address changes over time, as opposed to a static IP address which always stays the same. How does this help the problem? In the old days when everyone was using dial-up no one was connected to the internet 24/7 so it made a lot of sense - whenever you weren’t online your IP address was given to someone else and you would acquire the IP address of someone else who wasn’t online the next time you connected. These days the benefits have become significantly less - consumers are beginning to use broadband as their mainstay, and this means they are constantly connected. Still, most companies don’t give out static IP’s - they charge extra.

So, we have all these people with dynamic IP addresses - including you and me. Now imagine trying to call your friend (John Doe) but every day his phone number changes. How frustrating would that be? It’d be nearly impossible to get a hold of him. On the internet we are mainly establishing communications (e.g. we reach out to yahoo, aol, google) but in this case someone is trying to contact us. Oftentimes we wouldn’t want them to contact us, but what when we do? How can we get remote assistance when we need it?

Add to this the fact that there are many unethical individuals who enjoy or for monetary reasons hack computers. This means that even if you have a static IP address you probably have protection (such as a firewall) to protect you from hackers. But the firewall isn’t very intelligent - it can’t tell that Jane Doe is your computer whiz sister and not a hacker. We could go on to talk about other technologies like NAT (Network Address Translation) and PAT (Port Address Translation) that make it extremely difficult to give remote assistance but the point is - there are a lot of hurdles to jump to remotely assist or receive assistance from someone else for our computer, and just talking over the phone about an issue is a slow and inefficient way to communicate about computers.

So what is the solution? What solution is a new application called CrossLoop. Its free (woohoo!) and built on an old open source application called TightVNC. TightVNC allows one to remotely access computers. So why do you need CrossLoop? Well, TightVNC was written for geeks, CrossLoop was written for everyone. It allows all of us to remotely assist or receive assistance.

How does it work? Well, first you go to crossloop.com. There you and the person you want to assist download a very small program. You install and run the program. You then click the host tab. The person who needs assistance then tells the person they are receiving assistance from the access code they have on their screen and click connect. Meanwhile the person who is assisting types in the access code on the join tab and clicks connect as well. After a moment the assisting person will be able to see the individual in need of assistance’s screen and take control of the computer, just as if they were sitting in front of the computer. They can then perform any troubleshooting or diagnosis that needs to be performed. Close out of the program and they can no longer access your computer. Its an easy, free, and safe (as far as anything can be safe - e.g. even banks can be robbed) method of giving and receiving remote assistance.

Let’s talk a minute about how this magic works. Essentially when you click Connect you are sending a message out to the CrossLoop servers uniquely identifying yourself with the access code and whether you are the host or the assister. CrossLoop then acts as an intermediary who can point both of you into communication with each other and can keep track of where you. All of this occurs transparently to you, which is the beauty of CrossLoop.

If any of this seems confusing or scary, don’t worry - just pass it off to the person who is assisting you. They may just not be aware this application exists.