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.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower.

War. The war is so civil and hides behinds its mask an ugly monster. Humans, individuals normally united by common bonds and interests are split apart and become driven by man’s most basic instincts. Thrust, slash, run, shoot, dig, kill, die. Blood pours upon the ground and fathers, sons, brothers, mothers, daughters, sisters die. The statistics are easy to press into the back of our mind. What does a thousand mean? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Millions? Bar charts, graphs, numbers - impersonal, till a loved one never returns.

“War is hell.” - William Tecumseh Sherman.

In spite of its horror it is still something which draws the focus of our minds. We have made some of our greatest artistic works about it - consider Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Our heroes are oftentimes those whose greatest achievement is the role they played in a deadly conflict - George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchhill. As a little child I know I picked up my wooden gun and for hours and days I would embark on grand battles against imaginary enemies with my siblings and friends. It would take some years before I would come to realize that there was nothing so grand about war.

Still, as adults many of us engage in a practice known as wargaming. In this practice it is usual to simulate historical (as well as fantasy or science fiction) warfare. What is it that attracts the human mind to such a practice? I do not think it is a love for violence or death, but rather an interest in conflict and competition. But, I will not too long indulge in the reasons for our interest in wargaming, it is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, my purpose is to acknowledge this interest and point towards one of the best resources on this subject - The Wargamer.

The Wargamer is the most prestigious website dealing with wargaming currently on the internet, though Grognard holds a close second place (mainly limited by its focus on more hardcore wargaming). It was established in 1995 and over the years has seen significant growth and expansion. To briefly note, here are a few of its key features:

• Daily News - The Wargamer provides daily updates on the latest developments on the wargaming front, letting you know ahead of time what is happening in the world of wargaming and providing reports after important conferences, events, etc.
• Reviews & Articles - The Wargamer is a vast repository of reviews on wargames. While the games are mainly computer wargames there are also a number of board and card games as well. Whether you are looking for a review of a recent game or one that came out ten years ago - The Wargamer is a good place to look. They also offer interesting historical articles on various battles and historical events.
• Forums - The Wargamer has very active forums where you can discuss all aspects of wargaming as well as chat with those of similar interest about casual topics.
• Downloads - There are also a large number of scenarios and campaigns hosted by The Wargamer. These can be downloaded at no cost and offer significant additions to the built-in capabilities of many games.
• Opponents - If you have mastered your computer opponents, The Wargamer can help you find an unlimited number of human opponents to test your mettle against.

The Wargamer is a great place to learn about wargames and extend your current wargaming experience. I would encourage those (such as myself) who partake in this hobby to ensure that this gaming is never done without a ready acknowledgment of the horrific nature of the actual conflicts…That computer pixels or miniatures have no life and come back to combat another day, but that mere mortal humans have no such luxury.

Thanks to The Quote Cache for the quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I’ve never been skilled artistically. Part of this is because I took an absolute minimum of artistic classes and never cultivated this skill - something I sometimes regret. Still, as someone who has for years worked on websites I have had to do quite a bit of my own graphics work. In the past I could never afford Adobe Photoshop, so I used JASC Paint Shop Pro - starting with version 7 and then jumping to version X after Corel acquired JASC. I wasn’t doing much - creating or manipulating simple logos, resizing or cropping photos, removing red eye - the simple stuff. JASC’s Paint Shop Pro was a pretty good web designer suite, but eventually I got tired of the slow startup times, reinstalling it every time I reformatted my computer (because of its size), and paying out money for upgrades. That’s when I began using Paint.NET - an application PC World listed as #19 in its Top 100 Products of 2007.

Paint.NET was originally a project by several students at Washington State University mentored by Microsoft. Created utilizing Microsoft’s .NET framework technology, under an open source license, and intended as a replacement for Microsoft Windows’ built-in Paint application it has since grown into a robust and feature-filled application. While it is by no means an Adobe Photoshop, or according to the reviews I’ve read, even a GIMP - it is still an intuitive and useful application - especially for those of us to whom image design is more of a duty than a love.

Paint.NET is capable of opening images in the most popular formats - Bitmap (BMP), GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF amongst others. Besides being capable in supporting a variety of image formats it has an active community. In just one of several forums discussing Paint.NET on the official site there are currently 30,000+ posts. There are numerous tutorials such as “Make an Animated GIF with Paint.NET,” “HDR Image Blending,” and “Easiest way to make realistic eyes.” These tutorials seem to be written in such a manner that even I could follow them to completion.

Additionally, there are numerous plugins available to extend the built-in capabilities of the software. While there are many traditional filters (such as Shape3D and Curves+) perhaps one of the most interesting is a plugin that allows one to view and edit Photoshop files.

Okay, enough about the community and extendability of the application. What does the application itself allow that makes it so great? As already noted, it can open and edit most common file formats and is also extremely intuitive to use (especially compared to GIMP, the previously dominant open source graphics editor). It offers the usual palette of tools including selection tools, paint bucket, gradient, paint brush, shapes, and a color wheel. You can crop, resize, and rotate images. Changing an image to black and white or sepia can be performed with the click of a button. Layering, an advanced feature is available as well as any number of effects (e.g. noise, emboss, frosty glass). I could go on, but I’m already stretching myself far beyond my artistic capabilities.

The point is - Paint.NET is free and may be just the application you are looking for if you need a quick and easy way to create or manipulate graphics or photos. Its much better than the software that came with your digital camera and for those of us who don’t know any better, will hold its own against Photoshop for our simple needs. It isn’t yet a professional image editing application, but that doesn’t mean that someone using Paint.NET couldn’t make some beautiful work. So, stop reading and go download now!

I am indebted to the following blog posts for some of the technical information as well as verifying my own opinions on the usefulness of the application: Mushly, Graphic Identity Gallery, Nuvve Nuvve, Peachykeen, SpamRipper, Your2ndPlace, and Everybody Loves Your Money.

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.