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(Credit: Slice.com)

Hybrid pizza-calzone

Sure I read lots of technology blogs, but lately I am always hungry and more interested in food news. If you are not reading Slice and Eater, you are missing out.

Look at that gorgeous amalgamation of pizza and calzone and tell me that Web 2.0 is more delicious. You can get it at Peppino’s in Bay Ridge Brookyn.

(Credit: CC Mark Licht Notions Capital.com/Flickr)

According to Fox 5 in New York, “maria belen shapur photo” was one of the top searches on the Web of intrigue Thursday. And according to Google Trends, “mark sanford mistress photo” rounds out the top 10 Google searches at the moment. Yet no trace has been found of the governor’s taste in clandestine lovers.

It is a little sad that the media is pitching its large and very moral tent outside Ms. Shapur’s Buenos Aires apartment. Somehow, affairs of the heart don’t always seem the most appropriate subjects for public conjecture. It’s just that they’re so deeply exciting that we cannot prevent our more fundamental instincts from taking over.

And still there is no sign of the one thing the world needs most: a picture of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s Argentinian lover.

The people have googled. The people have binged.

I bet you just can’t wait.

Will Google have it first? Will Bing’s decisive algorithm slap its more vaunted rival across the chops and proclaim triumph? It may only be a matter of milliseconds. But in the search business, milliseconds count.

So I prefer to think of this as a technological exercise, a mixed martial-arts battle of the search engines.

If you call the tech support department of a company, take their advice with a grain of salt. Perhaps two.

Some people find the importance of their computer sneaks up on them. If you really need your computer, you need two. Same for a printer. It’s like tires – a
car needs four, so every car carries five. If your computer is nice to have but not really important, this blog is not for you.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I won’t install any software from Symantec on my computer or those of my clients. Although I use Windows XP, I avoid all other Microsoft software. Ed Foster’s Worst Vendor Poll offers some other opinions on companies you might try to avoid dealing with. Microsoft topped the list, by far.

Did someone point you to a really interesting video that just happens to require installing new software before you can view it? Don’t do it.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

Plan for the death of your computer

Obviously this applies to email messages, many of which are scams. A relatively new approach appeals to your patriotism – emails from people claiming to be soldiers stationed in Iraq who need help bringing money home. Yeah, sure. Skepticism is not only needed with the body of an email message, but also with the From address. Never trust it. Forging the From address is child’s play.

All computer users need firewall software – without exception. A firewall program that runs on your computer is called a “software” firewall. The term is used to distinguish it from a firewall program that runs outside your computer but still between you and the outside world. Consumers and small businesses typically run across these external “hardware” firewall programs in their routers. The best protection is provided by using both a hardware and a software firewall.

Scams aren’t limited to email, read my introduction to voice phishing.

Someone I know, who works from home, used to depend on AOL for email, both personal and business. This person had a huge email address book and depended on it. One day, there was a problem with the AOL software and AOL’s tech support turned a small problem into a big one by wiping out the email address book.

Windows XP users should install the free DropMyRights program. I blogged about this extensively back in August.

You wake up one day and your computer doesn’t work. Or, it was stolen. Plan for this now. Beside a new/borrowed/backup computer running the same operating system, you need to recover your applications and your data files. This is a large topic, but a word to the wise: disk image backups.

Backup

Perhaps the most important aspect of Defensive Computing is something money can’t buy, skepticism.

In that vein, there are some companies and software that are best avoided.

Keep Software Up To Date

No software can protect the gullible.

In the last couple days I’ve been told many things by techies at Comcast and at ATT CallVantage (a VOIP phone service) that were not true. This is arguably the rule, rather than the exception. The entire tech support industry is broken. You are likely to be talking to someone who is not well trained, not well paid and reading from a script they are not allowed to deviate from.

And…

Anti-Malware

Avoid Certain Companies and Software

A few days ago, Brian Krebs posted a cheat sheet on the latest version of 12 popular programs. Needless to say, the posting became outdated a couple days later.

Skepticism

*Only wsj.net and wsj.us belong to Dow Jones.

Windows users, of course, need antivirus and anti-spyware software. These product categories are blurring though and some software does both. No matter what software you use however, the protection it provides is limited, the bad guys are just too motivated (see Anti-Virus Firms Scrambling to Keep Up).

There is a flip side to this though, when it comes newly released software, it is usually best to hold back. New software is always buggy, so waiting lets others find and report the problems and gives the software vendor time to fix them. In addition, newly released software may cause problems for other software on your computer. Waiting gives these problems time to sort themselves out.

Firewalls

And, finally, read this blog for a steady stream of Defensive Computing tips.

Update. April 25, 2008: Added advice to wait before installing new software.

Web sites too, need a skeptical review. Are you a customer of AT&T’s CallVantage VOIP service? If so, be sure to go to callvantage.att.com rather than callvantage.com. The later is a phony website (for lack of a better term). Interested in public transportation in New Jersey? If so, go to njtransit.com rather than the phony newjerseytransit.com. Read the Wall Street Journal? Which of these domains belong to the newspaper: wsj.net, wsj.info, wsj.org, wsj.biz, wsj.us, wsj.ws? Some do, some don’t.* Does the website hope.net belong to Barack Obama? No, but a recent April Fools joke made it look like it did.

File sharing software, such as BitTorrent, LimeWire and the like, is not something that belongs on a computer you care about or one that has files you consider sensitive.

Even having three copies of important files is not overkill. For example, I appear weekly on The Personal Computer Show on WBAI and we record three copies of the show. In the studio, we burn a normal audio CD, the radio station records all the shows all the time and I make my own recording at home from the over-the-air signal. More than once, we ended up with a single usable recording. Stuff happens.

Technical Support?

Initially, the Leopard version of the Mac OS shipped with the firewall turned off, an inexcusable design decision and one that Microsoft corrected years ago. It was also buggy and poorly designed. There have been fixes to it since then, but according to this article at ArsTechnica, it still leaves something to be desired.

For Windows users my preference is the free ZoneAlarm firewall. It’s far from perfect, but a big step up from the firewall built into either XP or Vista. A big plus for ZoneAlarm is simplicity. Because it’s just a firewall, configuring it is relatively simple. Perhaps most importantly, when it issues warnings and alerts, the language is simple, to the point and devoid of techie terminology. Even non-technical users have a good chance of understanding the issue at hand.

Backup your important files to something you can hold in your hand. If they are very important, make two copies. Preferably, one copy should be a thousand miles away from the other copy.

Learn From The Experiences Of Others

What to do? For Java, see my javatester.org website. For Adobe’s Flash Player, see their Flash tester page. Windows users with little technical background are best served by having Windows automatically install bug fixes. If you can however, I suggest installing Windows bug fixes manually a few days after they are released. For everything else, Windows users can run the excellent online Secunia Software Inspector. Mac users should nag Secunia for their own version.

Windows users are best served by avoiding Vista, if for no other reason than it will suffer from more hardware and software incompatibilities than XP for quite a while. If you don’t install any extensions/add-ons, you are safer with Firefox than Internet Explorer. Likewise, Thunderbird is safer than either Outlook or Outlook Express.

Whether Mac users need anti-virus software is debatable and I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion.

The difficulty in keeping software on a Windows or
Mac machine up-to-date is an industry disgrace. It happens because neither Microsoft nor Apple is motivated to help other companies, many of which they compete against, install bug fixes. Instead, every company handles software maintenance differently, big companies may even have more than one system for maintaining their software. In the Linux world there is more co-operation between software authors and thus hope for a single software update mechanism. That said, I’ve seen my share of Linux distributions that handled software updates poorly. A shout-out here to
Firefox, whose self-update mechanism is excellent (at least when running on Windows).

Stating the obvious: install anti-malware (malicious software) software and learn how to check that it’s updated regularly.

If you use a router to share a single Internet connection, be sure to read my March 8th posting, Defending your router, and your identity, with a password change, about changing the password.

Bad software firewalls, such as the one in Windows XP, only provide inbound protection, better programs also provide outbound protection. Outbound protection is a nuisance to setup initially, but you are safer with it than without it.

A couple days ago, I wrote about how a Comcast cable installer removed a crucial component of the VPN software on my computer. Take stories like this as a heads up. If someone comes to install a broadband Internet connection, realize they may not have much computer training. Watch what they do on your computer like a hawk. Make the installer explain what they are doing and why, especially if they change something. If you run Windows, make a Restore Point before the installer arrives. If it is a cable connection, there shouldn’t be a need to install any software.

There are many websites that let you test your firewall defenses, a good thing to do periodically. My favorite, from Sygate, was assimilated by Symantec and no longer exists. The first such site however, is still going strong, Shields Up! from Steve Gibson. It’s a bit techie though.

You don’t tug on superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim

While staying at a hotel, whether using a wired or a wireless Internet connection, alway use a VPN. This also applies to public WiFi networks too.

Years ago, Jim Croce sang:

I’m also not a fan of all-in-one security suites such as Symantec’s Norton 360 Version 2.0, McAfee’s Total Protection or Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare. My point is not about these programs in particular (recently reviewed in the Washington Post) but the whole concept of a suite in the first place.

View a web page, get infected with malicious software. It happens, and one reason is that your computer has old software with known bugs.

Previous postings on this blog, like any blog, have been narrowly focused. Sometimes it helps to look at the forest rather than the individual trees. To that end, I take a step back here for an overall cheat sheet to Defensive Computing.

Good tech support is so expensive that many people will probably never experience it. You may get lucky, someone reading from a script, much like a parrot, may solve your problem. But talking to a really experienced person with a good understanding the product in question is all but unheard of. The best tech support I ever experienced was with mainframe software. If I said how much the software cost, some of you wouldn’t believe me. But, that’s what it takes to get good tech support.

Then, you choose which service you want to use–Yelp, say, for reviews of the restaurant that you named–and finally, the results should appear a moment later.

The idea is simple: you launch the Say Where app, which is expected to be free from Apple’s App Store–when it is approved, which Dial Directions hopes will be soon–and then, when prompted, say an address or business name that you’re looking for.

Or, by speaking an address and using MapQuest, directions would appear, aided by the fact that the iPhone’s GPS chip tells the service where you are starting from.

It’s too early to tell if the application will be a success. But it has a lot of potential, especially given that there could be many more service providers linked to the app down the line.

If you’ve spent any time using iPhone apps, you probably have gotten a hint of the fact that they may well be the hottest thing going and, in some ways, the future of software.

And on Monday, the company announced at DemoFall its Say Where iPhone app, a tool that allows owners of the device to use their voice to get information from several online service providers specializing in geographical information.

Now, Dial Directions, a company that has focused on providing speech recognition tools to cell phone users, is getting in the iPhone game.

(Credit:
Dial Directions)

Say Where, an iPhone app from Dial Directions, aims to give iPhone users the ability to employ speech recognition to get information from services like Yelp and MapQuest.

That’s largely due to the fact that, especially with
iPhone 3G, the device combines GPS, an elegant interface,
Mac OS X, an accelerometer and high-speed Internet connectivity.

The point is to allow users to get the information they want without having to use their hands–much–to get it. So, by using Say Where, iPhone owners should be able to get information they’re looking for while driving, for example, without having to focus on the iPhone’s screen in order to type in the name of the business or the address they’re looking for.

Say Where is an open application that Dial Directions hopes will lure in many other service providers. And that has a lot to do with its business model for the application, which is to get revenue by partnering with those companies and, ideally, incorporating the application into their services.

Dial Directions will continue to add partners, but it is starting out by giving iPhone users the ability to employ speech recognition with services like MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Ask.com, Yelp, and Traffic.com.

FoxTab lets you see all of your open tabs as thumbnails. You can maneuver them with your scroll wheel, or swap what type of view you'd like on the fly. (click to enlarge)

To toggle it on you just hit a small keyboard shortcut and it zooms out all the tabs into a giant wall. You can also summon it with a small button that sits next to the address bar, or by choosing it from the right click menu. Once opened, you simply pick which tab you want to see by clicking it, or simply scrolling with your mouse wheel. It’s not nearly as smooth as Tab Effect, an eye candy tab switching add-on Rafe wrote about back in September of last year, but it’s neat nonetheless.

There are five different styles in all, and each one offers a different way to view the thumbnails you have open. My personal favorite is the standard grid view, which can be tweaked to include as many rows as you’d like. Windows Vista users are more likely to choose the stack view, which is identical to Vista’s Flip 3D. No matter what you choose, it’s a pretty svelte alternative to hunting down the page you want by favicon and text alone.

Related: Surf your bookmarks by thumbnail with Bookmark Previews

Note: This is an “experimental” add-on in Mozilla’s directory, so you must be registered there to download it.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One of my buddies just tipped me off to a must-have tab management add-on for
Firefox. It’s called FoxTab, and it’s a cross between
Mac OS X’s Expose,
Windows Vista’s Flip 3D, and the thumbnail view in Google Chrome. When you’ve got a lot of tabs open in Firefox, this offers a quick way to jump to the page you want without having to eyeball the name of each one.

I can’t wait to be in Japan and rich enough to tick off the minutes at high speeds online. Until then, riders will have to search for ambient signals at station stops to send and receive e-mails, something I’ve found works pretty well on downtown Tokyo JR trains, but can be much harder on the Shinkansen.

The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or “bullet train” line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.

The service is to offer up to 2 megabit connections, and will be built in cooperation with NTT, Japan’s massive, partially government-owned telecom.

The main drawback to these trains is they’re not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn’t mention whether there will be a charge, I’m guessing they’d brag if it were free, and free Wi-Fi is pretty rare in Japan, at least compared to Chinese and U.S. cities, where coffee shops rarely have the infrastructure for paid connections.

Via Ajiajin, and thanks Hose.

These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.

While the format is different–there will be more in-depth technical sessions and tutorials for newbies who want to write mash-ups–Google’s developer strategy remains the same.

All the same Web platform?

Google, of course, is hardly the only tech company that is attracting Web developers to their “platform.”

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has laid out a vision of a providing unifying development model for a wide range of applications, from classic client-server Windows applications to Web services mashups using Silverlight.

“We’re trying to get more users, in general. We want to increase the number of users and the amount they use the Web. And improving the platform is the best way to do that, we’ve found,” Stocky said.

Google’s own engineers were able to push the boundaries of Ajax. Its first release of Google Maps, where users can drag a map around a browser, inspired many developers to push the limits of Webware.

“We don’t have an underlying platform we’re selling. We’re trying to improve the Web as a platform…and increase usage of the Internet as a whole.” –Tom Stocky, senior product manager, Google

Stocky said that Google’s focus with tools and APIs is JavaScript and good Ajax development practices.

More significantly, Microsoft understands platforms, how to build a thriving “ecosystem” of third-party applications and partners, and how to make money for everyone involved.

But the company set to shake things up the most in Web service development is Microsoft, which just hosted its own Mix Web development conference.

Google will hold a developer confab in May, called Google I/O, to discuss the challenges of writing applications for the Web.

Salesforce.com sells subscriptions to a customer relationship management application, but when you talk to the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, you quickly understand that he is betting that its development platform, called Force.com, will fuel growth in the future.

“In general, every developer I know is trying to learn more and more JavaScript and Ajax best practices,” he said. “It’s where programming is going.”

“If anyone’s going to push the Web forward, we want them to do it in way that benefits everyone,” Stocky said. “We don’t have an underlying platform we’re selling. We’re trying to improve the Web as a platform…and increase usage of the Internet as a whole.”

Other Web giants–Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon–all have their own developer programs as well.

Of course, Google doesn’t have a legacy development tools business–like Microsoft or Adobe both do–that needs refreshed tooling to write applications for the Internet “cloud.”

It already has many application programming interfaces (APIs) to its Web services, from Virtual Earth to Windows Live Messenger, and continues to release more.

This year’s two-day event in San Francisco is larger than last year’s Google Developer Day, its first organized conference aimed specifically at Web developers.

There is also a track on mobile development, including ways to use Google Gears for Mobile and Android, the mobile phone platform Google and its partners introduced last November.

On a technical level, Google’s push to attract developers to the Web has a slightly different flavor than others.

Stocky said that one of the goals of Google I/O is to garner some feedback from developers on where they are hitting the limits of Web development. But it’s clear that Google wants to ride–and push–the momentum toward more capable Web applications.

What will be different this year is an increased focus on developing social applications, reflecting Web development in general. Google will have sessions on social applications, including ways to use OpenSocial, which is designed to let people share information on social networks among different applications.

In addition, Google wants to promote technologies that work in all browsers, not things like Flash or Silverlight that require a special plug-in and are proprietary.

Why do they court developers? To encourage creation of more and better Web applications, said Tom Stocky, a
senior product manager at Google, on Tuesday.

Here’s my first point of concern. Takahashi is the head of something called Yeti Project Japan. How many times have those who are looking for something otherworldly actually found something otherworldly?

Despite his nine motion-sensitive cameras on the most recent expedition, Takahashi’s team failed to get a Yeti onto their Fuji. Still, Takahashi’s belief is that the Yeti is around 5 feet tall, in other words not entirely dissimilar in height to Danny DeVito.

So if you’re not persuaded that a Creepy Gnome really is terrorizing Northern Argentina, or that Bigfoot will ever be found (and certainly not by a couple of mendacious hicks) then perhaps you will believe Yoshiteru Takahashi.

In various articles I have seen him described as a “scientist,” a “mountaineer,” and an “adventurer.” However, Animal Planet calls him as a “house-fitter.” So one has to keep wondering just what Takahashi’s credentials are, other than the enthusiasm of a Japanese game show contestant.

In uncertain times like these, we are desperate to turn myth into reality.

Sex with Madonna really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, according to those gossiping over her divorce. And there really are supranatural creatures out there that have evaded captivity, according to many explorers, scientists, and teenagers.

Takahashi took a seven-man team far up the Himalayas and, while he didn’t manage to snap a picture of the Hairy One, he did take shots of 8-inch footprints, which, he claims, could not possibly be those of deer, wolves, or snow leopards.

Takahashi has caused a great stir over the last couple of days by displaying photographs of what he claims are Yeti footprints.

Will the Indomitable Man finally capture the Abominable Snowman? Well according to that impeccable news source, Pravda, President Theodore Roosevelt once saw a Bigfoot.

This, apparently, was a Yeti sighting in Central Park.

It’s the same thing as looking for your missing purple sock. It doesn’t matter how hard to try, you will not be the person to find it. It might be your wife, your daughter, your dog, or the man you called in to exterminate your rat population. But it won’t be you. So I am already skeptical.

“We’ll keep coming back until we get the Yeti on film, and then all doubt will vanish,” Takahashi is quoted as saying in the Daily Mail.

Takahashi claims he first saw a Yeti in 2003. According to Animal Planet he claimed to have first seen Yeti footprints in 1994.

One wants to believe that Takahashi is an honorable man. One tries to believe that he has not faked these footprints in an attempt to get sponsorship for another climb. (On this occasion, his team spent 42 days on Dhaulagiri IV, the 25,135-foot peak that he believes is Yeti’s patch). And one chooses to believe that he is just another obsessive who wants to be the man who proves the existence of the Yeti.

We must keep on dreaming, no?

(Credit: CC DoctorWho)

TechCrunch reported early on Friday that four companies are in the running to place bids on Digg–Microsoft, Google, and two unidentified “media companies”–and that a sale may happen soon. It’ll likely be less than the $300 million that Digg was once rumored to go for; TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington cited sources who said that Google is prepared to bid $200 million to $225 million and that Microsoft, which currently serves ads on Digg, is aiming slightly lower. That’s a good bit less than the $300 valuation that was floating around when Digg reportedly hired investment bank Allen & Co. to shop it around.

In an interview several weeks ago, Digg founder Kevin Rose told CNET News.com that he thought selling the company to a big buyer could get in the way of running it efficiently.

If every blog rumor were to be believed, social news site Digg would have been bought a dozen times over by now, so take the latest one with the requisite grain of salt.

As for the media companies, no specifics are given, but keep in mind that Digg has deals with several traditional media companies’ online arms, like CBS and News Corp.

One TechCrunch commenter noted, “Good for them, but Diggers will complain either way,” referring to the site’s active and opinionated crowd of regular users. “There’s no pleasing them.”

The biggest gripe that critics have had about PlayStation Home is that it’s long on Sony marketing and short on fun. But Dille says Sony is learning and will “nurture” and “develop” Home.

Sony doesn’t differentiate between active and idle users (by idle, I mean you’ve gone in once, checked it out, and never gone back), so it’s hard to say how many folks are really hard-core Home dwellers. However, what’s clear is that now that it’s had an opportunity to mature a bit, the company is making a push to publicize the virtual world that Sony officials have admitted has been a challenge to build and maintain.

(Source: GameDaily via Kotaku)

Home alone: The Ligne Roset collection you can afford.

He says that while micro-transactions are a big part of what Home is all about, users aren’t just spending money on the cheap stuff. “Surprisingly, some of the more popular items aren’t the cheapest things,” he says. “They’re things that cost a little bit more, like an apartment upgrade.”

(Credit:
Sony)

In an interview with GameDaily, Sony’s senior marketing vice president Peter Dille has revealed some stats on
PlayStation Home, Sony’s online virtual community, which was greeted with a rather lukewarm reception when it launched late last year. Word is 4 million people have come into Home and those who do stick around stick around for 55 minutes on average.

Anybody out there a fan of Home? Or did you just check it out and never come back?