Ed's Tech Tips

Firefox gets all of the cool plug-ins and is the browser I use most often. However, if I am simply browsing the web and want the fastest possible response, I pick Safari on the Mac. It is noticebly faster than Firefox. There are a few add-ons for Safari. A cool must-have add-on is a little free program call Inquisitor. It's like Spotlight for the web. Just start typing and links to websites pop-up immediately along with ideas to refine your search. It'll autocomplete your words and you can add more search engines to Safari with customized keyboard shortcuts.

To the left is a search I started for Mount Holyoke College. As you can see it shows you some of the top results, most popular related search queries, how many results and then links to other search engines or sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, IMDB and Dictionary.com. This is a fantastic tool for research.

I discovered a new game (at least to me) I've been playing at night recently at home. It's called Urban Terror (which is commonly abbreviated as UrT)  and it is a complete total conversion mod (short for modification) of id Software's popular first person shooter game Quake III Arena. Urt introduces a number of elements in the tactical shooter genre featuring team driven game play with realistic weapons and environments. You play a terrorist or a counter-terrorist SWAT team member. You can only carry so much, you have limited ammo and stamina, you have to reload, you are less accurate when running, if you get hit  and you are not fatally wounded you will slow down and eventually bleed to death if you don't see a medic. You can still do some super human jumps, but if you jump too far you will either cause damage or kill yourself.

Yes, I know violent first person games are usually a guy thing, but I know there are a growing number of female gamers who appreciate a good first person shooter. For those that are squeamish, there are settings to reduce the amount of blood or gore that is displayed.

By computer gaming years, the game is old. A beta version of the game was first introduced in 2000. However the latest release, version 4.0, was published April 2007. I was not aware of the game in the past, because it required that you had Quake III Arena which I did not because the demo was enough for me. The latest version however is completely stand alone, because id open-sourced the Quake III game engine. It is called ioquake3 and there are versions for Macintosh, Linux and Windows.

While the game may not have today's level of graphic realism, it is still a very fun game to play. There are numerous game options to configure. Plus, it is completely free and you do not need the latest hardware to play the game - a five or seven year old computer may work fine. There are a wide variety of extensive maps. You can still find many games online. There are many different game modes:

• Free for All (FFA, DM)
• Team Deathmatch (TDM)
• Team Survivor (TS)
• Capture the Flag (CTF)
• Capture and Hold (CAH, C&H)
• Follow the Leader (FTL)
• Bomb Mode (BM)

For more details check out the article on the game in Wikipedia.

Lemonade is a new site that is inspired by the spirit of the lemonade stands erected by enterprising kids on hot summer days at the end of their driveways. In a similar way, lemonade inc. enables people to combine commerce and community in the digital neighborhood of their personal online space. Cost-free and easy to use, this is the next generation of the old-fashioned Lemonade Stand concept. With Lemonade you can easily select and sell a wide variety of products on your web site, blog or Facebook page. I have recommended a variety of products on this site. Now Lemonade offers me a way to make some money on those items if my readers buy them through my lemonade stand. Here is how it works:

Visitors to your web page or profile will see your lemonade stand and click on the products and offers that you recommend.  Each time a visitor clicks on or buys something from your lemonade stand, you make money.   As a lemonade stand owner, you keep 80% of all revenue generated (from retailer commissions, leads and referrals, and advertising placements from your stand and we keep 20% for setting up all of this stuff and making it super easy for you.   When you reach a minimum balance of $10.00 we will credit your account via PayPal.

The service is free, well documented and there is a simple 1-2-3 set up process. Here is my stand of items that I can safely recommend, because for most of them I have either purchased them for work or myself:

If you have bought a new computer or were adventerous enough to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007  you need to be aware of the issues exchanging files with others that do not use Office 2007. While files created in Office 2003 can be easily read in Office 2007, files created in the new Office 2007 file format cannot be opened by users with Office version 2003 or older, nor can they be read by any Macintosh version of Office at all. IMHO, I would avoid upgrading until it is absolutely necessary. I have not found anything in Office 2007 worth the hassle and learning curve.I would strongly encourage a review of OpenOffice.org or Google Docs, but that's a topic for another blog. However, if you have here are some recommendations from Mount Holyoke College LITS department:

1. OFFICE 2007 USERS - “SAVE DOWN"
Users of Office 2007 should remember to “save down” to the Office 2003 format when saving their documents. This will ensure that others who are still using Office 2003 will be able to open their files. In all Office 2007 applications, select the Office Button in the upper left corner, select “save as”, select “97-2003” option. (Note: You can set your Office applications to automatically save in this format. Select the “Options” button at the bottom of the same menu. Select the “Save” category, Under Save files in this format, click on the dropdown arrow and  select “97-2003&rdquo

2. OFFICE 2003 USERS - INSTALL MICROSOFT’S COMPATIBILITY PACK.
The Pack is for PC users only; there is nothing currently available for the Macintosh. Once installed in the Office 2003 directory, Office 2003 users can open, edit and save Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 files.  For more information and to download the Compatibility Pack from the Microsoft site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923505

Some staff at the Alumnae Association received the following email supposedly from PayPal even though they do not have a PayPal account:

Dear PayPal customer,

We recently reviewed your account, and we suspect an unauthorized use
of your account. Therefore as a preventive measure we have temporary
limited your access to sensitive PayPal features. To ensure that your account is not compromised please log on to your PayPal Online Account, verify your account information and your online account will be reactived by our
system.

What you need to do:
Log On to your Online Account

Enter your Account Information

**************************************
IMPORTANT CUSTOMER SUPPORT INFORMATION
**************************************

We are committed to delivering your quality service that is reliable and highly secure. This email is one of many components designed to ensure your information is safeguarded at all times.

Please do not reply to this message. For any inquiries, contact Customer Service.

Document Reference: (9205120.

The links in the email take you to the following address:

http://mstudio2.aknet.it/.../.www.paypal.com/cmd=_login-run.html

This page is located on a web site for a furniture store company in Italy which is probably unaware that their server has been hacked and is being used this way. If you have the latest version of Firefox, you should get a warning if you try to visit the page that it is a fruadlent site.

The email message is very typical and unfortunately all too common. 

Here are some tips to help protect yourself: (More)

I use a great little open source program called Logwatch that sends me a daily analysis report of who accesses our web server and from what IP address they are coming from. There is at least one list that shows up each day listing numerous failed log in attempts with user names from A to Z (see a typical list below). These are from hacker programs or scripts that go through a list of typical names and various simple passwords or lack of passwords. It's an attempt to find a weak link in my defenses.  This is not a clever attack. It is a blunt brute force attack. Don't think that no one would be interested in your server or web host account, because someone somewhere is interested. Your basic defense is a good password that you change often, atypical user names and none standard port addresses for SFTP and SSH. Do not use telnet or plain FTP.

Here is a list of failed login names from October 15th, 2007:

 (More)

Despite all of the information available on the Internet and the portability of laptops and cell phones that can be used to access the Web, I still like old fashioned magazines. They are light weight, require no batteries, recharging or back-lights. They can be rolled up and tucked in a jacket pocket. The sharpness of the image and the clarity of color is pretty good, too. Also, despite my daily browsing of the the Internet and subscription to numerous RSS feeds I still find something I did not know on the printed pages. Yes, professional journalists are still needed despite the numerous amateur bloggers, such as myself, making their contributions to the collective. When there are portable devices that are affordable, flexible (meaning, able to be rolled up) and and easy to use I might consider giving up my magazines, but that does not appear to be happening anytime too soon.

Unless you have money to burn you should subscribe to magazines you read on a regular basis. You can subscribe in a number of different ways:

1. Fill out the postcards that fall out of the magazines, get a bill and pay by check via snail mail. This is the old fashioned approach.
   
2. Subscribe via the magazine drives that schools run as fundraisers. If you have kids, nephews, nieces, grandchildren or neighbors with kids you have probably been solicited with these offers.
3. Go to the magazine's web site and fill out the online forms and pay by credit card.
4. Or you could go to Amazon and select the magazines you want and after a couple clicks if you already have an account with Amazon you'll have a subscription at the same rate as the above methods but in much less time. 

 

Warning: This article is technical, but it pertains to something I have been working on for the past week and is pretty important: the backing up of data on the network.

You may have heard it said before, but it bears repeating: It is not a matter of "if" your hard drive or computer is going to crash but "when".  Therefore, you should be prepared if you care about the data on your computer. Our file/print/intranet server has four 250 GB hard drives configured in a RAID-5 configuration, so that if one drive fails the other drives pick up the slack. It works, I experienced a failed drive in a 3 drive array. Because of the redundent data the drives actually store 650 GB. The data is backed up to another four drive terabyte RAID-5 server that is remotely located. There are many backup strategies, but today I am just going to cover what I do with a free open source program called Rsync. 

From the rsync web site:

rsync is a file transfer program for Unix systems. rsync uses the "rsync algorithm" which provides a very fast method for bringing remote files into sync. It does this by sending just the differences in the files across the link, without requiring that both sets of files are present at one of the ends of the link beforehand.

Some features of rsync include

• can update whole directory trees and filesystems
• optionally preserves symbolic links, hard links, file ownership, permissions, devices and times
• requires no special privileges to install
• internal pipelining reduces latency for multiple files
• can use rsh, ssh or direct sockets as the transport
• supports anonymous rsync which is ideal for mirroring

This command line utility is very powerful and is relatively easy to use. The following command will backup up one directory to another: rsync -av /src/foo /dest. However, for useful daily incremental backups more options are required. There are some very complex scripts written around rsync, however, with the backup option the following script will backup multiple directories to a remote server via ssh (a secure connection), retain 29-31 days of incremental backups (depending on the month), store information in a log  and email the network admin when the job is complete. The first backup may take a while, but the following ones will be much faster since only the items that have changed will be transferred.

Here is the script with comments. You'll want to schedule it via cron, a scheduling application. Here is an article on how to generate and share a ssh key.

#!/bin/bash
# usage: backup.sh [ -d ]
BACKUPS=user@domainname:/c/archive
TIME_STAMP=$(date %d)
RSYNC_OPTS="-avz --timeout=600 --force --ignore-errors --delete --backup --backup-dir=/c/archive/$TIME_STAMP"
DEBUG=0
LOG_FILE=/var/log/your_rsync.log     ## Keeps a copy in /var/log
TMP_LOG_FILE=/tmp/your-tmp-rsync.log  ## Mails the current session's log
rm $TMP_LOG_FILE

CURRENT_DATE=`date`


# this option allows me to easily do a test run when I make changes
if [ "x$1" == "x-d" ]; then DEBUG=1; fi
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then RSYNC_OPTS="$RSYNC_OPTS --dry-run"; fi

# the following line clears the last months incremental directory
[ -d $HOME/emptydir ] || mkdir $HOME/emptydir
rsync --delete -aq -e "ssh -i /your-ssh-key" $HOME/emptydir/ $BACKUPS/$TIME_STAMP
rmdir $HOME/emptydir


#Clearly shows me in the log the the start of each backup
echo "Starting Backup of your server on : $CURRENT_DATE" >> $TMP_LOG_FILE


#this is a for loop to go through each of the directories I want backed up
for DATA in /etc /var/flexshare /var/www /home
do
rsync $RSYNC_OPTS -e "ssh -i /your-ssh-key" $DATA $BACKUPS   2>1 1>>$TMP_LOG_FILE
done

#separate lines for mysql database backup, because mysql needs to be stopped 
#This step backs up th entire  database
/etc/init.d/mysqld stop
rsync $RSYNC_OPTS -e "ssh -i /your-ssh-key" /var/lib/mysql $BACKUPS 2>1 1>>$TMP_LOG_FILE
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

#appends the log for the current session to the main log file. 
cat $TMP_LOG_FILE >> $LOG_FILE
cat $TMP_LOG_FILE | mail you@domainname.com -s  "Rsync Backup Results"

exit $?

I would have included the ssh command into the RSYNC_OPTS variable, but when I did I always got the error from rsync that "-i" is not a known option. And yes I did try various combinations of single qoutes inside double and vice versa to no avail. However, the above solution works fine.  The reason for the ssh command is that your connection is secure and you do not have to manually enter your password and the job can be scheduled to run any time of the day. 

This job only takes a few minutes to run after the initial backup (which took a few hours) and I run it nightly, however if you are really paranoid you could set it up to run every hour. If you do so, change the time stamp to include the hour, as well as the day to preserve your incremental backups of which you will have many more so make sure you have the free space. 

Miro, formerly known as Democracy, calls itself the only video player you need and I think they are right, but it is more than that. It is a tool for subscribing and automatically downloading videos from across the Internet. You no longer have to go out to many different video web sites. You can pull them into a single location and easily organize them into categories. You can watch classic Popeye cartoons or video podcasts from PBS. They even have a section devoted to High Definition videos, as well as, a built in Bitorrent client. You may also download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video, among others. The software is free and open source. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. The interface is well designed. Miro is the iTunes for Internet video. 

Miro is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit based in Worcester, MA.  I am very impressed with the organization of the web site, the extensive documentation and technical support, although I did not run into any problems with the application. It just worked. Everything is clearly labeled in the application and is fairly intuiative. The online guide is helpful in finding channels and videos and subscribing is very easy. There is an excellent related web site called MakeInternetTV that is a guide that has step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.

Here is a video demo of the Miro software running on Windows:

 

 

Don't take my word for it and check it out for yourself.  

This is a sample of Twitter content:

	moriza I'm in transit less than 5 seconds ago from txt
	egspoony At Local Option... Phone battery is dead though. less than 5 seconds ago from txt
	luxuryluke heading back to the fridge for another Urquell and the freezer for a pint glass. less than 5 seconds ago from web
	scottstys Recording Barnuts Saturday night around 830PST. Want to guest? Email me less than 5 seconds ago from txt
	jesmc @MsHerr: interview for what and we should chat about flights less than 5 seconds ago from TwitBin in reply to MsHerr
	dave_robinson MSP very nasty great soundtrack though less than 5 seconds ago from web
	BleuCaldwell @leahjones Yay! I'm headed in now... less than 5 seconds ago from web in reply to leahjones
	nisyura99 @Cusinart おはよーです！ less than 10 seconds ago from Twit in reply to Cusinart

There is a lot of hype about this micro blog or one way instant messaging service called Twitter. You can send short text messages from AIM, Facebook, your phone, your blog, email and recently even from Second Life (another over hyped piece of software). Who has time to read these blurbs? How do these people have the time to send messages about their mundane daily tasks?

There is a new service called Pownce that is similar, but has the ability to send stuff (messages, links, files, and events). It is in beta now and you have to be invited as they grow and develop the product. It appears to be more practical than Twitter, but I can still do the same things with email which everyone I know uses. 

Sometimes I think we have become over-saturated with technology and now we are seeing new developments with technology just for the sake of technology or making something "new". However, that "new thing" does not necessarily make life easier, more interesting, more fun or better in some way. This is not the type of thing you would expect on a technology blog. It may be that I am old enough to remember a time when there was no Internet, e-mail, MP3 players, PDA's, digital cameras, or for that matter home computers.

I like technology with a purpose, a utility, a practical function or a tangible benefit. For example, rsync, a terrific backup program. I could list many other applications, even games which offer entertainment and relief from stress. However, when it comes to Twitter, it is just not worth the effort for the payback at least for me. I think Twitter may be a niche fad. 

 

Are you a lawyer that wants to make the best use of technology in your practice or do you provide technical support for a lawyer or or law firm? If you are, you might want to check out TechnoLawyer. It's a web site that offers product reviews and legal technology and practice mangement information.  I came across  the site when I was researching some information  for my wife who works as a legal assistant in a busy law firm that was shopping for a document managment system. Being a do-it-yourself kind of guy I liked KnowledgeTree, but they went with another company that offered more hand-holding and thus cost much more, but that is a topic for another blog post.

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