by WebKeyDesign | Jan 29, 2009 | Networking
You ever work on something for so long that you start to think someone must be playing a joke on you, or at least laughing at you? This is the exact feeling I have when dealing with wireless networking. On the one hand, not having to run wires through your house and worrying about your dog or children tripping over them is nice, I am not sure the trade off is worth it. Let us begin with a simple home wireless network router and how the labyrinth gets complicated so easily can sometimes amaze you. Immediately you are encountered with a list of concerns that you never had with wired Ethernet, such as to secure the router or not? Any technical person would tell you that you need to secure it to prevent your neighbor’s kid from downloading all sorts of naughty things, because if you do not do this, ultimately you are legally responsible for anything that gets downloaded through your $50 router! Next you have to worry about signal interference, cause you do not want your wireless router to interfere with any cordless phone or other wireless router that your neighbor may have. Did I mention your microwave hates your router too?
Say you figured out all of that stuff and you are happy with your router security and your router’s placement. Now comes the fun part, which is having to one by one connect all your devices to your router and make them all play nice with each other. First come the desktop machines, then the laptops, and if you have mixed Windows and Macs it makes it more challenging. On older Windows XP machines, you end up cursing Microsoft for making this harder than running a marathon, and on the Apple side, you wonder if Apple documents anything at all with industry terms, it is as if Apple has to rename everything to an Apple friendly name just for the sake of being different!
If you survive all of this configuration and troubleshooting, you then are confronted with your son or daughter asking you if you can fix it so their Nintendo DS and Sony PSP can access the Internet. Oh, you probably need to fix it too so that the Playstation 3 can connect too. Overall, by this time you figured out that the easiest of all was the network printer, but for whatever reason the PS3 still can’t see your printer.
Lessons Learned
I am sure the Steve Jobs digital lifestyle works, if all you have are Apple products, but in reality wireless networking is a test of patience. What you suddenly discover is that networking is too complicated for normal people to do. With every device you add to the network, the security model tends to suffer and you see that inexpensive products like the Nintendo DS just do not support the latest security methods such as WPA2 and AES. You almost need two wireless networks, a highly secure one and a very open one that has limited functionality for all those devices that cannot connect to anything secure.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 1, 2008 | Mac OS X
Recently, I had the opportunity to diagnose a problem with an external Firewire drive and Mac OS X. The drive would no longer mount on the OS X desktop and the only place you could see it (other than Terminal) was in Disk Utility. If you ran Disk Utility – Verify or Repair, the message: invalid content in journal would appear. The fix to make it mountable again was to do the following in Terminal.
The first command gives you a list of all drives and in the right most column, you will need to identify what the Identifier Name is for your volume. Once you have that, run the second command and substitue the IDENTIFIER_NAME with the correct Identifier Name for your volume.
diskutil list
/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -N /dev/IDENTIFIER_NAME
Example: disk0s2
If it successful, this will mark the disk as no longer Journal, so you can now shutdown the Firewire drive and then unplug it. Wait a minute or so and then start it back up and plug it back into the Macintosh and then you should be able to see the drive mount again.
This allowed me to mount the drive again, but I believe there is still a problem with this drive, so my recommendation was to backyp the drive right away and then reformat it and exchange it for a new drive. I am not sure if the problems with the 1.5TB Seagate drives in RAID configuration apply to other Seagate drives as this one was a 1TB drive, but you never know.
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 30, 2008 | Windows
The Internet of late has been very chatty about how Microsoft screwed up and released a Windows version that no one really wanted. Not since WindowsME, has Microsoft had such an unimportant Windows release as Windows Vista. Faithful and ever persistent Apple followers have chimed in with the prophecy that Apple will once again reign supreme and take over the world with Mac OS X. As a Mac user myself, yeah I too can dream of the coming of OS X to all things, but that simply is not going to happen. The Operating System is irrelevant at this point. Yes, I said it. As much as I love Apple for their cool gradients and perfectionist design, the truth is that the operating system war no longer matters. It is the network that matters now. People don’t care what operating system they run as much as, what they want to access, works. Today for technical people like myself, this means Firefox on Windows XP, Safari on Mac OS X and my iPhone, and whatever browser works on anything else. If it is IE, so be it!
In reality there are two markets out there. The consumer market which Apple has already won and which Linux is close to figuring out and the business market where Microsoft rules with iron fists. Apple’s OS X strategy on the consumer side has worked great. Today I can message, play, and communicate on my iPhone better than I ever could on my old Windows98 machine. Most people do not even know what the operating system is on the iPhone, they just know it works. In this respect, OS X has become a consumer operating system. Consumers like choices too, and so today you can buy an Apple widget that works and live with it or you can go with Windows, Linux, and dozens of other operating systems that are out there. Apple’s consumer price is a tad higher, but as the iPod and iPhone have shown, people don’t care as long as it works. As long as Apple keeps OS X running smoothly on all these $300 devices, OS X will be successful, so successful that no one will know that is what they are actually using. The irony is that Microsoft wanted this for Windows and it never really happened. Why? Because Microsoft is obsessed with recognition that they have never figured out that you do not have to blast everything you make with “Microsoft” and version names that make no sense to consumers. What exactly does IE Version: 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_qfe.080814-1242 mean? I am sure someone could tell you, but to the consumer it does not matter at all. Apple’s marketing is simple, one logo and one name.
Microsoft is a company that is going in multiple directions, and it is causing them to remain stagnant and sink in quicksand. The relevancy of Vista has been a wake up call, that perhaps Office and Windows no longer matter outside of the business markets that they control. Do not get me wrong, Microsoft makes very impressive products for business. Windows Server 2008 being more impressive than Windows Server 2003 which is my personal favorite version of Windows, but outside of business Microsoft has many ideas, many strategies, but one senses the ambition is gone. Google is the super power of the Internet and it is pushing hard into remaking the world in its image. Google has made products that actually matter to you and me. Google Earth, Maps, Reader, and so on have made an impact on how we live and use this thing called the Internet. Google’s strategy is to make the network work for everyone and it is succeeding in building toolsets that are cutting into Microsoft’s expensive products. This is why the operating system war no longer matters. It is the network that Google is building that is changing the world. The business market is watching this revolution and they are very interested, as they should be. The future will definitely have business going less Microsoft, just how much business abandons Redmond, depends on just how relevant Microsoft products are. Right now, Microsoft still has the podium on which to speak volumes on where they want to take us, but for how much longer can they keep control may be out of their hands entirely. Vista is boring compared to Ubuntu, OS X, RedHat, and others.
On the consumer side, Microsoft has pushed hard with little success to show for it. The XBox 360 remains uninspiring and in third place behind Nintendo Wii and the PS3. Windows Live Search is not even a real contender in search. And Microsoft wonders why Vista (an operating system that can cost upwards of $400 on cheap $300 hardware) is not enticing to consumers? The rise of the netbook laptop, something which neither Intel nor Microsoft saw coming, is now the driving force in the consumer market. Microsoft had to hack Windows XP to run on these $300 laptops, this alone speaks volumes of how stagnant Microsoft has been. If shareholders have not thought of this, they definitely should consider what would happen if business customers start buying netbooks instead of more expensive hardware and switch to Google Apps for their software needs! Microsoft’s Cloud idea has to materialize sooner than later. In essence Windows is doomed, or at least what we think of Windows is. Microsoft has to build the network in ways that matter to everyone. They do not have to follow the same path as Google, but they definitely need to change the way we live. Microsoft’s best strategy is to kill Windows before its competitors make it irrelevant. The clock is ticking away.
by WebKeyDesign | Aug 29, 2008 | Site Design
One project that I recently completed was the relaunching of MovieComment. This is a website that I started in 2006 and which I let languish for over a year. The original intent was for me to provide the space for friends to write movie reviews, but for some reason, I could never persuade anyone to write anything down. Eventually I started to neglect the site as WebKeyDesign took most of my time and I also have a regular job that keeps me quite busy these days. Over the last couple of weeks, I took some time out and retrofitted the site with a new WordPress theme, added some content, made some minor improvements, and did a security audit to make sure the site was secure.
For the theme, I went with a theme called dsantuary. The theme had a nice layout and built-in advertisement placement, but I did not like the navigation bar at all. I ended up changing the navigation bar to something I came up myself. Other than this there were a few theme changes, here and there to make the site work. For example the graphic for the sidebar was not tall enough to accommodate a long enough sidebar. I had to create a new graphic for the sidebar. Once I got rid the navigation bar, I had to find a place for the Search form, since the original had it built into the navigation bar. Search was moved into the sidebar.
Plugins
While I will not list all the plugins that are setup on the site, the following plugins were added and configured for specific reasons and are worthy of consideration for most WordPress sites:
Since MovieComment was being relaunched, I needed to make sure that the content was going to be indexed properly and that it will show up correct on search engine sites. To start with good content needs meta tags. WordPress on its own does not really do a good job of providing this. For this you can try a plugin like All in One SEO Pack that tries to setup meta tags correctly for each page of your site. Once your content is meta tagged properly you will need to let search engines know your content is out there. The best way to do this is via a sitemap. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin does a good job of creating a sitemap automatically for you. Once you have Google XML Sitemaps setup go to Google Webmaster Tools to verify that Google has no problems reading your sitemap.
Security is important and I too have made the mistake of letting things slide and have paid the price for not keeping focused on security. Luckily now there are some good plugins to help with this. By installing Login LockDown and, WP Security Scan your WordPress site will be a little bit more secure and being more secure always helps webmasters sleep better.
by WebKeyDesign | Aug 28, 2008 | In Stock
It is pretty much agreed upon that in the Windows world of computing running a computer without anti-virus software is like jumping onto a busy highway and expecting to not get hit. No other platform has as many viruses and now spam infections as Windows. Given that, most Windows users will need to setup some sort of anti-virus application. In this review I will cover why ESET NOD32 should be considered one of your top choices as well as why buying anti-virus software in general can be difficult.
NOD32 Options
All software makers pretty much distinguish between two classes of software these days. You either buy personal software for home use or you spend more and purchase business (sometimes referred to as enterprise) software. It use to be that ESET offered one solution that you could install on Windows2000, WindowsXP workstations and Windows Servers, but they recently changed their software pricing model to make a clear distinction between personal home software and what they call the business edition. It is now no longer possible to buy just 1 license of NOD32 Business Edition so that you can run it on your server. You must instead purchase 5 business licenses and then you will be able to download the Business Edition. The Home Edition no longer installs on any type of Windows Server, it will only install on Windows Workstations! My biggest problem with this is that I run a home server and so I can no longer buy cheap anti-virus software. Almost every vendor now requires a 5 business license limit, so even if I just wanted one or two licenses, I no longer have that privilege.
However if you are not like me, and just have Windows XP or Vista workstations, then you can buy ESET NOD32 Home Edition pretty cheaply. The cheapest way to buy the Home Edition is to just purchase an OEM version. You should be able to find OEM versions for sale on Newegg.com and save yourself a few dollars in the process.
Other than the Home versus Business editions, you can purchase ESET Smart Security which is both an anti-virus and anti-spyware utility. The Smart Security suite is more expensive than NOD32 alone, but it will save you the expense of buying a separate commercial spyware utility.
NOD32 Interface
The software takes a few minutes to install and by all accounts is a relatively easy install. The installer will require the usual Windows restart. From this point on, any time you start Windows, you will get a NOD32 splash screen once Windows gets to the desktop, letting you know NOD32 loaded. The green logo will then appear in your systray and you can click on it to bring up NOD32. Version 3 of the software differs from version 2.7, in that version 3 gives you a nicer looking interface and hides the old style 2.7 setup screens. You can even configure NOD32 to show a simple interface if you think the Advanced Interface is still too cluttered.
NOD32 Protection
NOD32 offers real-time file system protection, email protection, and web access protection. You can turn off email and web access protection if you find those features too intrusive. The web access protection works quite well, it alerted me when I visited a site that had been compromised by a cross-domain JavaScript call. Overall I have been using NOD32 for over a year and in that time it has caught multiple virus problems and best of all, has not slowed my system down in the process.
Other than NOD32, I have tried Computer Associates Anti-Virus products which are very inexpensive compared to other vendors. However it is my opinion that NOD32 is the top anti-virus product in quality for Windows at this time. Business users though might want to look at Sophos who offers enterprise class anti-virus and spam solutions with a good reputation for quality. For home user though, NOD32 is still my best recommendation.
