Photoshop turns 20 as of today. The measurement of its success, similar to ‘google’, which is not achieved by many other more popular products, is that ‘photoshop’ has become a verb, although often time with a negative meaning.
I have been thinking of displaying the photos I took at the places I traveled on Google Maps. I think it is a great way to present two of my hobbies, photography and travel. Many geotagging software can map the GPS coordinates and synchronize the timestamps of GPS and EXIF tags embedded in the photos, so they can put the pictures at exactly where they were taken. However, carrying a GPS device and keeping it on throughout the travel is cumbersome, (a camera with GPS would be nice); in fact, often that kind of accuracy is not needed. If you travel with cars most of time, there is a way to translate Google Maps’ multi-destination route to a KML file using GPS Visualizer‘s services. After that, you can either overlay the KML on Google Maps, or upload it to services like everytrail or locr with your pictures. My travel page is created with this approach.
Google Analytics not only maintains how many visitors your website has and where they are from, it also has detailed breakdown of how they get to your site. From these statistics, you can more or less sense the current status of Internet. It is interesting to study them and compare them from time to time to see the transition of the computer industry.
The following screenshots are from Google Analytics of my blog site. My site has only about 900 visitors so far, but I think we can see some trends already. The noises made by my own visits should be mostly eliminated, because I can configure WordPress‘ Google Analytics plugin to not to send statistics to Google for logged in users.
Operation Systems: Windows dominate; MAC has 13% market share.
I have been using my home PC to host my website and gallery for almost 10 years. I had a good experience moving my gallery to Zenfolio and SmugMug (updated review here), access is faster, uptime is better and storage is really cheap these days, so I felt it’s a good idea to host my website on a professional hosting service as well.
I compared features and fees of a couple of hosting service and talked with two customer service agents. Because most pages of my website are driven by MySQL and PHP, these are the must-have features. Eventually, BlueHost stands out among others. It is the first recommendation in WordPress website and its online reviews are mostly positive. Although most services I evaluated provide similar features, bluehost’s website just looks more professional. The new user has 30-day money back guarantee, so I decided to go with it.
I have been mostly overlooking the URL shortener services provided by various sites until now. My attention was attracted by the proposed shutdown of tr.im site and finger pointing between tr.im and bit.ly. I just realized the service is so simple and works right away as you input the original long URL. It comes free and there is almost no gotcha tricks, such as advertising or banners. I think it is a good news to users but bad news to the service providers, as I can’t see any way to make money from it. Maybe this article sheds some light on this. Because more interesting pages are more likely to be shortened, potentially these enormous data can be processed and refined to provide value-add services. This is conceptually the similar approach that Google is using,
I don’t make many cellphone calls every day and I am not a saleman who travels all the time, so I always asked myself, “Why do I need an iPhone?” … until recently. iPhone has evovled several generations now. Technically there should be nothing to worry about. Almost everyone has some kind of smart phone, so still using a brick-like cell phone almost make you feel a little shameful. As a result, we bought an iPhone 3GS for my wife about a month ago. We instantly fell in love with it. A new gadget actually enable you to do a lot of things you didn’t do before. Once you wake up, you can look at stocks, read news and check weather without leaving the bed. The design is absolutely elegant. There are a lot Apps to choose from. You can play game, watch video, learn foreign language, read novels, take photos and use it as a GPS, a compass, a level or even a flashlight.
Then, I tried to upload some music. In fact, I cannot just “upload”, I have to SYNC through iTune. Even worse, it didn’t work using my MacBook. It did work with my PC, but it took unreasonably long time to copy a couple of songs. Why do I have to sync using iTune? It is so unnatural. I imagine I should be able to just connect the iPhone to a USB port, a disk will be mapped, then I can copy different media to different folders. The iPhone application can sort them out automatically.
Of course, Apple wants to make money. More than 1.5 billion Apps have been downloaded from Apple Store. Forcing the users to go through iTune is a great way to control users’ behavior and lock them to buy through Apple forever. Apple has a reputation of controlling its software and hardware since beginning. The up side is Apple has the total control of the look and feel of its product; the down side is Apple will charge more, as long as the consumers are willing to pay the premium.
Snort thread run an active discussion on topic “ROI on IDS/IPS products”. The one who initiated the discussion asked the question about how to measure the ROI (return of investment) on IDS/IPS products, by giving an example that a company removed their IPS deployment after 2-year of usage because the return didn’t justify the cost of maintenance and personnel.
It is interesting that someone compared the money spent on IPS with the car insurance. It is true that there is no quantitative way to calculate the ROI for either of these two models. But I also think that they are different in that, for car insurance, the insured pays a small amount of money to cover a potentially much bigger loss and the cost is shared by the community; in the case of IPS, the customers pay the price specifically for the device and service they buy and deserve to ask for the quality that the vendor claims.
Certainly, the customer should not expect IPS can solve all security issue in the network. IPS should be one building block of the whole defense-in-depth strategy. Other products like firewall, anti-virus, patch-management and identity-management system also play important roles in this strategy.
On the other hand, IPS has its own problems. It is an industry consensus that IPS is not a device that you can leave in the basement and never touch again. To make it really useful, continuous monitoring and updating are required. This is partly because IPS is dealing with applications which is way more complicated, flexible and dynamic than TCP/IP level protocols that router/switch works on.
On the positive side, IPS technology has reached the stage that, some products do provide great configurability, extensive reporting and analysis tools and, most important, much improved stability and quality. False-positives are greatly reduced through intensive research efforts. Fine-tuning the products has become much easier for the administrators, so that IPS can be relied on to play its role in the network.
Microsoft recently lauched a series of Ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. The following is the long version of its 2nd episode, New Family.
The feedbacks from the Internet community are almost negative since the first episode. Users critize the Ads. being ambiguous as a marketing attempt - not mentioning ‘Vista’ even once; attack its worthiness – spending 300 million instead of fixing the problem in the product; or just simply label it as ‘stupid’ and ‘lame’.
However, the intention of the comercial is not to promote Vista or any Microsoft product directly, but to restore the public image of the company. Microsoft has been depicted as an “evil empire” for long time. It is a fashion that if you don’t say something negative about Microsoft then you are not cool. Looking at Slashdot website, it is easy to find many posts that talk something else but at the end add, “BTW, Microsoft sucks”. Although tech people have the tradition of being anti-authority, it has gone beyond that and become a bias. As an engineer in the network security industry, I know attacks that target Windows and its software are hundred times more than those to Apple’s OS. Not because Apple is safer, just attacking Windows can reach more so it is more profitable. In fact, it’s lucky that Microsoft won the OS war in 1980s, otherwise, a PC would cost $1000 instead of $300, and we could never order case, CPU, fan, memory, harddisk, power supply online and make our own PC – everything would be made by Apple.
It is unlikely that Microsoft could fix its image by this campaign, but it steps to a right direction. In the ad., Microsoft doesn’t put itself at the incumbent position, but more like a humble underdog who is easy to access and eager to learn. Because it doesn’t mention any product, the consumers feel it is not pushing anything, so they want to follow the story and feel the connection. To Microsoft, with 90% of market share, this is more important then a few Windows licenses.
As I am writing this blog, I read some articles that state Microsoft will stop the campaign because of the negative responses as planed. If that is true, what a shame.
I attended ICSA IPS meeting in Las Vegas last Friday (8/8). The attendees were the mix of technical and marketing people from different security companies. It is not ‘cool’ to take pictures in a ‘hacker’s’ meeting, so here are some random snapshots outside of the meeting of Las Vegas Casinos.
The real hacker’s meeting, Black Hat, took place just before the ICSA meeting at Caesar Palace. The focus was certainly Dan Kaminsky because his founding of the high-profile DNS vulnerability. But, his founding actually won the Pwnie Award for the Most Overhyped Bug. It is said Kaminsky was outrageous when this’s announced. Quite a fun scene.
