Interesting Computer Stuff with Professor Cameron

It's Official! I am an Author!

2012-02-08T12:13:00.001-05:00

As some of you know, I took the 2010-2011 academic year off at Passaic to work on some projects. One of these projects was writing a textbook, and it was awesome to see it has been published and is on Amazon's Web site.

It really has been a dream of mine to actually author a textbook, and Pearson gave me a chance to do this with a small textbook in their Your Office series. The series editor, Amy Kinser, had a vision for how she felt the books should be, and it sounded a lot like the way I try to teach application software. Instead of "click click click", I try to talk about how certain features may be useful in a business environment.

Interestingly enough, the writing wasn't difficult for me. The most tedious part ended up being creating good screen shots, getting them labeled, getting permissions, and so on.

The book definitely will not make me rich - as it is designed to be packaged with the Your Office: Microsoft Office 2010, Volume 1 textbook, I was paid a flat fee rather than a commission. However, it was an exciting start to an authoring career. I hope to contribute more to other texts in the future, and having gone through the process, I know I can do it.

Death Wishes via Twitter

2012-01-23T12:24:00.001-05:00

As a Giants fan, yesterday was a good day. The 49ers played a great game, but in the end, a few mistakes by a player pushed in to an unfamiliar role did them in.

The last time the Giants and 49ers faced each other in the playoffs (2003) the same sort of thing happened. A player named Trey Junkin was signed out of retirement to snap the ball for field goal attempts. He messed up a snap earlier in the game, and at the end of the game, he messed up another field goal snap and the Giants lost the game. Junkin faded away in to relative anonymity, though he had to read about the Giants in the newspapers.

In last night's game, a young player named Kyle Williams was pushed in to the role of punt returner because of an injury to the player who regularly filled that role, Ted Ginn Jr. Williams had only returned two punts this season. In the early part of the game, Williams made a mistake and the Giants got the ball. In overtime, he fumbled the ball, which led to the Giants kicking the winning field goal.

Trey Junkin was 41 years old at the time of his mistake, while Williams is 23 and a part of the 49ers team plans. The thing I want to highlight, however, is how the Web changed the reaction.

A number of fans of the 49ers went to Twitter, and Kyle Williams had his account listed and available for fans. Fans rushed to Twitter and starting sending him death wishes. Though a number of news outlets have called them "death threats", I haven't seen any evidence of that online. As opposed to threatening to kill him, they have sent messages saying they hope he, his wife, kids and family die, or that they hope he gets AIDS and dies. (Read some of the quotes here). Of course, if they were really extreme, they may have been deleted or reported to Twitter.

It is a shame how Web 2.0 technologies can lead to things like this.

The Perils of Communication

2012-01-09T13:43:00.000-05:00

This is a story that 20 years ago probably might have made the local news, and not CNN.

An Asian Papa John's customer in New York City ordered a pizza and after she left she noticed the area that says "customer name" listed her name as "lady chinky eyes". Obviously, a cashier thought they were being funny identifying her in this way.

Twenty years ago, she might have just ignored it after being annoyed. These days, she posted a tweet with a picture of the receipt, and it went viral.

This led to the employee being fired within 48 hours and an official apology being posted on Papa John's Facebook page.

The perils of being a smart ass in the information age!

Link to CNN story

Photoshop Phriday

2011-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of bizarre little Web sites on the Internet. One of them is SomethingAwful, which does a pretty good job of being funny and sometimes offensive. They have a contest every week called Photoshop Phriday, where you are given a theme and offered the chance to create an image to go with that theme. Sometimes they put out a starting image and people make changes to it. Definitely amusing, if you are not easily offended! That is always the problem with sites that are based on user contributions, of course.

Link to site

The End of Another Semester

2011-12-18T16:24:00.001-05:00

So, the semester comes to an end again, a group of students moves on, and a new group prepares for the Spring semester.

Back in the stone ages of the 1990's, when I was in college, some fraternities used to carry around books containing teacher ratings. Of course, nowadays, it is much easier on the Internet. I love the idea behind ratemyprofessor.com - this is a free site that does not require signing up, and it allows you to anonymously post ratings for your professors.

Of course, there are always students who dislike certain professors who everyone else loves, but the more ratings a professor receives, the more accurate you would assume the rating is.

In terms of positives in my class, I know I have a passion for the material and I do try very hard to make it something students can relate to. I also try to encourage dialog in the classroom, and make it safe for students to ask questions. I also try to be entertaining and avoid using the PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes students don't like that teaching style. I also know some students dislike that they need to read the book, be on time to class, and turn work in on time. Personally, I feel like timeliness is critical one students transition to the business world, so I choose to emphasize these things in my classroom.

It's a great site, and here are links directly to my ratings pages:

Ratemyprofessor for me (Passaic)

Ratemyprofessor for me (Bergen)

When Web marketing goes wrong...

2011-12-02T18:51:00.000-05:00

There are a few companies making names for themselves in marketing. LivingSocial, Groupon, Gilt Groupe, and restaurant.com are some of the sites that have popped up that offer consumers deep discounts on various types of services. LivingSocial and Groupon are sites that are especially geared towards localized services. For example, my students and I looked at the sites the other day, and we saw packages such as a spa day, keratin hair products, and a day of go-kart racing, all offered at a discounted rate. The advantage for a company is they attract new customers by offering a discount, and the advantage to the consumer is they save money.

Is this a sustainable business model? I am not sure. I do know you sometimes hear horror stories about sites like that. Generally, they have to do with the stampede effect created by Groupon and LivingSocial. As opposed to restaurant.com, which will give businesses a random amount of business, Groupon and LivingSocial tend to bring a stampede of business in around the same time. Some companies report regular customers being driven away by deal-seekers.

These sites do allow businesses to limit the amount of purchases (see Groupon terms here). However, businesses sometimes underestimate the demand for deal-seekers. For example, a British bakery recently offered a deal for a dozen of their gourmet cupcakes for $10. This was 75% off their normal price. This bakery chose to do all the deals at once (link to article), rather than spreading them out over a few weeks, and also chose not to cap the number of purchases, which many companies do. The normal monthly sale volume was around 1,200 cupcakes a month, they ended up making about 102,000. The owner had to bring in temporary workers just to meet their end of the bargain.

Now, could Groupon do a better job helping the customer avoid disasters like this? I am sure they could. However, the bakery owner also has to realize that caps exist for a reason, and should have seen the potential issue with opening it up to everyone with no restriction. That said, you have to feel for the owner who made this decision and cut in to what was likely a thin profit margin.

Google+ at the four month mark

2011-11-15T10:16:00.001-05:00

Google+ is Google's new social networking site. Google released this in the summer of 2011, and so far, it has picked up a lot of users. However, it seems to have lost some of the early momentum.

Spot on, xkcd!

I feel like Google versus Facebook will be a tremendous battle. Facebook has already reacted and quickly started to implement some of the features Google+ offered. Competition is usually a good thing for consumers, after all! Now that Google+ is a few months old, it is less of a novelty.

As it becomes less of a novelty, people start to take a more critical eye to it. One of Google's engineers, Steve Yegge, accidentally (?) posted a rant about Google+ last month. To summarize his complaints, Google+ does not make it easy for other people to create Google+ apps, therefore making it difficult for app developers to create Google+ apps. This is certainly a current limitation of the system.

Will Google+ adapt or die? We shall see.

Also, I have a Google+ profile set up, if anyone would like to add me.

Spring 2012 Semester Schedule

2011-11-08T13:43:00.001-05:00

I am in the process of figuring out my Spring 2012 schedule. Of course, my schedule is up in the air until we are certain some classes will run. For the moment, here is what I know.

Definitely mine:
CIS 125 M02 (Microcomputer Software I): Tue/Thu 10:20 AM to 11:35 AM Paterson Campus
CIS 273 ME1/GD 273 ME1 (Web Graphics): Thu 7:05 PM to 9:35 PM
CIS 294 M01/GD 294 M01 (CIS Internship): Times TBA

Probably mine:
CIS 101 P01 (Computer Concepts and Applications): Mon/Wed 10:20 AM to 11:35 AM Passaic Campus
CIS 101 P02 (Computer Concepts and Applications): Mon/Wed 8:55 AM to 10:10 AM Passaic Campus

Here's where it gets complicated. If the CIS 125 P01 runs at Passaic, that will probably be mine, but if it does not, then I may get one of any number of classes.

At Bergen:
INF 163 001 (Internet Concepts and Applications): Mon/Wed 3:55 PM to 5:50 PM Paramus Campus

Microsoft SyncToy

2011-10-29T18:17:00.000-04:00

Moving between machines is always difficult. If you keep files on your hard drive, problems arise with forgetting files. So, if you copy them to a USB drive, you can end up with two copies to a file, which can be even worse.

One way to combat this is to use an online storage solution, such as Microsoft's SkyDrive. SkyDrive is basically an online USB drive, with access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps. Google has a similar functionality through Google Docs.

However, if you are looking for something that doesn't require an online account, you can also download a tool such as Microsoft SyncToy. This application is free for Windows users, but for whatever reason not installed with Windows when you first install it. If you are someone who has some issues with keeping track of files, this is a highly customizable tool. As opposed to a program like backup, a synchronization program can be set up to work both ways. In other words, if I change a file on my hard drive, it can be synchronized to my USB drive, and if I change a file on my USB drive, it can be synchronized to my hard drive.

For free, it's a great little tool, and a good alternative to accidentally overwriting a file with an older version.

Download SyncToy here

Computer Security Education

2011-10-19T17:51:00.027-04:00

Whether I am teaching a Computer Concepts course or a course in the Information Technology major, the topic of computer security will usually come up. At some point during the discussion, someone will usually ask "should you really be showing us this?" or something of that nature. I suppose that sort of issue exists in many areas. If you teach someone karate, who is to say they won't use those skills to hurt someone? If you teach someone how to shoot a gun, how do you know they won't shoot a person? Of course, causing physical damage is a little different than computer security. How about this: if you teach someone computer programming, how do you know they won't use it to create a virus? The short answer is that you don't.

We have a few courses that involve computer security at PCCC. I know Bergen also has a course that involves computer security. As a matter of fact, ABET (an accrediting board) includes data security and privacy as a "core" topic in Information Technology. In other words, it is a critical piece of any IT program. You can't send entry-level computer professionals out without some sort of background in this area. Even someone who is going to be employed in a career that involves computers (most college students, I would assume) need some background. Often, the weakest link in computer security is not your firewall, or your antivirus, or your VPN software, it is your users. I think we have a responsibility as educators to raise the awareness level of all students.

PCCC Surplus Sale

2011-10-11T09:58:00.001-04:00

Every few years, PCCC does a surplus sale, where they get rid of all their old equipment. Outdated computers, desks, and other stuff are made available for very low prices. Last time they did this, one of my friends bought 10 older computers for his mosque for $6 each, with the intention of putting Linux on them. If you can get here early for it, it is a nice opportunity. Students are given priority, so if you get here between 10 am and noon the first day, you will only be competing with other students.

They have the surplus sale in the parking lot of the Community Technology Center (218 Memorial Drive, Paterson), right by the intersection of Memorial and Market.

Even if you are not a PCCC student, it is open to the public noon to 3 on Wednesday, and 10 to 3 on Thursday. Here's the info:

DATES: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 and Thursday, October 13, 2011
TIME: 10:00 A.M. TO 3:00 P.M.

On Wednesday from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon it will be open to students with a valid ID only. Open to the public after 12:00 noon on Wednesday and all day on Thursday.

Facebook Freebies

2011-10-10T13:51:00.000-04:00

I am a fan of getting things for free. There are a few companies I follow on Facebook that give me free stuff.

Two companies that make free stuff available are Quick Chek and McDonalds.

For example, if you Like Quick Chek on Facebook (link here), they give you access to a weekly freebie. Right now, the freebie is a Dr. Pepper 10, a new flavor of soft drink.

McDonald's Local (link here) has been giving out free stuff as well, though they haven't done so recently.

I know people have this tendency to assume if something is free, there is something wrong with it. For example, I mentioned the Quick Chek site and showed it to my students, and I asked why they would give it away. A few students came back with the answer "because no one is buying it". Companies sometimes create promotions like this for new products to encourage stores to buy a new product. In the case of a restaurant like McDonald's, giving out a product (like the new smoothie) can encourage people to visit the store and try something they may not otherwise try.

The other advantage to either of these scenarios is that, if you are in the store or restaurant, you want to get people to come to your location, and this is certainly a way to do that!

Windows 7 and the curse of retraining

2011-09-23T14:29:00.000-04:00

As a computer person, I am in the position where I need to constantly retrain myself. Many of the things I learned in college are already obsolete. A career in computers always presents new challenges and new opportunities, and that is part of what I like about it.

I find that many people hate the fact that things change. Computerization of jobs is one thing. I know two doctors with small offices who are pretty computer illiterate. They both plan on retiring if and when they have to submit all medical claims electronically instead of faxing or mailing them. I certainly can understand that. In that situation they feel there is too much added expense (in time and/or money) in retraining themselves, buying equipment, and possibly hiring an assistant to do the computer work.

However, even computer literate users generally dislike retraining. I understand the thought. People who are not in the computer field seem to look at computers as an appliance, much like a stove. If I had to retrain myself on how to use a stove every year I'd dislike that and just order out more.

Since people don't like the idea of retraining, they tend to use a new tool the way they used the old tool. However, newer versions of tools generally include better ways to do things. For example, since Windows 95, I used the same process to take a picture of what is on my screen and save it. I would hit the print screen button on my keyboard (or hit alt+printscreen to only capture the current window). If I wanted to only keep a part of the image instead of the whole thing, I would then open a program like Photoshop, create a new file, paste the screen image, select the part I want, crop it down, and save. This process is clunky, but it works, and this was just how I did things. Windows 7 (and some versions of Vista) include a tool called the Snipping Tool. This tool would let me take an image of part of my screen in many less steps. Were I not constantly playing around with new features, I would be less efficient. For those of you who haven't started using this cool tool, here is the Microsoft Snipping Tool tutorial.

Rather than learn new versions of a tool, people may even actively seek ways to make the new tool look like the old tool. For example, when Office 2007 came out, people hated the Ribbon interface, which replaced the old menu interface. A number of companies released tools (such as ubitmenu) that allowed users to display the old menus back in Office 2007.

For me, retraining is part of the allure of computers, but if you are among those who view it as a curse, I can understand the thought.

Monetizing a Site

2011-09-09T11:22:00.000-04:00

As some of you know, I teach courses that involve Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, social networking, and other such material. For me, it is critical to be involved with some of these because it keeps me up to date on the stuff I am teaching. After all, if I am not staying involved with these things, how can I speak to their effectiveness, ease of implementation, and details?

I'll definitely talk about this in my Internet course this semester, but I felt like it might be a good idea to put some information out about how people make money off of Web sites, even if they are not selling products or services online. Here are three ways a Web site can make money with no risk, and links to sites I have personal experience with.

Advertising: Google has a program called AdSense, which allows a Web site owner to sign up and set up an account to display ads. Through a pretty straightforward step-by-step process, they are given the option to choose how invasive they want the ads to be. For example, you will notice I have a few small ads on this site. Through Google's Blogger service (which hosts my blog for free), it is even simpler. For other sites, Google will give you some HTML code that you embed in your Web site. If you don't know what that means, your Web developer will.
From my own experience, I've been running this blog since 2006. Google will send you a check after you make $100, and I haven't received a check yet. If I were being paid by the blog post, I'd probably be making about 20 cents a post. If my goal was to try to make money, I could choose to display more ads, or make the ads more prominent. I am also displaying blog entries in my Facebook account, so I assume many of my students are viewing this through Facebook and don't even see the ads, which also cuts down on possible ad revenue. In terms of keeping myself fresh with the technology, I will usually hop on and change the format a little bit before I talk about it in class. This way, I can speak about the latest version of Google AdSense from my own personal experience.
Is Google the only site that allows you to advertise? No. However, Google is pretty trustworthy. There are other, less ethical sites that allow users to display ads and may pay more. However, some of them use some shady business principles.
In general, if you are a small Web site, Google AdSense allows you to easily connect with advertisers without having to worry about doing much work.

Affiliate Marketing: Sites such as Amazon and Walmart offer affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing basically allows me as a Web site owner to provide links to Walmart or Amazon. If anyone clicks on those links and buys something, I get a small percentage of that sale. Amazon Associates is among the most popular. Users can log in and get a personalized link.
Users can link directly to a product, or just to the main site. Amazon requires a minimum payment of $100 before they will pay you. Again, I may reference it once in a while, but I've never received a check from them because I really don't push for clicks. I have a small link on the right hand side of my blog, and will once in a while go and build a link to stay on top of things.
Sites that really want to monetize may even ask their users to click on the Amazon link they have provided if they are going to buy something anyway, as it will help support them. The more a user sells, the larger a percentage of fees they get.
As a member I see (sometimes on a weekly basis) how they are changing the program. Amazon and some states are in court because of Amazon Associates. The short form is that states are suing them because states feel this program should compel Amazon to charge sales tax. Looooong story there.

On-Demand Publishing: Sites like CafePress allow users to upload a logo. Once the logo has been uploaded, you can decide what you want it to be on. Do you want it to be on t-shirts? mugs? underwear? You then choose how much markup you want to ad and provide your users with a link to the site. This is a great option for a company that does not want to risk buying t-shirts and then having them not sell. As a matter of fact, one of my students last semester mentioned he set up a site like this for one of his high school organizations. I've got a small site on there I haven't played with in a few years, but it's kind of a neat way for Web site owners to create shirts with no overhead, or for artists to make logo shirts, mugs, and other items.

If you have a Web site or are an artist of sorts, these are some options available to you.

Volunteer NJ

2011-09-05T08:10:00.004-04:00

With all the problems lately, one thing I have heard a lot about lately is volunteering. Volunteers have done a lot of good helping people affected negatively by the recent tropical storm.

I know I always used to wonder how I could volunteer, and it turns out the NJ Governor's office has made it easy for people to volunteer (and to find volunteers) in NJ,

People can fill out a volunteer profile, browse volunteer opportunities, and find agencies in need of goods and services. Volunteering doesn't have to revolve around emergencies; there are plenty of opportunities for people with a trade. For example, a quick search shows they need people to help low-income folks with taxes, provide computer training for senior citizens, and provide training for people who are out of work.

If you've ever wondered how to get started with volunteering, this site is a great starting point. For Students looking to beef up a resume short on job experience can always volunteer. Another advantage is that by volunteering, you get the chance to network and meet people who might have a job opening.

http://www.volunteernewjersey.org

PCCC Registration Fall 2011

2011-08-25T12:37:00.000-04:00

For all my PCCC students - I hope you have registered at this point, but if you have not, it's okay. Registration is going on right now. Of course, in the interest of getting people registered, they generally have a large gym registration in Paterson. If you are a student with a major, you can request to see someone specifically. I generally can only give very basic advice to Criminal Justice majors, and I am sure the Criminal Justice department doesn't know the IT program as well as I do. The Center for Student Success also has a number of qualified people, but there is no way anyone could know every nuance to every single program the college offers, let alone what schools our programs transfer to, etc.

If anyone in the IT or Computer Science majors saw someone outside of the major for registration, you can always come see any of the faculty members in-person. I personally will be at the Wanaque campus from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm on Monday the 29th, and again at the Wanaque campus on Wednesday the 31st from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Our other faculty members (Professors Atshan, Bamkole, Siegel, and Yip) will be in the gym in Paterson at various times, so you could go in and see one of them.

I'd say it is always better to ask if you are unsure, rather than end up stuck with a schedule that holds you back.

Google and Motorola

2011-08-20T01:25:00.000-04:00

I love technology, in part because there is more drama than an episode of Mad Men.

Google bought Motorola Mobility, who makes a number of mobile handsets. Motorola has been involved in a number of technology areas for a number of years. In 2000 or so, I had a Motorola pager. They've obviously graduated to smart phones by this point.

The company also makes processors and tablets. As a matter of fact, for many years, the Motorola processors were the only processors found in Apple computers. They've since gone to the same processor as you find in a PC.

The interesting part here is that Google now enters the mobile market full force. Will Microsoft feel the need to respond? Will Google's new Motorola products overtake Apple? Is Google trying to take over the world? Time shall tell.

Link to story

RIP Google Toolbar?

2011-08-09T18:00:00.000-04:00

I hate filling out forms on the Internet. For a while, I was using a tool called Roboform to assist me with it. The problem with Roboform was that there was a trial version, but to use the full version, you had to pay.

Google eventually introduced a form assistant in their Google Toolbar program, and I downloaded and installed it. I've been using the Google Toolbar for a while; it did what I needed, and though not as full-featured as the Roboform tool, it is free.

Firefox 5 recently came out, and when I upgraded, I got the warning that some of my add-ons were not compatible. Among them was the Google Toolbar. I figured Google would figure it out and send out updates eventually.

It turns out Google, surprisingly, has decided to no longer support the Toolbar in Firefox according to Google Toolbar's blog. This is disappointing for me, if for no other reason than I don't like change when I am used to something.

I've downloaded AutoFill Forms for the moment, and it seems to be working out. It is free, relatively unannoying, and functional. If you are looking for a replacement, or do not have a tool to fill out forms automatically, I would recommend trying this tool. There are of course other options available, but this works nicely for me.

I am just surprised because Google generally seems to be on the same page as Firefox. RIP Google Toolbar, at least on my computer.

Book Update and Soliciting Help

2011-08-01T13:46:00.000-04:00

One of the portions of my book involves me demonstrating a fake business on Facebook, and showing how you can set up a Facebook Page for a business. I set up a fake spa on Facebook, and in order to create a shorter Web site address, I need 25 people to "Like" it. I am hoping I could ask for help. I would need for people to first click the link below, and then click on "Like".

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Red-Moon-Spa/247383158624759

My goal is about 16,000 words, and I am at 13,876 as of this exact moment. I haven't written out the step by step description of the demonstrations, which I figure is probably another 1,000 words. There are very few illustrations and pictures in it, but it is at almost 55 pages double spaced. In other words, it is close. Now comes the proof reading and copy editing and all that. It has been a good experience thus far, though quite honestly a little intimidating at points.

I am posting this to my blog because I know I have former students who may not be friends with me on Facebook who may be able to help out.

Overdone Resumes

2011-07-21T13:50:00.000-04:00

I recently helped a friend with his resume. I have some experience with this from coordinating the CIS internship program at PCCC, though I am certainly no expert. My resume is about two pages long at this point. I'm certain it could be improved upon, but I basically have only needed it to send in a book proposal to Pearson and to apply to teach part-time at Bergen. Since I am not an active job seeker, I have not done a lot of work on it.

Though I coordinated the internship program, our former internship coordinator was my resume expert, so I sort of learned by watching her edit resumes. When we would work with our students to get their resumes done, I would help them with the basics (list your jobs, what sort of responsibilities did you have, etc), and she would come around and really polish the resumes.

This Career Builder article discusses some of those cliches, and how you can clean some of them up:
Link to article

Of course, if you are an active student, your college probably has a Career Services office that will provide you with free resume help. I'd say that is something to take advantage of, whether you are at Passaic, Bergen, or elsewhere. Otherwise, once you start looking for a job, you will end up bugging a friend or maybe even paying a professional to do it.

Medicine and IT

2011-07-11T11:05:00.000-04:00

If you've ever watched the TV show House, you will know that the main character (a doctor) has a rule that you never believe a patient, because "everybody lies". It's a very dark view of the world.

I can relate.

I've had friends ask me to take a look at computers, and while not everyone lies, I do find that many of them do. I imagine for a full-time tech support professional, it is doubly so. For example, if you spilled coffee on the computer, please don't tell me you dropped it. If you dropped it, don't tell me it just stopped working.

Any of my former IT students run in to this?

Big News

2011-07-01T13:03:00.000-04:00

So as those of you who read my blog know, I was on leave for the 2010-2011 academic year from PCCC. I am officially back as of today, since today starts the 2011-2012 academic year.

That is not the big news, however.

I told my classes in person last year that one of the things I wanted to do with my year was to work on a manuscript for a textbook. I submitted a sample chapter to a publisher in November, and I hadn't heard anything from them, so I just sort of assumed it wasn't going anywhere. However, I did do some side work for the same publisher, doing some test banks, PowerPoint presentations, and other supplements for some of their textbooks.

I received an email last week from the publisher, wanting to speak with me. They said in effect that I've proven to be an asset with the smaller projects I've worked on, and that they'd like to move me up to a bigger project. The woman who emailed had read my sample chapter, and we've come to terms on a book. Yes, I will be an author!

I'm going to be writing a smaller textbook that they will bundle in upon request from a college. There is a new Office textbook series they are coming out with called "Your Office". I know for their other textbooks, the main Office topics (Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint) are usually sold together as one big textbook (as you see with the 1000 page Go! with Office 2010 text). To allow faculty freedom to teach other topics, they have a series of smaller books they can bundle with it. For example, instead of having a chapter on Windows 7 there, faculty can choose a smaller 96 page Windows 7 book, or get the Windows Vista one instead. If you'd like to additionally teach topics like Internet Explorer, OneNote, Outlook, or one of any number of topics, you can get one of the smaller books bundled in with the main book. My book will be the equivalent for the Your Office series, and the topic is Web 2.0 applications like social networking, blogging, podcasting, and cloud computing. I am still working on finalizing a projected table of contents.

The publisher gave me a link to the marketing materials, and I have to admit, the main series editor and I have a very similar approach to education, and I think this is a great fit for me.

Dining on a Budget

2011-06-22T10:58:00.001-04:00

I enjoy saving money, and I also like food. A good intersection of these two interests is the Web site restaurant.com. I've been using this site for a number of years, and it's a pretty good site if you want to save money and try new restaurants. I know people see things like this and think "scam", but I've been using restaurant.com for years.

For example, my girlfriend and I went down to Baltimore in January. Rather than break the budget, we decided to see what restaurants were close to the hotel we were staying in were on the restaurant.com Web site. We purchased some gift certificates, and saved somewhere around $150 on food.

Here's how the site works. As a consumer, you go on their site, you purchase a gift certificate to a restaurant, and you use it. Different restaurants offer different types of certificates, but the ones I see most commonly are $25 off any purchase of $35 or more, or $10 off any purchase of $25 or more. A $10 gift certificate costs $5, and a $25 gift certificate costs $10. By that math, if I went to a restaurant and got $35 worth of food, it would cost me $20 ($10 for the gift certificate, and $10 for the difference between the gift certificate and the bill). Even that would be a pretty good deal, but restaurant.com also does one other thing that makes it a great deal. Generally, they have some code or another you can use to save even more. For example, right now they have a deal where you can take 70% off any order. So, going back to our previous example, that $20 gift certificate would cost me $3 instead of $10, and the $10 one would cost $1.50 instead of $5. Therefore, that $35 bill I mentioned before would cost me $13.

Now, restaurants can do things a little differently. Just a quick look at the site shows some restaurants do a deal where you can get a $100 off a $200 purchase for $50 (and, if you used one of the common 70% off coupons, a $200 order would cost you $115). Some restaurants charge a little more for their gift certificates, which make it less good of a deal, and others don't let you use them on weekends. However, it is a nice idea if you are looking to try a new place, or travel. They will apparently make it right if a restaurant you go to stops accepting them (I've never had that experience). Gift certificates don't expire, so you can use them or trade them in if a restaurant stops accepting them.

If anyone owns a restaurant, you can sign up with the site as well and offer the gift certificates to your site, though I can't speak to that experience, it seems like a nice way to get people to come in and try your restaurant.

You can generally find the discount codes if you sign up for their e-mail list, or if you visit their Facebook page.

Google Image Stalking

2011-06-15T11:42:00.001-04:00

So, Google is introducing a few new features, and as always, the applications can be used for evil.

One of the features aims to allow users to ask questions through their microphone, and have Google search for the words you speak rather than requiring you to type them in. It will recognize your voice and send the words to the search engine.

Another new search is the Google Search By Image. This feature claims that it will let you upload a picture and find information about that picture. For example, if I have a picture of me in front of a building, Google Search By Image would attempt to identify that building. That seems really interesting.

I decided to test it out with some pictures of a trip I took. I went to the Google image search, and downloaded the Firefox extension which allows you to right click on any image in your Web browser and search the Google Search By Image tool for it. However, it doesn't work with Firefox 4.0 yet, so I decided to try it in Google Chrome. I then dragged a few images in to the browser.

I had some pictures of a cruise I took last summer, so I decided to try those.

First, I tried a picture of a lighthouse I saw in Canada. It came up with some pictures that were very similar, but they were the lighthouse in Cape May, NJ.

I decided to try something easier, and I dragged a photo of the Statue of Liberty there. Google Search by Image correctly identified it and returned other images of it and a link to the Wikipedia article.

I tried a picture of a random chunk of the NYC skyline, taken from sea, and that also did not return anything useful.

I tried a picture of a pretty distinctive tour bus from St. John's, Canada, and it wasn't able to match that either.

Verdict on the image locator: weak so far.

Google also claimed it could locate an image that is on the Web. I dragged an image of something I am selling on Craigslist, and it was able to immediately find and display that for me. I dragged another image of something I am selling on eBay, and it was able to find that. Finally, I tried an image I downloaded randomly, and it was able to show me where that image came from. I would say this is a success.

Verdict: This could also be pretty powerful if you are checking to find where an image came from, in case you want to use legally it in a publication, but isn't going to be able to determine where a vacation photo was taken unless it has a pretty obvious or distinctive monument in it.

Google does claim there is no facial recognition that will be available. Color me suspicious.

For a number of years, Google had a free 411 service called Google 411. Many people felt like the reason Google was doing this was to allow testing of their voice-recognition algorithm. All of a sudden, they have Google voice search. I would assume they tested and improved their algorithms in part with their free 411 service.

Now, Google is going to claim there is no facial recognition that is available. However, they will be amassing a powerful database of photographs. The Google privacy statement seems to allow them to keep Web requests, and my interpretation of an image is that it is a Web request. Given what they did with Google 411, I would suspect that they will save the images you upload for their own testing purposes. Could facial recognition be something they are testing? Who knows.

I tend to trust Google more than some of the other big name companies, but just because they aren't making facial recognition available to the public, doesn't mean they aren't gathering our uploaded photos to test their software.

I also have some concerns about how, if this technology develops, people might use this to stalk or harass other people. For example, let's say someone uploads a few pictures to their Facebook, or hacks their phone, or steals their digital camera. If someone is trying to hide from someone, those pictures may be searchable and usable. In addition, let's say a criminal finds a digital camera and notices people wearing nice jewelry in it. Could the pictures possibly lead them to a person's residence? As I said before, this does not seem to be at that point yet, but always something to think about.

One in Every 14 programs downloaded is malware?

2011-06-06T01:11:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, Microsoft blogged about Internet Explorer 9's new "SmartScreen Application Reputation" feature. Microsoft quotes a statistic that 1 in every 14 programs downloaded (on the Microsoft platform) is confirmed to be malware. Of course, statistics can be twisted, so I am not sure what Microsoft defines as "malware". I also assume they are talking about files downloaded through Web browsers, and not files downloaded from the Internet.

From my experience, the riskier the behavior the user engages in, the more likely it is they are going to have a problem. When a friend has a computer crash, it generally has something to do with the activities they engage in on the computer. For example, if people visit shady sites to download videos or music, they risk running in to problems. Making things even riskier (though not affected by this study, I assume) are the file sharing networks.

Even if you have an updated antivirus program, and antispyware, and a firewall, you still risk running in to problems. A virus released today may not end up being blocked by antivirus tools for a few weeks. First, the virus has to come to the antivirus company's attention, and then they must figure what it does and how it does it, and then program a fix, test the fix, and make it available for updates. Then, the user's home machine needs to download the update and apply it.

These viruses are called zero-day viruses, and it isn't unreasonable for it to take weeks for a low-priority virus to get blocked. Further complicating matters is that many home users do not always pay for updates to the antivirus tool. It's generally better to have a free, up-to-date antivirus tool than an outdated commercial one, because new viruses are written all the time. I have in the past personally used the free AVG antivirus, and there is also a free version of avast! antivirus available.

Of course, Linux and Macintosh computers deal with less viruses, not because they can't be written for those operating systems, but because Windows has the largest market share and generally has more inexperienced users. If Macintosh ever became more popular than Windows, hackers would certainly work to find exploits for that operating system too.

So, Microsoft will claim IE9 is safer than Firefox, and Firefox will claim they are safer than IE9. If nothing else, turn a critical eye to both claims. And, if you want to be safe, stop doing risky things. They say the safest sex is abstinence, after all, and the same concept applies to computer activity.

Link to Network World article

Customer Service Follow-up

2011-05-30T22:41:00.000-04:00

So, after I talked about how bad my customer service experience with Comcast was, I thought I should follow up regarding my positive experience as well.

As I mentioned in my other Comcast blog post, I was not happy with the customer service I received, and I felt like the representatives on the phone were more concerned with following a script than doing what was right. I had a situation where Comcast as a company really made some mistakes, yet no one was trying to make it right. As a result, I was considering moving to FIOS.

I went to the physical Comcast location near my house to return the rental modem. I was planning on just dropping it off and verifying the fee was removed from my bill. The representative took a look at my account, and I think he saw all the issues I had been having. I wasn't even planning on talking with them due to my frustration level, but he offered me a different package. Basically, it will save me about $40 a month for the next 6 months, and gives me more channels.

I marked my calendar to call in November and change back to a cheaper plan, but for the moment, I save $240, which was an unexpected surprise.

Again, just from a customer service perspective, I am not sure why it took me physically showing up to get a good deal, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say.

So Comcast. you've won me back over, for now.

Customer Service Failures (A Comcast Rant)

2011-05-21T13:20:00.000-04:00

I hate dealing with customer service most of the times. There are some companies that do a spectacular job of it, and others that do not. Still others are helpful in some areas and not so much in others. I get offended when companies make me use my time to fix their mistakes,

As an example of this, let me tell you about my issues with Comcast. I've been a customer since roughly 2000, between two addresses. I've had a number of bizarre issues occur, for example, when I moved, I returned my old cable box. Two years later, I received a bill for the cable box, and since it was two years later, I didn't have the old receipt. It took me getting on the phone and talking with people a few times to get this fixed.

In early April, I received a letter from Comcast saying my old cable modem didn't support the highest possible speeds for the network, and that I should call them for a new one. A few years back, I had purchased my own cable modem to avoid rental fees, but my thought was that if it meant higher speeds, I could use their modem for a month or two and buy the same model they sent me on eBay to save on future rental costs. I called and the representative asked if I wanted to pick up the new modem or to have it sent to me. Since there was no cost mentioned, I took them up on the offer to ship it to me.

The modem arrived very quickly.

Before I disconnected my old modem, I went to speedtest.net (my 163 students will recognize this site) and got a baseline speed. I swapped out the modem for the new one, spent an hour resetting everything and registering the new device with Comcast, and then re-ran the test on the site. Oddly enough, it was about the same speed.

I called Comcast and they told me my old modem would not support the higher speed connection if I chose to use the more expensive Internet service ("Blast"). I decided to stick with the new modem and find a replacement, because I have been considering upgrading.

I sold my old cable modem (again, my own personal modem) on eBay. This is when problems start.

The modem arrived to a customer out in California. He tries to set it up and Comcast tells him it is a stolen modem. The customer wants a refund, and since I sold the item and it did not work, he rightly filed a significantly not as described complaint. So, it cost me $11 to ship it to him, and $15 for him to ship it back to me. I am now out $26 because of Comcast's mistake.

My bill comes in the mail the next day, and I have three charges:
1) Unreturned modem fee ($60)
2) Shipping Fee ($9.95)
3) Modem Rental Fee ($7.00)

As you can imagine, I was frustrated. I called Comcast and tried to be polite. I find that explaining that I am frustrated up front helps me to stay courteous. The rep tells me they need to submit a research request, which would take ten business days, after which I would be contacted via email. The rep took down my email address and we ended the conversation.

I hadn't heard anything for over two weeks, so I called in. The rep I spoke with yesterday told me the credit for the unreturned modem was there (and I was able to verify this online), and she wasn't sure why I didn't get contacted regarding this. Having resolved the modem fee, I asked about the shipping fee, and the customer representative was able to refund that, since it was a charge that I was not told about, and the eBay stuff is my problem. She then tried to get me to sign back up for Comcast Voice, which really infuriated me. I told her I have an Ooma and ended the conversation.

So, Comcast refused to refund the modem rental fee, and as a result of Comcast's mistakes, I have wasted $26 on shipping, $7 on a modem rental fee, a bunch of hours dealing with their customer support, my first negative feedback on eBay, and frustration. Comcast has decided they can't do anything more for me, and while the representatives are nice, this is an obvious mistake on their part, and my inconvenience is my problem.

I think companies nowadays spend way too much time following procedures, and I don't feel like customer service representatives understand "the right thing to do". If a first-line customer service representative sees something that just isn't right, they should be getting a supervisor involved.

I've had other issues with Verizon. My apartment building just got wired for FIOS. My doorbell rang, and the person said "I'm here from Verizon". I told them "you must have rung the wrong bell" - assuming he was setting up someone else's apartment. Two days later, the doorbell rang again, and it was Verizon. He asked if he could speak with me, so I assumed they might need to get in my apartment. (When they set up FIOS in the building, they had to put some equipment in the back of one of my closets). I stopped work on a project and went upstairs, and the guy was just there to try to sell me FIOS. I walked away from him, and called Verizon, because it isn't the right thing for me to be harassed at home like this. The first representative I spoke with told me to go to donotcall.gov and register there (which only opts me out of phone calls, not in-person calls). We got disconnected somehow. I called back and re-explained my problem, and they told me there was nothing they could do. I finally sent an email to the customer support on the Web site, explained the situation, explained my frustration, and asked to be forwarded to a supervisor. The supervisor got back to me and told me they added me to their "do not knock" database, but offered no apologies or explanation as to why the other reps couldn't do that. Had Verizon been a little more helpful or a little less intrusive, I would be switching from Comcast to Verizon right now. I'm still considering who is the lesser of two evils, but it does look like FIOS would be about $20 cheaper.

For those of you going in to support-related fields, try to keep the idea of "what is right" in mind when you deal with customers. I know it is not easy, and I know I stray sometimes myself when dealing with students and co-workers, but it is a good ideal to shoot for.

Evolution

2011-05-19T00:12:00.000-04:00

My semester is now officially over. I have from now until September off, and then I will be teaching six courses in the Fall 2011 semester (my complete Fall schedule is linked here). I got to thinking about the last year, and how it has changed me as a professor. Here are some of the things I learned this year.

Teaching less classes yields better results. I have in the past had a tendency to take on a very heavy load, and only teaching two courses a semester has left me with more energy to get in to the classroom.
There is a better way to teach application software. This was inspired by one of my students in INF 101, Kevin. Teaching application software in introductory computing classes is difficult, because of the different levels of students. I've tried to teach this a number of ways. First I would lecture and leave the computers open, which led to people not paying attention. I feel like my job is to structure a lesson to promote the maximum possible learning, so I did not like that. I then tried using hardware to lock the computers and offer class time to work on things, but as soon as I stop lecturing students seem to disappear. I then moved to a model where I first demonstrate the software (with the computers locked), and use ungraded groupwork to practice (with two students sharing one machine to prevent drifting), and then assign an individual case problem to students. This seems to work well, but in the CIS 101/INF 101 courses, there is never enough time to leave for that groupwork. Kevin inspired me to try something different, so I combined groupwork and lecture for Access and PowerPoint this semester. I would lecture and demonstrate, and the groups would follow along. It gives the advanced students a chance to teach, and what better way to reinforce skills than by teaching? It gives less advanced students more individualized attention, since they are more likely to ask a peer a question. Finally, it keeps everyone focused on the work. I really liked how this turned out and I will use it in the future in certain classes.
Electronic tests have many advantages. At PCCC, I never really investigated giving tests on hte computer. We have a campus portal (which allows students to submit assignments, allows faculty to share files, etc.). This portal does not allow students to take tests online. We also have WebCT, which is primarily used for online classes at PCCC, but is available for regular classes. I may continue to use the portal for assignments, and use WebCT for tests. It's convenient, ends up with less mistakes (and no true/false answers that look like a combination of the letter T and F), and saves me from reading handwriting for essays. Bergen has a software tool called Respondus LockDown browser, which allows me to prevent students from using the Internet and other electronic files. This tool works both in WebCT (which we used this year) and Moodle (which we are moving to). At PCCC, I don't think we will have the software, but I can use the monitoring software we have in our classrooms in Hamilton Hall.
Open book tests work. I always was sort of against open book tests, but I tried it this year, and I see similar results to non-open book tests. The trick I never caught on to is a time limit of 45 seconds to one minute per multiple choice/true false/completion question. With a strict time limit, looking up every answer is near impossible, and students still need to prepare for the tests. Even better, if they know it is open notes, they may take the time to really organize their notes. Organizing notes requires students to re-read the notes, review them, and even look up things they are not familiar with. This is a good thing. I found the standard deviation and average for the open book tests were similar to tests I've given in the past. Anecdotally, I feel like this gives students with a good work ethic an advantage over students who come in to the class with some knowledge.
I can kill less trees. I generally would create and print assignment sheets for every assignment I give out, and run off copies. I would also make those descriptions available electronically. I did everything electronically this year in my INF 163 course, and it went well. I figure students can print things manually if they would like a copy.
Doing textbook supplement authoring is kind of fun. Since I had so much time on my hands, I did some freelance textbook supplement authoring. I've done test banks, PowerPoint presentations, scorecards (rubrics), lesson plans, and book reviews. I've actually had some fun doing this, and I may pick up a small project or two.
Sign language interpreters have a tough job. I had one deaf student each semester, and in a technical course, it becomes difficult for the interpreters to keep up. I have a tendency to throw out all sorts of technical terms and abbreviations, and interpreters are experts in translation, not in technology. In addition, there are many technical terms that need to be fingerspelled (in which the interpreter spells it one letter at a time). Bergen actually had a grant to provide signers for students, so they sent a team of two signers to every class, and paid a student notetaker. Even with that, there were challenges. For example, Bergen's INF 101 course has podcast and video assignments, and the publisher hadn't made accommodations for deaf students. The college allowed the interpreters to work with the student in an open lab, and the publisher did eventually provide transcripts and captioning. It was a learning experience for me, to be certain.

All in all, I think being taken out of my comfort zone has led to growth, and for that, I am grateful. I look forward to returning to PCCC, evolved.

Productivity Software and Being Productive

2011-05-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

Programs in Microsoft Office generally fall in to a category of software called productivity software. The idea behind this is that users should be able to use the tools to save a company time, and hence money. Programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are tools many companies view as useful.

However, I hear that many companies are not impressed with the technology skills of students graduating college, and that seems counter intuitive at first. I think the issue is only partially technology-related. For example, I am in the process of teaching PowerPoint to my 101 class. I try to make the comparison between the things businesses like students to know and the things students want to know how to do. The things students like to do in PowerPoint include animations, slide transitions, and sounds. However, in a business environment, those things are generally not used. As a matter of fact, in many medium to large sized companies, employees will be using a standard company template and just adding the data they would like to the slide.

What a company would look for is certainly part technology, but also part English. A company would expect a new hire to be able to take a paper and summarize it in to a presentation. This involves very little technical know-how. If a new hire takes that paper and types in complete sentences on the slides, or spends a lot of time playing with animations, the company will not be impressed. I try to get across a few key pieces of information, for example, don't write in complete sentences on each slide, summarize data and try to use the 7x7 rule (no more than words per line, and 7 lines per slide), and use the notes pane, especially if you plan on sending a presentation out via email (this will allow a blind user's screen reader to give a blind user a similar experience to a non-blind user). As you can see, those are less technology issues and more using the technology to achieve a task.

Similarly, I see a disconnect between the technical aspects of Excel and the application. Every semester, I put the percentages for each component of a grade on the syllabus. Let's say tests are 40%, lab projects are 40%, and the final is 20%. With that information and knowledge of what grades the student has received, this spreadsheet should be pretty easy. However, I find most students seem to have no sense for how they are doing in a class unless I tell them.

In a business environment, this is the type of problem a new hire may be presented with. Given a certain situation you should create the formulas to get an answer. If a new hire can't figure out how to do that, is that a logic problem or technology problem? I'd argue logic problem, providing they know how to enter formulas.

Companies expect new hires to really understand the technology. It isn't just remembering every point and click, because even I forget specific tasks sometimes and have to Google it. It is also understanding the capabilities of each tool and being able to apply it to the tasks you face.

My last job before I started teaching full-time was at a highly technical company. People did amazing things with programming, but they were still doing really silly things like using a paper log book to keep track of problems. If one wanted to log something, one had to go to a specific person's cubicle and write it down on paper. I made the suggestion that we create an Excel spreadsheet and just put it on the network (in a configuration management system - don't worry about the details). Of course, I didn't try to force it on people, because that never works. I made a suggestion to my manager, and he asked me to create a prototype. He loved it and made it policy. Soon people were asking me how we could generate reports to show only open problems...show ones that were more than a month old...replace a text column with a pull-down menu...validate data...etc. This little spreadsheet took on a life of its own, but made a lot of information available to management, things they would otherwise have had to have someone tabulate by hand. It also helped reduce mistakes. This was me applying technology to an existing situation, and this was something that helped me stand out. In a very technical company, I got promotions and gained the faith of management because I could not only use Excel, but also because I had the vision to see where it could make things more efficient. I did a lot of things that helped streamline processes, and was on the fast track as a result

I think many students have a built-in understanding of computers that people thirty years older than them do, but they don't always know how to apply the tools to real-world problems. If you can do so, you will do well in the real world.

Cool Tools: Tunatic

2011-04-27T10:55:00.000-04:00

I found a bunch of old CDs the other day, with hundreds of songs on them. These were CDs I had burned in 2000, 2001, and 2002. There were a number of songs I remembered, but I could not remember the name for them. I figured there had to be a tool out there to help me find the names (because iTunes imported all the files with the names Track1, Track2, etc).

I did a quick search and found a tool called Tunatic. This is a pretty nice tool that works much like the iPhone tools Shazam and Midomi. You let the computer hear the song, and the tool will identify it. It's a free tool, so I downloaded it and gave it a shot.

This worked extremely well for me. It had a little problem with some of my more obscure songs, especially anything without vocals. Since I have a computer headset with a microphone, it was extremely easy to set this up.

I'd recommend this, as long as you have some sort of microphone input.

Link to Download

The Day eBay Changed

2011-04-19T11:03:00.000-04:00

Today is the day eBay changed to a new business model. For years, eBay has had a fee structure based on a few things (for small sellers, anyway):

Listing Fees (a cost for posting an item)
Listing Upgrade Fees (want your listings to appear in bold? go for 10 days? etc.)
Final Value Fees (they take a percentage of the final sale value)

In addition, eBay bought Paypal a number of years ago, so they also take a percentage of each payment processed.

For years in my CIS 152 course at PCCC and more recently my INF 163 class at Bergen, I've discussed how having an item go for 99 cents is not a good thing for eBay, in my opinion. It would be better for them to let people set a starting price and give them a free listing fee, because they would make more money off a final value fee. For example, if I list an item for $1.00 and it sells for $1.00 cents, eBay would get about 19 cents (10 cents to list the item and 9 cents for a final value fee). I might list an item so cheaply to avoid paying a large listing fee, which I am responsible for even if the item doesn't sell. Many sellers avoid risk, so they start items cheap in case the item doesn't sell, minimizing cost for listing fees.

My personal opinion was that if eBay cut out listing fees and simply raised final value fees, they would reap two benefits:

Sellers would list items for higher prices, therefore leading to higher final value fees.
Sellers would be more likely to sell items that might not sell, due to reduced risk of wasted fees.

eBay has seemingly decided to go with this, and will now allow sellers to sell 50 items a month with no listing fee, regardless of starting value. In addition, these auctions will be eligible for a free "Buy It Now", which allows an anxious buyer to purchase an item for a set price and preempt the auction.

Link to new fee information

Listing upgrade fees still exist, as do final value fees.

Of course, there are always catches. First of all, eBay will no longer just be taking a percentage of the final sale. They are also taking a percentage of the shipping cost. There still seem to be some workarounds, but eBay has done this because a seller could list a $200 item for $0.01 with $199.99 shipping and pay no fees on an item (and sellers did try to exploit this).

It seems like eBay's idea here is to keep small sellers around, while motivating medium sellers to move to eBay stores. The eBay stores are a system which has monthly subscription fees ranging from $15.95 to $299.95.

The loser in all this is the buyer who is looking for bargains, because in my opinion, they are going to be harder to find.

My Bookshelf

2011-04-14T13:50:00.000-04:00

I am in the process of doing some updates to my place of residence. As part of it, I ended up cleaning out my bookcase and reminiscing about some of the books I found there. It seemed like a cool idea to mention what's on my bookcase and why.

Google Hacks (2005): This book was a pretty cool book for the time, teaching you how to use many of the Google services more efficiently. This book is how I learned about some of the special Google commands (as basic as using the title command or as in depth as using commands like inurl). It also gave a bunch of Perl scripts you could use to do all sorts of cool stuff, effectively combining a Perl script and Google to give you the power to automatically perform and parse searches. This book doesn't seem to have continued past the third edition (I have the second), but it is a cool read, especially for those of you with knowledge of programming.

Fire in the Valley (2000): This book details the history of the personal computer, going back to the days when people ordered the parts and put them together themselves. The central part of the book details the battle between Apple and Microsoft, made more famous by the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I found it fascinating, though a little dry at times.

The Art of Intrusion (2005) / The Art of Deception (2003): Two books by Kevin Mitnick detailing some hacking and social engineering topics. It is fascinating how social engineers can manipulate a person to the point where you are thanking them as they steal your information. These books taught me about things like SQL injection attacks (which we just talked about in my 163 course - see page 175 of the Art of Intrusion). I asked the librarians at both PCCC and BCC to get these books to have on hand, they are definitely worth checking out.

Cryptonomicon (2002): This is a tough read, but it's an excellent fictional novel. It has two main storylines. The first has to deal with a group of people in World War II who have broken the German's secret code (Enigma). This was early cryptography, and it was interesting to see the characters intercept messages but not actually warn troops sometimes, because they also did not want the Germans to know they had broken the code. The second storyline has to do with a group of more contemporary individuals trying to create a secure digital cash system, using cryptographic methods.

And, just to show I have more than computer books on the shelf...

The Butterfly Revolution (1961): I actually had to read this for a freshman class in high school, and my teacher gave me one of the books since I liked it so much. It has to do with a socially awkward teenager who goes to a summer camp, where he ends up involved in a takeover of the camp. Chaos ensues. Picture "Lord of the Flies" in a summer camp.

The Machine (2009): A book about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. Even as a child, I read a lot of books about baseball. I remember in high school having to write a persuasive essay, and I wrote one arguing that Pete Rose (featured in this book) was innocent of gambling charges. Of course, he later admitted this so I was wrong, but as a fan, I guess I was blinded. So, the book involved one of my favorite players, and had the extra bonus of being authored by my favorite sports blogger, Joe Posnanski. I've been reading his stuff for years, and it was cool to see him go from a small writer for a Kansas City newspaper to someone who writes for Sports Illustrated. Behold, the power of the Internet!

The New New Thing (2000) / Moneyball (2004) / The Blind Side (2008): All these books are written by Michael Lewis. I was first introduced to him through the first book listed, which was about Dr. Jim Clark, founder of Netscape and Silicon Graphics, and how it was fascinating for him to take chances on new technologies and stay at the forefront (and find the new "new thing"). The book detailed a company called Healtheon, which later merged with WebMD. The Blind Side and Moneyball were both excellent sports books which had movies made from them.

The Closing of the American Mind (1988): This book was recommended to me a few years ago by a colleague from PCCC, Dr. Ida Greidanus. The author feels as if modern colleges and universities are failing students, and that America is in a crisis regarding higher education. I think this book made some excellent points which got me thinking about my teaching in a different way.

The Dark Half (1989): The first Stephen King book I ever read.

There are many more books on the bookcase, but I think that's a good enough sample for today!

Spyware

2011-04-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

Spyware is a topic I don't feel like many of my students really see the risk in. I figured I would put up some information about it since I am going to be talking about it in class soon.

Not THAT type of spyware (Image from icanhascheezburger.com)

Spyware isn't the same thing as a virus, and this was a problem at first. Programs started appearing that would monitor what a user was doing and possibly transmit the results elsewhere, and antivirus software programs did not block them, because were not a traditional virus (especially in that they did not replicate/copy themselves to another machine).

Some examples are keyloggers, advertising software ("adware"), and tracking cookies,

Keyloggers keep track of the keystrokes entered on a computer. They can be either hardware or software based. A hardware based keylogger would simply plug in between the keyboard and the system unit. Since most people don't regularly examine their computers, this is a good way to spy on someone. It is generally a little more difficult to detect since the operating system may not even detect it, but it has the drawback that you need physical access to the machine. Software keyloggers are a little safer, but also more likely to be caught by anti-spyware tools. Some of them can record the keys you hit and even email or upload the log file to someone.

Adware keeps track of a user's browsing habits and pops up ads. The adware tends to be a little more aggressive than your standard pop-up ads. Certain adware will attempt to scare you in to buying things like antivirus software. The reason this can be more malicious and dangerous is because once it is installed on your machine, it has more permission to do things (like pop up windows or change system settings) than a regular Web site does.

Tracking cookies also present a threat, though they are less scary than the other things mentioned. These keep track of your viewing habits and store information on your computer. These may be used to, say, display more ads about cars and less about baby clothes if you often click on car ads and never click on baby clothing ads.

The main thing that distinguishes tracking cookies and adware is the way they are used. Adware is usually installed versus the tracking cookies just being left by a Web site.

Either way, you should have some sort of anti-spyware protection on the computer. Most antivirus tools come with some sort of anti-spyware at this point, though if you are looking for extra protection, tools such as Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy do have free versions.

Adventures in Laptop Repair

2011-03-25T20:31:00.000-04:00

My friend had an old laptop he brought to me today. It was pretty old. It has 64 MB of RAM, a 233 Mhz processor, a 4 GB hard drive, a dead battery...a real winner! In addition, whoever set it up installed Windows XP on it, so it takes FOREVER to start up.

He asked me if I could put it in Spanish so he could send it to his niece in Puerto Rico.

I decided to take a look and see what I could do. After all, it keeps my tech skills fresh!

As I have never done a Spanish install before, I first started by going to the Windows control panel. I took a look around, and went in to the language settings. Ah ha, I thought, this should fix it. I switched everything to Spanish, restarted the machine, and waited for it to work.

Sadly, this did not work. The Windows XP system files were installed in Spanish, and this did not even change the Start Menu to Spanish. It made sense when I thought about it. All the programs were already installed in English. A little Internet research showed that in order to do what we wanted, I would need a special installation of Windows with a new license key. License keys are generally tied to a specific version of Windows, so even if I got the Spanish version, I doubted the existing license key would work.

I was also sure that my friend did not want to pay for a new XP license for this machine.

At this point, I had a few options. I could have considered pirating the key, but my personal ethics ruled this out. Even if they didn't, the risk of downloading stuff from torrents/file sharing networks (0-day viruses, getting caught) would deter me.

Besides, when I thought about what my friend wanted for his niece, it was a computer that allowed her to do Internet research and type papers. At this point I decided to investigate Linux. I figured there should be a Spanish distribution of Linux, and it would certainly run better than Windows on this machine.

I am familiar with Ubuntu Linux, but it did not look like there was a complete version, so I did some searching and found Asturix, a Spanish Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. I downloaded the CD image and burned it on to a CD.

I brought my new CD back to the old laptop, and tried to open the CD-ROM drive. No response. Luckily, I know about the trick to open a stuck CD-ROM drive with a paperclip (that's why that tiny little hole is on the front of the drive!).

I opened the drive, inserted the CD, and started the machine. I walked away and came back, and it booted directly in to Windows. I restarted, and went in to the BIOS (the computer's basic input/output system). It was correctly set up to try the CD-ROM drive before it booted off the hard drive.

I restarted again, and paid attention this time. When the computer restarted, the CD-ROM drive made a very odd sound and then stopped spinning, and then the computer booted in to Windows. To verify, I went to My Computer, and the CD-ROM drive wasn't even listed, which means it was malfunctioning.

Normally at this point, I would consider creating a USB boot drive, but this machine was so old, the BIOS did not support it.

At this point, I considered partitioning the hard drive, but it just wasn't worth the effort for me.

Fall 2011 - What I'm Teaching

2011-03-18T13:48:00.005-04:00

I've got my tentative Fall schedule set up. I figured I would pass it along.

At PCCC - Passaic Campus
CIS-101-P02 Computer Concepts and Applications
Monday, Wednesday 8:55AM - 10:10AM

CIS-101-P01 Computer Concepts and Applications
Monday, Wednesday 10:20AM - 11:35AM

At PCCC - Paterson Campus
CIS-152-ME1 Internet/E-Commerce Technologies
Thursday 7:05 PM - 9:35 PM

CIS-170-M01 Website Design and Tools
Tuesday, Thursday 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM

CIS-290-M01 Database Fundamentals
Tuesday, Thursday 10:20AM - 11:35AM

At Bergen CC - Paramus Campus
INF-163-001 Internet Concepts and Applications
Monday, Wednesday 3:55 PM - 5:50 PM

The battle for online sales tax

2011-03-15T16:38:00.003-04:00

Funny, we were just discussing this in one of my classes, and now it jumps in to the news.

There are a number of ways to make money online. Advertising is an obvious one, along with having a Web catalog. There are always sites that do on-demand publishing like CafePress where someone can design shirts and link to their store there, and CafePress handles the printing and shipping.

One of the other ways has traditionally been affiliate marketing. This is the type of thing where I can link to someone else's site, and they give me a percentage of any sales generated by you clicking on the link. Many companies, such as Overstock and Amazon have these types of programs.

For example, I have one that I don't push through Amazon Associates here. That link takes you to Amazon, but if you bought something, Amazon would give me a small percentage of it. This is a great program, with very little risk to either side. Amazon makes money, so do I, and my users may buy something they were going to buy anyway through the link.

However, this has also been at the center of a big war. This is not a new war. However, online retailers do not need to charge sales tax to residents of a state in which they do not have a physical presence. So, take NewEgg. They are located in California, so they are required to collect sales tax for anything sold to California residents. However, they do not have a physical location in Alaska, so residents of Alaska do not have to pay sales tax on NewEgg purchases. Of course, companies like WalMart and Best Buy have been fighting this for years, because they feel like it puts them at a disadvantage. State governments don't like this either, but a Supreme Court decision (Quill v. North Dakota) from 1992 said companies without physical locations in a state do not have to charge state sales tax (this ruling was for mail order catalogs).

With many states in dire financial situations, this has become even more of an issue. Some states have made the argument that if a site has affiliates in a state, they now have a physical location in that state. Since I live in New Jersey, this would mean Amazon now has a physical location in New Jersey and must charge sales tax.

To me, this is a very loose interpretation of the law, but a number of states have passed laws to require any companies with affiliates in their state to collect sales tax. Amazon's response has been to just end the program in the states that pass this type of legislation. Amazon terminated the program in Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Colorado, so anyone who lives in those states can not be affiliates. Amazon has been doing battle with New York over this issue, and (to summarize the legal blah blah blah) the state basically now has to prove that having an affiliate in a state is really the same as having a sales representative in a state.

This is now even more newsworthy because Minnesota has a bill in the Senate that would try to collect Internet sales tax. The article linked also states that Minnesota made $20 million in income tax from Amazon Associates, so they are on the brink of losing the program.

In addition, the governor of Illinois today signed into law a bill that did the same thing as other states, and Amazon predictably cut ties with affiliates in those states. I am not sure if the Illinois government really expected anything different, but now Amazon Associates is no longer available in Illinois. Walmart, as a company that already charges sales tax to everyone, is pushing their affiliates program, since this is the only option some people have.

If the government really wants to do this right, maybe the original law needs to be revisited, because it has become a big staring contest.

No, your operating isn't perfect either

2011-03-10T11:50:00.002-05:00

When I was in college, I gave up on Microsoft's operating systems (I got tired of Windows freezing on me) and ran a distribution of Linux called Debian for a few years. For my needs, it worked well, probably even better than a Windows system did. I did a lot of programming, and the Linux operating system was very similar to the Unix (Solaris) operating system that our assignments ran on.

When I teach introductory classes, I have students who have Macintosh computers at home or people running Linux. When we come to computer security, I will generally mention the idea of antiviruses. I generally will have some student say "I don't need one because I am not running Windows". Sometimes, I even get "you can't get a virus on a Mac (or Linux) system".

This is factually incorrect. In security, there are no absolutes. There are viruses, malware, and other programs which end up out there for both operating systems. This doesn't mean the Macintosh and Linux operating systems aren't inherently safer, however.

If I am a hacker, I have to determine my audience (much like a research paper). Who am I hacking? The answer is probably something like "new computer users". Most new computer users are not running Linux, and therefore, if you are writing an exploit, you want to target non-Linux users. Similarly, if you are writing an exploit through the Web, you want to target your biggest audience, and that would be Windows operating system users running the default browser (Internet Explorer). Of course there are other reasons you might target the Windows/IE combination (such as Active-X controls).

The reason this is on my mind...out at the Pwn2Own hacker challenge, some folks from a French penetration testing company hacked a fully patched Mac. They did it using an exploit in the Safari browser.

Link to story

Teams will also compete to create more exploits for a number of different browser/OS/plug-in today and tomorrow.

Most Popular Pirated Movies 2010

2011-03-05T00:36:00.003-05:00

I was wondering what the popular 2010 searches were, though not on the Google search engine. I was wondering what people were searching for on the torrents. This follows up to my post about keywords people were using to find me.

So, I did manage to find a site that was referenced by Gizmodo, who I trust. The site TorrentFreak had a list of the top ten pirated movies of 2010.

The list is linked below, but I am not surprised that the most popular movie was Avatar. However, I was surprised that the movie Kick-Ass was second, though it was a low-grossing film. While Avatar made almost $2.8 billion, Kick-Ass brought in around $100 million. It's the second lowest grossing movie on the top ten list.

I was also surprised that Iron Man 2 was not higher up the list (it came in at number 5, after Shutter Island).

The sheer number of downloads (16.5 million of Avatar alone) makes it apparent why movie companies are trying to crack down. Then again, Avatar did make almost $2.8 billion dollars, so it is pretty doubtful the Internet cut in to the profits THAT much.

Kick-Ass and the Hurt Locker, on the other hand...maybe.

TorrentFreak's Top 10 downloaded movies of 2010

Stalking? There's an app for that.

2011-02-26T01:05:00.005-05:00

A large part of Facebook's appeal is the ability to add apps to your account. Games (such as Farmville or Vampire Wars), social apps (like Yelp or horoscope apps), self improvement apps (dieting apps, investing tips) and many more can be found on the site, many of which are free.

There are times where Facebook will determine that certain apps violate their terms. For example, in early 2009, Burger King created an app that, if you dumped 10 friends, would give you a free Whopper. Really. Facebook's rationale was that apps are not allowed to tell people if you've dumped them as friends, and this app did.

Facebook just pulled the plug on an app that many contended was a stalking app. Breakup Notifier was an app released recently. The whole purpose of the app was to let you know if someone's Facebook relationship status changed. For example, if someone was listed "in a relationship" and changed their status to "single", you would be alerted.

Many people view this as a stalking app, but in my opinion, if someone puts this information out there publicly, there really isn't anything wrong with it. I could just as easily bookmark a profile and revisit it to see if someone changed their profile status, and I would also be able to see it through my News Feed. This app would just monitor it for you and send you a response via e-mail when that status changed, providing you with real time information.

Facebook has apparently permanently disabled the app, citing some reason or another. Was it the 3.6 million users it amassed in a week (and the strain it added to their servers), was it complaints, or was it something else? I would guess complaints. I am assuming that the same people who post their relationship status publicly are the same people who wrote to Facebook to complain.

Undeterred, the creator of the Breakup Notifier has created another app, Crush Notifier. This works very much like speed dating. Let's say Sally has a crush on Tim. She would mark that she has a crush on him, using this app. Tim would not receive notification of Sally's crush, so Sally does not risk rejection or awkwardness. However, if Tim marks through the app he has a crush on Sally, they would both receive e-mail notifications that they like each other. Crush Notifier even has a business model, where you get two uses for free, and would need to use Facebook credits to receive any further e-mails.

Amazing how social media continues to change society, huh? Well, as Ricky Bobby said, "Does that blow your mind? That just happened!"

I am the number 6 Google result for "cat-proof software"

2011-02-19T14:06:00.001-05:00

Statcounter (the site I mentioned which showed what browsers people were using to visit my site) provides a lot of cool features. If I had my own Web server, I could get this same information by perusing my Web server logs, but since I am running a site through Google's Blogger service, I don't have access to those.

Statcounter logs all sorts of information, for example, computer IP address, operating system, browser information, screen resolution, and more. One of the other things that is cool is that it can tell you how people found your Web site, assuming they didn't just type it in to their address bar.

For example, if you Google:
Professor Cameron blog

I am the first result for this. This makes sense. If you were to then click on that Google link, I would be able to see that someone Googled that and found me using those search terms. I can also see which search engines people used to find me. Of my recent visitors, 55 found me using Google, 7 using Bing, 4 using Yahoo!, and 1 using Ask. (Note: Statcounter only logs the most recent 500 visits for free users, and many of them didn't find me using a search engine, hence the small numbers).

I sometimes will pop on the system and see how people for finding me, and there are always some interesting results.

For example, I have a number of searches I would expect. The following searches led people to me (again, some Google, some not):
interesting computer stuff (name of the blog, that makes sense)
professor cameron (makes sense, that's me)
fun stuff with professor cameron (I assume someone just forgot the name of my blog here)
eric cameron pccc us (that's me!)

In addition, there are searches that turned up specific blog posts of mine. I have a number of searches related to computer hardware disposal (due to a recent post), PCCC Panther Alert (something I've discussed a few times - PCCC's emergency alert system), Zune disaster (an older post), an assortment of things related to Microsoft Office hotkeys, and other such searches. As a matter of fact, I am the number 6 result on Google for cat proofing computer due to a post from last year.

Then, there are the bizarre ones. These serve to show me that search engines, though amazing, still have a ways to go. Here are some of the bizarre searches that have led people to my site:

simple one touch notification pagers from chef to servers 163-001
i get taken advantage of a lot
AVERAGE TIME WASTED WAITING FOR OLD COMPUTER
Bergen Community College, "flight simulator"
Professor Cameron porn
wife playing world of warcraft when supposed to take children +subpoena

Some of those are bizarre! I wonder what was going on in that last search...

Anyway, you can see searches like Professor Cameron porn would lead you to this site because somewhere in a page is each of those words. I posted about pornography a few times, and of course Professor Cameron is on every page, so yeah, that works.

I am pretty sure whoever was searching for that was disappointed when they found my blog.

Web browser usage

2011-02-16T18:44:00.003-05:00

Sites like Statcounter can track happenings on your Web site. For example, I can tell you of my last 500 visitors, 49% used Firefox, 27% used Internet Explorer, 6% used Google Chrome, 2% used Safari, 0.4% used Nutch, and 0.2% (one user) used Konqueror.

We see a lot of statistics regarding Web browser usage. It does vary by region. Firefox and Chrome seem to be more popular in Europe. According to Statowl, the latest numbers for the US, around 60% of users are running Internet Explorer, and only 20% running Firefox. World numbers are somewhere around 47% for Internet Explorer and 31% for Firefox, according to Statcounter.

None of these will be 100% accurate, but they do paint a picture for us. Why are my users more likely to use Firefox than the average world user? I would assume that, as I maintain a technology-related blog, my users are more likely than the average user to use a browser like Firefox.

If I were doing Web design and I had these numbers, I would need to make sure the browsers my users use were the browsers I was testing my site in. Though it really should not happen, there are times a page looks different in Internet Explorer and Firefox (for example).

It is interesting for me, as someone who is not running a for profit site, to look at these statistics. For someone who IS running a for-profit site, this information can be critical.

Spy vs. Spy

2011-02-12T14:04:00.003-05:00

A few years back, I attended a workshop hosted by NJ Infragard. It's a group that puts on workshops related to security, specifically computer security.

(Amusingly enough, every time I mention Infragard, I get an email from someone telling me how "bad" they are. I also get a comment every time I post anything remotely related to Web design, from someone who hates a stock photo company called Getty Images. Always interesting to see what brings out the commenters and emailers!)

Anyway, that said, one meeting had the key speaker being Kevin Murray, of Murray Associates. His company is one that is part of an industry I didn't even realize exists. His company will come in and sweep your company for wiretaps, listening devices, and the like. It was quite educational for me. He told some crazy stories about how far people go to spy, in politics, and in private industries like pharmaceuticals.

Anyway, the company maintains a blog with tons of news involving espionage, privacy, and security. This site is definitely one I check out from time to time. I enjoy computer security, but I am not actively involved in it on a day-to-day basis. Reading the perspective of someone who is out there in the field is entertaining and educational for me.

Link to Kevin's Security Scrapbook

Happy Birthday Facebook!

2011-02-05T21:27:00.002-05:00

So Facebook turned 7 yesterday...and to celebrate, it seems to have developed a problem. For many users, the site is down, and the Internet seems all a-buzz over it. Rumors of the site shutting down start flying and people get crazy.

This is the longest outage I can remember (around 12 hours). I can imagine there are many people who are lost right now...or angry they can't play Farmville or Mafia Wars...or can't communicate with friends because it seems like no one keeps track of people's email addresses anymore.

This does seem to be an issue with certain people's accounts. My professor one works fine, but most of my friends can't get in, and I can't get in to my personal account.

I am sure heads will roll at Facebook after such a long outage.

"I Will Smash Your Face In"

2011-01-27T18:16:00.002-05:00

I've been reading a book called God Save the Fan, by Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin. Deadspin, of course, is an independent sports Web site Leitch started because he felt the people who should be reporting sports news (i.e. ESPN) wouldn't report things in an unbiased manner for fear of damaging their relationship with different sports leagues.

Anyway, in his book, one of the chapters talked about how people idolize players that, if they met them in person, they would not really like. For example, it's easy for me to say Derek Jeter and David Wright and Eli Manning seem like nice people, but I've never met them, and can't know for sure. I'd assume they are similar to most of us, in that they have bad days, make bad decisions sometimes, and have their own insecurities. In the past, the only way players and the masses generally communicated was through press conferences with local reporters who wouldn't always publish everything a player said, for fear of damaging their relationship with the player and team. If I work for the local NBC affiliate and made a certain player angry, the player (and perhaps his teammates) might just give important news to the CBS affiliate, damaging my ability to do my job.

Enter Twitter.

As I have discussed in the past (here, here, here, and here), leagues have tried to crack down on Twitter use, in part to protect the league and in to protect the players from themselves.

The NFL is at a crossroads at the moment. The collective bargaining agreement has run out, and no one is quite sure if the NFL will exist in the fall. Some players are not happy with that idea, and Antonio Cromartie (cornerback, for the NY Jets) called out the union leadership. A player from the Seahawks, Matt Hasselback tweeted (and then deleted) a comment saying someone should ask Cromartie if he knew what CBA stood for. Of course, this could have been a joke, but you can't hear the tone of a message over the Internet. Hasselback apparently decided to delete the message, but once you publish, people see it!

Of course, Cromartie took offense to this, and instead of calling Hasselback and talking with him, tweeted that he will smash Hasselback's face in. Really.

Just because you are a professional athlete doesn't mean you are professional (see: Rae Carruth, Lawrence Phillips, etc.).

So, who knows if Hasselback is a jerk, or if Cromartie really wouldn't smash someone's face in over a comment. Either way, the way news is reported is changing.

Metadata and You

2011-01-18T14:27:00.002-05:00

I first encountered the word metadata back when I started creating Web pages in the mid 1990's. Programs called "search engines", like Webcrawler and Altavista, would automatically find your page and make it available for the world to find. They did have issues adequately describing your page, so as a Web developer adding "meta tags" was critical. It was a way of adding text that did not show up in the Web browser, but allowed search engines to find information about your site.

Metadata is something that is used today in many areas, from computer forensics to corporate espionage. I will give you a regular example first. As a professor, there are times when I think something might be an exact copy of someone else's file. The first thing I will do is take a look at the file properties. In Office 2010, I would go to the File tab and select "Info". On the right side are properties. I can see very easily the name of the person who created the file. In a computer lab, most people probably have the same user name, so that may not tell me anything. However, if you created it at home and gave it to a friend, there is pretty damning evidence since your friend has handed in a file with your name in it. Other ways include "date created" - this tells me the day and time the file was created. I am of course not opening up my whole bag of tricks here, but these are two ways to investigate a file further.

In terms of corporate espionage and hacking...many times, the metadata in programs such as Word (and most of the rest of Office) includes data like username, company name and a file path. If this file was created on a network drive, I now know the name of one of your company's internal servers and possibly your username. This information is valuable for hackers!

If you are distributing a file from Office, also be aware if your company uses tracking changes, revisions, comments, or hidden text, that information can be included in a file you distribute. If a member of a company's staff left a comment in the file, there is a good chance it could be found. You can use the Office 2010 Prepare for Sharing options to minimize this risk, though once again, most people do not realize this.

Even programs like Photoshop can cause metadata issues. Let's say you have an image, and you choose to blur out bits of it. Photoshop will save a thumbnail as part of the file, to make it quicker for the operating system to give users a preview. Therefore, a smart hacker may be able to see your original image using some advanced techniques. Programs such as jStrip will help minimize this risk, but many people don't realize it is a risk.

Like many other technology issues, the only way people know about this generally seems to be if they are burned by it.

Verizon, Google, and Net Neutrality

2011-01-06T00:29:00.003-05:00

The idea of "net neutrality" is an important one. All ISPs (Internet Service Providers) work together in a collaborative way on the Internet. There are a few key points:

ISPs and other Internet companies do not discriminate against each other's traffic (for example, Gmail won't block all email from Yahoo! accounts to try to convince people to use Gmail, and vice versa).
Every Web site should have the same priority. In other words, pages from Amazon won't be transmitted before pages from some small Web site. This also his prevents companies like Comcast and Verizon (in my area) from trying to get exclusivity agreements with certain sites. For example, right now net neutrality would prevent Comcast paying YouTube a bunch of money in exchange for having faster YouTube connections (and effectively slowing Verizon customers). If they could do this sort of thing, it would make our lives as consumers much more complicated.
Finally, in practice, this prevents Internet Service Providers from filtering our content and throttling certain types of downloads (for example, blocking or slowing down downloads from file sharing sites).

Note that this isn't the same as monthly download traffic caps, which some providers (such as Comcast) have, and others (such as Verizon FIOS) do not.

Anyway, one of my students (thanks, Kevin!) brought in an article (available here on PC World's Web site) last semester that details a Google/Verizon pact. It sounds great in theory, but there are some ideas that may be shady. First of all, though it says the Internet should maintain net neutrality, they include the phrase "lawful Internet content", which some people interpret as a way to stop file sharing. Secondly, they do not address wireless access, because they feel the market is competitive enough. Finally, there is a provision for a private Internet which would not be covered. Though this could be something positive (stuff like health care systems), others interpret this as a way companies might find a way to exploit and get around net neutrality.

It sounds bad, but a bigger issue is this is all informal as it stands, and companies can do whatever they want at the moment. Something needs to be in place and formalized, and as I've mentioned before, most of the people in Congress do not have a technology background. I just hope we do not find ourselves in a bad situation in five years because Congress got Rickrolled by Verizon and Google.

Web Templates

2010-12-29T00:06:00.002-05:00

Back in the stone ages of the mid-1990's, I developed Web pages by hand. Some of my students seem pretty impressed that I can still code a page by hand, and seem to want to do things that way as well. My advice at this point is to not do it that way. A good working knowledge of HTML can be useful in order to tweak a page, or if you are writing a script to generate a dynamic Web page. However, for static Web sites, it generally makes a lot more sense to just use a Web development tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver.

As someone who is not a graphic designer, I would have problems making attractive Web sites. If I were really planning on doing Web development, I would either find a graphic designer to work with, or plan on purchasing some sort of package. Many times, designers or design companies will sell templates to Web developers for this purchase. For example, a site like Project Seven sells some really nice designs that I would never be able to create for $60. The nice part is they are designed for use with Dreamweaver, and should cleanly plug right in to your interface.

I look back on some of my early Web work, and it was clumsy, but by purchasing the rights to something like that, I'd be able to make some really professional sites with very little effort.

NORAD Santa tracker

2010-12-24T11:11:00.002-05:00

It always amazes me how people use technology.

As a child, I remember writing a letter to Santa. Now, you can email Santa.

Just to one-up that, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command - a joint Canadian/American effort) has launched a Santa tracker, complete with Google map and computer graphic video. Pretty cool stuff! If I had a small child to show this to, I would certainly do so.

noradsanta.com

Hope everyone has a nice holiday break. Looking forward to doing some recharging myself.

Java up, Adobe down

2010-12-17T10:00:00.002-05:00

...in terms of exploits, anyway. Looks like Java exploits are gaining favor with hackers again lately, according to this CNN article.

One of the problems with the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web is there are so many moving parts. Many novice users do not seem to realize the complexity of it all. Any application software (including Web browsers) present security risks, and when you add in the various plug-ins (such as Adobe Flash Player, Javascript, Microsoft Silverlight, etc.), you have a hacker's paradise. In the typical interaction, you have three points where security breaches can happen:
1) The browser
2) The plug-in
3) When the browser and plug-in interact

A perfect secure world would have no plug-ins at all, but that is not realistic. We are left as end users to hope the developers of the plug-ins secure their products.

Adobe has come under fire a bit for some of their exploits, but it seems as if they have done a good job (albeit, a reactive job) of plugging up some of their security holes. The report linked above shows that the number of Adobe exploits recorded has gone down, while Java exploits have gone up. Does that mean that Adobe has fixed their problems, or does it mean that Java problems are easier to exploit? That I can not tell you.

There's an option for that

2010-12-11T12:37:00.002-05:00

One thing many computer users don't seem to intuitively understand is the idea of customization for the programs and apps they are using.

My approach to using software is to try to use the software, and when I find something I don't like, to try to find some way to change it. For example, inside of Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can change the start page. Most computer savvy users know this, but one of my friends just called this morning saying he changed his somehow and couldn't figure out how to switch it back.

This applies to Web sites as well. For example, Facebook allows you to turn off certain notification emails, change privacy settings, and change many other options. Most free email providers allow you to set up "filters", which would basically let you screen your mail (for example, you could have all email from people at a certain college go in to a special folder so it does not fill up your Inbox, but does not get deleted). If you use a site such as Yahoo! Calendar, you can set it up so it will send email reminders for events to a certain email address or phone number by default, instead of having to set that up every time you create a new event. Even games like World of Warcraft are customizable. You can switch things on or off using some of the menus in a game.

Chances are, if you are annoyed by something, there is an option to change it. Don't like Excel starting every file with three worksheets? You can change that. Do you hate it when you open a bunch of windows, and things compress on your taskbar? That can be changed. Would you prefer your Word to always space in one inch when you hit tab instead of a half inch? That can be done. Does your Blackberry give you annoying little "message sent successfully" messages every time you send an email? That can be removed.

The key is knowing that things can probably be changed, and finding the answer on the Internet.

Bring out the Dancing Pigs!

2010-12-03T13:44:00.004-05:00

"Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time."

Once someone explained that line to me, I loved it. Basically, Bruce Schneier (a US computer security consultant and cryptographer) explained, "If the computer prompts him with a warning screen like: "The applet DANCING PIGS could contain malicious code that might do permanent damage to your computer, steal your life's savings, and impair your ability to have children," he'll click OK without even reading it. Thirty seconds later he won't even remember that the warning screen even existed."

That basically seems to summarize computer security these days. Users often get taken in by phishing schemes, download viruses, give out personal information, and do other things that compromise security...for the promise of dancing pigs. Smart hackers do this and create attractive links that people will click on.

As you can see, there are tutorials taking potential phishers through the process of stealing information. Stopping sites posting information like that is like playing Whac-A-Mole.

Congrats, you shut down a phishing site! Put down the hammer, I don't think others will pop up!

I do not know that most Americans are adequately prepared to figure out what sites are legitimate and which ones are not (and to read warnings). Sadly, people seem to learn by making mistakes and losing their personal information or getting hacked.

Proper Hardware Disposal

2010-11-30T12:29:00.001-05:00

In one of my classes last week, we discussed the proper way to get rid of old computer hardware, to avoid privacy issues.

I've gotten rid of old computers, but I generally either keep the hard drives (to destroy) or use software to do a thorough wipe of the drive's data When I say "thorough wipe", I am not talking about deleting files, because data can easily be recovered from a hard drive, EVEN AFTER YOU DELETE IT. Really. As a matter of fact, Microsoft's pre-Windows operating system, DOS, used to include an undelete tool which could recover deleted files easily.

eBay is one place people can purchase used hard drives, and they even provide information on why you need to thoroughly wipe a hard drive before you sell it. You can see that the site shows that social security numbers, credit card numbers, and all sorts of stuff can be found on these hard drives. This means your identity can be stolen even if you do nothing wrong, if a company you have purchased from does not follow good procedures for hard drive disposal. Aside from eBay, there are sites like Craigslist where people get rid of old hardware, and there are always garage sales. In the corporate environment, many colleges and companies pay companies to dispose of old hardware (such as eRevival locally). If you go with a cut-rate company, you may find that though they promise to clean hard drives, they may not do so thoroughly. Any of these are ways that data can be leaked if the hard drives are not wiped.

One way you can provide a level of security is to physically destroy the hard drive, though someone could pick it out of the trash and recover something. The best way is to do a full wipe of the hard drive, or what we used to call a "zeroize" at the company I used to work for. We were putting defense systems in military crafts, and one of the requirements was that the pilot needed to have a button to wipe all the data in the system, to prevent classified data from falling in to the enemy's hands. (Yes, that information is public.)

The Department of Defense has pretty high standards for data wiping, and there are a number of tools that meet their standards. The problem is most of these tools cost money. The one that I recommend is a free tool called Darik's Boot and Nuke (available for download at www.dban.org). Despite the informal name, it is a legitimate program (referenced by CNN and the BBC). There are commercial tools that do this sort of thing as well, but the major difference is not function, it is speed (DBAN has a reputation for being slow - the BBC article says it took two hours for an 80GB drive). DBAN is cool because it gives you a CD to boot off of, and you select the depth of the wipe you want. The more depth you want, the longer it will take to run. If you are going to do this, I would recommend choosing the most in-depth wipe, doing it before you go to bed (as a home user) or before you leave work in the evening (at work), and just letting it run overnight. That way, there is no time wasted waiting for wipe to be completed. In a professional environment, having a DBAN CD around is not a bad thing, especially so your company does not end up in violation with the standards that govern your industry (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, FACTA, etc.).

A larger company may want to invest in faster, packaged software for this, or a hard drive sanitizer (such as this one - though I am certain their claim of 7 minutes per drive is for the simple wipe and not the seven-pass version).

Any of these options are better than the ol' sledgehammer method, because who wants to clean up that mess?

Spring 2011 Schedule

2010-11-30T12:23:00.003-05:00

I just wanted to post my tentative Spring 2011 schedule at Bergen.

I am scheduled to teach:
INF 163 001 (Monday/Wednesday 3:55 PM to 5:50 PM)
INF 101 009 (Tuesday/Thursday 3:55 PM to 5:50 PM)

I may also be teaching a Summer I 2011 course, if that information is solidified, I shall announce it here.

The Gmail Killer

2010-11-21T00:56:00.002-05:00

Facebook is preparing to come out with a new email service, where users can get email sent to an email address @facebook.com. There were a number of headlines that advertised this as "the Gmail killer", though it could just as easily be "the Hotmail killer" or "the Yahoo! Mail killer".

First, Facebook started to try to be your "one true login". They seem to be succeeding in this, because a number of sites have started to give you the option to sign in using Facebook instead of creating an account. For example, here are some random sites that came up when I Googled "Facebook Connect":

Evony
Joost
SurveyMonkey
TravelPod

Facebook even has taken so much of Myspace's market that they are introducing a "connect with Facebook" option. That's the ultimate admission on Myspace's part that Facebook has won the war.

Facebook has succeeded there, so they are looking to expand. The next horizon seems to be Facebook email, which they've announced plans to implement. Facebook's CEO says that this email will be even better because they know who your friends are. No, really.

"Because we know who your friends are," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, "we can do some really good filtering for you."

There is something a little creepy about that, but I do think this idea will take off. The interesting part is this: back in the early 2000's, sites like AOL had email and chat services, and tried to expand in to profiles...same with Yahoo! and MSN. None of those transitions worked well. However, Facebook starting with profiles and expanding to chat and then email might actually work.

So, Facebook vs. Google...who wins? Time will tell.

Link to story

Keeping up with the Jobses

2010-11-13T13:15:00.002-05:00

There's a saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" which goes back to the early 1900's (thanks Wikipedia). It basically has to do with people needing to keep up with the neighbors (in this case, the generic Joneses). I feel like Microsoft has this same symptom at points.

According to recent numbers, Microsoft Windows Mobile was only on 2.8% of cell phones, according to Gartner Research. Compare this with 36.6% for the open-source Symbian OS, 25.5% for the Android OS, 16.7% for iPhone OS, and 14.8% for the Blackberry OS. In other words, Microsoft Windows Mobile just is not cutting it.

Since Microsoft needs to keep up with the Jobses (Steve Jobs is often considered the Face of Apple), Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 last month. Microsoft basically redesigned the operating system, because as we see it wasn't working. According to USA Today, the first phone to run this OS is the Samsung Focus through AT&T, which was released on November 8.

According to cNet reviews, Microsoft does seem to have done a nice job on the operating system, but as they point out, it is an uphill battle to overtake some of the companies above them on the list. One interesting feature that jumped out from the review (since I haven't used it myself yet) was the integration with Xbox Live. That could be something that sets this phone apart, if it gives people access to their games and accounts in a mobile fashion.

We'll see how it shakes out, but Microsoft does have a long way to go.

Thanks to Kevin for the heads-up!

Twitter and Poor NBA Etiquette v2.0

2010-11-05T10:46:00.004-04:00

Charlie Villanueva, an NBA player, recently played against Kevin Garnett. During the game, Villanueva claims Garnett called him a cancer patient. Garnett, for what it is worth, said he called Villanueva "a cancer", which isn't as far fetched as it sounds. According to urbandictionary, the term cancer "[is] often used as an insult when referring to someone who is a pathelogical [sic] source of trouble and discord within a group."

Now, who knows what happened and what did not, but I can see someone exaggerating because they are annoyed. Either way, the point is he came out and put it out there, and as we know about Twitter, there is no undo button.

If this guy's name sounds familiar, it is because he is the same guy who was benched for tweeting during halftime of a game in 2009. I blogged about that here. I would think the guy would have learned his lesson about Twitter, but nope. If it is getting in the way of your professional life, perhaps it is time to let someone else serve as your filter.

Death by Farmville

2010-10-29T15:14:00.003-04:00

Wow.

We've seen this story on the news before...a parent shakes a child and it dies. Sad, unfortunate, but also not uncommon. This happened down in Jacksonville, Florida. What makes this sensational is the fact that the mother got upset with the child over it interrupting her playing Farmville.

Facebook's role is being overblown in the media. Notice it is not "Mother Shakes Baby to Death". Headlines seem to be more "Child Dies due to Facebook Game". The focus is put on Facebook. News articles do report she was playing it through Facebook, but Facebook did not create Farmville. You don't have to be on Facebook to use Farmville (Myspace and Twitter also work, as I understand). Putting Facebook in the headlines is sexier than putting Farmville in the headline.

Of course, this is also going to be something people cite when they say Facebook is bad for society. I have a friend who hates Facebook, and I am sure this friend will see this headline and just tie it to Facebook.

Let's be honest. If this woman would shake a baby to death over a Facebook game, she probably have done it over a TV show, or cooking, or a phone call, or any of another thousand reasons.

Link to CBSNews Article

Time Machine: Everything Old is New Again

2010-10-22T10:43:00.005-04:00

Some topics of interest from this week's classes.

We discussed the Do Not Call Registry, which was a way to prevent telemarketers from calling you. Someday, we may see a Do Not Email Registry, but I wouldn't expect that for a while. I remember telemarketing being annoying in the 80's, and it took them until 2003 to do anything about it. Here's my original post about how to get on the registry and save yourself from telemarketers.

Second of all, passwords came up in one class this week. Microsoft has a free password strength checker on their Web site, where you can see how strong or weak your password is. Here's the link. We also discussed passwords, and how you can make a better password. I discussed the mnemonic device method for creating and remembering a password in class, and here is my original post on that.

Of course, for people majoring in the IT area, it's always a struggle to find a balance between security and ease of use. If you require difficult passwords, your users may end up writing them on a sticky note, or putting them in a passwords document.

Stalking a criminal

2010-10-15T18:39:00.003-04:00

The Internet has obviously changed many things. One thing it has changed is crime. Criminals are known to use sites like Craigslist and eBay to sell stolen goods.

It's interesting how people have also used this in the investigation of crimes. For example, a woman recently had a GPS stolen, and used Craigslist to get in touch with someone who was selling a GPS of the same brand the next day. She contacted the guy, got his email address, used that to find his profile on an online dating site, used that information to find him on Myspace....

The police were able to get video footage from a McDonald's where he used her card, and the Myspace profile matched the face of the person on the video.

It's a lesson that (as she says) you never know who you are robbing.

Link to story

Charging for Web design work

2010-10-07T12:18:00.002-04:00

One of my former students emailed me to ask about freelance Web design work, and how much to charge. This is always a very difficult question, and I don't know many people who are comfortable setting rates coming out of college.

Keep in mind that companies will pay what sounds like a really high hourly rate because they are not subject to the overhead that their regular employees have, such as health benefits, office supplies, and other such items.

The difficult part in freelancing early on is figuring out how long things will take. I found as a programmer I had no sense for how long projects would take me to do. People would ask me how long things would take, and I would think it should be a 2 hour project, and I would spend 25 hours on it. I developed that sense over time. Classes like Systems Analysis and Design were great in theory, but when it came to applying the lessons, I fell a little short.

Customers don't really want to pay based on how good you are, so generally, customers should not see your hourly rate. I would suggest creating some base packages. For example, a 5 page Web site should cost X, a 10 page Web site costs Y, etc. You want to be clear with a customer what they are paying for. I found a company that does something like that here, for reference.

You can see they have a base package for $600. For a basic 5-page site, $500-$750 seems to be the going rate. This would generally include the basics of meeting with them, gathering content, designing it, having the user test it, fixing the errors they find, and making the site live. In reality, the technical end of the work will probably take less time than the other components of the project.

Other stuff that is extra, and this is where I would run in to issues. If the customer wants e-commerce stuff, or they want Flash animations, that would be stuff that would cost extra. When they describe the requirements, that is when you have to determine the cost of it. If they describe a Flash animation, keep in mind that is rarely a two-hour gig. Flash animations, Web programming, and e-Commerce projects should include testing and bug fixing time. There have been times where I wrote a program in an hour and then spent 5 hours trying to hunt down a bug. Flash programmers can charge rates of $50-$75 an hour, so a site that is heavy on customization like that will be more costly.

What is very clever is that there is a maintenance package is $50 a month for two hours worth of work, and additional hours are extra. You may want to offer options like "10 hours of updates over the next year for $250, or updates at an hourly rate of $40" rather than constraining someone to a number of hours in a month. By offering a package deal, you may have someone pay for the 10 hours even if they don't need them, just because it looks like a better deal. Also figure most updates will be small changes, so a lower hourly rate is fine.

You can of course work with people on price. There are people I've been eager to work with, and made allowances for them.

You also have to decide if you are going in to the hosting business, or if you are going to arrange for the customers to host things elsewhere. I generally would not want to get in the middle of a transaction between a customer and a Web hosting service. If this is the case, make sure you provide them the username and password for the site. Even if they don't use it, it's professional to make sure they have access to this. I've dealt with people who have no clue about this, and if they ever need to change hosting sites, it's a pain for them. Same idea goes for the domain name purchase. You can direct them, but you probably don't want to be the person in the middle since domain names do need to be renewed.

If you are not doing the hosting yourself, you have to assume some customers may have a URL purchased and a hosting agreement, and others will not. If the customer does not have the infrastructure in place, there is some startup work you have to do to get them up and running, and that may be something you want to charge for. This may be something you want to charge $100 for.

I would recommend the customer set up a billing arrangement directly with the hosting service (like godaddy). If you end up in the middle, your credit card is the one the hosting service has on file. If, however, you are planning on hosting sites yourself, that is something different.

You should always have some sort of portfolio available. For my PCCC students, your capstone project can be a start, but you may want to expand on it and upload it to a server somewhere.

The main problem I think most customers have is that they don't understand that you don't provide content. When they pay for a site, you are taking their existing information and turning it in to a Web site. You will need to meet with someone in their organization, and they should be providing you electronic copies of the information they want on the site. Some customers think you are going to actually write the text for the site, and (unless you want to do this) it needs to be made clear that this is their responsibility, and that you don't provide proofreading services.

As you get better at doing basic Web sites, you can probably get things done quicker and therefore make your business more profitable. You can also change prices as you go along. Notice the site I linked above also includes a year (2010 rate card). You can always change rates yearly (or project to project).

Census and computing

2010-09-29T12:56:00.003-04:00

The US census brings to mind one of the reasons computers advanced.

The 1880 census took 8 years to tabulate. Of course, the census is done every 10 years, so a long wait for results makes this data almost useless. The fear was that the 1890 census would take more than 10 years to tabulate, which of course makes no sense.

Enter Herman Hollerith and his fabulous mustache. He invented a tabulating machine that helped with this purpose. This tabulating machine allowed them to count survey results in one year. Of course, many early computers used punch cards, so this was one of the forefathers of those computers. I did not know (until I read a little bit of the Wikipedia article) that his company was one of the companies that would merge to form IBM in 1924. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Anyway, the 2010 census results are being tabulated, and you can already see the response rates posted for all towns. Making things more interesting is the use of data mining. We can now use the computers to not only count results, but to do projections, spot trends, and all sorts of stuff that would have been impossible 100 years ago. It looks like President Obama will get the first report by December 31, 2010. Considering surveys were sent out in March and data collection ended in July, that's really amazing turn around time. Now, if everyone just did the data entry on the computer, imagine how quickly it would go!

Anyway, here's the site with the response rates:
http://2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/

Using Google Earth to make $75,000

2010-09-21T21:52:00.002-04:00

Just another case of learning from my students...

In class today, we were discussing Google services, including the advanced Google search options, image search, and Google Maps. It came out during class that the town of Riverhead, NY used Google Earth in a very interesting way. People started getting summonses for having illegal pools, and it came out that they were using Google Earth to find this out. Really! Turns out they wrote about $75,000 worth of summonses before people caught on and complained.

NPR did an interview with the chief building inspector of the town, and he said they did it for the protection of the neighborhoods, saying "I use it strictly for safety." Of course, there is some validity there, because as he states, there are requirements to make sure children don't drown, and I agree with that. I also think that, well $75,000 had something to do with it. I'm a little cynical when someone won't admit to that. Of course money making is part of it. It's not just about safety.

In the "DUH" statement of the year, he stated "Most of the people that complained were the ones that didn't have the permits." Of course those are the people that complained, because they were the ones who were directly affected and may or may not have had their right to privacy violated.

The town is no longer doing this, so I think that tells us how they feel about whether it was a good decision. If they thought it was, they would have kept on doing it. My opinion? As someone who worked for a company doing government contracting, we were told that the government could not spy on its own citizens. The government tried to implement domestic spy-satellite imaging through the innocuous-sounding National Applications Office, but this idea was withdrawn over privacy concerns. If the government can't do it using our own satellites, why can they do it using Google's? Again, my opinion, they shouldn't be doing that, but that's me.

The other interesting part is Google. This sort of use of Google Earth is not prohibited, either in the main terms of service or the government agency terms of service addendum. Yes, I checked. In theory, this is fine per Google's viewpoint. Then again, they haven't updated the terms of service in a while.

Dead Online

2010-09-16T13:00:00.002-04:00

Had an interesting discussion during class the other day. We were talking about online gaming and I mentioned the case of Shawn Wooley, the 21-year old who killed himself over Everquest back in 2002.

It always made me wonder how word would get out about things like this. If you are part of online communities (aside from Facebook, where people can post information to the "wall"), how do people find out? When my aunt Judy died in 2000, I remember the hassle of having to get copies of a death certificate to places like banks, retirement companies, health insurance providers, and other places, and with the advent of the Web, this becomes even more complicated. How do you get access to Web sites and other accounts if someone dies? Are things like World of Warcraft, Amazon Associates, Paperback Swap, and other sites things you would want people to have access to after you died? At this point, a World of Warcraft (or Starcraft, or whatever) account might actually be something people would put in their will...a site like Amazon Associates or Google AdWords might have unclaimed income (and continue to generate income). No one is going to change their will every time they change their passwords, so there has to be some other solution.

This is one of those areas where no one has *the* solution yet, so here are a few sites that I have read about.

First of all, there is Death Switch. Death Switch will send you a message at various times and if you do not click on the link and enter a password, they will assume you are dead. At that point, you can have the site email out your usernames, passwords, etc. that you might want your wife, children, friends, etc. to have. Of course, if you take a really long vacation, or if you die and forget to change the email address of the recipient, there are problems!

Another way to do this is to use Legacy Locker. This is a site that is similar in concept, without the replying to emails. The person would assign two verifiers to verify that they weredead, and if so, the information stored on the site would then be released. Of course, there are security issues there as well, if the two verifiers are people who conspire against you!

A little morbid, to be certain, but it's interesting that companies have found ways to make money off of this.

They both have very limited free versions. For the paid versions, Legacy Locker costs $29.99 a year at this point (or a one-time, $299.99 fee), and Death Switch is $19.95 a year.

Zero-Day exploits

2010-09-09T11:44:00.003-04:00

I have pretty tight security on my home system. I have my anti-virus, my anti-spyware, and router with built in firewall. I keep my operating system and anti-virus up-to-date. I feel pretty safe on a day-to-day basis. I sometimes forget that this is not true. We are all vulnerable to "zero-day exploits". These are basically newly discovered ways for you to get a virus (or get hacked, etc) even if your virus scanner and operating system are 100% up-to-date. This is the part of computer security that people don't always understand. Anti-virus programs, anti-spyware programs, the operating system, and things like that all get updated AFTER problems happen, so someone needs to be the first group of people to get this virus. Unfortunately, fixes are often reactive (oh, no, we didn't think of that!) rather than proactive (hmm, how would I exploit this system if I were a hacker?).

Yesterday, Adobe (the company that makes Acrobat and Flash, among other tools) released a statement saying there was a vulnerability in even the latest version of Adobe Reader. This is a free tool most people have installed that reads read-only versions of documents. Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Well, there is an exploit that allows this to beat security. If I were to download a file, my firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and operating system would all be beaten by this exploit.

What helps is avoiding high-risk activities online. File sharing networks and torrents obviously present advantages in the form of free stuff, but even if you have all the protection I mentioned before, you are subject to zero-day exploits. This one is an exploit with Adobe Reader, but it could happen in iTunes, or in Windows Media Player, or Internet Explorer, or Firefox, or any other software package. It can also happen when people download software through these networks and actually run a program on their machine. Just remember that despite the updated anti-virus, you are vulnerable. This doesn't even take in to account the folks who have anti-virus software that they don't subscribe to and don't receive updates to.

(For those of you who understand digital signatures, this is a very clever exploit that seems to take advantage of stolen certificates. Who knows, maybe the hackers used a zero-day exploit to steal the certificates!)

Back to School (Fall 2010 Edition)

2010-09-08T11:44:00.002-04:00

Today starts a new semester...as I mentioned at some point, I will be teaching two classes at Bergen.

I think in my case I have become very comfortable in Passaic. As a full time faculty member, I have a lot of freedom as to what I do in my classes. As I am a creature of habit, when I found something that worked, I stuck with it.

I have been teaching since 2001, and I hope I have improved each year, but the only place I have taught a formal class is at PCCC. I am impressed with the amount of work the department chair does at Bergen to provide support for the faculty teaching the intro course. I know some faculty resist things like standard tests, etc. However, I generally do not find this offensive. I may be in the minority, but I feel like if we as a community college want four-year colleges to accept our courses, there needs to be some standardization. I have heard it argued that the four-year schools do not standardize, but all we can do is keep our side of the street clean.

My prep time is less because the full time folks have done work setting up tests, assignments, etc. I generally spend a lot of time on assignments, so they have freed up my time. As such, I am going to try new things that I would not have had the time to do at PCCC. There is no doubt that this will make me a better educator.

So today I have INF 101 004, an Intro to IT course similar to PCCC's CIS 107, and INF 163 001, similar to PCCC's CIS 152. My experience at Bergen will certainly serve me well, and I am excited to get started.

The Weakest Link: Password Reminders

2010-08-25T23:31:00.004-04:00

Security vs. Ease of Use...always is a tradeoff.

I always use an example of a car security system in class. If I could GUARANTEE that no one could steal your car, and it wouldn't be expensive to install, you'd probably go for it, right?

What if I then told you it would take 90 minutes to get in to the car? At that point, the security isn't worth it.

Generally, when you sign up for accounts, you are given very few choices for password hints. For example, what is your mother's maiden name? Or, where were you born?

The problem is that some of these things can be found out from social networking sites or even from personal knowledge. For example, if you friend your mother, everyone who is a friend of yours now knows the answer to that security question, especially if you use the Facebook "related to" option to show she is your mother. Where were you born can be guessed many times as well, even without Facebook. Where I went to high school, I would guess that most of the students were born in the same hospital. In more rural areas, that isn't as tough of a question as you might think. A good private investigator might chat you up in a bar to find out the answer to the question "what was the name of your first pet", if the answer to that question is valuable enough. In divorce cases, this sort of information can be a gold mine. If you are going through a divorce, remember that things like birthdays and anniversaries are things your future ex may know, and they can circumvent your password that way. Even things like "what is your blood type" aren't great, because how many possible choices are there? (A, B, AB, and O, I think). Even questions like "who is your favorite actor/actress" is tough, because answers change.

On the other hand, no one wants the question to be "pick your favorite number between 122 and 488".

Some sites will let you create your own questions, which present their own problems. People may tend to make even easier questions ("what is your middle name"), or really poor questions ("what color shirt are you wearing"). Yes, I've seen questions like this when helping people.

One of the better questions I have seen is "what is your father's middle name". I couldn't tell you the middle name of my friend's fathers, so this would require a little more work. Other good questions might be "what was the first bone you ever broke" - certainly something you would remember, but still vague.

Another clever idea that hasn't taken off is "Passfaces", where people use visual reminders as a password. Clever idea either as a replacement for a password or as something to augment password reminder security, but not mainsteam yet.

The best defense is to pair sets of questions together, asking people to answer multiple questions to get access. Another way would be to give people a checklist, for example, ask "which of the following statements are true about you", give a list of 15 things, and have the person check off which they have done. For example, give statements like:
I have shoplifted something worth more than $10.
I have been to Cincinnati.
My first car was white, yellow, brown, or green.

Have the person check off yes or no for each, and they are only granted access if all 15 questions are correct. Even if someone tries to guess their way through that, that is hundreds of possible responses. The problem here is that the best questions are the deeply personal ones that no one else knows the answer to. These are also the questions people might be shy about answering honestly. For example, the "shoplifted" question is good, but would I really check off "Yes" if this were a password reminder for a company I work for?

Or, you can do what I do, and give fake answers to the questions in a way that you will still remember it. Or, just use your mother's maiden name everywhere and wonder how all your accounts got hacked on the same day.

A Vision of Students Today

2010-08-17T21:46:00.003-04:00

Students learn differently today than they did even 10 years ago when I was in college. I've been at a number of meetings at PCCC where they emphasize this. It's never easy to change teaching habits.

A few years ago, a professor at Kansas State University put together a video that describes some of these things. Writing on the blackboard should be replaced by more entertaining ways of learning. I grew up on Nintendo, and I personally was bored in college by straight lecture. I think that education is changing, and I think a lot of professors feel like if they are paid to lecture for three hours, they should be lecturing for three hours. I saw this video for the first time last week at an adjunct orientation at Bergen.

I feel like online classes has helped create some momentum in education reform. Professors have had to find ways to redesign education, and this is a good thing.

This video definitely gave me something to think about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

My Fall Plans

2010-08-13T12:37:00.004-04:00

As I mentioned earlier, I am taking a leave from PCCC in the Fall semester. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to recharge. However, that doesn't mean I am going to do nothing with my time.

One thing students do not always get to see is how active some professors are outside the classroom. I know it took me three years at Montclair State to figure out that my professors actually had other obligations besides teaching and office hours and course development. I guess it just never crossed my mind that all sorts of things need attending to.

For example, who approves changes to courses and programs? There should be some sort of process where other people in the college can discuss proposed changes. One of my duties has been to prepare some of our curriculum changes, filling out the appropriate paperwork, and getting my department on board. This also involved presenting the changes to our Curriculum Committee (ably chaired by another member of my department, Professor Bamkole). If there were changes suggested by that committee, I would then incorporate them. I would need to present them again at the Academic Council - this is the entire College community. Again, people could make suggestions and I would need to incorporate them. Any small change to a course required at least three meetings and a number of possible revisions. In other words, rewriting a course description might take 30 minutes to rewrite and then 5 hours to document, present, revise, re-present, and revise.

Point being, there are a lot of responsibilities of being a full-time faculty member that are not necessarily obvious. I wanted to update you on my fall plans.

First of all, I will be teaching two classes at Bergen Community College. I am scheduled to teach INF-101-004 (similar to PCCC's CIS 101) and INF-163-001 (similar to PCCC's CIS 152 class, but with more technology and less business. The courses both meet in the late afternoon, which is interesting, since we generally have problems filling classes in those time slots at PCCC. Bergen does things a little differently, so I am working on getting fluent in their WebCT/Blackboard system, as well as learning the INF-101 textbook. It's a book that is taking a really interesting approach to things, and I look forward to trying it out.

I am also working on a few side projects.

I am working on doing some of the supplements for a new edition of the Exploring Access 2010 textbook (test bank questions, etc). I am also working on a manuscript for an Office textbook.

I also will be doing some work with teachers and possibly students through the PRISM program at Montclair.

Should be an interesting semester, to say the least.

Microsoft Digital Literacy

2010-08-04T11:45:00.002-04:00

Microsoft has a new program available called Digital Literacy. This is part of their efforts to help educate America.

As part of it, they have a set of free trainings available on their Web site. One is a basic computer literacy training, and the other is a slightly more advanced Microsoft Office and Windows training.

For free, why not right?

Link to Site

Workshops, and the role of computer training

2010-07-28T19:19:00.004-04:00

I just finished a series of workshops with the group I work with at Montclair (PRISM) in conjunction with PCCC. It was very interesting to be working on a joint effort with these groups. I have been working for the PRISM project (and it's previous incarnation, CETERMS) since the summer after my sophomore year. They are a grant funded project that provides teachers with training in the math/science areas. It is actually the place I got my start teaching. Someone was scheduled to do a technology workshop and called out sick. I had been assisting the workshop coordinator, so I knew the workshop, and I gave the workshop that day. I've been doing technology training for them ever since. I've done Internet concepts (and for 1999, that was pretty forward thinking!), PowerPoint, data analysis with Excel...and a few more workshops. I also used to do their Web site (coding the Web pages by hand, instead of with a tool like Dreamweaver). Who knew I would turn out to be good at teaching and would turn it in to my career? I certainly did not, and I don't think the woman who runs the program foresaw this either.

Anyway, this summer presented a very interesting challenge. The theme that was chosen for PCCC and PRISM to work together was Forensic Science. I didn't really see any way I fit in to this, but eventually as I worked to liaise between the two groups, I noticed they had fingerprinting database software. Basically, it would be able to look up people's fingerprints and match them to a local criminal database that you create. It's not FBI, but it's good enough for training and small police forces. When I suggested including that, I was told that they did not have anyone qualified to teach it, and that people were waiting to go to training for the software.

The beauty of studying computers is that once you have a feel for computer interfaces, new technologies are easier to learn. I sat down in front of this program (by a company named Sirchie called ComparaPrint- though oddly enough, I can't find it on their Web site so I can link) and picked it up very quickly, and I have never seen a program quite like this one. I managed to learn how to use the software very quickly because I understand the concepts of databases. This software is basically a big database package, and since I understand databases, all the natural operations (adding a record, performing a query, generating a report) came pretty naturally. Likewise, back in my undergraduate days, I remember teaching myself a programming language called Perl by doing what we called "hacking around". I just sat down, played with the language, and learned the key things in one night. That was easy for me since I learned programming concepts at Montclair (as opposed to receiving training in a specific programming language). Montclair did an excellent job of using the programming language as a vehicle to teach programming concepts.

In most college programs, there is a mix of theoretical concepts and facts, and the general feeling I get is that if you teach students how to learn about their field, it will treat them well going forward. It reminds me of the old saying "give a man a fish, and you will satisfy his hunger...but teach a man to fish, they will eat for a lifetime". Most careers require evolution, and computers perhaps more so, so this is why I do not think it is critical if my students remember what tab the spell check button is on. My personal opinion is that Information Technology should not be a degree where you simply learn where to click around, but a career where you learn how to learn new technologies. This is why, even though I teach software in my application software training classes, I do tend to ask some short answer questions about how the tool can be used.

I had a lot of fun, and I do not think that many people (some of whom may be reading this now, since I did give out this blog address) realized exactly how short of a time I was using that tool.

How Old Spice just changed social networking

2010-07-17T16:27:00.003-04:00

I was watching the baseball All-Star game the other night and there was an Old Spice commercial that came on. This commercial featured a good looking guy basically telling women that their man doesn't look like him, but they could smell like him. It was really over the top and goofy.

So yeah...amusing enough, I chuckled. Were this the end of it, that would have been enough, but the commercial producers arranged for their Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit sites to allow people to tweet/post questions. The actor, a former NFL hopeful named Isaiah Mustafa, then posted an incredible amount of responses...all of which were done in a towel in his bathroom as if he had just left the shower. Some of them were to famous people, and some to random people. Some of the celebrities he tweeted videos to include Demi Moore, George Stephanopoulis, Ellen Degeneres, Rose McGowan, Ashton Kutcher, Ryan Seacrest, Starbucks, and perhaps most famously, Alyssa Milano. Alyssa Milano went back and forth, with the actor posting four videos flirting with her, and even sending her flowers in real life, and prompting Alyssa Milano to post a video response in a towel of her own (view the entire set of videos here).

Apparently, he responded with over 180 videos over a few days, and had 5.9 million video views in the first day, according to this article. The amazing part is that this is getting news coverage, and celebrities are basically giving Old Spice free advertising. This is just one of the most amazing Internet buzzes I have seen. Sadly, the videos seem to be done for now according to the Twitter feed, but I wouldn't be shocked if Old Spice brought them back based on the popularity.

The question for Old Spice is always "will this improve sales" and the answer isn't clear at this point. If nothing else, they generated buzz!

The actor, based on this, was signed to a deal with NBC, who hope to capitalize on his buzz and create a sitcom.

Check out the tweeted video responses here:
http://twitter.com/oldspice

Amazon Free Shipping For College Students

2010-07-14T12:06:00.004-04:00

Let's say you wanted to purchase one of Kevin Mitnick's books on Amazon. At the moment, "The Art of Intrusion" costs $11.53. If you were to purchase this, you would need to get to $25 worth of purchase to get free Super Saver shipping (5-9 days), or you could pay $3.99 for shipping for this item and get it in 3-5 days.

Amazon also has available a program called Amazon Prime. This will let you get free shipping on most orders, but most of the time to sign up for Amazon Prime costs money ($79 a year).

At the moment, it is free to students. Sadly, for PCCC students, it requires a .edu email address, which our College does not provide. However, for readers who are at other colleges, you may be able to take advantage of this. Amazon does reserve the right to ask you to provide "proof" that you are a college student.

www.amazon.com/student

Bill Gates joke

2010-07-01T13:42:00.001-04:00

I was reading an article by one on my favorite writers, Joe Posnanski, about Lebron Jame and where he will end up. As a Knicks fan, I am hoping the answer is New York, but we shall see. The article had a joke that was similar to one I had heard about Bill Gates. It went something like this:

Bill Gates dies and meets with St. Peter in purgatory. St. Peter says to him "Bill, you did a lot of good in this world, but you are also responsible for Windows ME and Windows Vista. I'm going to let you decide whether you want to go to heaven or hell, we will take a tour of each."

St. Peter takes Bill on a tour of heaven, and there are angels playing harps, things like that. Bill thinks this is nice, but is curious as to what hell looks like. St. Peter takes Bill to hell, and the devil himself takes Bill on the tour. There are warm, sandy beaches with beautiful women on the beaches, people drinking and playing volleyball, warm sunshine and laughter.

The devil returned Bill to St. Peter and gave Bill the choice between heaven and hell, and Bill chose hell.

A week later St. Peter decided to check in on Bill and see how he was doing. When he got there Bill was chained to a wall, being burned and tortured by demons. St. Peter asked "How's everything going?".

Bill said "This is nothing like the hell I visited last week! What happened to the hell I visited with the beaches and sunshine??"

"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.

(I've also seen the ending "that was just the screen saver")

Easter Eggs

2010-06-27T12:06:00.000-04:00

The term "Easter eggs" refers to features that are hidden inside of a software program, DVD, or other such technology. For example, back in the original Nintendo days, there was a game called Contra. You started with three lives, and that was a pain. However, you could also enter a code (now known as the Konami code - after the game manufacturers) to give you thirty lives. It's been years since I played the game, but I still remember you had to hit up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and then Start, and you would start the game with thirty lives. That was my first experience with Easter eggs. Nowadays, you can find many sites that list the Easter eggs in video games. Aside from video games, many DVDs now come with Easter eggs built in, as you can find on this site.

There are typically Easter eggs built in to software, as well. For example, Microsoft Excel 97 used to have a flight simulator built in to it, but Microsoft apparently removed Easter eggs in their software in 2002. Note that sometimes people get confused as to what is a hidden feature and what is an Easter egg.

Anyway, even Google has some Easter eggs in it, and I saw an article showing some of them.

Top 15 Google Easter eggs

Joe Biden and the war on piracy

2010-06-22T15:45:00.002-04:00

The Vice President of the United States is working with groups to fight piracy of music, movies, and software on the Internet. According to the article linked below, he considers it theft. A government officer issued a report that sounds like it actually included intelligent recommendations, including working with file sharing sites based out of the United States (and therefore, not subject to our laws). For example, sharing copyrighted files here is illegal. However, in other countries it may not be, so how can the United States prosecute people doing it elsewhere? (Short answer: we can not as it currently stands). However, they can collaborate with these countries (and put pressure on them too), which is apparently what this report recommends.

This is part of a more widespread intellectual property proposal that includes things like counterfeit pharmaceuticals and other such things.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20008432-261.html

Times Square Bomber and Computer Forensics

2010-06-13T15:31:00.002-04:00

Most people think just because it is a free email address with no billing address, they are safe, but there are many ways they can be tracked. Take for example the suspect in the Times Square bombing. Technology helped lead to his arrest. The car that was used was apparently purchased in cash after an ad on Craigslist. The guy was apparently somewhat clever in covering his tracks, according to reports. He switched license plates at a place where it was unlikely to be noticed (a garage - when was the last time you checked to see if your license plates are really yours anyway?). He also attempted to remove the vehicle identification number. Unfortunately, it is found in a number of places in most vehicles, and the suspect missed a few locations.

So, how did Craigslist play a role? The seller apparently got an email from the buyer, who paid in cash. With that email, authorities can determine what IP address that email was sent from. With that IP address, it's an easy matter to determine who the Internet Service Provider of the sender was, and you can subpoena that ISP to get the name of the customer.

If that was a dead end, they could also trace the email address. Let's say the guy signed up for a free Hotmail account. He signed up from some computer somewhere, so law enforcement could subpoena Hotmail to find out what computers accessed that email account, and follow the trail as mentioned above.

Now, this guy was either sloppy or just did not think they would catch up to him quick enough for things to matter, because there were a number of ways he could have obscured his identity better.

First of all, he should have created this email address from a public computer, and only accessed it from a public computer. Either that, or he should have "borrowed" someone's wireless Internet connection, because then the trail would lead back to them. He could have driven around and found one easily (and this is part of the reason not setting up security on your wireless Internet can be a very bad thing).

Secondly, he should have made sure there were no cameras that could help aid in his identification, regardless of the method. A nice, unsecured location could be helpful, and scouting is important.

Thirdly, he should have made sure to pay in cash (if this were a cybercafe), use a fake ID (in a library), or used a program to try to hide his computer's network card address (if he used someone else's Internet connection). Each network card manufactured has a unique identifier, so if he connected to my router, I could browse my logs and find out the network card address (known as a MAC address). Law enforcement could subpoena the manufacturer to get the name of the buyer. If he was smart, he would have paid cash for a cheap network card (and bypassed the built-in wireless found in most laptops) and used a throwaway one. Again, if it was purchased recently, store cameras could be used to track suspects.

Finally, he should have used some program to anonymize his Internet usage and/or mask his IP address.

I do not know the specifics of what he did or did not do right, but electronic communication is not difficult to track with a little technical knowledge and the power of a court order.

Link to Story

Out of Office Message and Privacy Risks

2010-06-05T02:20:00.000-04:00

I remember as a child my parents used to have an answering machine. For those of you too young to remember those, they were basically like voicemail, except they plugged in to the wall. I remember at some point my parents changed the message from "we are not home right now" to "we can't take your call right now". I remember the explanation was that if you said "we are not home right now", a criminal would know you weren't home, but the other message might give them pause. My parents did not lock the doors, by the way, so I do not think an answering machine message would deter them. I suppose I can see not wanting to say "we are out of the country from June 1 through June 10", but do you really confuse criminals by saying "we can't take your call right now"? I guess I never felt like it would be a deterrent.

The reason this came to mind is because as I mentioned I am going to be away from PCCC next year. I am considering what to do with my out of office message. By putting one out there, there is a slight risk of that information being used against the College. A smart social engineer could in theory find a way to leverage that information. However, the alternative is to check my work email, and I am in theory not supposed to when I am on leave.

We use Microsoft Exchange. This will allow me to put up an out of office message. I have the choice to reply only to people in the same domain (@pccc.edu) or only to people outside our domain (everyone else), or simply everyone. Most people would just put up an out of office message saying to contact their department chair, but the problem is that by doing so, I open up two accounts for spam. If a spammer sends an email that gets past the email filters, they will get a reply not only showing my email is active, but also giving the spammer my department chair's email address.

I could also make it a little more complicated, for example, say email
person at pccc dot edu
(which would of course translate to person@pccc.edu)
...but some people would get confused with this.

Making matters more complicated is that I have some business contacts that I would like to be able to contact me. If I want them to be able to find me, I should probably provide some sort of email address for them to use to contact me. So, the end result is going to be me setting up a new email account, to protect my home account from spam, and an added risk to both my email address and my department chair's email address.

Now, to figure out what this message should say...

Web Celebrity Hall of Fame

2010-06-02T00:28:00.000-04:00

Wow, this is an interesting site (though possibly not safe for work). College Humor has put together a list of what has to be about 75 sites that have gained fame throughout the years...from "Chocolate Rain"...to "Numa Numa"....to "Angry Ginger Kid" (no relation) to the "GI Joe Spoofs". This is apparently a part of their site that has been up for years, but I hadn't seen it until today. Definitely very cool to see many of the Internet memes put together in one place. At one point or another, I have seen most of these things show up in my mailbox or over an instant message.

Warning: This may suck hours from your day.

http://www.collegehumor.com/web-celeb-hall-of-fame/alphabetical

Your lawmakers and technology laws

2010-05-27T00:19:00.001-04:00

In my CIS 152 (Internet/E-Commerce Technologies) course, we discuss some of the reasons technology is ahead of the laws. I usually then bring up a picture of Frank Lautenberg (an 86 year old Senator from Paterson) and half jokingly asking if the class thinks this guy even knows how to check his email, let alone write laws on technology. (And yes, I am sure he has a staffer who does the work for him)

I do know there are many committees and subcommittees who specialize in certain areas, but part of the problem is the representation we have. A government should really represent the people they represent - in demographics, education, race, occupation, etc. However, if you look at the numbers (scroll down to "Education" or "Occupations"), you will see that over 50% of the Senate have law degrees (57/100), while only 1 of 100 has nothing beyond a high school diploma. None have associate's degrees. Yes, this means 99/100 Senators have at least a bachelor's degree. Now, I understand that you do need a level of savvy to do things politically, but it is one thing to study groups you don't know, and another thing to actually be one of those people and try to be an advocate for them.

In addition, if you look under the occupations, you will see there are (as far as I can tell) no Senators and only one Representative with a degree in Computer Science (Steve Scalise from Louisiana). Meanwhile, there are 24 members of Congress who are medical professionals. Of course, one does not need a degree in Computer Science to understand technology, but if you are not using the technology on a daily basis as an everyday person is, you can't truly understand the challenges the way the everyday user does.

If I needed any more proof in my mind, the article below confirmed what I thought. In this Washington Post article, it says that a number of Congresspersons do not even know how to use an ATM, or do not use them frequently. This is information culled from public statements, and I am sure there are many more who, if they answered honestly, would say they also do not use ATMs. Therefore, when reform comes across the Congressional floor regarding ATM fee reform, they do not truly understand the problem (in this case, large ATM fees) as someone who pays large ATM fees does.

So, if Congresspersons do not have a deep understanding of ATMs (which I take for granted as a pretty simple technology), imagine when someone tries to explain phishing to them...or the challenges of wardriving....or why spyware should be restricted.

I am sure they have some staff members who can inform them about these things, but it is very different when a Congressperson has first hand understanding of an issue and a passion to fix it...and another thing when a staffer gives them information on a topic.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is part of the reason why technology laws are so far behind the technology.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

2010-05-21T16:39:00.000-04:00

Facebook certainly has had its share of controversy, and another round of controversy has come up recently.

The entire Facebook site was banned in Pakistan due to a Facebook user creating a group called "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". Images of the prophet Muhammed are considered offensive by many people of the Muslim religion, as shows like South Park have shown lately. I think every group has the right to their own beliefs, and if they believe that an image of Muhammed are offensive, I don't think I have any right to tell them otherwise.

Facebook was blocked in the entire country of Pakistan as a result of this controversy. The offensive page has been removed. No one is quite sure whether Facebook removed it, or whether the creator did, or whether it was hacked and taken down.

Sites like Facebook present such interesting problems for governments. In the United States, we enjoy a freedom of speech, but in other countries, this is not necessarily the case. In a country where that is not the case, how does a government deal with a site that is based in the US (and therefore a site they have no jurisdiction over)? Worse yet, how does a government deal with a site that contains offensive material posted by a user, as was the case here? In Pakistan's case, they chose to simply shut off access to Facebook. Fascinating. One person posts something offensive, and it causes an entire country to block access to the entire site. Think of all the losers here. Advertisers could not get their message out, so they lose. Facebook could not display the ads, so they lose revenue there. People around the country who had nothing to do with this and no knowledge of it could not access the site.

It makes me appreciate our freedoms just a little more when I read things like this.

Cyber Crooks and Disasters

2010-05-18T20:39:00.000-04:00

As always, criminals are clever.

When disasters or other newsworthy events happen, they rush to get information out there. The goal is to get people to visit their sites, and if they can be the first results on Google after an incident, they can often infect people before Google has a chance to filter out the results.

For example, when the recent Icelandic volcano eruption happened, the scammers were smart enough to realize people were not going to search for the actual name of the volcano (Eyjafjall), because who is going to remember that spelling? Instead, they had results up quickly for the search terms people would likely use - things like Icelandic volcano eruption. By getting their results on to Google quickly, they had the chance to infect people's PCs.

Interestingly enough, newspapers want to be the first people to report news to gain prestige. They are now competing with hackers.

http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/volcanos-ashes-and-malware/

Leave

2010-05-15T21:07:00.000-04:00

I know I announced this in some of my classes, but I wanted to make a public mention of this. I will be taking a leave of absence from PCCC next year. Since I am tenured, this is not an end, but rather a chance for me to take some time and recharge. The College has supported me in this, so I thank them for that.

My plan is to return in the Fall 2011 semester. I still plan on updating this blog and being around, and of course I will be at graduation this year (and next year).

10/SP Grades

2010-05-14T13:05:00.001-04:00

I am always happy to see technology make things easier for people.

I remember when I first adjuncted a class in 2001, my students wanted to receive their grades. They told me it took them weeks to get the information from the College. I was happy to email the grades to them, but this being 2001, many of them did not have email (and the College didn't buy a portal until 2004 or so).

It used to be that we would have to fill out paperwork, send that paperwork to another office, and then that office would manually enter this information in to the computer. Yes, I would take my electronic files, turn them in to paper copies, and then have someone else turn the paper copies in to electronic copies in the College's database. Then someone would print letters, put them in envelopes, and put them in the mail, and a month later, students would get their grades.

Now, it's all electronic. When I enter grades, the Registrar's Office just hits a button and students can access their grades.

I sent grade information in for all my classes by Wednesday of this week, so at this point, all students are able to see their Spring 2010 grades. Two days to get grades...we have come a long way since it took a month to get them.

I think most of our professors assume you know how to get the grades (this is what a College Experience course should teach you, among other things). If you do not, you can find the information on the College's Web site:
http://pccc.edu/prospective/registration/grades

Blogging with Word

2010-05-07T15:45:00.001-04:00

This blog is being done entirely in Word 2007 on my home computer. I've resisted using this so far because (as I've been discussing lately), sometimes retraining is hard for someone who is experienced with a tool. I am making a concerted effort to try to really use some of the new features.

I enjoy blogging (obviously - if I've been doing it here for four years). I typically use the Web interface to blog, but there are some advantages to using a new feature in Word 2007. Word 2007 will allow you to publish directly to many blog services, including Blogger (the site I use) and WordPress. For someone like me, who is familiar with the Web interface, this is not a big deal. However, let's take the case of a company that has no technical expertise. They want to add information to their Web site, and their Web person has integrated a blog in to their Web site (such as the site FutilityInfielder.com. Jay Jaffe (who I met a number of years ago at a Pizzeria Uno in NYC) has his blog set up through WordPress. He publishes directly to WordPress, and it shows up on his Web site. Many companies want this type of ability. The only problem is that Web blog publishing can be complex for a new user. A good Web developer could set up someone up with a Word 2007 blog and avoid the hassle. If the person knows Word 2007, all they would have to do is click on the Office Button and select "New", and then select "New Blog Post". The account setup only needs to be done once, so you could very easily give a less savvy customer a five minute demonstration and get them blogging. Now this user will have all the Word tools they are used to: spell check (with their custom dictionary), formatting tools, thesaurus, symbols, tables, and all the rest. Once they type the blog, all they need to do is click "Publish". Adding pictures becomes a little more complex to set up, but can also be automated. The ability to give a customer push-button blogging that integrates in to their Web site is a great little feature.

One other issue that I see is that sometimes, people want to keep a record of their blogs. For example, there was a site named Gaia that had a blog function. A colleague of mine was blogging there for a few years, and the site shut down. In order for her to save old blogs, it became a real pain. If one were to use Word 2007 to do this, they could very easily click "Save" and keep a local copy of all blog entries as they publish them.

Here are instructions on how to set this up: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA101640211033.aspx

What's also cool is if I make changes, I can just type them in to Word and click "Publish", and it knows to "Republish" rather than create a second entry.

Still haven't figured out how to add tags, but overall a nice feature.

New Blog Post

2010-05-04T18:10:00.001-04:00

This is a post demonstrating that you can "push-button" publishing from Word to a blog.

From XP to 7: new features part 2

2010-05-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

One of the new features in Windows 7 that I noticed was the addition of libraries. Windows 7 has introduced a feature that allows me to specify a group of directories as a library.

Let's go with an example. If you have a folder for music in your Documents folder. However, let's say you also download song files through a program like Ares. If you do that, you would typically have to move those files from the Downloads folder over to the Music folder in order for you to listen to the music.

Now, with the addition of Libraries, you can specify a number of folders that contain music, and simply browse to it. For example, under your Start Menu in Windows 7, you will see an area called "Music". This is a link to the library. This will show you music files in all folders that it recognizes as music folders. Right clicking on it and selecting it will allow you to add or remove folders from this list. You can do this for pictures, videos, and documents by default.

You can also create your own custom libraries. For example, I have three locations that I am typically using for school stuff. The locations are my downloads folder (where electronic files I need to check go), my documents folder (where I typically keep some information), and my desktop (where I put stuff I really don't want to forget).

It is also very cool that programs optimized for this (for example, most of the Office suite) can use these libraries as well.

Though you CAN include folders from an external hard drive, you can NOT include locations on a USB drive. That is one negative I have. If someone is technically proficient, it should not be a problem. For example, my USB drive is always assigned to a drive letter of "H". Any non-work USB drive gets "F". I think I understand why they wouldn't allow this - but there should be an option to override it. In my case, there will never be confusion between my main USB drive and others, and I think that is why Microsoft disabled this option. I wouldn't mind if it gave me all sorts of annoying warnings, if it allowed it.

Cool feature, though the USB drive being excluded is a bummer.

Link to more information (with pictures)

From XP to 7: Using the new features part 1

2010-04-27T14:34:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I went to a conference in the city and they demonstrated the new features of Windows 7. This got me thinking that I should start using the new features. Since I skipped Vista as an operating system, some of the things I am learning were new in Vista, and some are new in 7.

Here are some new features I am going to use:

Flip 3D: Since the old days, holding down the ALT key and hitting TAB was the way I switch between open programs. Windows 7 has a new feature called Flip 3D that is similar. If you hold down the WINDOWS key and hit TAB, you can switch between programs, except with a 3D effect. This is a very neat little feature that I will add to my bag o' tricks.
Windows+Arrow: I have two monitors at home. I have times where I want to switch things over to other windows, and I have thus far been dragging things from one monitor to another. Who knew I could simply hold WINDOWS and hit the RIGHT ARROW to move it to the screen on the right, and WINDOWS and LEFT ARROW to move back to the left screen. This is a pretty neat little feature that saves me some mouse clicks.
Problem Steps Recorder: There are times where I want to show people problems I am having, and I end up taking screen shots (using print screen). The problem is I then have to type up the steps and do work to show this. This tool will let me simply record step by step what I am doing, so I can create a report and just mail that with very little effort. I can imagine this is going to be a great tool for technical support professionals in the future as well. Link to more information

Interesting Computer Stuff Wayback Machine: 4/17/2010

2010-04-17T12:36:00.000-04:00

Trent at The Simple Dollar does this thing where he looks back and says "what was I doing at this time last year". I thought I might check it out for my blog and see what happens.

Wayback to one year ago (April 2009):
Just because security is an illusion doesn't mean you can't be safer
How readable is your Word document?
Nissan vs. Nissan
I discussed how motivated hackers can get in to most any system, and how your goal should be to not be the weakest link. I also discussed "readability statistics" in Word (which I recently demonstrated in my CIS 125 classes). I also discussed the case of Uzi Nissan, who owns Nissan.com and is constantly sued by Nissan, the car maker.

Wayback to two years ago (April 2008):
Secure, Random Passwords
What not to do in PowerPoint
People want passwords that are easy to remember. Sometimes, for security's sake, it is worth it to memorize a difficult password. PC Tools has a link that will create a difficult to hack, random password. And when I say "memorize", I don't mean "write it on a sticky note and put it on your monitor". I also had found a PowerPoint video that I still use today: "Life After Death by PowerPoint". This is a comedy routine that a comedian does to show common presentation mistakes.

Wayback to three years ago (April 2007):
Massacre of Virginia Tech
Wow. The College was in the middle of closings due to the flooding of downtown Paterson (sound familiar?), and the Virginia Tech shootings had just happened.

Wayback to four years ago (April 2006):
Hello World
The blog had not been created yet, but it was close. I started the blog on May 6, 2006 after attending a conference at NJCU.

Learning Technology

2010-04-14T11:55:00.001-04:00

One of the problems with teaching technology is that everything changes. Many times, people just sort of stick with the features they know and just look for the spot where that same feature is, rather than learning the new features of a program.

The most recent example I can come up with is Office 2007. People got very frustrated with a new interface, even if it is a simpler interface. One company even created a program to make Office 2007 look like Office 2003, and charges $30 for it. People will pay $30 to stick with the old interface! (To be fair, businesses don't like dealing with retraining, because it costs money).

This does go beyond new versions of software. I remember when I was in college, we were being taught the C programming language (something we computer people use to actually create computer programs). The college upgraded to a newer version of the language called C++, and I did not bother to take advantage of the new features. For those who know programming, C is designed to be procedure-oriented, while C++ is designed to be object-oriented. It took me years to gradually accept the object-oriented programming method.

The reason this is on my mind is because I went to a conference in the city last week, and they included a demonstration of Windows 7. I have had Windows 7 for a while at home as my primary operating system. I didn't realize how many features I haven't been using, because much like the programming days in college, I have been using Windows 7 like it was still Windows XP. I am planning on spending some time playing around with the new features this weekend and re-learning my behaviors a bit, because that's what a technology person should be doing, right?

Hacking Facial Recognition Software

2010-04-12T11:01:00.000-04:00

One thing that I see often in TV is facial recognition software. For example, in the current season of "24", Chloe O'Brien is able to very easily figure out who someone in based on the digital image of their face. The way these software programs work is similar (though not as advanced as in "24"). They take a facial image and scan it to determine what the features of the person are, and then compare that to a database of people's characteristics.

Of course, the easy way to beat this would be to wear a ski mask or something, but it would be way too obvious if you were walking around in public with one on. I often wondered if some sort of plastic surgery would make you harder or impossible to detect, and that certainly is an option.

However, a computer programmer was able to reverse engineer this software to find ways to beat it, in theory by using makeup patterns. He had three sets of images. The first set were basic images with no makeup, the second set was images with random patterns, and the third set were images that exploited what he considered potential weaknesses in the facial recognition software. His conclusions? The patterns he created all fooled the system, while the random patterns and the blank patterns did not fool the system.

His conclusion? The images represent potential anti-surveillance makeup.

Now, if someone was walking around with the makeup you see in the images, it might look weird still...but the potential is there. If someone can wear a weird makeup pattern and throw off these systems - well, these systems need to be more mature and figure these things out. I am sure the companies will say "well, no one is going to walk around with that makeup" publicly, while privately scrambling to find a fix.

Needless to say, if a graduate student came up with an idea like this...imagine what terrorists who do not want to be found will come up with.

http://ahprojects.com/c/itp/thesis

Probably Bad News

2010-04-07T14:58:00.000-04:00

If there is one thing I like, it is looking at the world around me and being amused by it.

Probably Bad News is a site that accepts user submission of bizarre and poorly worded newspaper, online, and television news reports. It's definitely worth a click, though it may not be safe for work!

probablybadnews.com

Animator vs. Animation

2010-03-31T23:42:00.000-04:00

This is an interesting use of Adobe Flash and also very creative.

Adobe Flash, of course, is the program that we use to create animations. Most home users have Adobe Flash Player installed, which allows them to view these animations (but not create them). Many companies like this feel they can give away the viewer, and if people actually want to design things with the program, charge for that.

The animation below is pretty cool because in my CIS 273 class, I teach Adobe Flash, and it's cool to look at an animation and just understand how it is done. My Web Graphics students, past and present, should understand how much work went in to this person's animation. Cool stuff!

Link to animation

Cat-proof your computer

2010-03-22T23:52:00.000-04:00

So, I ran across this site today and, it's interesting to say the least. You can buy software to cat-proof your computer. Really, for those cat owners out there, is this a problem worth software for?

I think my favorite feature is the one that detects cat-like activity, and plays a sound that annoys cats to chase it off of your keyboard.

This is not a joke, from what I can tell:

http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/

Professionalism and what they don't teach you in college

2010-03-15T02:17:00.001-04:00

All of a sudden, I feel like the committee that put together our schedule was brilliant. They scheduled it on the week of Daylight Saving Time, which gives us all a week to get used to the new time schedule. If it were planned, I would be impressed, but I do get the feeling it was not actually planned and is just a coincidence.

I was thinking about something this morning, and it has to do with professionalism, and how these things are not formally taught in a classroom. Specifically, I was thinking back to a moment about ten years ago, and how I personally didn't understand professionalism once I got in to the workplace. My first place of employment out of college was an Internet startup, and the standards there were, shall we say, lax. It was a rather informal environment, and it was a perfect adjustment for me coming out of college.

However, the Internet startup days were ending, and the company wasn't meant to succeed. Many of the employees saw the writing on the wall and started to look elsewhere for employment. A friend of mine worked at a place in Clifton, and I was hired there. It was quite a change. At Montclair State in graduate school, I remember we talked about this thing called COCOMO in a Software Metrics class, and we discussed how large companies and small companies differ. I understood that on a logical level, but going from a company of 40 people to a company of 40,000 (really) was a culture shock. Where I used to walk in to work in a football jersey and jeans, I now was expected to be in business casual attire. Where I was used to not needing to be in the door EXACTLY at 8:30 am if I didn't mind staying later, I now needed to be. Where I was used to being able to use the Internet at lunch time and at various points in the day to check personal email, it was now monitored and reported to supervisors. I struggled with this, because I was doing a good job, and I didn't see why this other stuff mattered.

There was building access at ITT 24 hours a day, and there were times I needed to come in during off-peak hours to work on things. I came in on a Sunday and worked 10 hours one day, because there was a limited number of systems we could use to test our software, and it made our lives easier. Since it was a Sunday, and there was rarely anyone else there, I didn't think it was a big deal to come in wearing jeans and a t-shirt. To make a long story short, one of the more established members of my department was also there, and told my boss, and he talked to me about it. Another time, I was working overnight for the same reasons as I mentioned before, and I brought in music and a radio. Since no one was around, I had the music playing loudly. A similar situation arose, where someone mentioned it to my boss. My reaction at the time was to wonder why these people were not minding their own business. However, I sort of understand it now. I had to drop my ego in order to really start to succeed in the business world. I dressed the way that was expected, acted as if someone were around, even if they were not, and generally tried to behave the way other people in the company were. I bristled at this, but it was my route to success.

I say this because I know employers complain about students sometimes, and the complaints typically are not about technical capabilities, but in the business savvy, or "soft skills". A friend of mine was recently laid off, and I know from my personal relationship that they can be somewhat abrasive and irresponsible. Companies, many times, make personnel decisions based on the way you fit in to a company. Even if they say that they are laying you off because of cut backs, many times that is just a way to fire someone without having to show cause. Things like dress code, business communication, taking constructive criticism...these are things that people are not necessarily taught. My feeling is that college should be part of that. When you as a student deal with a professor, it's a chance to practice interacting with a boss and authority figure. When you are in college, some of the things you can get used to that will help you professionally are timeliness, maturity, responsibility, and how to be less egocentric. These were some of things I had to learn, at least.

Other uses for Facebook

2010-03-09T23:13:00.000-05:00

We've been discussing Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter in my CIS 101 classes recently, under the guise of social networking. Business folks refer to the collection of technologies like social networking, wikis, etc. as "Web 2.0" content - more interactive Web pages.

Aside from the obvious uses, there are other things that these sites are used for. One thing that you have seen in certain areas is police departments asking for help. For example, in the link below, a New Zealand police department caught a thief by posting a security image on Facebook. This is an article from last year, but it's still an interesting application of social networking.

Link to Story

Watching TV on your PC

2010-03-03T12:12:00.000-05:00

I like watching TV shows, and I finally broke down and got a digital video recorder (DVR) at some point, because it was a pain to program my VCR to record all the shows I wanted to see (and yes, I said VCR).

I know many people like the idea of watching television on the PC, because you can do it from locations (like work), and you aren't on the network schedules. Hulu is a great site for this. It's free (advertising supported), legal, and lets you view episodes of many shows that have aired recently, even if you don't pay for a television package. Unlike sites like megavideo, you also don't have to worry about legal issues, time restrictions, and spyware.

www.hulu.com

If you are like me, you can also hook up an old PC to your television and use Hulu to watch shows on your TV. I took an old machine, wiped it out, put a basic operating system and security suite on it, and it's now my TV computer.

Finding Porn by Accident on Google

2010-02-25T12:08:00.000-05:00

When I teach Google to my CIS 101 classes, I find that many people have never even noticed the "Advanced Search" option, which allows you to use more advanced options (such as how recently the site was updated).

Likewise, when searching for images, there is an option to allow you to change how images are filtered. The default is for images to be filtered at a "Moderate" level, but you can switch this to more and less restrictive levels. If you switch the filtering off, you get some interesting results, to say the least.

Cracked.com (a Web site that may not be all that safe for work) had an article about this - they discuss nine seemingly innocent searches that end up with pornographic results on Google image search.

Read on unless you are easily offended.
Link to Cracked.Com Article

RIP Aquila Mouzone

2010-02-22T14:05:00.001-05:00

One of my students from Passaic, Aquila Mouzone, passed away last week. I have had former students die before, but this was especially sad because she was still in my class...I still had one of her tests to give back to her. I went to the wake last evening, and it was so sad to see. I am glad that the family had so much support.

RIP Aquila...

Free Stuff Contest - $100 Google AdSense Credit

2010-02-13T18:57:00.000-05:00

People always seem to wonder how Web sites make money. Much like television, much of the money comes from advertising. Large companies have enough staff to set up and maintain advertising relationships, but most small companies and one-person Web sites do not have the staff to do all that work. This is an excellent way for people to make money on the Internet, without needing a huge infrastructure.

One of the companies that does this type of advertising is Google. People who want to advertise with Google sign up through Google AdWords, and those advertisers pay for the services they want.

The other half of the equation is Google AdSense. Google AdSense is the site where people who have content (bloggers, small Web sites, etc.) can sign up. Google gives them the HTML code, and all the person needs to do is add that code to their site and ads show up.

Google, by being the "middle man", makes money connecting the two.

I participate in the Google AdSense system, in large part because when I teach these concepts, I can say that I know how to do them from experience. I don't have the traffic to make any real money off of it.

Anyway, Google recently sent me a letter that included a free $100 worth of Google AdWords advertising credit. I could advertise my blog, but I don't really see the sense in it, so I figured it might be nicer to give this advertising credit to someone who might actually have a use for it. This credit starts losing value after 3/5/10 and expires completely on 3/31/10, so you have to sign up and apply it to your account before that point.

This is open to students and non-students alike. To enter, just email me and tell me why you want it. Anyone with a Web site to advertise is eligible.

Since this is a limited time offer from Google, email me as soon as possible. Again, all I want is to see it go to good use.

Using Technology to Save Money

2010-02-08T10:06:00.001-05:00

Among other things, I like saving money. I brought this up in both of my CIS 101 courses, but when I look to buy things, I use the Internet to help me find some deals.
For example, rather than simply going to Staples to buy something, I check prices online. It's not worth my time to go visit 20 sites to get the best price, so my time is also a consideration. The best solution is to use one of the sites that do the work for me. Two such sites are PriceGrabber.com and Google Products (formerly called Froogle). Let's say I wanted toner for my home printer - a Samsung SCX 4100. If I go to PriceGrabber, I see the price on Staples is $95.39. However, if I were willing to go with another company, I could get it as low as $68.70. Not bad for a few minutes work! Now, in this case, the vendor with the low price is one I don't know, so I could also read merchant reviews on the site, and make a decision on how safe I want to be.

They also offer generic toner, so if I were willing to do that, I could get a generic cartridge for this device for $30.99. That is a savings of almost $65 from the original retail price, if I am willing to go with a generic cartridge. As a bonus, the retailer with the lowest price is one I am familiar with and one who has excellent reviews. If I needed toner, I'd go with the generic cartridge for that price.

I used toner as an example here, but you can try anything and see the results...a Nintendo Wii...a Panasonic VIERA 50" Plasma TV...an LG Refrigerator...Acqua Di Gio Cologne...a Fellowes Intellishred SB-99Ci Shredder...Note that not everything on the site has multiple vendors listed, but it is a good site to do some initial research. Remember - if there is a site you are not sure if you trust, read reviews, and feel free to make a decision from there. These sites do not discriminate between big sites (Dell, Staples, etc) and small sites, so all will be listed.

There are other places I go for other deals, but if there is something specific I am looking for, I usually start on PriceGrabber or Froogle.