Readers looking for Computer tips are requested to skip this post. Having found that That Damn PC has become a victim of blog fraud, it is my duty to alert the community.
Blogging is increasingly being seen as a sustainable model of income. Where money is involved in large sums, there is also fraud. Problogging is perhaps at too early a stage to discuss at length about blog fraud, but there’s undoubtedly an upward trend in these cases.
A blog with too many advertisements, IMHO, isn’t a fraudulent blog. It is simply a bad idea, and sometimes not altogether bad either.
Here are three common types I’ve come across:
Fake Blogs: The Internet provides a mask for users, allowing them to lurk anonymously. This is true in the case of blogs as well, though less frequently. While bloggers using a fake name isn’t necessarily fraudulent, nor is it unlawful by default, there are instances where fake bloggers abuse their anonymity to defame or injured or cheat organizations or people or readers.
Sell-out Blogs: Affiliate blogging means selling products through blogs, which is good because the sale often comes through a feature overview and a review, and the reader can make a decision based on that. But unlike salesmen who believe in the product they sell, sell-outs have a pride in selling even trash. Sell-out bloggers excessively do affiliate blogging, providing positive reviews to each product they come across.
Pseudo Blogs: While sell-out bloggers take pains in creating original content, however untrue that might be, pseudo bloggers have tons of content all of which is dutifully lifted from elsewhere. The shrewder psuedo blogs post content taken from other not-so-popular blogs so that readers don’t easily recognize the content. Some take a step further and make disclaimers that they mostly pump feeds from various blogs across the World wide web. However, no acknowledgements nor links to the original source are ever made, unless by accident.
You can help curb blog fraud. When you suspect a blog as fraudulent, raise an alert in any open forum. The best remedy is to inform the original source if possible.
A friend of mine once defined the tiniest measurable period of time as the time between you sending a mail and then remembering that you forgot making the attachment. How many times have we clicked “Send” without adding the attachment? A few of the instances may have been humiliating as well. If only there was a way.
I’ve trained myself to add the attachments before composing the mail and to fill the address fields after composing the mail. Just so that I would neither forget an attachment, nor send to the wrong person. You could try that, or an easier way is to use an attachment reminder.
An attachment reminder is a easy function that makes one pass across the text in your composed mail searching for the substring “attach” (and perhaps common spelling mistakes around “attach”) and gives you an error message if you haven’t made an attachment. These are tiny apps (rather plug-ins) and you will be able to find one for most email clients with a straight-forward search.
Following are three widely used ones.
1. Forgotten Attachment Detector: Gmail’s attachment reminder. Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Labs. Scroll down a bit to find the feature and enable it.
2. Outlook Attachment Reminder: Mark Bird’s attachment reminder is an Outlook macro that you can easily add following the instructions in the attachment reminder’s home page.
3. AttachmentRemember: This Thunderbird attachment reminder is an add-in (.XPI) with a wide range of features (custom words and sentences to scan) and is available in multiple languages.
Let me know if you have trouble with any of these attachment reminders.
How do you shut down your computer? How do you restart it? What about your monitor? How do you eject and close the tray of your CD/DVD drive? If “push button” is the category under which your answer for any of these falls, now is as good a time as any to change that habit.
The reason isn’t far-fetched. Push buttons have a very limited life as compared to that of a mouse. The mouse is built to be abused by humans. Moreover, push buttons are usually a part of something complex, and getting them repaired is more cumbersome and could end up costing more than a new mouse.
1. Personal: These days, the power button can be used to shut down the system. But the “Start -> Shutdown -> Turn Off” or its equivalent is not convoluted either. Same with the restart button provided. Frankly, I’m especially suspcious about the restart push button, as suspsicious about any spineless creature.
Hello everybody. I’m Sravan, the new guy on That Damn PC. I love personal and make a living with them. I’ve learnt a lot about them over the last several years, especially about Personal computers, and I would like to share them here with you.
As someone with more hands-on experience with software than hardware, you may find me concentrating more on software, security, and general troubleshooting. That, however, doesn’t mean I won’t cover hardware at all.
I encourage you all to post any doubts you might have and I will try my ideal to get you an answer. I’m not an expert in any of these, but there’s a good chance I might know them. Even if I don’t, I’ve the interest and patience to dig deeper for an answer. We will see what can be done.
The regular readers might have gotten used to Kiven’s and later Jesse’s style. It will take a while for you all to get used to my style, and for me to get a grasp of their content in the archives. While I promise to try my best, you might find some posts overlapping with the older ones. Pardon such slips, but please point them out to me.
Recently got hold of an ACER Aspire One, ACER’s landmark device that marks its entry into the ultraportable market. So there they’re with the likes of HP and ASUS. One thing’s weird though. In the tech specs of the Aspire, it states that with the bundled 1GB of RAM composed of two sticks of RAM, one half is actually soldered into the device while the other 512MB is expandable. Now here’s the thing - the RAM is expandable to a MAXIMUM of 1GB which means that you have an odd assembly of 1.5GB of RAM for an ultraportable. Damnit! Why create expandability options that only grant for half a gigabyte?
ALSO …. there seem to NOT be any way to remove the RAM chip and tampering may actually - *we’re speculating* - void the warranty.
As an IT guy, I very rarely leave my cell phone, laptop, Blackberry or other computer-related device behind. I hate the though of going somewhere without being connected to the rest of “my world”. The internet is supposed to be a never-ending place. And I never want to be without it just in case it does end. I would have to be the first to hear it.
When I started at Rohm and Haas, I was without a phone, desk, computer or login accounts for 3 days. This was one of the strangest feelings I’ve had since learning to drive a automobile, or the first time I partied too hard in college. It wasn’t fun. Sure, I wasn’t stuck over a toilet or driving like a granny, trying to not go over the speed limit, but it was nearly painful.
I’m used to being connected to anyone and everyone at the push of a button. Now, I had to pre-plan what route I was going to take (no Google Maps), who I might need to call (no company directory at hand) and what I had to do (no Blackberry connected to my datebook). I think in the end though, it was good for me. I learned over the past couple months to not always stare at my email, respond to them in near real-time and to live on the World wide web (especially Twitter) day in and day out.
With this, I ask you, do you have nomophobia? If so, what do you think you should do about it? Face your fears or live with it?
eWeek had a great article/annoying slide show about the top 10 security risks that your users pose to your organization. One interesting thing I noted was with all of the increases in security (firewalls, IPS/IDS, NAC, password hardening, etc) in today’s organization, most of these are not even looked at.
Think about the easy of someone to walk out with their laptop and have it lost on the train (with not encryption)… Or someone with P2P software on their machine (that is sharing out their entire C drive)… Or worse yet, wifi (without separating it from the rest of the network) that isn’t secured with WPA2… Oh the horror!
USB Flash Drives
Laptops
P2P
Web Mail
Wi-Fi
Smart Phones
Collaboration Tools
Social Networks
Unauthorized Software Updates
Virtual Worlds
What are some of the other security risks you can think of that companies face?
Why, even the huge dogs (read: companies) still have very “small” IT departments. No, I don’t mean they have tiny people or even a small number of people — they do have a small-group feeling, though. Having recently switched from a company of a few thousand to one of tens of thousands of people, I’ve learned something very quickly…
Every company out there has to run about the same way. Sure, a publicly traded company has rules and regulations they must follow but when it comes down to the real work, it takes small teams of people to get the jobs done.
Take for example, a recent need — a few switches installed in a data center. These weren’t production switches but they were being used for development and testing, so they were no laughing matter. Rather than the normal steps:
Submit a ticket (with a difficult system)
Wait for a reply from the helpdesk (shouldn’t take more than 2 hours for them to type in a ticket)
Speak to the person the ticket is assigned to (good luck reaching them by phone, email or telepathy)
Go back and forth with IT and the group that needs the switches (because IT likes to feel real important)
Order the parts (even though they exist somewhere else in an old storage area)
Wait for an outtage window (that isn’t necessary because it’s not production)
Have the switches installed and tested (that means, make sure the lights are on)
The way that a good IT department handles it is by skipping steps 3-6. In most organizations, that just saved 2 weeks worth of waiting time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very important to keep track of what everyone is working on. It’s even more important to test things, especially if they might impact something else. But it’s not always necessary for IT to put up a tough image that says, “I am IT and I can put you off and make you wait for my help because you’ve no option.”
Next time, the finance or HR guy needs a bit of help, keep in mind, you have to give a little to get a tiny — And sometimes, acting little isn’t always bad either.
Number 1, we picked the name for the confessional — correction, you picked the name for the confessional — and it will be…
The IT Confessional
I know, you’re all surprised and excited. I know I am. The second piece to this post is what you’re all want to hear. Who won the contest?
The winner of this particular contest is Kevin Potter for his awesome, “Is that a large or tiny zero?” story! I’ll be contacting Kevin (or superior yet, if he wants to email me at jesse.middleton at b5media dot com) to get him his KB.
I want to thank everyone who posted and emailed in their stories, they were a great read and many of them will be used to form some, hopefully, pleasing posts at That Damn PC.
Keep checking back for me and sending your stories in.
Image via WikipediaThis is just a swift rant. Meets are a pain in the butt. I mean, sometimes it’s necessary to meet and speak about a project or get people up to speed on the latest information. We have them each week for the bloggers and our group and I usually held a network meeting each week at my last company but to have meetings to decide what will be accomplished at the next meeting is rediculous.
People who set these types of meetings up — and you know who you are — stop it! Email and IM are great tools to collaborate while getting work done. A swift, “Who will do the research on the new cat toy?” email will do wonders. It doesn’t take blocking out 30 minutes of someone else’s time to decide on this.
Oh yeah, and when the research comes in, email it out to the group before the meeting. It’s of almost no use if people have to thumb through 30 pages of junk at a meeting table before they have the ability to even begin to talk. Archives, message boards, wikis and more are great tools that businesses and groups of people should not take lightly. They’re productivity tools for a reason. They increase it.
As an IT guy, I very rarely leave my cell phone, laptop, Blackberry or other computer-related device behind. I hate the though of going somewhere without being connected to the rest of “my world”. The internet is supposed to be a never-ending place. And I never want to be without it just in case it does end. I would have to be the first to hear it.
Take for example, a recent need — a few switches installed in a data center. These weren’t production switches but they were being used for development and testing, so they were no laughing matter. Rather than the normal steps:
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