May
02
2009
Of all the titles I could apply to myself, the sexiest sounding would probably be “hacker.” Hackers are, at their core, people who just aren’t satisfied with the default state of the world around them. We see something that’s less than what it could be, and we try to fix or “hack” it. Like most hackers, my worldview has always been slightly skewed in this way, to always look at broken things and desire to fix them. On a small scale, this can mean taking apart toasters, jailbreaking your iPhone, or reading binaries in hex. On larger scale, fixing what is broken can mean starting a foundation to find a cure for AIDS, discovering tomorrow’s ubiquitous energy solution, or creating the next social web phenomenon. The truest hackers find joy in the process, not necessarily the solution, so tinkering to our own needs is often sufficient. However, when the needs of particularly Jedi-like hacker meets the needs of the greater community, amazing things can happen.
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Tags: hacking, inspiration, philosophy, ponderings, quotes
Posted in Articles and Op Eds
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Mar
24
2009
(You can skip all this emotional gobbledy-gook below by going below the fold)
Starting from when I first started playing around with making websites, I had dreams of owning my own dot com website. Initially, I was just using Front Page to place some files onto a free web account, which I believe was on Lycos’ Tripod, now out of business. Later a friend of mine who owned a dedicated server was nice enough to give me a little space, and I continued to play with these emerging technologies. Only this time, I didn’t have ads on my page!
While I was excited by the prospect of having my own websites, the strongest description I could give to these efforts is “dabbling.” In college, however, I returned to my old curiosity and started to code HTML by hand. Unlike before, I now had access to awesome computers all over my campus and a smokin’ broadband internet connection, as well as one tiny programming course under my belt. I dove right on in and became immersed. Armed with 100 MB on my college’s web server and the kind help of my college webmaster, I had free reign to learn HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, etc etc.
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Tags: bookmarklets, javascript, projects, sourcecode, utilities
Posted in ThatsSoMeta
2 Comments »
Sep
10
2008
It has been a week since Google released their addition to the web browser market, Google Chrome. In case you’ve been in a coma for the last seven days or turned off the RSS feeds for any tech site on the internet (I wouldn’t blame you), Chrome is based on WebKit, the same spectacular rendering engine behind Safari, Adobe AIR, the Google Android browser, the iPhone, and a few other projects. Also, much like WebKit, Google is open sourcing almost all of the work that they’ve done on the browser, including new additions to the framework like their Javascript virtual machine called V8. They have also included a way for outside developers to contribute to the project via Google Chromium. This is to be commended in my view, because many other open source projects sponsored by big companies, do not allow developers to contribute to the product.
Google has released this product only for Windows users, for now, but they intend to release versions for Linux and Mac. This is to be expected of course, since WebKit is, after all, largely developed by Apple and we’ve seen ports of the engine ported to Linux in some upcoming projects. The real problem right now is that they’re trying to finalize UI (user interface) and integration designs, which, quite frankly, I don’t mind them taking their sweet time on. Too often, open source projects get way too excited about the idea of the project, rather than the people who will be using it, and, as a result, user interface in open source projects falls to the wayside. To be clear, this is purely my opinion, but I strongly believe that software is inspiring and worth spending my life studying, using, and making because of people, not in spite of them.
Now, I know that this post, so far, is off topic from my stated mission of helping you with your computer problems. I promise that I am working on a way to make many, many more tips available, in shorter write-ups, so you’ll see more content coming at you soon. However, I was so interested by Google’s efforts in Chrome and what it could mean for the rest of us, and was so frustrated by journalists’ coverage of the event, that I felt compelled to put my thoughts out there. So, here goes.
Following the advice of Henry McCracken, formerly of PC World and now founder of Technologizer, you can put almost anything in a list, so why not my contentions? Here are my problems with most news analyses of Google Chrome.
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Tags: browsers, chrome, google, news, op-ed
Posted in Articles and Op Eds
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Aug
27
2008
For the first few years of my life on a computer, I knew almost nothing about security. I built my first desktop PC at age 15 and I loved it. I was cheap, so I put Windows XP Home on it, ignoring the warnings of my older and wiser geek friend about XP Professional vs Home. I turned it on, happily clicked the seemingly-smiling blue E icon on my desktop, and blazed about the interweb on my 56K connection. I paid no intention to passwords, firewalls, antivirus software (I knew about it, but remember, I was cheap), or anything resembling safe browsing habits. Several nasty trojans and something called the “Zlob worm” later, I started to take what you might call a mild interest in security.
Almost 7 years later, I have become a security freak and find myself evangelizing about the latest and greatest security practices and products. Security Now on the TWiT Podcasting network is one of my favorite podcasts and an excellent resource for the security-concious. However, it was only until recently that I started taking the notion of secure passwords seriously. While I have certainly changed my outlook on the value of computer security, I have stayed cheap, and I have been extremely reluctant to spend money on a good password generation and management application such as RoboForm or 1Password. Yet, as of late, I have found a great way to manage and create secure passwords within one’s browser. And it is free.
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Tags: bookmarklets, internet, keylogging, passwords, security, utilities
Posted in Articles and Op Eds
4 Comments »
May
10
2008
So I was listening to Buzz Out Loud yesterday and it was mentioned that one of the listeners received his email from his Internet Service Provider (ISP), but was incredibly disappointed when his ISP’s email servers failed and they did not have a backup! Of course, this meant that he had lost his email with no recourse to get it back. This got me thinking as to how one could backup his/her email to another service in case of a massive fail by an ISP. As I started to do some research around this, I realized that the easiest resource was staring me in the face as I checked my own email: Gmail!
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Tags: backup, email, gmail, google, just in case, storage
Posted in Tutorials
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