Technology Bites!

Having a propular product can mean boon or bust for a software company. According to security firm McAfee (see report), Adobe will become the top target for hackers in 2010, surpassing Microsof Office products.

Hackers tend to attack the most popular products to achieve maximum impact. That usually makes Microsoft the primary target for exploit. But, Microsoft's dominance in some areas is dwindling. As other products reach levels that compare or surpass Microsoft's, they become exploit tools for hackers.

Adobe has acknowledged their products have seen an increase in attacks and have begun to respond by decreasing report-to-patch times. The products primarily used for exploits include Flash and Adobe Reader.

Adobe is not alone, other products experienced an increase in hacker exploit activity in 2009. Namely, Firefox and Apple's Quicktime.

2010 looks like it will be a busy year for anti-virus/security firms. A good New Year's Resolution would be to purchase good quality anti-virus/anti-spam/anti-malware tool (or tools) and schedule daily updates of your definition file(s). It may not be a "total" answer, but it might reduce a "bite" to a "nibble".

While reading articles via Google news, as I’m prone to do, I clicked on an article titled: Microsoft targets Linux, IBM with Windows Server for really small biz. My opinion of the article will be noted in my next article. It’s not so much the article itself, but computerworld.com that rubbed me wrong.

One tenant of designing web sites is not to muck around with the user’s computer. In the case of computerworld.com they seem to have forgotten that messing with the user’s desktop pisses them (ok me ) off!

It’s bad enough computerworld.com tries to throw-up a pop-up with each visit, but they change the size of my browser window too. Pop-up’s I tolerate, resizing my window is a no no. Needless to say, it’ll be a while before I return to computerworld.com.

Computerworld let Eric Lai cut an article titled: “Microsoft targets Linux, IBM with Windows Server for really small biz“. After reading the article I suspect Microsoft is using a BB Gun.

Essentially the article reads as though Microsoft has unleashed a killer OS for use by really small businesses called Windows Server 2008 Foundation. The product permits up to 15 users and comes without additional software. So, if you want to use it, you’ll need to buy a little bit more software to create your solution.

Still chuckling…

My favorite part was;

In a blog, Bilal Jaffery, a marketing manager for IBM Lotus Foundations, called the new rival product from Microsoft “a strategy to improve the [Microsoft] short term bottom line as it provides nothing new to the market … That only results in my business partners being able to close more deals by providing more credibility to the Linux revolution.”

Bilal hit it right on the head. This is a ploy to increase MS’s bottom -line. The reality is, they’ve ignored small (really small) businesses for a very long time. This has allowed Linux to squeeze into the small business space by necessity (the mother of invention) and lack of support.

I have to believe that MS will lose this battle. For most people that have made the switch to Linux, once they have a “handle on it” they won’t go back. Really who wants to use a stripped-down Windows Server limited to 15 users, when Linux is a free - enterprise quality OS that has no such limitation?

Perhaps MS should explore other areas they once deemed unprofitable for additional revenue sources.

Six months, or so, ago I was brow-beaten’ to remove Linux from our community computer (that’s the one everybody else in my house uses) and reinstall Windows. With great reluctance and a warning I complied. The warning; “If it gets infected, someone else in this house is going to learn how to install Windows. I’m done with it!”

I was greeted with a note from my daughter this morning;

Daddy, Would you please fix my computer.

My first thought was; “Thanks for the detailed explanation!” The second was; “Don’t make me work on a Windows machine today!”

Sunday is not a day I normally do computer repair. But, when it’s prefixed with “Daddy” and contains “please”, I’m compelled to comply. So, upstairs I go. She left the computer on. The monitor read; “Boot device failure”. Cool, that usually means a virus or the hard drive took a dump. So, I powered down the machine, waited a minute and restarted. Viola! It boots. No problem found. Nothing to fix right! I have my fingers crossed.

While working  on My machine this morning my wife decided to join me upstairs and search for employment. In the past 30 minutes, she’s mentioned 2 unexplainable pop-ups. So the community machine is likely infected with malware and who knows what else.

If they had stuck with Linux, there’d be no motivation for this post! Looks like my daughter’s gonna;

• learn how to eradicate malware and viruses from Windows
• or learn how to reinstall Windows
• or learn Linux and suck-it-up!

Learning new things is good right!

I work creating and maintaining  websites and applications. Seems like everything on the ‘net gets cached at some point. It can be a real P.I.T.A. to keep track of where cache is created, when to clean it and when to leave it alone.

Some of the sites I care for are CMS based. Don’t get me wrong, I think CMS’s are great. They save a lot of time and keep the content separate from the design elements. Which makes life easier. Some however, have caching built-in. And the built-in caching actually works from a performance stand-point. What bites, is the necessity to periodically clean the cache. With tens of thousands of cache files, just getting the cache display page to load takes forever. Deleting the files takes time too and it’s never a single-pass operation.

Also many sites are PHP based. PHP can be setup to cache as well. Can’t say I’ve had a problem with PHP’s caching system, nor have I found it necessary to clean that cache content. Kudos to the PHP implementation.

When we deal with the web we also have to remember the browser caches pages too. That’s ok, so long as the page never changes or the user knows how to clear their cache when a page reloads with old data. Personally, I change the cache settings in my browser to keep cache for a very short period of time. It helps me avoid the <control><reload> (or <control><refresh> in IE) thing. In my life, I need to see a lot pages after changes and cache gets in my way.

Cache has it’s value, it helps make the browsing experience faster. But, they’re little trails of dirt. At some point, it has to be cleaned-up.

Ever wonder how much of your web audience uses dial-up? Want to know what it feels like to use an old 56k modem again? Scarey huh?

I’ve been reading lately about how webmasters have forgotten that there are still people using dial-up and that we proceed to create sites that are slow for dial-up users. This, of course made me curious.

It would be nice to say; “Put a crow-bar in your wallet and spend a little more for broadband”. But, realistically, broadband’s not available everywhere. So, I thought I’d test how miserable it really is. Try yourself; Here’s a site that emulates a 56k modem - http://www.optiview.com/POV/task,ov4modemdemo/parse.html.

Very few of the sites I have responsibility for (120+), regardless of design, loads in under 45 seconds via 56k modem. A quick run through my GA stats suggests 10 percent or less access via dial-up.

Yes, dial-up is really as slow as I remember! Ouch!!

From a webmaster’s perspective, with stats that low, it’s a minor issue that barely merits concern. Unless modems make a come-back, I’m not going to concern myself with “the dial-up experience” any longer.

As far as I am concerned: People using dail-up need to stop belly-aching about slow sites, purchase another pack of patience, or stop surfing the web!

This has been an interesting week in the Information Technology landscape. Steve Balmer has stated “Vista is a work in progress”, Apple reports a 50% increase in computer sales and Ubuntu releases it’s latest distribution of Linux for desktops and servers.

Admitting your product is a work in progress must be a hard pill to swallow. Considering the 5 years between releases of Windows. It takes a lot of nads to tell the public that the product you released a year ago is incomplete. I hope management at Microsoft didn’t expect the statement to be well received by their customers. Charging people people for incomplete product sounds a little like a rip-off to me.

Apple is reaping the benefits of Windows Vista. In large part due to the well documented issues with Vista. Are the problems with Windows Vista leading to Microsoft defectors? A 50% increase in computer sales at Apple could be an indicator a defection is in progress.

Ubuntu’s web server and several of the mirrors are so busy today, I keep getting 503 or Server Too Busy errors trying to download the latest version. Perhaps Ubuntu didn’t plan for as many people to hit their sites all at once. On the other hand, perhaps this is another sign of people looking for alternatives to Microsoft Windows.

Back in Microsoft’s shoes, it must be a little scary. Other operating systems seem to be challenging Microsoft’s dominance. With a not-so-stellar offering of Vista, it could be the beginning of real competition for the desktop OS market. Microsoft might actually have to share the market with others for a change. Scary for them, great for the consumer.