Hey! Just where exactly have you been??

Whew, well I've been busy lately....sorry. I've been debating whether or not I should move to a "real" host or not. And this week I found the need. The fact I need a commercial web service to test web applications and such has prompted me to turn to godaddy.com. They do have some pretty decent packages and hosting has come down a lot since I last looked. I was going to just run a server from home but knowing our connection well.... let's no go there.

The new address for the blog and other projects is http://momentsindigitallife.com, no major drama hey? Like always, I have a lot of plans on what I want to do with the site but we will have to see if they can be achieved. I think for the blogging side of things I will just be running WordPress but the problem is that all of the themes that I have found look bloody horrid and the same. Hmmm I'm not sure I can be bothered dicking about with a CMS these days, so I might see about a custom theme.

So I'm sorry if you just started reading this blog and are pissed that everything on here is changing but believe me, it's for the better! Hopefully the new site will have a clearer direction and it will be a little more on topic and informative, rather than pointless ranting and raving. And so, I bid thee farewell and hope to see you soon at the new site. Thanks for reading.

http://momentsindigitallife.com
See you there soon :)

phpitter, a Twitter app for linux.

Okay so there is only going to be few people as excited about this as I am but you can probably skip this post if you aren't interested in Twitter or Linux for that matter. I received a tweet last night (actually it was early this morning...) about a Twitter app for linux. I thought it would be some buggy AIR alpha release or a hobbled together resized window web interface. Fortunately it's not and it is awesome. It's built with php and gtk, runs standalone and it doesn't need a standard web browser window to do its job.

The application is called phpitter. At the moment it is still under heavy development, the developer Ryan Hadley has only been working on it for about five days (on the bus ride mind you). The interface is clean simple and easy to use. What's more, for the true geek in us, it spits most of the information out to the terminal, if you don't want to run it as a background process that is.

A few features that stand out are:
* A pop-up or splash screen that appears when you hover over an avatar, you get the username, their Twitter nick, location, bio, website link and follower count. I was glad this feature was available because the main application window only returns the users full name rather than the nick which is helpful for @ replies.
* If you have the libnotify-bin package installed, tweets that come in are put into notification windows so you don't have to have the whole phpitter window open all of the time.
* On the lower left there is combo box that let's you display all of the tweets or just the @ replies. Handy for when you were asleep or out and missed something that was directed towards you.
* Links are clickable. No big issue here but I'm glad it's there as twitter can turn into a link fest, great for disrupting study or going off in tangents.
* The ability to send direct messages and retweet. No real need for an explanation there.

Overall phpitter is a great application, there are a few bugs but only minor ones. For such a young app it is pretty encouraging that it hasn't fallen over yet or spat out any error messages, or showed any signs that it might. Actually it did give me one error message but that was before I installed the libnotify package which can be remedied in Ubuntu with a simple:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

It will be interesting to see what happens when Scobleizer and Co. get chatty again.

If you are interested you can get phpitter here (screenshots as well):
http://code.google.com/p/phpitter/

You probably will need to install a few dependencies, Ryan documents the install process (Ubuntu) here:
http://code.google.com/p/phpitter/wiki/UbuntuHowto

Enjoy.

Marketing Turnaround.

I used to hate online advertising. I blame it on the so called Web 1.0. In the earlier days of the internet. I didn't mind the occasional ad splashed onto a web page here and there, they started of plainly with a nice and quiet static advertising space. But as soon as someone found and used the blink tag, things definitely came to grow ugly. Add to that if you will, a scrolling marquee and a host of flashing and annoying fit inducing animated gifs not to mention absolutely horrid abuses of gaudy fonts and colours then you have what I remember online advertising Web 1.0 style to be.

As the face of online marketing began to change the bigger companies seem to realise that there was actual revenue to be gained by allowing part of their marketing division to investigate the possibilities of actually making a return on this new form of media. The bigger companies quickly seemed to realise that hideously annoying flashy-blinky-bleeping things were not the way to go.

Everything was going good for a while..... and then along came flash. Awesome a new way to deliver flashy-blinky-bleeping things that can contain a longer more repetitive message and that can also implement real time human interaction. I don't have a problem with flash mind you, I have a problem with the trend that it brought with it. Flash based sites, bandwidth boggers (yes by the way, I am making some of these terms up as I go...) all started appearing. Who really wants to sit around waiting for something to render on a page only to be greeted with a shitty flash ad that bears little resemblance to the site theme (content or appearance wise).

And then came the spam, spyware, malware, badware etc. In my opinion all of these problems rose because of the sheer value and profit that could be attained from using the internet as an advertising platform. From that first bit of spam that hit usenet to companies doing shady deals with spam creators and software developers, these are the reasons I detested online advertising. For further detestation (yeah that's my word.... leave it alone) companies started tracking users all over the net with data mining and recording user habits.

When all of this began there weren't any of the current privacy laws or safe guards in place. This led to some of the more questionable marketing entrepreneurs capitalising on this and they started trading personal information as a commodity amongst partners or to the highest bidder. What concerned me is what did the companies actually do with all of this information? Why would want them to have my information to trade with other parties that I haven't even heard of let alone read their privacy policy? I kept hearing cries of targeted marketing but I can't say that I once ever saw it implemented well without it turning into spam or off the mark affiliate adverts. But hey, what I consider spam you could very well called thoughtfully placed advertising and vice versa no doubt.

So that brings me to current day. There was a fair gap I just brushed off then but there is not much to be said other than there was more of the same. It is now in this so called Web 2.0, that things seemed to have worked themselves out. We now have an emphasis on privacy policies, end user license agreements, terms of service agreements, terms of service etc. Unfortunately though It must be said that there is only a small percentage of users that actually endeavor to read them. All of these binding and non-binding agreements together with a legal system that has had to think on its feet while this still young form of media evolves has resulted in a remarkable turnaround in the quality and content of online marketing.

One of the main defining turns it seems for online marketing was the increasing popularity of social networks. Ads on social networks seem to scale fairly well and most of them aren't annoying or distracting. While the spam level has not subsided it has become somewhat manageable (just). But the actual on site advertising has become refined, defined and well targeted. I no longer mind opening a page up and seeing a few ads unobtrusively placed about the page. I no longer want to pull my eyes out with a fork because the page is full of flashy-blinky-bleeping things. It seems that online advertising has caught up, nice to see. I even take adblock plus off half the time now, yay for me.

Net Neutrality.

I was just listening to the latest Security Now netcast (139), and I was surprised to hear them talking about Network Neutrality. I was just recently clearing crap off of my hard drive and came across one of the best Net Neutrality videos that I have seen. Needless to say that this stayed on my drive and after that I got side tracked and started researching the current state of the argument. Unfortunately or well I couldn't dig up much recent information so I'll just put up the video. Grab yourself a chair, a coffee or a beer and enjoy... well maybe enjoy is a poor choice of word....
This video is pretty old now so some of you have probably seen it before, but I think everyone should see it and question what it means to them (if anything...). I understand and respect the fact that whatever the outcome it will make no difference to everyone. But to those of you that feel strongly about this, help spread the word and make people aware of the situation.

Runtime is approx. 10 mins.

Security: Educate The Uneducated.

I posted this earlier today as a comment to an article I found here: [nobosh.com]
"No matter what network restrictions you put in place or what security policy you try to implement you can never protect the user against themselves. With social networks growing there is a rise in link sharing and email forwarding, not to mention drive by downloads and iframe trickery and the like that sit quietly on infected web pages. You can lock a whole network down as tight as you can, but you can never protect yourself fully from an uneducated user. Social engineering is still the biggest risk (in my opinion) to most networks, the more users the more risk. I guess my point here is that an educated user that can be trusted not to abuse policies and privileges is the best security tool."
Another user asked "How do we educate users?".
Good question.
My reply was in reference to a business environment setting where you would have departmental policies as access control restriction set. It was only after I wrote another response I realised that he might be talking about users in general.
There is such a broad scope of people that use the internet these days that it would be impossible to educate everyone and just plain stupid to try. The thing is that, most of those people don't want to be bothered hovering over a link and seeing where it goes, they definitely won't be bothered using something like noscript to block scripts from being run or executed.
I think the general public want the one app that does everything.... which is unfortunate because all of the ones that claim to do everything.... well, sure they can do everything, but there is nothing that they can do well. So for now we are going to have to stick to auto updating and integrity checking, but that's not so hard is it? Just click an allow button once in a while if you are pedantic like me and liked to be notified of all network activity.
That brings me to another point, which is how users cope with "learning" firewalls. I've seen a lot of people with the best intentions of reading the alerts constantly only to get sick of it after a couple of days and absent mindedly clicking "Allow" as soon as it pops up. To this I don't think there will ever be a remedy, especially if all of the users of that computer aren't aware of what do. You all know the sound, "Hey (insert name here), there's this thing on the screen that says blah blah. Should I click allow or deny? (insert name here)?". I'm not saying that everybody should be a geek and know exactly what they are doing, but rather every user should have at least some idea what the protection software wants them do do.
You could stand on a hill and yell "Free beer for everyone that keeps their software patched and up to date!" and still not everyone would do it, granted some may prefer wine or spirits but that's hardly the case. The truth is... most people don't care. They just want to use their computer and get on with their lives. I have nothing against that and to a large degree think that's how it should be. All I ask is that if you are knowledgeable about this pass this knowledge on to your freinds and co-workers. Set up their firewalls / IDS/ AV software / malware / spyware / detection / registry backup / patch schedule / OS updates / and whatever else they need (whew, just kidding).
When it comes down to it, help them once to avoid having to help them many times... if you get my drift.

Old friends, ridiculously good looking people and the long road home.

Ok, so I was just about to start this entry but someone just called who had been infected with a new type of malware variant. So I am off to go and see if I can grab a sample and send it off to http://offensivecomputing.net.
I am also using a new blogspot plugin called Zemanta so I want to have a bit of a play with that before I post again. I am also thinking of removing outbrain that was more of just a play around anyway. Let me know what you think either way if you feel it necessary.
So for the moment I would just like to thank everyone that I caught up with for a great time and I hope you all woke up better than I did on Sunday...... definitely NOT really, really, really ridiculously good looking. As I mentioned in my status updates, I had a hangover that would have brought down an elephant.

Word For The Day

Today I'm starting a new blog section, word for the day. It's just an entry containing a word, a definition and how it should be used for that particular day or days thereafter. Most of these definitions will be taken from here [Merriam-Webster Online].

And so to get started, here is the first Word For Today:

Vehement

vehement

Main Entry:
ve·he·ment Listen to the pronunciation of vehement
Pronunciation:
\ˈvē-ə-mənt\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin vehement-, vehemens, vement-, vemens
Date:
15th century

: marked by forceful energy : powerful as a: intensely emotional : impassioned, fervid b (1): deeply felt (2): forcibly expressed c: bitterly antagonistic
— ve·he·ment·ly adverb

Usage for today:
I vehemently despise facebook application request spam.

Well, that's it for today. I'm sure there will be many more. If you have any ideas let me know and I will be glad to include them. Have a nice day.