Please Use Protection

Last week we did this thing at work called “Tech Check” (or TekChek, or TechCzech, or something hip-but-actually-not) and I got to help a lot of new students try to get their systems to a minimum standard of functionality for their school year.

This was eye-opening. Viciously eye-opening.

The quantity of people who should be computer literate who were running wildly out of date systems with no anti-virus and no admin password was astounding. It was a combination of not knowing that they should and not knowing how to do so. I am not going to go into details about why these things are important, just quick, easy instructions on how to do it.

So, for anyone who’s reading this, I’m asking you to now, please, for the love of all that’s holy (or not), install A/V and updates and make sure that your user account has at least something for a password. Even if you’re using a Mac, you need to keep your system up to date and have a password.

Windows Instructions

1. Open Internet Explorer and go here: http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate. Follow the prompts to install all available updates. Go there over, and over, and over until it says there are no updates left to install. Reboot as many times as necessary. Then go there again, just to make sure.
2. Get anti-virus. If you want great protection, you have to buy it and this is the one I recommend: Eset NOD32. Purchasing a good A/V solution is extremely important if you are using your computer for business at all, and Eset NOD32 provides discounts for multiple computers or multiple years. Please do this right now. If you were unwilling to pay the “extra” money for a Mac, this is one of the costs you chose to bear. If you are unable to shell out $40 / year for a great solution, here’s an adequate, free solution: Avast! Home Edition. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. Note: lots of businesses and schools will provide anti-virus to their employees, students, etc. Often this will be pre-configured to download updates, run in the background, etc., and may never require you to purchase a license. Check with your employer or school.
   
3. Give yourself a password: Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and click the button that says “Change password”. It is important that you remember what this password is, so make it memorable. Make it your drivers license number, or your license plate number, or your insurance policy number, or something else that you can have written down that doesn’t look like your password. Here’s an idea: pick something in your wallet that expires regularly, and use something from that (your insurance policy expiration date, for example). Then, every time that expires and you have to get a new one, change your password to reflect the new information.

Mac Instructions

1. Click the Apple logo in the upper left corner and choose “Software Update…” Install all available updates, reboot if necessary, and keep checking until there are no updates left to install.
2. Give yourself a password. Click the Apple logo and choose “System Preferences”, then click “Accounts”, your account should be highlighted with a button that says “Change Password”. It is important that you remember what this password is, so make it memorable. Make it your drivers license number, or your license plate number, or your insurance policy number, or something else that you can have written down that doesn’t look like your password. Here’s an idea: pick something in your wallet that expires regularly, and use something from that (your insurance policy expiration date, for example). Then, every time that expires and you have to get a new one, change your password to reflect the new information.

Please remember that this is just a base level of security meant only to deter the casual intrusion – kinda like wiring your bike to the bike rack. It’s not going to protect you from someone who is dedicated, but it should help you from being one of millions of people who get pwned just because it was so easy.

Also, feedback is always welcome. If you want more instructions for making your computer safe, let me know and I’ll write more documentation.

UPDATE: Eset has a free online virus scanner.

Getting in Sync

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of information in a lot of places – personal email, personal computer, work email, work computer, iPhone, etc. Today I decided to spend some time figuring out how to connect them all together to keep my information in sync and accurate. Mostly anyway.

While the primary goal was to get all of my data in sync, the secondary goal was to protect my data from loss or exposure.

Here’s what I’ve done:

• Work PC (Outlook) syncs email & work calendar with Work Server (Exchange 2007)
• Work PC (Outlook) syncs work calendar with Google Acct using Google Calendar Sync
• Google Acct syncs all calendars (work, home, holidays) with iPhone using Google Sync for Mobile, (which, stupidly, only does calendars and contacts)
  
• iPhone pulls work email via IMAP and sends work email via work SMTP
• iPhone pulls Gmail via IMAP and sends personal email via Google SMTP
• iPhone syncs with Address Book via iTunes (the only cabled connection)
• Address Book updates iCal’s “Birthdays” calendar
• iCal syncs work, home, and holdiay calendars with Google via CalDAV

The final result is this:

• My personal and work data are visible from home or work and on my iPhone.
• My personal data are on my personal equipment and not my work equipment.
• I can lose my phone without losing any data.
• I can lose my job without losing (or exposing) any personal data or having my data wiped by my employer.
• I can lose my personal computer without losing any data (Time Machine, FTW).
• I can lose my work computer without losing any data (Iron Mountain).

What is lacking

• iPhone does not have my birthdays calendar (so no reminders, sorry everyone).
• Outlook on my work computer has to be running in order for Google to get my work calendar.
• Google contacts does not match Address Book or iPhone.
• I still have to use a cable to sync my iPhone with my Mac when my phone and my computer both have Bluetooth. WTF, Apple!? Fix that.

Google’s contact management still needs some work. I tried sync’ing that at one point and it screwed everything up -  lots of duplicated contacts: Google had their email, iPhone had their phone number, so now I had two contacts. Google has finally given us the ability to merge contacts (and it works well), so I’m going to work on getting that cleaned up. What really needs to happen is that Google updates my contacts automatically when they update their own contact info – like Exchange.

If anyone wants more details about how I accomplished any part of this, post and I’ll fill in the details.

Killin’ Zombies

I wanna kill me some zombies.

courtesy i-hacked.com

Really bad.

But I have a PS3.

Therefore, I can’t play such sweet shovel-into-cranium games as Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, Stubbs the Zombie, etc.

I have even considered buying an Xbox360 to play those games. But I don’t want to buy a system with a failure rate so high I’m virtually guaranteed to have to mail it back to M$ and wait several weeks to get another POS back. People accuse me of being anti-Microsoft, and I have a hard time denying it. Especially since their console scratches disks so bad they have to be replaced, their flagship game ships too scratched to play, and their failure rate approaches that of an after school special about drug use.

So I’m really glad to hear this: Dead Rising 2: in development and multi-platform.

I know Sony’s screwing up the Playstation brand left and right and couldn’t market their way out of a wet paper bag, but I still have one and want to kill some damn zombies.

And a big thank you to everyone who called, texted, and emailed to make sure that I knew someone was hacking road signs to say “ZOMBIES AHEAD”. Zombies are ahead.

Just how far ahead is anyone’s guess.

Update: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is almost enough to get me to read a Jane Austen novel.

Another’s Shoes

I have been a systems admin for years, whether my business card said it or not. I have dealt with hundreds of users and systems.

Growing up I mostly had Windows machines. I had come to digital maturity using 95 and 98, and really came into being a sysadmin on 2000 and XP. I had learned to deal with, expect, and train others in the daily headaches of dealing with windows systems.

Then I started dealing with Macs. For the first years I was dealing with far fewer Macs than PCs, so I chalked up the lack of incodents to the smaller market share. Then I started dealing almost exclusively with them. And it wasn’t until then that I figured out that they really are that much better. And I grew accustomed to it. No longer was being an admin a daily headache, no longer was I apologizing to users because their systems crawled to a stop while it scanned for a virus, removing and reinstalling hardware so that the drivers might work, or re-installing the entire OS because I couldn’t explain why some problem couldn’t be fixed.

And now I am working in a place that is almost all Windows Vista on ThinkPads and ThinkStations. And Windows is so much worse now.

Vista is a nightmare. Vista is such a nightmare that IBM, who built the Thinkpads, will not install it on their company systems. It is what happens when committees of sheltered, brain-washed people make decisions. It is the result of “good enough”, of settling, of people accepting gruel because that is all they’ve ever had.

But people are learning. Learning that they get what they buy. Learning that their computers should be helping them get work done and enjoy their time with them.

Now, if only businesses woud stop “drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid” I think we could make some real progress.

The only way that this is going to happen, I think, is if they try it out. See what they’re missing. See why so many people love their Macs. See why it takes half as many admins to run a network of Macs.

When your computer is a constant obstacle to getting work done, it’s time to look at new options.

Thanks, Bill

As you may or may not know, today is Bill Gates’ last day as a full time employee of Microsoft.

There are a lot of lists of the best and worst of Bill’s tenure, reminiscences of what he’s done (and should’ve done), and a lot of snide comments about his legacy.

Say what you will, but I can’t imagine anyone who has had a bigger impact on personal computing, business computing, and the industry in general.

Directly or indirectly, Microsoft has, I suspect, created more jobs than anyone. Besides the thousands of people that work directly for Microsoft, worldwide there are probably millions of people who have jobs because of Microsoft.

Think about it: What if Microsoft’s products worked quickly, easily, intuitively, and with little or no maintenance!? How many people do you know that would be out of jobs? How many fewer international phone calls would you have made? How much less stressed, more productive, and more happy would you be? How much less would you spend on Advil, Excedrin, Tums, stress-reduction toys, therapy, etc.? How much less would you get to spend on manuals, guides, training, certification, seminars, etc.?

What if personal computers were like tools? How many hammers do you buy in your life? One. Maybe two – if you lost the first one. Conversely, what if everything you used on a daily basis was as reliable, trustworthy, simple, and easy as your computer? Ugh.

Unfair comparison, I know.

This was actually supposed to be a sincere “Thank you,” to someone who contributed (and wil continue to contribute) a huge amount to the world around us. So, before I start ranting again: Thanks, Bill. You may be hatefully remembered, but you will certainly not be forgotten.

I am not a Software Developer

…but I respect them.

In college I studied Mathematics and Computer Science. When I was a kid, for some reason, I thought the life of a coder would be what I wanted – long restless nights of coding in the dark, followed by days sleeping on the couch at the office, bloodshot eyes, big headphones thumping techno and blocking out distractions so you can focus on the code. I may have watched too many movies like “Hackers”.

In one of my junior year’s programming classes (3D Animation, I think), I discovered that it’s not actually fun. It’s boring. And tedious. Programming is 10% writing something new and 90% finding the bugs in what you wrote. At least, it is when you’re just starting out.

So, I started doing other things – graphic design, troubleshooting, networking, etc. Basically putting to use what developers had created. Let them worry about compiling errors, product cycles, iterative loops, customer specs, and so on. I’ll use it when it’s ready for use.

But having some programming and business behind me helps me understand what it is to develop software.

Without going off on several tangents in the same post, the point of this is to bring some attention to this great series of articles about one developer switching from Windows to Mac (Win32 to Coca). And, in particular, his description of A developer taxonomy.

I won’t contend that this is not boring for 99% of the world – probably more. However, when you’re shopping for software, implementing new software, or running through a demo, having an understanding of the type of people who wrote the software you’re looking at makes it much easier to see the madness in the method calls.

Microsoft Promotes Terrorism

I re-installed Windows XP on a beige-box this morning.

This particular beige box had been sitting in a closet for at least a year. Then sitting on a pallet rack for at least six months (because I cleaned the closet). I didn’t know what might be living in this old thing, so I decided to do a format and install. There was a shiny MS Proof of License Certificate of Authority right there on the side, so it should’ve been no problem.

You can see where this is going, I’m sure…

After a 45 minute installation, this particular product key, in all its foil-stamped, holographic glory was “invalid”. Wouldn’t activate. Tried several times to no avail.

So I called Microsoft. Like a good, responsible, not-pirating-at-all citizen, I went through their friendly voice-activated messaging system, read off my 54-digit installation ID, clicked all the right buttons and was told that this is an invalid product key and I would need to contact the manufacturer…of the non-descript, unmarked PC with a clearly valid product key sticker. Then I got hung up on. No “Would you like to try again?”, no “Press zero to talk to a CSR.” Just *click*.

Awesome. Let’s try that again.

Call back, this time I don’t go through the prompts. I just wait. It’s an old tactic, but a good one that works with lots of phone systems. Wait or press zero.

Finally I get a person. The ol’ Microsoft special: low call quality, marginally english-speaking, not helpful at all. I give her all 54 digits of my installation ID again. And again. I click all the horribly obvious buttons (if I hadn’t clicked them I couldn’t have gotten to this phone number in the first place).

“I’m sorry, I cannot help you resolve this situation. You will have to talk to our Product Key department.”

This is, apparently, a totally different department than the Activation department (that makes sense) and she can’t transfer my call there (that makes sense, too). Awesome. I’ll call ‘em myself.

More voice-prompts, more repeating myself, more repeating this horribly long installation ID, more re-clicking the same buttons, re-entering the same numbers. But this time, the guy can help me. He gives me a new product key. Another 25-character alphanumeric string. In almost english.

You’d think that’d be it – new product key, a button that says “Change Product Key”, and I’m golden. Nope.

Now I get a new 54-digit installation ID string! What’s that mean!? Another phone call to the Activation Department!

Only this time, he can quickly and easily transfer me to the Activation department. Apparently Microsoft phones only work in one direction. That saves me time, though. In a way. I guess.

Back to the friendly, voice-activated Activation department. Where I have to enter this newer, better installation ID. Which finally works. And my installation is activated. And windows will quit bugging me…at least to activate it.

So, at the end, I have spent (precisely) one hour and 27 minutes on three phone calls with Microsoft to activate a product that I had a real, valid, certifiably authentic product key for. This required three 54-digit installation IDs to be repeated twice each, two 25-digit product keys to be repeated thrice each, and a 42-digit confirmation ID to be repeated twice.

Now, you’re still wondering how this relates to terrorism. Or you should be.

After I got off the phone, just out of curiosity, I Googled “windows XP product key”, and in .18 seconds I had multiple links providing unlimited-use Windows XP product keys. By Microsofts decisions and on-going actions, piracy is cheaper (free), easier (copy, paste), and faster (by a lot), than doing it the legal way.

And, according to Michael Mukasey piracy funds terrorism.

Therefore, ipso-fatso, Microsoft Promotes Terrorism.