Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 11, 2011
by sjvn01
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Getting a user-friendly Web address on Google Plus

I’ve had several friends tell me about how wonderful it was to get a Google Plus (G+) Web address via the Gplus.to Web site. With it, I could, for example, have http:/gplus/to/sjvn instead of https://plus.google.com/113169713749496726739 (Try saying that three times fast!). That sound good, but I have several problems with it, and besides, you probably already have a human-friendly G+ Web address.

First, the good news: Your Google Profile, https://profiles.google.com/username, already has your Gmail name on it, and if you use that as your Web address, you’ll find it takes visitors straight to your G+ stream page. So, for example, https://profiles.google.com/sjvn01, will bring you right to my G+ page. No fuss, no muss, and no need to do anything.

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July 11, 2011
by sjvn01
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Security: It’s not just for Windows users anymore

Historically, Windows users were always the ones getting blitzed by malware. Viruses, worms, you name it, Windows PCs got it. Lately, though, malware is appearing that targets Macs as well.
I know some Mac users refuse to believe it. Believe it. Even Apple finally admitted that Mac Defender Malware was a real and present danger.

Don’t get too bent out of shape about it though. Just because Mac malware exists doesn’t mean that your Mac is as unsafe as an unpatched Windows XP PC. It’s not. It never will be. Windows, by its very nature, has always been more insecure than Linux or Mac OS.

From the day of its creation, Windows was designed to be a single-user system in an non-networked world. That hasn’t been true for more than twenty years now. Linux and Mac OS roots though go back to Unix. Unix was designed from the ground-up for a world with multiple-users and networking.

But that’s no reason to lean back with a big stupid grin on your face and think that you’re safe as houses. You’re not.

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July 10, 2011
by sjvn01
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How many millions of people are already using Google Plus?

Some people, like yours truly, already love Google Pus (G+). There are also a lot of people who desperately want to be on G+ but haven’t managed it yet. Some people have suggested that Google has been creating G+ hype with an artificial shortage of G+ invites, that Google could let the world in if they wanted too. I disagree. After all, would Google have left G+ go briefly haywire over the weekend if they really had the resources to keep everyone happy? I don’t think so!

On Saturday, Google started spamming G+ e-mail inboxes with a flood of email notifications. What happened? According to Vic Gundotra, Google Senior VP of Social, which includes overseeing G+:

“For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.”

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July 8, 2011
by sjvn01
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The end of the future: The last Shuttle flight

When I was a kid, growing up on a dirt-road in the middle of Appalachia, not too different from how Max Jones’ childhood home in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starman Jones, I dreamed of starships.

When I was older I followed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions religiously, and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon I watched on a static filled color TV at a science camp. I dreamed of working at NASA, and, oddly enough, despite my liberal arts degrees I ended up working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in the 80s. During my time there I met astronauts, worked at GSFC’s Spacecraft Tracking and Data (Acquisition) Network (STDN) for eight Shuttle missions and I saw the Challenger disaster.

After that horrible day, I saw, and in a very, very small way, helped NASA return to flight. Then, I left NASA. I did it because I was starting my career as a technology journalist and because I had learned how NASA was slowly dying on the vine.

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July 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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Avoiding and Fixing Facebook Malware Faux Pas

My wife recently fell victim to a Facebook spam. She’s in good company. While many Facebook spam notes are as easy to spot as their e-mail counterparts—Click here to get CHEAP VIAGARA!!!—others are much more subtle. Recently, for example, one “offer” appeared to be a discount from a major airline. The one that caught her promised a sensational story about a local suicide.

So what can you do? Well, for starters, be as paranoid about unexpected messages from friends and colleagues as you would be when checking your e-mail. Would my friend Esther really send me a note with a link about Pittsburgh Steelers season tickets? I doubt it. Baseball maybe; football never! [Go DBacks! —Ed.]

Be especially wary of short messages that promises insight into some kind of dramatic news. Let’s say you click on one anyway; suddenly your Facebook wall has junk all over it and your account is sending messages to all and sundry. What do you do now?

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July 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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IPv6: What the CIO Needs To Know

The clock has stuck midnight. While your carriage may not have turned into a pumpkin, we really are out of IPv4 addresses on the Internet.

Oh sure, in North America, a few addresses left haven’t been spoken for yet, but they’ll be gone by the end of 2011. And you can buy IPv4 addresses for your growing enterprise for a little while. But the chimes of midnight are ringing in the air: You must start switching over to IPv6.

It’s not going to be easy, and you probably want to consider the transition in phases.

I recommend you start your IPv6 deployment by making your external Web, DNS, and e-mail services reachable from the IPv6 Internet.

The good news, though, is that you don’t need to switch over your intranet to IPv6 anytime soon. Within the confines of your company, you can still use IPv4. You need to move to IPv6 for your gateways, load-balancers, and outward facing Web and application systems, but at least for a while you can get by with IPv6/IPv4 gateways, dual-stack systems, and the like.

In short, you and your network staff need to learn some new technologies. It would be great if IPv6 was simply backwards compatible with IPv4 so we could easily switch over to tomorrow’s IPv6-dominated Internet – but it’s not.

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