Wednesday, December 22, 2004

What is a Blog?

The term Blogs (not my favorite word) is slang for web log. It allows rapid content publishing. They are only a couple of years in the making in its current form, but have been with us since the beginning of the web with Tim Burners Lee. They became popular during the last gulf war and were catapulted to legit journalism status during the recent elections.

A blog gives the writer the ability to say exactly what they want to say the way they want to say it without an editor censoring their thoughts. The political blogs during the elections exceeded traditional news sources in readership. The traditional news sources were caught off guard by the popularity of the blogs. It puts a whole new meaning on the meaning freedom of speech. Now there are millions of blogs on just about everything that you can imagine and some that you don’t want to know about.

The current blogs are very easy to start by anyone and do not require any technology knowledge. Content is king that is why Google bought Blogger.com and set it up for free.

Administering a site like http://security.efsnm.com is a blog site and a lot of work. It runs on a Linux server and uses the server config’s to maintain the mySQL server that is the database engine for the site. That site took minutes to setup and start using. However, you can spent days learning their syntax and modifying the site design. So you may spent more time on site design and navigation than on composing the content.

At blogger.com http://technutz.blogspot.com/ setup up this blog took minutes. I used one of their templates and tweak the site settings. I already had the content from class that everyone has read. Form the time I setup the site, edited and posted the content that it currently there only took me about 3 hours. I am sure others would take longer, but I was really please with the blogger.com blog site.

The blogger.com site has everything I was looking for as it is easy to use, very nice templates (that are able to be changed) and it is FREE.

As a business one would think how could Google offer all that for free? Easy, they would like you to use their Adsence product. It is not required, but I already had the account and post it as a way to get a pay back for the content. Content is king, otherwise why would someone come to your site…

ODBC vs. ADO.NET

I dislike ODBC and its many versions, incompatibles, its poor performance, its unpredictable results, its inconsistent drivers from the various vendors, its lack of syntax consistent standards and it overall difficulty to use and to deploy in a client server environment.

I only speak from first hand experience with working with ODBC. There is nothing wrong with using ODBC. It may be your only option at the moment. ADO.NET is the latest evolution in database access, but has it roots in the evolution in ODBC. ADO.NET is a rewrite in which Microsoft learned form the sins of the past. Back in the day a few years ago ODBC was the only method of data access on a Windows system that worked and saved developer a lot of time in development for database communication. At the time it was much welcomed, but today it is demise is much welcomed.

I was just unfortunate to be a part of the evolution of the ODBC madness, having to re-write my code every time they published a new release or service pack is a major pain. I have bloody scares on my forehead from backing my head on the keyboard in dealing with the ODBC insanity. When you have 1,000’s of lines of code and a lot of database access code, it gets old pretty quick rewriting it to accommodate a syntax change, a retired command, change in the default behavior of an object or setting, new methods, new functions or stupid parameters that are now required, but not documented.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Parent Awareness of PC Usage

Having reloaded many home computers for my business customers, most of the parents that I have work with on their computer have no idea what there kids are up too, where they have been or how to tell what has been done on the computer.

My worst case was a parent brought us there computer to be reloaded as it was full of spyware. We had just reloaded that same PC a month pervious. This go around, we found a ton of adults images. Normally we simply dismiss it as we always find adult stuff, not because the user was downloading it, but because of adult spam, spyware, adult joke apps, adult malicious ware, and viruses, etc. So it is not uncommon to find that stuff peppered all over the computer.

However this time it was a lot of clear web surfing to the common name adult sites. It was in their boy’s XP profile that we found the stuff in the internet cache while doing a search for family pictures that the parent wanted to save. Any rate the parents being good religious people were dumb founded and very embarrassed. It is typically the case, shock, bewildered, upset, angry, and embarrassed in that order.

Do you know how much adult material is on your PC? You might be unpleasantly surprised, especially if you have kids and they use your computer.

Monday, December 20, 2004

This Blog Site

The TechNutz blog was a great exercise. The blog site serves many purposes. It is an open source of information that uses hardware, software and the internet to relay information. It is requires an input device to create the data and a monitor as output to review the data.

The data is contained in a very large relational database with many fields, records and data types oh my! It uses SQL as its queries language and uses HTML, Java Script, JAVA, DHMTL, CSS, XML, RSS, email, e-Commerce with the Google Ads and an Oracle backend database. The blog is a collaborative virtual site in which the users can participate from most anywhere on most any device that has a web browser, even my PDA phone. It uses a user name and password security to limit access to certain sections of the application.

Sunday, December 19, 2004

The Cycle of PC Upgrades

My experience both with big and small companies that it is cheaper to buy new than to upgrade. Labor costs kill the ability to benefit for network, server and desktops upgrades.

As for resale there is generally no resale value left in a computer. The life cycle of a desktop PC is 3 to 5 years. Most PCs are processed and disposed by a company that is hired to get rid of the hardware that meets EPA requirements. I am paid to pickup, wipe the hard drive with a DoD utility and I donate them to a local organization that recycles PC's for the disadvantage people.

I agree with your assessment about size. This does however come into play with notebooks, cell phones and PDAs. With desktops there is no benefit. However the funny thing is the smaller is more expensive.