Geek meet Nature…

While I am quite the geek I really enjoy the outdoors.  Any excuse to get out into the woods really.  The biggest problem is having the time to get out.  This summer I managed to find a good excuse however.  I have started a part time job as a Gypsy Moth trapper for the Ohio Department of Agriculture.

Every one I talk to thinks it is one of the weirdest things they have ever heard of.  Personally I have found it to be a lot of fun.  Without going into great detail, the department of agriculture is working to stop the spread of the gypsy moth through trapping and spraying of pesticides as it poses a major threat the the forests of several north eastern states.If you want more information than that you can get it here.  As a trapper it is my responsibility to place, check and remove the traps while documenting how many moths I find and where.  This information is used to track the their migration.  I use a GPS to both find the traps and record the trap information.  It’s a lot like geocaching but instead of a cache of goodies you get a glue trap full of moths and other bugs.

I guess I find it amazing how they are implementing the GPS and GIS information in all of this.  If you get a chance follow the above link read a little about the project, it is really great to see how well organized they are with all of this.  By the way, the number one question I have been asked is what the large purple traps are for that hang from the trees, it is for the emerald ash bore not the gypsy moth.

Password Security Best Practices

I have noticed with several websites lately an increase in password security.  Sites that at one time allowed for simple passwords have added new requirements to force people to have more secure passwords.  This made me think about some of the miserable passwords I have used and known others to use over the years.  But what is the biggest problem with most people’s passwords?

The biggest mistake people make is using a password that is made up of personal information.  For example a name with a birth date like josh101980.  Passwords like this are easy to guess by anyone with common knowledge about you or your family.  A password needs to be something that a person can’t guess and using easily attainable information.  At the same time a password needs to be complicated enough to be guessed at random.  Using dictionary words a password can be easily cracked by lots of free, easily accessible software.  Passwords need to be a combination of characters, both upper and lower case, along with numbers and for maximum security symbols.

Now I know that this seems a little over complicated and hard to remember but there is an easy way.  To make a a password you can remember use words or phrases substituting symbols and numbers for letters.  Here is what I mean, take the word Internet for example.  Using letters and symbols you can make it into something like !n73rn37 which is much harder for anyone to guess.  Substituting a ! for the I , a 7 for a t and a 3 for an e just made a weak password into a strong one.  This is a common practice that became really popular with gamers several years ago and I have found it to be really useful for passwords.

The second mistake people make is not keeping their passwords secret.  Other than common passwords we have certain sites, I don’t even share my password with my wife.  If a coworker needs my password for something I will change it then give it to them or just give it to them and change it when their done.  Clifford Stoll said “Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.” and I think he was right on target.   I have even seen people so lax on password security that they will prite their username and password on a post-it note and stick it on the monitor.  Not exactly the hight of security.

Lastly, going back to what Stoll said, Change your password at least once a quarter.  Changin it may seem inconvenient but it is one of the easiest things you can do to protect your security.  If you can keep up with this along with the other tips you should be on your ay to a more secure computer experience.

hello.its.me - Montnengro domains on sale

Montenegro has been delegated the .ME top level domain and domains are on sale to the general public tomorrow.  While a lot of “Premium” domains have been reserved by Montenegro for auction after general sale starts, there are still a lot of domains left.  If your one of those people that just likes to buy domains here is your chance to get some prime domain names.  Landrush sales will continue through tomorrow when the public sale starts.  The go live date is July 17th

The iPhone for the Enterprise World

So today was the long awaited day, the WWDC Keynote. As everyone expected there was a new iPhone introduced only after a myriad of plugs for the phone it’s self as the hot new development platform. I have a feeling that after it was all said and done there were a lot of sad Apple fanboys out there. While Apple made a couple of minor design changes and a few key additions (3G and GPS) there is not a whole lot else to get excited about. They appeared to be pushing two major things, the iPhone as a new development platform and it’s introduction into the enterprise world.

For me both of those options are a major plus. The idea of the iPhone as a development platform means all kinds of third party apps. With the overall popularity of the phone there will undoubtedly be a lot of really cool software that come out of all of this, some of which was previewed by people like MLB.com with stats and streaming video apps. With the popularity of the jail broken iPhones and the installer that is available there I can only begin to imagine the loads software that will flood the new apps store. I can definitely see the iPhone being the hot new platform if not for the phone than for the cool apps and games that will be on it. The thing is that all of the same apps will be available with a software upgrade on the original iPhone (FREE!) and the iTouch ($9.99) so this is really not an improvement for the iPhone 3G.

The enterprise support however looks to be Apple’s attack on the Blackberry and the entire business world. Not only are we getting full blown Exchange support but a lot of key security enhancements for Wifi and VPN. There also looks to be some really cool management for the enterprise such as the ability to enforce policies on phones as well as the ability to push out configurations though XML scripts. All of these are definite improvements over the current model but again all of these are improvements are available in the software upgrade.

I’m sure there are a lot of people that will buy the new model for the GPS and the 3G radio. That’s fine but I don’t live in a 3G coverage area so I guess strike number one. The new price points, $199 for the 8Gb and $299 for the 16Gb, makes them look a lot better though. Compared to the laundry list of expected improvements people expected, better camera and copy & paste and 32Gb or 64Gb models, there wasn’t a whole lot that changed beyond the software. To me this is where the iPhone should have been to begin with so I can’t say that I am overly impressed with today’s announcement.
I had thought about buying one but after today i think I will wait a little longer. I am going to wait to see what cool apps come out and maybe give them a little more time to introduce the 32Gb model that I know has to be coming. In the mean time my Tilt already has 3G and GPS. It’s not an iPhone I know but I already have it and I can spend that $299 on something else like a Roku box and some HD space for my aging PC.

By the way, official launch date is July 11th.

Data Backups: A necessity of the modern world

I was reading an entry in Alvin Trusty’s blog the other day in which he was discussing file synchronization. One of the things he mentioned was Microsoft’s new Live Mesh which allows for online storage and synchronization of files. I signed up for an invite and it showed up in my email today. After spending a few minutes with it I quickly noticed that it only offered 5 gigabytes of data storage. That was not enough for me to back up everything I need to backup. This got me thinking about the necessity of backing up your data.

It wasn’t all that long ago, about 2 years ago, that I lost a years worth of pictures of my kids. The hard disk was making that evil clicking noise and refused to work.  I looked at data recovery services but they were all too expensive.  I guess you can put a price on your memories.  Anyways that taught me one important lesson, you must have backups. I know a lot of people that backup pictures and such to DVDs or other media and store them is a safe or a fire box but for me that just doesn’t cut it. For a while I used file synchronization between 2 hard disks but there was one thing that kept haunting me with this method. In the event of a house fire or a natural disaster of some sort all of my pictures and all of my other important data could be lost forever. While it’s nice to have a local backup of your data in case of a hardware failure or such it is a lot better if you can get an off site backup solution. This is is what I once heard Alvin refer to as a “Nuclear Backup”, or something far enough away from your house that it could withstand even the worst of disasters.

For me it has been a long process getting my backups to where they are now. I started out keeping an external hard disk at work with my data on it but eventually found it to be in the way more than anything. Later I decided that the most important data I had was the pictures of my kids so I got a Flickr Pro account and uploaded all of my pictures there and used that as a backup. The downfall with both of these first two methods was this, my wife could not backup anything without my intervention. I have finally settled down on a backup solution that is working really well for me and requires little intervention on anyone’s part, Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk.

This is something I had heard floating around within some of the School Districts but I never checked it out, assuming that it would be way too expensive. A few months ago I finally looked into it and I have been loving it ever since. Jungle disk is an application for Windows, MAC OS, or Linux that allows you to easily automate backups to the Amazon S3 service. The software runs in your task bar and allows you to schedule your incremental backups. It also maps a drive to your backups and even allows you access to your documents through a secure web portal at myjungledisk.com. The cost of the software it’s self was around $20 one time. The Amazon service on the other had is billed monthly depending on the amount of data you are storing and the amount of data you transfer within a given month. The price is currently $0.15 a gig for data storage on Amazon.

Like I said, so far I have been really happy with this new setup. I have 3 PCs being backed up every six hours with no intervention from me other than the occasional check to ensure everything is still working. Everything was easy to set up and you really can’t beat the price. I am backing up about 15 gigabytes of data currently and I am only paying about $3 a month so if your in the market for a new backup service you might want to check jungledisk out.