IDEAS

Children aren’t going to understand the importance of keeping passwords secret unless you explain it to them.

I had a conversation with a guy the other day, and he told me about his son’s personal password tragedy. The kid really liked an online game. He played it often and accumulated a lot of valuable in-game items; magic swords and armor. One day another guy in the game convinced his son to give up his password. The guy stole all of his son’s equipment and left his character essentially naked.

The bright-side of this story is that his son learned a valuable lesson about password protection, privacy, and security within the safety of a game. As upset as the child was, the damage wasn’t irreparable.

My message is simple, teach your children to keep passwords secret.

After you teach them, they can choose to ignore you as a teenager… But that will be on them, you did your job.

Teach your children to practice safe computing.

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I thought this was cool.  Members of design agency in Colorado will be gathering today to have a funeral for the Death Internet Explorer 6.0. Oh those words sound so nice for a web agency that pulls its respective hairs out coding for IE 6.

Here is an excerpt of the article that appeared on CNN.com.

More than 100 people, many of them dressed in black, are expected to gather around a coffin Thursday to say goodbye to an old friend.

The deceased? Internet Explorer 6.

The aging Web browser, survived by its descendants Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, is being eulogized at a tongue-in-cheek “funeral” hosted by Aten Design Group, a design firm in Denver, Colorado.

The memorial service will feature a coffin holding a “body” that has an IE6 logo for a head. Attendees are expected to eulogize the Microsoft browser by sharing remembrances, some of which have already been posted on the company’s online funeral invitation.

“I feel terrible admitting this, but … I never really liked him,” posted someone who gave his name as Eddie Escher. “He had so many hang-ups, and he looked awful — especially in his later years. But… he was always there when you needed him. You have to give him that.”

Internet Explorer 6 isn’t exactly dead yet, and in fact remains widely used. But in recent years, it’s been eclipsed by newer, faster browsers that are better equipped to run the Web’s latest bells and whistles. Google Docs and Google Sites discontinued support for the browser Monday, and YouTube will follow suit March 13.

“The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively,” wrote a senior product manager in a Google blog post. He urged users to upgrade to more modern browsers.

Read the rest of the article.

Got this email below today about dimdim.com’s newest features which finally include quick desktop sharing and username based URLS to simplify starting a meeting. If you don’t know what dimdim does, it’s a web conferencing tool that is free for up to 20 users and the price goes up from there, but it’s very reasonable and it’s very stable.  For the attendee to a meeting there is no software to install, for the host that wants to share their desktop, there’s a small plug-in to install and it works for both PC and Mac.  I just used this tonight to view a Mac user’s screen and she was able to install without any direction from me.  It was pretty sweet to send her a URL that goes directly to the meeting I’m in that’s based on my username instead of some long guid URL.

If you haven’t used this product, give it a try. If you have meetings with less than 20 heads, I’m sure you’ll find this comparable to webex or live meeting.

Here’s the email from DimDim:

“Thanks to your suggestions, we’ve made Dimdim faster, easier, and a lot more powerful.

The instant you log into Dimdim you’ll notice the change. A big red button invites you to “Meet” Click it once (go ahead, try it) and in seconds you will be in your live Dimdim meeting room.

Now look at your browser’s navigation bar URL. It will be http://my.dimdim.com/username Simply email, IM, Skype or Tweet this Smart URL and your guests will join your room just as fast as you did — all without installing any software!

Speaking of software, if you choose to share your desktop in a meeting we’ll prompt you to install an optional plug-in we call Dimdim myScreen™ You’ll call it magic. Just click the new system tray icon (PC) or menubar icon (Mac) and you will instantly share your screen — even without opening a browser or starting a meeting! Share your Smart URL and your guests will see your screen in seconds.

If no meeting is running or you are not sharing your screen, your Smart URL points your guests to your new profile page where they can register for future public events (any event without a meeting key is public) or wait for your event to begin.”

Just read this off of the AP (Original here):

“Google plans to build experimental, ultra-fast Internet networks in a handful of communities around the country.

The search company said Wednesday that its fiber-optic broadband networks will deliver speeds of 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 Americans. Google Inc. says those systems will be more than 100 times faster than the networks that most Americans have access to today.

In a blog post, the company said the networks will let consumers download a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes and allow rural health clinics to send 3-D medical images over the Web.

Google says it will seek input from communities that might be interested in getting one of the testbed networks.”

My thoughts:

1. I already have FIOs and I think that my 20 megs down and 5 megs up is fast (check out the image I’ve attached), but more speed won’t hurt right

2.  This is Google getting around the normal ISP’s and their nonsense of wanting to double dip by charging the users who pay ISPs already and content providers like Google who don’t have to pay the ISPs currently

3.  The motto “Google does no evil” is getting weaker everyday something like this gets launched.  Don’t get me wrong, I love that they’re pushing other companies to get their ish together and offer services at better quality for lower prices, but they’re have such a cash engine behind them that they can wipe out whole industries

4.  They’re slowly getting closer to the root of the internet, first they’re running their own DNS servers for users, and now their own portion of the internet, soon they’ll make their own Root Servers and we’ll all be paying a google bill for home services

5.  if you think they track alot of your internet usage now, what about when they are the ISP…. and couple that with what they already know about u…

Overall, I’m still in a wait and see mode with Google and all their ventures as we use a lot of their services and don’t mind giving up some info in exchange for those services.  But I’m watching and waiting for some greed or shadiness to happen because if it’s possible, it will happen….

Thanks to Shawn for this one.  This is a good add on to the my previous post about subversion for Dreamweaver.  Get the client at http://versionsapp.com/

Many people watch for just the commercials, and most like me love the game and can’t wait until next season! At the party I attended, it was like Mystery Science Theater 3000 with everyone spitting out the opinion quickly and often I would say we had more thumbs down then up, and very few that I can remember today. Godaddy (the use of females tearing off dress shirts), Doritos (funny ones, especially the Doritos ninja), Hyundai (people carrying the car), Etrade (Talking babies still work), Jay Leno, Letterman and Oprah (have no clue what it was for, but was awesome to see).

But by far the best commercial was definitely the Google one, very clever, very simple, and pulls on your heart strings. I only remember seeing it once, and it was so memorable. If you can think of a better commercial let me know in the comments, but I think they ended up with the best bang for the buck commercial by far:

If you need to move your wordpress site, like we just did, follow this link from Wordpress Codex to find out how: http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

We ended up making 2 moves, one to a new subdomain on an different hosting provider and 2nd one to a subfolder within the new host and officially off of the root. In both cases, the directions given here worked!

Looking for an HTML 5 countdown, check this out: http://ishtml5readyyet.com/

Sometimes you run into issues and within 10 minutes the internet comes thorough by giving you a solution with no reasoning as to why your having the issue, but you’re just happy to have it and will chalk that one up to the good guys!  Just ran into this one while working on our IIS server and certificate authority: 0×80094801 – the request contains no certificate template information

The solution was found here

“The solution is to import the Certificate Request in command line with CertReq tool.  Use the following command to import your Certificate Request file.

certreq -submit -attrib “CertificateTemplate:WebServer” <Cert Request.req>

If the template is different, find the correct template name in “Certificate Authority” console. If you don’t find it, you may have to add the template before you try importing the request file.”

No name, no person to give credit to, but thanks!!!

Lifehacker has a great post up about the facts and many myths about browser cookies.

Here are the facts, and myths they cover:

• “Myth: Cookies Spy On You and Track Everything You Are Doing”
• “Myth: Cookies Are Viruses or Spyware and Create Spam and Popups”
• “Fact: Spyware and Viruses Can Read Your Cookies, but So What?”
• “Fact: Cookies are Used by Advertisers to Track Sites You Visit”
• “Fact: Disabling Cookies Doesn’t Matter If You Have Flash Enabled”

The bottom line is that cookies aren’t really a problem, and blocking them will generally make your life more difficult.

I strongly recommend you give it a look – Fact and Fiction: The Truth About Browser Cookies

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