Happy Halloween #ZombieGeek

A few weeks ago local-IT-company-done-good Spiceworks premiered a second video combining IT and Zombies. It's "part 2" so you'll want to watch it back-to-back with "part 1". These videos were filmed and edited by Spiceworks' own staff here in Austin, Texas. I'm lucky enough to have visited the company's headquarters a few times and have met a number of people featured in the videos. The company works hard to foster a fun, friendly environment and does a great job carrying that approach all the way through to their customers. These IT Zombie Apocalypse videos are a good example of that company culture.

(Note: The company mascot is a T-Rex. Just so you know.)

ZOMBIES Part 1



ZOMBIES Part 2

Gawker DR Scrutiny #DisasterRecoveryGeek

Gawker, Lifehacker and 
others surprise with no 
Business Continuity plan. 

At the time of this writing the latest "storm of the century" (hybrid storm/hurricane Sandy) is still working its wrath across a major portion of the US. The expected devastation has occurred across a number of states including loss of life, property, coastline, etc. Power outages and flooding were a given but what is unexpected is the loss of some well-known websites that, apparently, were hosted only in Manhattan. As in the island of Manhattan. Who would choose to have their popular, highly-trafficked websites hosted on servers located on a tiny island using an infrastructure already pushed to the limits by a densely-packed population? Here are a few such websites...

Web Stats and Your Target Audience #AnalyticsGeek

General web stats don't tell 
the whole story and can 
sometimes severely mislead.

Web browsing stats are a regular news item: mobile device browsing gaining heavily on desktop browsing, IE use still outnumbers Firefox use, etc. We hear the general trends but rarely the fine details. IE users continuing to outnumber Firefox users? Not within tech circles. Chrome now more popular than either IE or Firefox? Not even close for web-based content related to health (as we'll see).

Because generalizations don't tell the whole story I regularly review statistics for sites I create and maintain, both business and personal. In that vein I thought I'd share some "targeted audience" stats and highlight a few trends...

XKCD graphs via Python #CodeGeek

XCKD web comic influence has now
crossed over to Python programming code. 

Say "XKCD-style" and a great number of people will know exactly what you mean. For everyone else XKCD is a web-based comic that has steadily gained rep among geeks, especially coders and math nerds. The visual style is decidedly sparse and obviously hand drawn -- the focus is on the ideas, not the artwork. In this sense XKCD is very similar to mock-up tools that purposely generate "rough sketches" rather than polished facades.

In the past month a movement has popped up among coders to create "XKCD style" graphing routines. In just a matter of weeks several solutions have surfaced but the first I happened to run across was written in Python...

Nokia FAIL Wireless Charging #PhoneGeek

Nokia 920 wireless charging. 

Every year a company raises hopes that wireless charging of mobile devices will finally move to mainstream. And every year such hopes are dashed when product details are revealed. Typically the issues are price and availability: either your device isn't supported or the equipment costs far too much.

Enter 2012/2013 and the Nokia 920/820 smartphones with optional wireless charging. Huzzah! Nokia is fighting for life and really needs to outshine its competitors with unique devices brimming with advanced features. Wireless charging is a perfect fit! Too bad, then, that Nokia also seems intent on maximizing phone accessory profits...

New Dog #TwitterGeek

I couldn't resist turning this tweet into a photo. The tweet is courtesy of @johnmoe, former host of Marketplace Tech Report and current host/writer/performer/humorist of MPR's WITS. This one manages to rate a post on ATXGeek thanks to its tech-related source (that's my excuse, at least)...

Nest: Updated But Still Not Complete #GadgetGeek

The Original Nest Thermostat

Nest is the company that brought "Apple-influenced design" to thermostats by creating a beautiful, super-advanced yet super-simple device. The Nest shipped less than a year ago and the company has already unveiled it's successor: a sleeker, more advanced update of the original.

The Nest is to thermostats what the original iPhone was to smartphones: a huge leap forward and a shining example of the type of modern features and design we should expect from our major home appliances. As good as it is, though, the Nest is still not "complete"...

iOS: Four Walls and No Gate #MobileGeek

iOS vs. Android? 
Consider the roads...
 

Van Baker, an analyst from Gartner (the world's largest technology research and advisory company) who analyzes Apple products, was recently quoted on the iOS-versus-Android smartphone debate as saying Android is heralded mostly by "technologists" while iOS is more often supported by "fans". The implication is that Android proponents have concrete, technical reasons backing their choice while iOS proponents are more simply driven by fandom.

I agree with the "technologists" part of the assessment but, taking a few steps back, I also doubt there would be any serious complaints if iOS had remained the only game in town. Why? Let's compare mobile technology to US roadways...

Improve photos by avoiding the knee chop #PhotoGeek

An otherwise nice photo whose
subjects are chopped off at the knee. 

Here's one to file under "pet peeves": photos of people cut off at their knees (or waist, or ankles). There is a strong tendency for people to frame their subjects near the center of a photograph. For portraits it's often people's heads that get centered instead of the entire body. While this works for some shots it usually results in way too much overhead space and not enough under-head space. This tendency is so common that, when handing the camera over to someone about to snap a quick portrait of my family, I often say "make sure you get our feet, too". The person snapping the photo may find the request a little odd but I end up with better-framed photos.

Once you've gotten your friends and relatives to master the art of not chopping people off at a joint, try sharing the "rule of thirds" to make shots much more interesting. From there move on to a few more simple techniques for improving photos.

GoDaddy FAIL = SAVINGS #WebHostingGeek

GoDaddy FAIL

GoDaddy didn't quite meet its 99.999% uptime goal this week when technical difficulties affected a huge number of websites and millions of users. Every cloud has a silver lining and this cloud's lining comes in the form of GoDaddy apologies -- apologies backed by hard cash (er, credits).

You don't, however, automatically benefit from GoDaddy's mea culpa credits.  You have to log in and do a bit of manual click labor to reap the downtime rewards...

Password Cracking Estimation Tool #SecurityGeek

By now most of us have seen the "password strength" estimators when creating a new account on websites. That's handy but it's not nearly as eye-opening as the "time needed to crack your password" tool over at howsecureismypassword.net.

Just enter your password -- or, preferably, a password that's similar-to-but-different-than any password you actually use -- and the tool estimates how long it would take a standard PC to crack your password. Although there are a number of advanced password-cracking techniques in common use (such as rainbow tables) the estimate appears to be based purely on the simple brute force method. This means the estimate is actually a best-case scenario -- a real world password cracking attempt is likely to take even less time.

And, yes, that "3 hours" estimate shown in the screenshot *is* the result of me testing a password similar to the passwords I get using my favorite password generation method. Time to rethink my password strategy...

"Choose Your Own Adventure" Dissected #BookGeek

"Choose Your Own Adventure" (CYOA) books have been around since the 1970's and provided the fundamental pattern for the earliest computer RPGs. A few years ago a very smart person by the name of Christian Swinehart set about studying the composition and workflow of CYOA books.  The resulting 13-month-and-11,000-lines-of-code effort yielded a detailed and informative analysis with a few surprising results.  Perhaps the most appealing aspect was the article's supporting charts which were, quite simply, "gorgeous"...