I’ve finally decided it’s time to look into whole disk encryption for my notebooks. This day and age with all the information one has on a mobile PC there really isn’t much of an excuse to not have it encrypted. I’ve recently found a program called Free CompuSec by a German company named CE-Infosys. I would like to say thanks to Steve Gibson of the Security Now podcast for putting me on to this program.

Free CompuSec can do lots of things but my main reason to use it was for the whole disk encryption because I was worried what would happen in the even my notebook was lost or stolen. Below is a short list of the features I think are very useful.

1. Pre boot access control (the main reason I use it)
2. Encryption for CD / DVD for secure publishing and sharing of CD data using CDCrypt
3. Encryption for Diskettes and Removable Media Devices such as ZIP drives, USB thumb drives or Memory sticks
4. [ClosedTalk]® for secure VoIP communication
5. It’s free for both personal and business use (this not not very common)

Installing Free CompuSec was a breeze and only took a few minutes. What sucks up the time is when you first encrypt the drive. This can take up to two hours (at least on the two notebooks I tested it on) so if you are of the impatient type you might want to set it to encrypt when you are on the way to bed for the night.

All in all my first impression of this software is good. There are others out there like TrueCrypt, which is open source, that would probably accomplish the same thing but I am not overly familiar with how it works so you may want to try both of them and see which one works best for you.

~TheNerd

I now have Haiku running on real hardware with a functioning display, keyboard, and mouse. The hardware being used is a Dell Latitude D600 (Laptop Battery Dell Latitude D500/D600) with Ubuntu installed to use as a build system for Haiku. The unfortunate part of it is that my network interface doesn’t have a driver so I’m left without Internet access for the time being. I was thinking about opening a bounty to create a driver for it but I’m thinking that there are other areas that need bounties before that.

I’ve yet to test the sound because there aren’t any sound files included in the default build. I guess I’m going to have to learn how to used the build script to copy over files during the build process. I suppose I’ll also want to play with some of the other features that aren’t included by default so learning how to configure the build process is not such a bad thing.

I was talking with Sikosis on IRC last night and told him it was time for me to hone my Haiku skills. It seems like I spend more time talking about Haiku and Haiku politics than I do using it. But I guess now that I have Haiku running on real hardware I don’t have any more excuses. I’m hoping that once I can get some more software, video files and sound files on it I could use this system as a demo and show all kinds of people what Haiku is all about. There is a computer swap meet in my area next month and if I can get there I would like to get a table and do a demo. Sadly, I’m pretty sure I’ve been spoken for that weekend so it’s not looking good.

(if I get a chance I’ll take a picture to prove it )

Well it’s been a few weeks now since I started running my two proxy websites (squibber and cme) and I must admit that I am as excited as ever. I’m not making a loads of money yet but I can definitely see the potential. I’ve currently brought in right around $20 US (I’m Canadian so it’s even better with the exchange). I know… It’s not much but if you consider the fact that I’m averaging about $1/day over the past week it’s very encouraging.

Still not a gold mine but this $1/day, if it keeps up, will pay my web hosting fees from Hostgator (most of my sites) and Tech Entrance (proxy sites). That’s the magic number to keep me going.  I’ll update again in the near future as I, hopefully, start making even more money!

~TheNerd

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the good old Google Hacking Database and I had forgotten about all the neat little things that Google can turn up. I’ve spent the last half hour or so looking at AXIS web cams all around the world. It’s pretty neat to see what you can find and watch. I guess some people don’t care if they are broadcasting to the world but if it were me I’d want to have the cams secured so only those who need to see them can.

Here is a list of a few cameras I found:

• Pacific Internet Limited - Singapore
• Salisbury University - Maryland, USA
• Bus Terminal (i think) - Chile
• Subaru of New England - Norwood, Massachusetts USA
• Roads - Tottori, Japan

Those are just a few of the 145 results returned by Google when using this query.

~TheNerd

Each and every time I set up a new computer (happens quite often) there are a few “must have” applications that I install right away. Here is a list of my top 6 picks. They are all open source so are available for free. Don’t worry I’ve provided the links in case you want to try them out.

1. OpenOffice.org - An enterprise worthy office suite
2. FileZilla - Top notch FTP client (must have for a webmaster)
3. Notepad++ - One of the best text editors out there (also a must have for a webmaster)
4. UltraDefrag - When you move, copy, and delete as many files as I do this will come in handy. I’ve reviewed this in a past post. This is a relatively new find but it’s going on my list from now on for sure.
5. VirtuaWin - When I can’t have my dual monitors I can at least have virtual desktops. I also reviewed this in a previous posting. This is a relatively new find, just like UltraDefrag, but it’s going on my list from now on too.
6. Firefox - I can’t stand using Internet Explorer so this is a must have for me

I do install more apps on each and every computer I own,  such as AVG Anti-Virus, MSN Messenger, Skype, Google Earth, etc but these 6 that I have listed are by far the most important ones for me to get work done.

~TheNerd

It’s been a few days now since I last reviewed a piece of software so I guess it’s time. This time around I am reviewing a neat little open source application called VirtuaWin.

VirtuaWin is a virtual desktop manager for the Windows operating system that allows you to manage multiple applications over virtual desktops (or workspaces). Some of you might be familiar with this concept if you’ve used one of the many flavors of Linux.

One of the things I love about this app is the size. The binary is only 382kb and downloads in just a few seconds. It’s also super easy to configure. The only tweaking I had to do was name the four virtual desktops I was going to use and assign them each a hot key. I’ve set VirtuaWin up to use the Windows Key plus the numbers 1 through 4 (respective to the virtual desktop I created).

There are a ton of options that can be set but really the name and hot keys were all I had to do to get it set up and running. One option I would consider setting up is the mouse functions. You can set VirtuaWin to let the mouse direct which virtual desktop is selected. I did try it out and it was pretty neat. When I would move the mouse off the right side of the screen it would move over one virtual desktop and when I moved the mouse off the bottom of the screen under the taskbar it would go down one virtual desktop. OK so my terminology is a little off but if you look at the screen shot that shows the little tray icon you will see what I mean. It’s separated into four quadrants.

On the VirtuaWin website you can find a bunch of add-ons (called modules) and icon sets. It’s a very configurable and customizable program.

The one and only thing that I was able to find that I didn’t like was the sheer amount of settings. You can get quite involved in tweaking. My personal preference is dead simple and I’m not a huge fan of tweaking. I prefer to run things more or less “out of the box”. Regardless, once I figured out which options I needed to change I was all set to go in just a matter of minutes. It took me a lot longer to write this post than it did to learn how to use the program.

You can get VirtuaWin here.

That’s right folks. Your’s truly is now an official podcaster. As of today I am co-host of the Haiku Podcast. I’ve been wanting to get into this for quite some time but never had the chance to until a few weeks ago when I was talking to Sikosis (a prominent member of the Haiku community) and he mentioned that he was looking for a co-host.

Needless to say I jumped right on it. It took a while  for us to meet up on Skype because he lives in Australia and I live in Canada. There is actually a 14 hour time difference between us. We finally met up a few weeks ago to test the skype connection. It went very well and we decided that I would join in on the next episode. This past Friday was the time to record.

Wow what an interesting experience that was. In all my years here on this lovely planet, I have organized events and stood up in front of crowds of people to speak but nothing really compares to this. I know it’s weird but for some reason the fact that it was being recorded and saved forever somewhere was in the back of my mind the whole time. I did manage to get through it and when Sikosis edited all of my “uhhhs and ummms” out of it, it wasn’t that bad.

I can definitely say (well as long as Sikosis agrees)  I will be co-hosting the Haiku Podcast for some time to come. If you want to listen to the episode click here to get to the podcast home page.

Cheers!
~TheNerd

Yup, that’s what I am in to now. Lately I’ve been building and promoting web based proxy sites. When I recently went through a web spaz and decided to update and reformat a lot of my sites I also decided to try and find a use for some domains I had registered but weren’t in use.

After spending a bunch of time surfing around the forums on digitalpoint.com and hearing a bunch of people talking about web proxies, I decided that is what I would use my spare domains for. Some of the folks around digitalpoint.com said that the proxy market was over populated and that it was hard to make money there now. I must say I thought they were wrong so I continued on.

My first proxy (squibber.net) was built with a script called Phproxy. After I had finally got it up and running I realized that the author had given up on the development of it. I figured there wasn’t much use in using a script that wasn’t supported anymore so I went in search of a new one. I stumbled upon some other scripts such as CGI-Proxy, Zelune and Glype. I finally settled on Glype because this script was still under development and had an active community. It was also very easy to install, configure and style (there’s lots of free templates around).

All that was just the first part of what I needed to do to start making money. I then had to find the right PPC networks to run. Adsense is good but I came to find out that their TOS does not allow the use of their ads on proxified pages (the pages viewed after loaded in via the proxy) so I had to find another one. This was to hard because lots of people said that Adbrite was decent for this so I decided, since I was already signed up with Adbrite, to use them on these “proxified” pages.

Now that I had my ads all sorted out I needed to find a way to get people to visit my sites. Since proxy sites aren’t made of content (like a blog would be), it’s not much sense to try and get Google to index it and move up the PageRank scale like one would traditionally do (although it will evently help). I found that there are tons of proxy top sites out there so I went on a mad spree submitting my sites. To my surprise this worked quite well and I went from 0 to ~140 unique views almost overnight.

Since I had pretty much cluttered my pages with reciprocal links I thought it might be time to find another way to promote my sites without having to reciprocate each and every link. That is when I found Web Proxy Talk (a forum based on all things proxy). What a good find this site was. I was able to get answers from a community dedicated to the new niche I was exploring. It’s still a fairly low traffic site but the folks there have been more than helpful and I’ve been able to exchange links, find more top sites, and learn about MySpace bulletins and news groups.

So I bet you are now asking “Are you making any money?”. Well, honestly, not much yet. Come on now, I just started so give it time. One thing I have learned over the years is that making money on the web is not the “get rich quick scheme” that most people think it is. It takes lots of time and effort to get good at it and start bringing in the money (of course that’s what I’m guessing because I’m not there yet).

If you want to start looking into the proxy site business here are some links that will help you out:

Web Proxy Talk
Proxy friendly web hosting from TechEntrance
Domain name registration
Pay Per Click Ads: Adsense & Adbrite

Cheers!
~TheNerd

One might wonder why I would like using such a dying technology. The answer is not that simple but I will try to explain some of the reasons I like using NetWare and OES as well, I will describe some of the drawbacks associated with it.

I may as well start off by saying that I am not a network tech or server admin. I work on a help desk where some of my duties include user administration, file management/maintenance, tech support, and other stuff.

So here goes. What do I like about NetWare, OES, eDIR, etc.?

1. Printing with NDPS or iPrint works very well
2. eDirectory is logically designed and the types of objets are easy to understand
3. File management is a breeze
4. eDir and OES can be integratd with other services such as Active Directory and LDAP.
5. User account administration is very straight forward
6. Zenworks for Desktops is great for keeping an inventory of computer systems and software
7. NetWare 6.5 may be the last of the NetWare family but it’s still support fairly well
8. GroupWise is a very good email system
9. Since NetWare is not as popular as MS Windows, there aren’t near as much malware or vulnerabilities directed at it
10. In my experience, people who work with NetWare (and other Novell services) know it well. Probably more than most of the folks who work with Windows based products.

Now that I’ve talked about the good stuff here are some things that I don’t like.

1. ConsoleOne is junk but is needed to administer GroupWise
2. The DNS/DHCP console is also junk but is needed
3. Anyone who’s ever used NetWare knows what happens when it can’t synchronize properly
4. Novell has been promising an “all-in-one” tool for years but has yet to produce it
5. Novell is more focused on Linux now
6. Drivers for new hardware are getting harder to find
7. There are limited online resources where one can find information to help solve problems
8. Less and less software vendors are creating software that is compatible
9. When consulting is needed for big projects it’s harder to find qualified people than it was in previous years
10. Having the extra overhead of the Novell Client on the desktop. This gives us one more piece of software to upgrade, manage, and troubleshoot.

I am sure that there are people out there who will disagree with my pros and cons but keep in mind these are just things I have noticed over the past fours years while employed in the IT sector. If you have been living under a rock and have no idea what NetWare, eDirectory, Zenworks, or anything else I mentioned is click here to get to a Wikipedia article that explains more.

I was surfing along the other day looking for a replacement defragmentation utility for the built in one that comes with Windows XP and happened to stumble upon UltraDefrag. Personally, I don’t like the Windows XP utility because it has a tendency to skip over some fragmented files for no good reason. I’ve also been weary of the fact that the Windows utility can’t be run under Safe Mode (well at least it never seems to work for me – I know it works for some people).

Over the years I’ve tried the defrag utility that came with Norton SystemWorks and Vopt8, just to name the first two that come to mind but neither one of them seemed to work as good as UltraDefrag and they cost money.

I decided to download it and give it a try. Here is what I liked.

First off, there are four versions: i386, AMD64, IA64 and EM64T. This makes it available on most Windows friendly architectures. I’m using the i386 version because I’m currently running Windows XP 32bit on my of my systems.

Secondly, the program is open source. That means that you can download it for free and even modify the code if you so desire.

Finally, It’s quite feature rich. See below for a small example of the features .

• Very fast defragmentation, the work is done via a kernel mode driver which has an optimal defraging algorithm.
• Very small engine written in pure C.
• Nice graphical interface - compact and functional.
• Safety, because the file moving is accomplished with Microsoft’s own Defrag API.
• Simple to use.
• Ability to generate html reports of fragmentation status.
• Ability to include/exclude files based on simple filters.
• Native x64 support.
• Free: Distributed with full source code under the GNU General Public License.

I’ve spent the last two days defraging with this utility and it works well. It hasn’t crashed on me yet and it appears to get some of the files that Windows defrag missed. You can also set it to run when Windows first boots so you can snag those bulky system files and defrag them. That’s another thing that Windows defrag doesn’t do.

Here are a couple screen shots of the program to give you an idea of what it looks like. I have to say it does have an “old school” look but I happen to like it that way. That’s just the nerd in me coming out I guess.

If you want to download UltraDefrag click here to get to their home page.