Are you one of those people who are always looking for the best deal? Do you cut the coupons out of the Sunday morning paper? Do you try and haggle with anybody and everybody just on the off chance that they might break down and give you a deal? If so, then this application from Codedifferent is perfect for you. CompareMe is an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that is essentially a price comparison guide. You can take two measurements, prices, and discounts/premiums and compare the two. Basically, you have a small program that tells you what to buy. It also tells you how much you save (or how much more you spend) overall. Oh, and for those of you who forget basic math, it also converts units for you. Now, before you start thinking that I am a price-conscious American, I want you to dig a hole and bury that idea six feet under. I go through my money like there is a hole in my pocket, and I rarely am concerned about price-difference. Sure, I will check the per-ounce price, but I really don’t care that much. CompareMe is not made for people like me. No, it is made more for those who buy in bulk. Say you go out to the lumber yard and buy a pile of rocks, or a bundle of lumber. Those do not have a per-pound comparison so it is harder to judge. Plus, if some are on sale and others are not, it gets even tougher. Or say you went to Home Depot and were buying some nails; same scenario and issues apply. This is where CompareMe steps in and saves the day. The application is designed for exactly these sorts of situations, ones where it is hard to tell the price differentials. Plus, if stores offer price matching, you can use this application to show the actual prices per unit. CompareMe is an interesting application. Most that I review and try out happen to be either flashy or expansive. CompareMe is neither; it is a small application, with one screen, that performs only one function. There are no nifty graphics and no interesting menus. Nope, this application is pretty simple. Yet, in simplicity comes usefulness. An application that performs its one duty, and does it well, is hard to come by these days in the App Store. CompareMe does its job flawlessly, and that deserves commendation.
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February 12, 2009 - 10:57 pm
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Music
This is the first in a three-part review covering Lightbox Photo™ Gallery Software from Lightbox Photo™. I have broken this down into three parts because of the scope of this system is pretty large and to try to work it down into a single review would do the product an injustice. In the first part I will cover an overview of the software and look at what it takes to install and setup of the Lightbox Photo™. Part two I will look at what the existing features of the product are, and in part three I will look at what new features have been added to the latest version of the software. So let's look at a general overview and setup of Lightbox Photo™ Gallery Software. Lightbox Photo™ is a software package that runs on a server and its main purpose is to assist you in creating your own photo sales site. There are three different versions of this product that can handle everything from the independent fine art photographer to someone who wants to set up their own stock photo library business. The system is very flexible in that it can be set up on your own server as well as on a server run by an independent hosting company. Lightbox Photo™ also has the ability to host it for you. The software is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, and there are three versions that are available to you depending on your needs. The standard version is aimed at the freelance artist and will let you create galleries, add images, display your images, accept payment via PayPal, VeriSign, and WorldPay among other payment processors. The professional version is focused to the small studio, collectives, and freelancers by adding additional searching tools and the ability to have multiple administrators with different privileges, as well as additional methods for payment such as offline payment for invoicing, or allowing a customer to pay by methods other than credit card, and shipping options for physical products. The Enterprise version is geared to those who need to manage multiple artists, use credit systems, and offer subscriptions. If you want to set up your own stock agency, then this is the version you would want, but it also has a number of features that really just about anyone would like. These include the ability to sell sets of images and allowing users to buy frames or other product options.
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February 11, 2009 - 9:08 am
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Music
I just finished reading an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal by M. P. McQueen, which suggests that the bear market is creating a bull market for fraudsters. According to the numerous experts cited in the article, the reason for this is economic gloom and doom with a healthy dose of anxiety. This shouldn't be surprising because gloom, doom, and anxiety make effective social engineering tools that can be used to part people and businesses from their money. The article references phishing expeditions that lead to fake Web sites — which often spoof a financial institution or government entity — and entice people into giving up enough of their personal details to drain their financial resources. It also mentions that some of these sites leave behind malicious software on a person's machine, which steal all these details automatically. Also mentioned is the use of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), caller-ID spoofing and cell phone technology to mount texting and vishing attacks. Vishing is merely another method of tricking people to give up personal and financial information via the telephone. In these attacks, the caller ID is spoofed to make it appear as if it is coming from a legitimate institution. Apparently telephone technology is being used to commit other types of crimes, too. Many of our 911 centers cannot identify spoofed calls coming from computers using VoIP technology. This has led to S.W.A.T. teams being tricked into deploying in full battle gear to residential neighborhoods when no emergency existed. Of course, businesses use the same technology to trick people who have caller ID into picking up their telephones. You can even buy a card to do this at will from any telephone right over the Web. It sometimes amazes me how much irresponsible technology there is out there, which is being sold legally. There are even Web sites, with disclaimers, that specialize in making this technology available to the general public. Of course, there are also complete DIY (do-it-yourself) phishing kits being sold over the Internet. Some of these even come with tech support. The phishing kits are illegal, but can be found for sale in chat rooms if you know where to look for them. Sadly, the truth is that these chat rooms aren't very hard to find. The fine line between legitimate enterprise and scams is often a little blurry. The WSJ article quotes a lot of experts, including Gartner, the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, who all seem to agree that scams are on the rise. An interesting phenomenon called out were small fraud charges being found on accounts. I guess taking small amounts, which might be mistaken for bank fees, is a good way to stay under the radar. A lot of people don't realize how many small fees are being charged to their account and it can be quite confusing at times. I guess the crooks are trying to make themselves look like bankers (speculation) and it's probably a good time for all of us to review our statements, carefully.
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February 9, 2009 - 7:26 am
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Music
The bystander effect is a social psychological phenomenon in which people are less likely to offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders. With millions of Internet users communicating through social network environments everyday, the bystander theory may not remain a valid theory for online social networking. Because people are joining these communities to make friends, these people are more inclined to come to the aid of a friend or distant contact if a personal emergency were discovered. The challenge we face online is how millions of nonprofessionally trained folks determine the validity of a “call for help,” and how do these users know if someone else has acted on a potentially serious “call for help.” We could have a “Digg” format where users responding to an apparent serious communication click a “helped” button, making visible their response to help someone. Does the Bystander Rule apply to Internet users? Is it time for the formalization (accountability) of “calls for help” on the Internet? Because the social networking communities are open to all people that have a computer and Internet connection, it serves as a vehicle for expressing an individual’s feelings on a regular and real-time basis. By allowing an online community member to interact with other members virtually, they can freely express thoughts and feelings they may not normally share when in a face-to-face situation offline. It’s like speaking with your psychologist or psychiatrist instead of a family member or friend. A possible approach, suggested by the American Psychologist, to negate the bystander effect is to pick a specific person in the crowd to ask for help rather than appealing to the larger group. For example, point directly to a specific bystander and give the person a specific task such as, “You in the red shirt, dial 911.” This clarifies the situation and places the responsibility directly on a specific person instead of allowing it to diffuse.
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February 7, 2009 - 3:35 am
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Music
Internet radios certainly made the hot topic list at this year's CES held last week in Las Vegas. Everyone was talking about new devices that allow listeners to stream their favorite station. Lots of companies introduced new streaming devices: Philips, Acoustic Research, RCA/Audiovox, and VTECH. Chumby's tiny Internet radio/alarm clock was even featured as part of Sony Chairman Howard Stringer's keynote address. Sony will produce a next generation Dream Machine alarm clock in partnership with Chumby. According to sources including the blog Paid Content, Stringer said that in two years, 90% of Sony devices will have connectivity. In addition to streaming table top and stereo devices, Blaupunkt and miRoamer made news and a few "best of show" lists with an announcement of an in-dash Internet car radio, gaining kudos from industry blog Venture Beat and Popular Mechanics award for innovation. Mobile streaming platform Flycast was featured by PC World as one of the best products at the show as well. Thanks to Internet radio, technology and electronics are taking a second glance at radio. During his speech, Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro said Radio is deeply ingrained in the U.S. culture. "Radio in the 1930s lifted the economy out of the Great Depression," he said. People listened to news and entertainment and drew hope and inspiration from the broadcasts. Today, radio continues to play an important role in the consumer electronics industry, which generated $1 trillion in economic activity globally last year, Shapiro said. I'm not sure if Internet radio will lift the economy out of our current misery, but it sure is looking more and more like it might be one of the few bright spots in 2009 and that's a very good prospect.
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February 3, 2009 - 3:04 pm
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Music
The summer after my college graduation, I lived in a tent for three months. After selecting a tent in the consignment section of a local mountaineering shop, I packed my backpack with essentials and flew across the country to Seattle. I met up with a friend in Bellingham, and then we took a ferry across Puget Sound and drove onto San Juan Island. From the ferry terminal, we drove through the small town of Friday Harbor, and continued through the pastoral countryside for five miles and then turned left onto a dirt road. After following the road for half a mile into the woods we had arrived to a plot of land with a handful of tents in the middle of nowhere. That afternoon, after setting up my tent and unpacking, I was instantly restless. I had no cell phone reception, no running water, and no computer. At the time, I was still using an actual film camera. While I was waiting for the other residents (all recent college grads) of our little ’shanty town’ to get home so I could meet them, I sat in the vestibule of my tent and sketched my feet for two hours. The first week living in shantytown was rough. It wasn’t easy to be so disconnected from everything. I eventually grew to like the analog lifestyle and ended up having some great adventures that summer. One of the big lessons I learned from the experience is that it’s possible to exist without technology. For three months, my technological diet consisted of 30-minute PC sessions at the local library and limited cell phone use, when I could find reception on the island. Today, boy, have things changed. Now my life relies heavily on technology. I use the Internet for everything. I haven’t looked at a paper map, CD, or roll of film in years, yet have no problem getting around, listening to music, and taking pictures. I generally think technology enhances my life and that things are more efficient.
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February 1, 2009 - 9:12 am
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Music
As Jon Flanders explains early on in his enjoyable book, <i>RESTful .NET</i>, Representational State Transfer (REST) is a set of guidelines on how to architect your web applications. Because it is tightly aligned with HTTP, architectures that follow the principles of REST are able to hook into a number of benefits that come built into the technologies that surround the web. Flanders delves into REST briefly, but he does it well enough that you understand its value even if you haven't consumed the groundbreaking book RESTful Web Services. The transition to programming REST using .NET is just as nicely handled. Windows Communication Foundation is a sprawling technology precisely because it is a model that covers a wide variety of programming paradigms (it supports a multitude of protocols like messaging, HTTP, SOAP, etc). There is a quick tutorial on implementing HTTP services using WCF – which serves to remind us that WCF isn't only tightly coupled to SOAP. The rest of the book is divided up into chapters that zero in on specific implementation using WCF: Read-only services, Read/Write services, RESTful services and Feeds. Flanders also covers both server side implementation and client-side consumption of the services. There is coverage of Ajax and Silverlight clients and a short chapter on using WCF Workflow to deliver the REST services. RESTful .NET's biggest strength is that it is concise, clear and lean. It zeroes in on the essentials and provides very lean tutorials. To that point, you need the basics of HTTP, SOAP, WCF, XML, C# and (briefly) ASP in place to fully appreciate the book. The most valuable chapter for me was the one in which Flanders covers programming feeds. But there is enough diversity in terms of types of constructs implemented, that you'll find something of value here. It is highly recommended if you are a Windows Web programmer and have a growing interest in REST.
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January 28, 2009 - 5:45 am
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Music
Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from my Mom warning me not to open any e-mail with the title "Obama Acceptance Speech" because it contained a trojan. It even cited Snopes as stating that the threat wasn't a hoax. I sent her a reply referencing the last post on spam I did, which had a paragraph about Obama spam on it. My point was anyone who thinks there is only one e-mail of this type is out there is probably sadly mistaken. On Sunday, with the inauguration less than 24 hours away, I got a hot tip that the Symantec Lab had detected another round of Obama spam with malicious intent being sent across the electronic universe. Zuftikar Ramzan announced on the Symantec Security Blog that this latest round of Obama spam uses lures with titles like "Our new president has gone," "Obama refused to be the president of the United States of America," and "There is no president in the USA anymore and Obama has gone." Zuftikar also mentioned a link in these e-mails (removed for safety reasons) leading to a faux website that looks amazingly similar to the official Obama-Biden site. The fake site can be seen below. This fake site attempts to exploit weaknesses in a Web browser to install malicious software without the owner's knowledge. According to Zuftikar, the page and its links all have malicious software on them. In other words, the entire site is literally a virtual booby trap. The files are titled usa.exe, obamanew.exe, pdf.exe, statement.exe, barackblog.exe and barackspeech.exe. While the titles might be different, they lead to the same variety of malware known as the W32.Waledac. This malicious software is capable of stealing sensitive information, turning your machine into a spam-spewing zombie and leaving a back door for a hacker to gain access to it. Political themes have been used a lot in recent times to lure people into clicking on links in spam e-mails they shouldn't have. Other common lures include the old fashioned too-good-to-be-true, security and badge-of-authority types (IRS, FBI, CIA, etc.). With tax season upon us, expect the IRS to be a common one used in the near future. Symantec does provide removal instructions for this malware on their site, but most of us are far better off by not clicking on this type of stuff in the first place. These e-mails are sent out by the millions and the best thing to do is hit delete before opening them up.
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January 26, 2009 - 4:13 pm
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Music
Advertising 2.0: Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 World is a comprehensive look into the new models of advertising for business-to-business and business to consumer organizations. The book highlights specific companies and how, through their use of the various modules, they were able to create online relationships with current and future customers. It is no surprise that advertising has changed drastically. Tracy L. Tuten, author and Associate Professor of Marketing at Longwood University, introduces the readers to the shifts through the emergence of social networking, virtual worlds, blogs, and online games. She clearly explains that companies must change tactics if they want to compete in 21st century advertising. She urges a thought shift away from advertising being viewed as one-way communication and towards what is called Brand Engagement. Brand Engagement can happen on many different levels and in many different ways. Advertising 2.0 demonstrates best practices from the most popular social media websites while exploring methods that can take your company to the next level. While the book covers what might be considered obvious social media companies like MySpace and Facebook, it also has companies consider other means of building online relationships through consumer reviews and brand sponsored alternative reality games. By also considering social news communities and marketing a company can create an online word of mouth that becomes viral and grows on its own. If you are new to social media marketing, Advertising 2.0 will help you learn the basic vocabulary as well as introduce many different options a company can consider in determining the type of online marketing that will be of the most benefit. Table of Contents: 1: Advertising Online: Engaging Consumers with Web 2.0 2: Socialcentricity and the Emergence of Social Media Marketing 3: Friendvertising: Advertising and Brand Building with Social Networks 4: Advertising in the Imagination: Social Virtual Networks and the “Vlobalization” of Brands 5: From Moments to Minutes: Advertising with Social Play 6: Influence the Influencers: Building Brands with Social News Media 7: Citizen Advertising: Consumer-Told Brand Folklore 8: In My Opinion: The Social Influence of Consumer Product Reviews 9: Social Fiction: Branding with Alternate Reality Games 10: Ads in Play: Immersing Brands In and Around Social Games 11: Social Media Impact: Balancing Metrics and Insight for Advertising Success
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January 23, 2009 - 7:31 pm
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Music
My girlfriend's PC is an amalgamation of old and new parts. The ten-year-old motherboard went south and needed replaced, but the IDE hard drives were still in good shape. Seeking to merge the old with the new, it was upgraded from a 750MHz AMD Duron processor on a decade-old Gigabyte motherboard (hot when AGP first debuted) to one of the newer Intel Core 2 Duos with a Gigabyte S-Series motherboard. IDE is on the way out, replaced by Serial ATA, so I had to look specifically for that in whatever motherboard I was going to buy. We put the thing together, fired it up, installed Windows XP Pro, got everything else on there, and she started happily plugging away on the upgraded monster (slipped a Geforce 7950GT in there to replace the 3dfx Voodoo3 too, to feed her growing gaming habit). Everything seemed ready to cook. As an avid online-TV watcher, it wasn't long before she discovered the sound and video in the stuff she was watching would stutter often, though it seemed to smooth out as things played on. I initially chocked it up to buffering issues, but when it started happening in offline videos and music in Windows Media Player and iTunes, I knew something was amiss. We tried updating sound hardware drivers, but that didn't help. Then we defragmented the hard drive, but to no avail. I even replaced the IDE cable, but nothing changed. I had narrowed it down to only happening when the C drive was being accessed, though. She tested it by playing a video file, then in the middle of it, she initiated a file copy from her laptop through the LAN to the afflicted machine's C drive and sure enough, as soon as the HDD activity LED lit up, the sound started getting choppy. Even Windows start up and shut down sound events were affected. After a few minutes of tireless searching (hey, I'm good), we stumbled onto a couple very specific fixes other users fighting this problem had reported. The first was to see if Windows had reverted the Transfer Mode between the hard drive and motherboard from the more common and faster DMA back to the slower but more reliable PIO. Windows switches automatically to PIO after a number of disk errors are reported, as it's apparently a more stable reading method. Problem is, since it is slower, it can cause glitches like what we were experiencing, and it's particular to IDE drives, so I wouldn't have seen this before on our other machines, which use SATA exclusively. To check for this, go to Settings-> Control Panel-> System-> Device Manager-> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers-> Primary IDE Channel-> Advanced Settings. Look under Device 0 and it should be set to "DMA if available." If it says "PIO only" instead, change it, click OK, save settings, and reboot. This may resolve your issue, though if the disk is really going bad, Windows is likely to change it back to PIO after some time, and you may want to look into getting a new hard drive.
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January 21, 2009 - 6:44 am
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Music