Category: General

I was reading the Google article, Strengthening 2-Step Verification with Security Key, and decided to see how much strengthening my security would cost. Everyone says they want better security until they see the price tag. Surprisingly a security key does not cost much. The cheapest key on Amazon comes from Plug-up International, costs $5.99 with $2.00 postage, and my estimated delivery date is November 10. I can do that!

Last week I was browsing the statistics for our web site created by Awstats and noticed something odd. Safari was our second most popular browser! This result was odd since I had read a report saying that Google Chrome had recently passed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in the world. On our web site the most popular browser was Internet Explorer(51.8%) followed by Safari(18.3%), Firefox(17.6%), and Google Chrome(8.0%). Since 21.3% of our users are using either a Macintosh, an iPad, or an iPhone, the Safari number looks reasonable. Going through the previous months files I found that Safari pulled ahead of Firefox in December of 2011. After a little hacking of the operating_systems.pm using the instructions in the article, Analyze HTTP logs, looking for iOS, a significant chunk of the Safari traffic originates on iPhones and iPads. Since we believe that the group of people visiting our web site customers are older than average, this makes an interesting statement about the acceptance of iPhones, iPads, and Safari. This group seems to have chosen iPads and iPhones over Macintosh computers as their browsing platform and the Safari browser over Google Chrome and Firefox browsers for their Internet browsing.

PC magazine wrote a nice article on the current trends in web browser, Google’s Chrome Tops IE in Global Browser Share. In that article Chloe uses two different sources for browser statistics, StatCounter and NetMarketShareâ„¢ and they come up with different results. Except for the Safari/Google Chrome issues our web site statistics are very similar to NetMarketShareâ„¢. Here are their graphs for market browser share.

Graph generated at StatCounter.

Graph generated at NetMarketShareâ„¢.

135 terabyte, 4U server for $7,384 is pretty cool!

It’s been over a year since Backblaze revealed the designs of our first generation (67 terabyte) storage pod. During that time, we’ve remained focused on our mission to provide an unlimited online backup service for $5 per month. To maintain profitability, we continue to avoid overpriced commercial solutions, and we now build the Backblaze Storage Pod 2.0: a 135-terabyte, 4U server for $7,384. It’s double the storage and twice the performance—at lower cost than the original.

Backblaze Blog » Petabytes on a Budget v2.0:Revealing More Secrets

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on an automated pricing program. This was not one of the algorithms I was looking at.

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

Jason left a comment on a previous post about wanting to see the script I am using to email NTBackup log files. Recently I converted the script to powershell from vbs. Here is the old file.

#**************************************************
# Script Name: 	Ntbackup_E-Mail_Alert
#     Version: 	1.0
#      Author:	Bill Huber
#Last Updated:	19.Nov.2009
#
#     Purpose:	Concatenates two or more log files into the body of an email message. I schedule
#				this script to run at a time the backup job should be finished and to send me 
#				the latest NTBackup log files as an email with a somewhat informative subject field.
#
#		Legal:	Public Domain.  Modify and redistribute freely.  No rights reserved.
#              	SCRIPT PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR GUARANTEES OF ANY KIND.
#              	USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. NO TECHNICAL SUPPORT PROVIDED.
#**************************************************

# Customize the following variables for your SMTP server, email from address,
# email address the message is going to, the minimum log size, and the log path.
 
$SmtpServer = "mySBServer" 
$From = "mySBServer Administrator <administrator @myCompany.com>"
$To = "billhuber@myCompany.com"
$intLogSize = 1000 		#If the log file is less than this size, the backup probably failed
#The following variable point to the log file location
$logpath = "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\*.log"

# End of Customization

$SmtpClient = new-object system.net.mail.smtpClient
$SmtpClient.host = $SmtpServer 

#Get the filenames and other stuff for the last two log files
#We are going to concatenate the last two log files into the body of the email message

$a = get-childitem $logpath | sort-object lastwritetime | select-object -last 2
#Get the last write time for the last report for the subject line
$b = $a | sort-object lastwritetime -descending | select-Object -first 1
$c = $b.LastWriteTime
$d = $b.length

$Title = "SUCCESS - Full Backup at $c"
if ($d -lt $intLogSize){
	$Title = "ERROR - Full Backup Failed at $c"
	}
$Body = ""
 foreach ($line in Get-Content $a)
    {
    $Body += "$line `n"
    }
 
$SmtpClient.Send($from,$to,$title,$Body)

PrtScr

I was just about to pan PrtScr until shortly after I installed it I wanted to add a copy of an embedded Flash animated graphic. Foolish me! My first choice was to make a PDF of the web page. It turned out to be a terrible choice.  The original chart had subtle shades of red. The PDF had one big blob of red. Score one for PrtScr. Selecting a rectangular area was a bit of a challenge on my laptop. I had to press on the Ctrl Key and the left mouse button while marking the area. I wish I could remap the PrtScr keys. Snag_It appears to be the favorite but it costs money.

Quotepad

I thought I would have an immediate use for Quotepad. It looks promsing. I use Cut-and-Paste often at work but I have not used QuotePad yet beyond the initial trial. Keeping Clipboard history is a favorite requested feature for a lot of users and there are a lot of competitors in this area.

uSbuntu

I found uSbuntu on HowtoForge and it looked promising, too. A bootable Ubuntu that could also work under Windows. Too bad I was not able to get it to boot under Windows. It kept complaining about memory problems. Portable VirtualBox looked promising at first because it is so slim compared to VMServer. Too bad I never got it to boot completely.

 

Portable Ubuntu

I found Portable Ubuntu on Lifehacker. Portable Ubuntu installed with a minimum of problems. It was easy to install and in my limited testing, it worked without a fuss. My biggest problem is that I really don’t have a real use for Ubuntu. One of the areas Linux excels in is network testing. Backtrack3 is my favorite in this area but I have to reboot. So as an extra test I decided to install a Nmap variant called knamp. It installed and it worked. Not bad!

I gave the Portable Ubuntu program a run today. I manually extracted the files using 7Zip since the executable had an error when it extracted the files. Then it took about three runs before my firewall, Comodo, and I agreed on the executables to unblock. I did get Portable Ubuntu to burp and stick my PC with a task using 50% of the CPU. Restarting Portable Ubuntu fixed that problem. Other than the burp, the performance was adequate. The biggest problem is I am not sure what I would use it for. A Portable BackTrack 3 might be more interesting since it has Linux applications I am interested in using occasionally.

Windows only: Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your…

Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows [Downloads]
Kevin Purdy
Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

I had several versions of Java on my PC and I lamented the fact that I needed to use “Add/Remove Programs” to remove them. This script came in handy although my copy and paste of the code needed several fixups before it would work. The single and double quotes from the copy were funky according to DOS. So I have posted my cleaned up copy. The SyntaxHighlighter Plus plugin has solved this copy problem for me in the past. Good Luck!

Rem to run this file and log the output use: "uninstall java.bat">>java_remove.log
Rem @echo off &
cls
Rem List all Installation subkeys from uninstall key.
echo Searching Registry for Java Installs
for /f %%I in ('reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\microsoft\windows\currentversion\uninstall') do echo %%I | find "{" > nul && call :All-Installations %%I
echo Search Complete..
goto :NoneFound
:All-Installations
Rem Filter out all but the Sun Installations
for /f "tokens=2*" %%T in ('reg query %1 /v Publisher 2^> nul') do echo %%U | find "Sun" > nul && call :Sun-Installations %1
goto :EOF
:Sun-Installations
Rem Filter out all but the Sun-Java Installations. Note the tilda + n, which drops all the subkeys from the path
echo %1
for /f "tokens=2*" %%T in ('reg query %1 /v DisplayName 2^> nul') do echo . Uninstalling - %%U: | find "Java" && call :Sun-Java-Installs %~n1
if errorlevel 1 (
echo Doing further conditional checking on variables.
for /f "tokens=2*" %%T in ('reg query %1 /v DisplayName 2^> nul') do echo . Uninstalling - %%U: | find "J2SE" && call :Sun-Java-Installs %~n1
)
goto :EOF
:Sun-Java-Installs
Rem Run Uninstaller for the installation
MsiExec.exe /x%1 /qb /quiet /passive /promptrestart
echo . Uninstall Complete, Resuming Search..
goto :EOF
:NoneFound
Rem No Java found to remove from this system
echo No Java found or all versions already removed from this system
goto :EOF

Recently I was debugging why a backup of a QuickBooks file was not working. A scheduled job running on the server was supposed to create a compressed encrypted version on a removable USB drive. The job was written by someone else and I guess they never checked to see if it worked!? I found that itt worked when I ran it interactively but it failed when I ran it as a schedule job. It took me a while to figure this problem out but the QuickBooks folder was actually a shared folder on another computer and the drive mapping was not available in the batch environment. To fix the problem I added the following statements to create a drive mapped as ‘r:’.

	Dim objNetwork
	Set objNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
	strLocalDrive = "r:"
	strRemoteShare = "\\myserver\Backups_Daily"
	objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive strLocalDrive, strRemoteShare, False

Andy wrote:

My jaw dropped this morning as I read Chester Finn’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled The Self-Inflicted Economic Death of Ohio.  First, because the piece quantified some of my gut feelings about Ohio’s talent drain, and second, because of the magnitude of the problem.

It’s So Important To Keep Talent In Ohio « Cincinnati IT – an andy erickson blog

Unlike Andy I am still searching for a word to describe how I felt when I read this article. I have a seventeen year old son and we talked frequently about college and jobs over the last year. Our talks were stimulated by what they did not discuss at high school. Let’s just say he is learning a lot more about the job market from me than from his school and he goes to a “good” school. About a year ago his school started the college selection process. This is a lot earlier than when I was going to school so I was duly impressed. I don’t think I even talked about colleges and majors until I took my SAT test. I was pretty clueless about colleges but I was well prepared for a major in a science or engineering field. What shocked me was that my son’s college counselor was encouraging him to pursue a liberal arts major. I was curious about their reasoning so I started asking questions. The deeper I probed the less I liked about the philosophy of our present education system. It was not hard to figure out that the college counselor’s recommendations were a natural result of the educational system that was in place. My son had plenty of opportunities to try out science and technology courses but was generally steered away from them.  When we met with the counselor and I mentioned that the biggest job needs for the next decade are still in the science and technology fields, she said that he should have pursued a course selection with more science and technology courses in it.  Okay, let’s drop “Conversational French”. Her answer was, “He can’t do that!” Besides she said, “He is taking Honors English and History”. Huh! Another point she made and I have heard it repeated several times, is that you what you study in college does not determine your career choice. This is definitely not true for those pursuing a job in a technology field. Wow! When I worked for a large chemical company we rarely interviewed college graduates who did not have an engineering degree. That was just a fact of life. Another fact of life is that engineers are paid well. If you happened to have and engineering degree and work experience from a co-op program you were gold and would get top dollar. It really looks like the high schools are just going through the motions of college/career counseling.

About a month later he got his PSAT results. He got a 700 on the math portion and the PSAT report recommended that he consider a college with science or technology major. Go figure!

As seen from del.icio.us I must be seen as…

Through the grapevine I heard that FeedDemon is now free! Since GreatNews has been crashing on me recently, I decided it was a good time to give FeedDemon a try.

Greg Reinacker just announced that NewsGator Outlook, FeedDemon and all the NewsGator clients are now totally free! The NOT-FREE thing about FeedDemon has always been the one point that has stopped me from using it. Sounds like Nick has a new user.

NewsGator, FeedDemon are Free!
randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin)
Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:33:50 GMT