Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

I don’t normally pass along virus alerts because they are often outdated and obsolete, but this one is strait from my IBM inbox.  You may have heard about a virus that is set to strike on April 1st in the news recently.  It is called Conficker.C and you can read more about how it works by visiting these addresses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/

As stated in the links above, the virus takes advantage of a buffer-overflow vulnerability of certain server services on Windows based machines.  Microsoft issued an update (MS08-067) for Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 & SP3, and Vista to patch this hole back in October of last year. So if you have installed all available Windows updates you should be fine and not need to worry.  It is highly recommended you install all available updates if you have not done so lately.  To force your PC to check for available updates, click Start>All Programs>Windows Update and follow the on-screen instructions.

If your computer is directly connected to the Internet it is advised that you have a quality software firewall installed and blocking unexpected inbound traffic.  A comparison of free firewall software can be found here:  http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm

In addition you should also have a quality anti-virus software solution in place.  Any of the following will suffice:

• CA Anti-Virus
• Symantec Anti-Virus
• F-Secure Anti-Virus
• Panda Anti-Virus
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus
• McAfee Anti-Virus
• BitDefender Anti-Virus

I personally recommend  AVG Free Edition

In summery:

• Be sure to apply all available updates for Microsoft Windows
• Ensure you have some form of firewall blocking unwanted network traffic
• Install a quality anti-virus solution

Now lets all have a happy April Fools day!

You’re walking through the entertainment department at your local shopping center and pick up a DVD that you’d like to see.  You scan the bar code on the back of the DVD with your cell phones camera.  By the time you get home, the movie you looked at while shopping has already been downloaded to your PC.  Check this video out to see how it works:

It goes without saying that downloading a movie illegally via bittorrent is probably going to piss the MPAA off.  But if they’re smart about this, they could actually take the concept of scan-to-download idea and turn it into a big money maker.  There’s probably plenty of people who would purchase a digital download of a movie if it were offered to them at a reasonable price.  Just take a look at iTunes or Amazon offering DRM-free MP3 merchandise.  You might even take a look at what Valve Software did with Steam recently:  They cut the price of Left 4 Dead by 50% and noticed a 3000% increase in sales.  Ultimately it just goes to show that there is an ever increasing number of people who want to purchase digital merchandise and they’re willing to pay for it as long as it’s not overpriced.  I could even see movies being offered up for free with commercials inserted in a hulu.com style.

Anyway, cool app for a cell phone to say the least.  Thought for pirates, it would be kind of like saying, “Hey.  As if my IP address weren’t enough information, here’s my phone number too.”

This is what you get when you combine a portable video projector, a camera and a cell phone that has access to the Internet and the ability to process visual information for you.  Simply amazing!  Click on the video below to see a demonstration.

As cool as this technology is, I have to say that I think it’s already up against some stiff competition from smart phones like the Google Phone and the iPhone.  For instance, the video shows a demo of evaluating different kinds of paper towels for the user so they can pick out the one that is the most environmentally friendly.  A somewhat similar application that already exists on the Google Phone (and others before it in Japan) is a program that allows you to use the built-in camera to scan the products UPC barcode, which would then give you an instant price check for that product at local stores and even through online merchants.

It would take little effort to expand the capabilities of the above smart phone application to allow for sorting of the search results to be prioritized for other criteria besides price.

The key feature that the projector/camera technology does have that you can’t easily do with a cell phone is the ability to project visual data onto any surface and interact with it in 3D space via hand gestures.  While there are a lot of unique uses for this, a drawback of this is that you are required to have a usable surface in front of you in the first place, and I think (for now) the LCD screen of a smart phone has the upper hand in that department.  For instance, you could be walking down a street at high noon and look at a building (like some sort of historical landmark) but not have a usable surface to project meta-data on to (although I suppose something could be read to you through an ear piece).  On a cell phone, the screen is much more visible in nearly any lighting and given further software development, all kinds of information could be overlayed onto a camera captured video stream as seen below:

The end goal in both of these technologies is pretty strait forward:  Overlay relevant information on top of the real world.  And between these two technologies, I have to say that I think smart phones still have the upper hand… for now. Even though smart phones don’t have the freedom of using hand gestures to operate your phone, it could be argued that multi-touch screens are comparable (for things like zooming on maps, photos, etc.).

What I think the real knockout advantage of a cell phone (besides the fact that an LCD screen works as a better display surface than most real life objects) is the fact that information is presented to you in a more private, personal fashion.  If you were to have personal information projected out, anybody nearby could eavesdrop on whatever is being shown to you.  For example, you wouldn’t want your online bank statement to be projected on to a wall when you’re surrounded by strangers at an airport.  It’s more personal to have such things confined to a smalls screen that you have more control over.  Then again, the idea is to use a cell phone as the core processor of the system, so in the event you have to look something personal up that you don’t want projected, you would just take your phone out of your pocket and do whatever it is that you need to do.

A bold prediction is made at the very end of the first video:  That we will one day have the ability to augment digital information on reality through some kind of brain implant.  While such a wild technology is still a long ways away, it will likely occur within a couple decades time and the development of this is only the first of several steps towards a technology we once thought to be impossible.

There’s no need for me to write a description about this as there are dozens of Youtube videos up right now showing off this cool trick.  Like this one:

If you want to try this out for yourself you’ll need a webcam and you have to visit this website.   And yes, I realize how ironic it is to have a campaign that hails the greatness of renewable energy asking you to waste a piece of paper to play with a little 3D model of some windmills.  At least you can recycle that paper.

The only annoying thing about this is if you want to look at your little augmented reality up close, which requires putting the paper closer to the webcam… which can be tricky:

As demonstrated above, you can clearly see that there is a little scarecrow standing among the windmills.  Or maybe you can’t see because the paper is directly between you and your monitor!!!  Damn it!

Well it’s about freakin’ time!  I’ve been using WordPress as a framework for writing blog entries here on my website since the I started posting some many months ago.  And every time a new version was released, I would have to upgrade manually.  This was nerve-racking because you had to be careful not to accidentally delete certain files from your server, or your whole blog would be wiped out (of course you’d also have to manually backup before doing this).  Worse, the whole upgrading process would take about 15 minutes or longer (depending on connection) because even though Word press only consists of about 1.2 MB of data, it’s split up into hundreds of tiny files, which makes things SLOW over FTP.

But today (which is turning out to be a pretty great day for a lot of different reasons) I logged in to check on my comments and notice the following:

Oooo!!  An update button!  In the past, something like this would direct you to WordPress.com and have you download a zip, extract the few hundred files out, delete certain folders from your server, then upload the necessary files to replace the old ones, THEN go to a special web link on your server to complete/verify the upgrade.  In a word, it SUCKED.  To my delight, this is what I got after clicking the button:

Automatically?  Huzzah!!

Now I know that to advanced web developers, this doesn’t come across as a big deal because if you had shell access to your server, you could just SSH into your server and run a couple of commands that would extract the download and fore-go the need to upload hundreds of tiny files.  But that costs extra and when it comes to web hosting fees, I try to keep things on the cheap side.

So Cheers to the WordPress devs!  You’ve made my life just a little easier.

As much as it would probably sooth the stiffness in my neck and shoulders from doing busy work inventorying computer equipment today, I’m going to try to not turn this into a sarcastic sounding slam against Microsoft… although they damn well deserve it.

I’ll just keep this very short.  Internet Explorer has once again dropped the ball in the realm of Internet security and it’s something that’s been present for over 48 hours already.  You can read about the problem via BBC’s website by clicking here.

The article states in bold letters at the top, “Security experts recommend switching to a rival browser until the problem is fixed.”  Need a rival web browser?  Download Firefox at www.firefox.com.  It’s free, faster and much more secure than Internet Explorer ever will be.  Seriously.  Why is it more secure, you ask?  Because it’s open-source, just like Linux.  But again… don’t wanna turn this into a “Microsoft sucks” bashing post.

Also, on the side, I should mention that I’ve see a LOT of Windows systems get hit with viruses in the last 3 weeks, a good chunk of which have come in from emails on Facebook.  Which isn’t to say that Facebook is bad.  It just doesn’t have much of an effective spam filter or virus scanner built into it.  You would think that after a few people have recieved the same spam from their friend whose computer was compromised, they’d start filtering messages with the same links, the same stupid subject line, and all the rest that comes along with basic social engineering-based viruses.  It’s what Yahoo and Google do.  So to you Facebook/Myspace users out there (and everyone else who doesn’t uses these services), be VERY cautious about clicking on links to websites you’ve never visited to before in email sent to you by a friend.  They may not have actually sent you something.  In fact, it’s possible their account password was phished, changed, and their account used as a lauch pad for spreading the same infection to other people (like you).  So be careful.

About a week ago someone had posted a comment on my blog in reply to my “Is Ubuntu Family Friendly” post, and by accident I marked it as spam.  This is common for people like me who have installed the WordPress software on their servers, but never have actually signed up for an account with WordPress or installed any third-party spam management plugins.  People like that (like me) would end up getting anywhere from 15 to 40 of the most absurd spam comments posted to their blog for review on a daily basis.  Because you actually want genuine comments to appear on your website, you sit down and go through all the comments and end up getting into that habit where you hover your mouse over the same part of the screen and then repeatedly click over and over without moving anywhere else.  Do it too quickly, and you’ll end up clicking “Spam” on stuff you don’t want to mark as spam.

While googling for a solution to recovery the comment I accidentally tossed into my WordPress database purgatory, I found a cool spam management plugin called Akismet.  You can download it from www.akismet.com.  This little thing has a lot of really cool features, including pie-charts and line-graphs showing statistics about the daily spam and “ham” (real comments) submitted to your blog.  And for once, I almost never ever see 40+ spam messages a day waiting to be trashed.  Not to mention the fact that you can very easily recover comments you didn’t mean to mark as spam in the first place.  If you’re a user of WordPress, I highly recommend this little plugin.  The only slight drawback is that you have to sign up for a free account with WordPress.com, but that only takes a few minutes and I’d bet that most of you out there have already done this.  Blog on!