Technology and geeky stuff Archives - Page 26 of 45

Wireless data in London #TG2009

7 May, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I’ve been informed that the Traveling Geeks will be provided with British Telecommunications [BT] OpenZone wireless connections while we’re in London in July. From what I read, BT has been building out these services for a couple of years now, and they prominently feature “outdoor” public access to wi-fi. Central London has some number of indoor hotspots and outdoor coverage areas. When I get there I’ll know better how this works in practice.

In the US, several cities have experimented with open or public wi-fi access. [Read more…]

MySQL and Java – two birds with one stone

22 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

The old phrase “killing two birds with one stone” – yeah it sounds impossible when you think about it realistically – ka-bing, ka-bing, there they go. But Oracle may succeed in killing off both Java and MySQL after its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Or at least sidelining both into stagnation in favor of big-ticket licensed Oracle products.

In 1999 to 2001 I was responsible for purchasing Oracle licenses for a large organization with large plans. We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (US) for initial and continuing licenses on Oracle database software. The stuff was industrial-strength. But since then I’ve used (the free) MySQL dozens of times for small-to-medium size sites. And several systems I’ve used or designed have been Java-based as well. The availability of these free tools is critical to the existence of millions of web sites around the world. [Read more…]

Can short URL sites and Twitter together be attack vectors?

19 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

On my site The Social Graph of Malware, I try to present current information (with appropriate background) on malware and attack vectors that use social engineering as a part of their methodology.

Last week I read somewhere (I know not where) about the potential for URL-shortening sites pointing you at sites containing malware. It’s pretty simple – imagine that someone posing as your friend twitters you and there’s one of these shortened URLs inside the message … but that this shortened URL points you at a site containing an embedded virus rather than at a site that you would want to actually visit. Your actual or supposed friend might not even know the site is poisoned. How can you protect yourself against this? Read this page at The Social Graph of Malware for more details. (I promise you there are no shortened URLs in the article.)

Doodling – or is it Visual Mapping?

18 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Jay Cross writes about developing a reputation as the guy who was doodling in business school classes.

But what Jay shows as examples might not all be doodles. Meaning aimless drawing. Yes, Jay may have been doodling much of the time, but there’s often more to it than that. And it can be extremely useful as well. [Read more…]

Did PHP kill the Java radio star?

10 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Responding to Infoworld Did PHP kill the Java radio star?

Zend’s CEO, Andi Gutmans, claims that PHP is disrupting Java. Meaning that PHP has gotten a significant toehold and is dislodging Java from its position as the granddaddy of server-side web applications frameworks[1]. I take the word disrupting in its modern sense of disruptive technology – a technology that significantly differs from the standard paradigm and whose effect would have been hard to predict, based on the “rules” of the standard paradigm.

I am a long-time Java-user (9 years) and I agree that PHP is a real contender in the web applications sphere… and would like to make some additional observations. [Read more…]