Reviews

Google Reader changes for the better

I used Google Reader several times yesterday, as I’ve been doing for the past several months, keeping track of the feeds I like to read. Then I read this entry on the Google Blog, telling us that they’ve just launched a new version of the Reader. When did that happen? Wow, that was quick! They launched a brand new version in just a few hours, propagating the change across all their servers.

The new version is much better than the previous one — which worked great, don’t get me wrong — but was not as polished and easy to use. The major changes in this version are obvious: all of the feeds are listed nicely in the left column, and if new items are available, the feed title is bolded and the new items are counted in parentheses. The text formatting for the feed items is also much nicer.

Another cool feature is the Share option, which lets you mark feed items for sharing, and puts them onto a separate page, all your own, with a feed that people can subcribe to. That’s cool! So I don’t have to Star the items that I use, then copy and paste the OPML onto my blog. Now I can just manipulate the feed and display it as I want, wherever I want. But I see that the option to share my starred or tagged items has disappeared. Where did it go? Is it gone for good? (If it has, that’s a bummer, and I’d like it back.)

Finally, I see that the Email feature has been placed next to the Add star and Share options, and the “Blog This!” option has been taken away. If you’re not familiar with it, it would let you blog about a feed item right in your Blogger account. But people didn’t bother to edit the entries, instead choosing the leave the form fields pre-filled with a quote from the post. They’d hit the Publish button, instantly turning their blog into a splog. I can see why Google did away with this.

All in all, a good, solid upgrade. I’m looking forward to using the new Google Reader on a daily basis from now on.

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Reviews

Want to watch your recorded shows and movies over the Internet?

OrbWith all of the media hype surrounding Slingbox, and the Sony LocationFree Player, an easy and inexpensive (as in FREE) solution is getting overlooked: My Orb. But that’s to be expected. They haven’t advertised heavily, and they’re fairly unassuming. But don’t think that their product is underrated, because it’s not.

To use it Orb, all you do is install their software on your desktop system (only works with Windows XP machines), and it’ll let you access your photos, music and movies right through the Internet, right away. It’ll even stream your music in Windows Media Player or Quicktime streams, depending on what computer you access your files with (PC or Mac).

I wouldn’t have known about it myself, except that I bought a Creative web cam for my laptop, and found the software bundled onto the install CD. I tried it, and it really works like a charm! I simply installed the software, set up my account at My Orb, and logged in. All of my photos, music and videos were listed right in my account. I was able to stream my movies from my home machine, and watch them over the internet, at work. And if you’ve got a Media Center PC, it’ll even let you access your recorded TV shows, or the live TV stream. Cool!

And, what’s even cooler is that they’ve got this service called Orb Secure, which they make available for free to Creative web cam buyers, that’ll let you use your camera as a surveillance device. You can access the camera’s video stream at any time to see what’s going on at home, or even better, use it as a motion sensor, and set it to record video for a pre-set amount of time whenever movement is sensed. What’s more, this service will even email or SMS you whenever motion is detected. You can then watch either the live video stream, or the recorded video portions, right on the Orb site, and take action if needed (i.e., call the police). How cool is that!

So why spend your money on yet another piece of hardware? Use what you already have, and get your money’s worth. Look into Orb.

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Reviews

WD Passport Portable Hard Drive: a new kind of sexy

These new Western Digital portable hard drives have me drooling. They’re reasonably priced, and they come in various sizes: 60 GB, 80 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB. They’re powered solely by the USB port, and they’re bundled with encryption software and a bunch of Google software (probably the Google Toolbar and the Google Desktop.) Not that I give a hoot about that — the design is much too cool for me to care about anything else. Wowza!

If you don’t like the prices on the WD site, PC Mall is running a sale on these and other WD drives.

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Reviews

Dictionary of Information Security by Robert Slade

Dictionary of Information SecurityHave you ever wondered just what the jargon of information security specialists really means? What are all those arcane words they throw around to scare us into submission as they lock down our computers even tighter? “What do you mean, we can’t even install a screensaver now?! Can I at least use the bathroom without your permission?”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dumb Information System Security Officers (ISSOs) at corporations and organizations. I’ve known a few myself. These are the folks that barely know what they’re talking about, and go by the latest article they read. Their reaction to a new piece of software is to lock down the system and disallow it even before they research it properly. Case in point: was Skype shut down at your place of business or at a friend’s workplace? That was a dumb ISSO in action. They also know so little that they simply throw words around, and anyone with a little knowledge of computers can tell when they mess up. “No, ROM is not RAM, and no, it’s not a 300 Gigabit hard drive, it’s a 300 Gigabyte hard drive.”

That’s why books like this Dictionary of Information Security really help. We can educate ourselves, and know when they’re wrong. We can tell when they’re BS-ing, and when they’re telling the truth. My experience has been that they BS for 80 percent of the time, and don’t know what they’re talking about for the other 20 percent. “No, RSS doesn’t stand for Really Scary Stuff, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. And yes, it’s okay for us to subscribe to RSS feeds. Really.” Or, “No, this is a perfectly harmless screensaver. It’s not a RAT (Remote Access Trojan). You’re a rat, for all I care.” I could go on and on…

I love this book. Robert Slade did a great job putting it together, and the terms are explained in language that anyone possessing a cursory knowledge of computers can understand. I’m amused by the forewords, acknowledgments and preface. They’re abnormally long for a book this small, but that’s to be expected. This is, after all, the first Dictionary of Information Security, and a precedent has to be established, so to speak. But once you get down to the terms, you forget about all of the beginning sections, because if knowledge is power, this book packs a wallop.

Get it, and read it. I know it’s hard to believe, after all, who’d read a dictionary, but I’d read this one. And keep it around for reference. And when your ISSO gets on your nerves, start encrypting all your emails with PGP if he doesn’t stop scanning them. Or, if he doesn’t stop blocking access to your webmail account, set up a VPN connection to your home network and do all your web surfing through that. That’ll knock his SOCKS off! Let the fun begin!

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Reviews

Zoom Search Engine: a powerful and inexpensive search engine for your website

Zoom Search EngineI’ve been using the Zoom Search Engine for over a year, and I’ve been very happy with it. But today I realized I hadn’t told many people about it, so I had to fix that.

So what’s the Zoom Search Engine? It’s a beautiful piece of software written by WrenSoft, an Australian web software company. Here’s what I think is amazing about it:

  • It’s inexpensive: the Standard edition is $49, and the Professional edition is $99. (I have the Pro edition.) There’s also a free edition for smaller sites. A side-by-side comparison of the different editions is available on the WrenSoft website.
  • It’s small in size, but feature-packed. The executable is 1.65 MB. Bloatware this is NOT. It is small and it packs a powerful punch. If you don’t believe me, install it, then run through the various options. There are a LOT of them!
  • It does the job — no crashing, no malfunctions. In over a year of serious use, with it running daily to index a lot of files for most of that time, it didn’t crash once. It just did its job.
  • Tech support is great, and included in the price of the software. I needed to contact them twice to ask them about some advanced configs for the app, and they responded within 12 hours. What’s more, they actually solved my problem. There were no excuses and no passing the buck.
  • It’s a scalable piece of software. Not only will it index small, simple sites, but its indexing engine can use ASP, PHP, JavaScript or CGI. The CGI engine can be used for enterprise sites – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of pages here! Not only will it index sites hosted on web servers, but it will also let you put a search engine on a site that runs off a CD or DVD.
  • It spiders and indexes most document file types with the aid of free plugins that work with the paid editions of the software. They’ve got plugins for Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Flash and FlashPaper, and Rich Text formats. Having used all of these plugins over the last year, I can tell you they work a treat. They certainly do the job, and there’s no false advertising involved.
  • It’s a customizable and flexible piece of software. You possess the search index. You have access to the actual files used by the search engine, and you can tweak the engine and the index as you please. You can adjust everything. I can’t think of any other solution on the market that will let you do that. When it comes to this, it beats Atom and Google and any other solution, hands-down. Google’s search appliances are a black box. You can play with the options, but you don’t have access to the search technology. You can’t pop the hood and have a look at what makes their searches tick.

So how exactly have I been using the Zoom Search Engine? It’s been powering the site searches on Exprimare and the Road Management Catalog, among a few others. While Exprimare is a fairly small site (it’s my consulting/portfolio site), the Road Management Catalog is a big site in terms of the content, file types and number of pages. It belongs to the World Bank, and vendors of various road construction, measuring and testing equipment have accounts where they submit company information and upload brochures in various file formats. The Zoom Search Engine’s job on that site is to index all of the uploaded files, all of the various companies’ info, the regular site pages, and to make them all available in the search index. It’s been doing a wonderful job over the past year, and I love it. I’ve scheduled it to run every day, and to index all of the files. When it’s time for it to start, it does so automatically. It spiders the site, builds the index, uploads it to the site through FTP, then closes automatically. I don’t have to do anything other than adjust search parameters here and there as the need arises.

Here is a screenshot of the main app window, just as it’s indexing the Road Management Catalog. Once it’s configured, it spiders the site (you can set it to start multiple threads so the indexing goes faster) and then it goes about its business.

Zoom Search Engine

When it’s done, it gives you an index status report, to let you know what it found. It also outlines in red any indexing errors, such as files or pages it couldn’t download or index.

Zoom Search Engine

If I had to talk about the many configuration tabs, I’d have to reproduce their user manual. Instead, let me just show you a screenshot of one of them, the Indexing options. How cool is this! I get to decide what gets indexed, what gets boosted, and how words get joined. And this is just a small sample of what the app can do.

Zoom Search Engine

A lot more screenshots are available on the WrenSoft site. Their support section is extensive, a forum is also available, and their tech support is only an email away.

The Zoom Search Engine is an amazing product, and well worth its price. As a matter of fact, I’d call it underpriced. It’s a tremendous value given its functionality. So if you own a site and have been looking around for a suitable search engine, don’t settle for something that’s overpriced or inflexible. Get something that’s been tried and tested, something that’ll work, something you can use on a daily basis and tweak until you get just what you want.

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