Google Wave was launched with a lot of buzz. However it has since failed to live up to the media hype it generated. Early ads targeted RPG players and professionals, however nearly a year after its launch. The name Wave evokes confusion and silence.

Nobody really knows what to do with it. Google already has a phenomenal email product in Gmail, so why change the formula that works. Google hailed Wave as the next trend in communication. I certainly was never able to use it to any potential. If I don’t understand it, you won’t either. The world just isn’t ready to revolutionize email.

Wave isn’t totally dead, many of its technologies will doubtlessly be reused in other Google technologies. Think of it as a huge proof of concept.

Sources:

Google Axes Wave (PC World)
RIP Google Wave (Techland)

A lot of people ask me for computer security tips. I wanted to cover a little of that today, especially since there’s been a security product announcement from Microsoft. I’ve always found it silly that Microsoft would itself enter the antivirus market since viruses take advantage of security flaws in the operating system that they, Microsoft, had built. It was especially bizarre that Microsoft would charge a subscription for such an oddly self-serving purpose; almost as if making their operating system vulnerable would contribute to their income stream.

Thankfully Microsoft wasn’t totally insane and has made their Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) program free for home users. It has managed to make a name for itself and stand out amongst the other free home antivirus possibilities. It’s balance of quick scanning time, low processor utilization, and its ability to stop common malware make it an excellent choice for any home PC.

Microsoft has just released a new public Beta for the next version of MSE; which they promise includes an improved scanning engine and will integrate better with Microsoft Windows Firewall (don’t care too much about that myself).

Antivirus scanners won’t completely protect you against 100% of all security threats, but they provide a strong defense which minimizes the attack surface of your system. I suggest a four-pronged system of protection to keep you as safe as possible from malicious code.

1. Software Updates

Stay up-to-date on Windows Updates, as well as updates to frequently compromised software addons. Software in this category would include Windows, Office, Adobe Reader and Flash, Java, Firefox, and Chrome (automatically updated). Updating your software will help eliminate vulnerabilities that would open your system up to attack.

2. Use a Firewall

If you’re not a power user, at least take advantage of the Windows built-In firewall. If your router comes equipped with stateful packet inspection, this is a good idea as well. Firewalls filter the traffic you receive and send to the internet and protect your computer from being compromised remotely by a hostile attacker.

3. Run Antiviral Software

There are many free antiviral vendors out there. Don’t settle with purchasing that Symantec or McAfee product that came loaded on your new computer. These two vendors are pretty much junk, don’t pay money for something that you can do better for free.

Antivirus software helps to intercept malicious code BEFORE its run on your machine. Many of them include a web component that will help to scan webpages that you visit. Check out one of the following resources:

AVG Free
Microsoft Security Essentials
Avira (Ads, bleck)

4. Anti-Malware Software

In addition to Antiviral software, it’s a good idea to have a decent anti-malware scanner, which may have the ability to catch stuff that your antivirus would miss. These types of software are more geared toward web-based malware threats than your file system, that’s what your Antivirus is for. Here are some suggestions:

Spybot Search & Destroy
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
HiJack This

These important steps are all part of your Anti-Viral Barrier. Following these tips will help prevent your system from being compromised. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line via my contact page.

The punches keep on coming for my favorite PC manufacturer. Dell has started warning customers this week that spyware managed to be shipped in the firmware for their PowerEdge R410 Server Series. The malicious software is installed on the hardware itself in firmware. Dell was not specific about the type or name of the spyware detected, or how to get rid of it.

What is known is that the spyware is windows-centric and will not affect other operating systems. New servers ordered through Dell will not be infected, although why you’re ordering from them, I don’t know.

If you happen to have recently bought a R410, Dell should be contacting you via phone and mail. If I were you though, I’d get on the phone right now and let them know just how unhappy you are and how this is causing a production-level disruption to your organization.

Sources:

PowerEdge R410 replacement motherboard contains malware?! (Dell Support Forums)
Dell warns on spyware infected server motherboards (The Register)

After only 24-months, brief even in the world of mobile phones, Microsoft has permanently retired the Kin. The Kin was advertised as the latest and greatest in social networking for phones. A niche that should have offered it some legitimacy and press apart from its huge rivals iPhone and Android.

The Kin was neither revolutionary or evolutionary. Neither its features nor its price were liable to turn heads. In fact, recent reports say that, apart from press samples, Verizon has sold only about 500 of these, out of their 2000 stores; that’s 1 Kin sold for every 4 Verizon stores, a dismal failure when compared to Apple and Google.

The Kin’s niche was that it was designed for social networking. It runs a precursor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. I would call this a bridge product. It has some of the features of Phone 7, but its not a full-blown implementation. While tells me that maybe Microsoft should have finished that up and shipped a finished product before asking us all to buy what is essentially an expensive stop-gap aimed at bandaging their falling market share.

At one point, the mobile phone world was cut between Windows CE \ Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Since then, Apple and Google have really come out with worthy, superior products, and Microsoft is rushing to catch up. I can’t see how Windows Phone 7 can be the iPhone\Android killer that Microsoft wants it to be, especially with these articles citing it as an Ad Delivery Platform. Unless they’re going to give it to me for free, they can keep their ads, and I’ll keep my business somewhere else.

So the Kin is dead and nobody cares. It’s time for Microsoft to step up with a finished product instead of a half-baked idea. With Apple and Google retaining most of the mobile phone market share, Microsoft’s product will need to be superior in order to increase market share. Superior, Kin was not.

Sources:

How Many Kins Did Microsoft Sell in Two Months? (Tom's Hardware)
Microsoft Kin is dead (Engadget)
Microsoft Kin One and Two review (Engadget)

Corporate purchasing relies on things like SSI’s or Strategic Sourcing Initiatives, where they enter into a contract to purchasing items, such as computers from a single vendor. In the business world its, more often than not, a Dell, HP, or IBM. I have a word of warning to you if you purchase Dell products. I’m not a friend of Dell, I’ve aired my own complaints about their consumer customer service here before.

Let me put this plainly; Dell doesn’t care about you, they only care about their bottom line. A friend of mine recently forwarded this article from the register. Dell knowingly provided customers with defective capacitors in their Optiplex product line. They knew that 95% would fail within 3 years. What’s more, they instructed their tech support to obfuscate the issue and not acknowledge the problem. Following this, they then knowingly provided defective replacement parts, hoping that eventually their customers warrantee would expire before they died again.

I urge you, as an IT professional to say no to Dell. I recently had a bad support experience where it took over a month to get, not a product, but a promise that the product would be on the way for a mission critical server replacement. I’m appalled by what they consider service.

Sources:

Secret docs reveal Dell knew PCs were faulty

I’ve had this little side project going for a while called Core Technology Consulting. I’ve done some web and server work here and there for people I’ve come into contact with that need this type of help. My goal one day is to own my own business. I’m not sure where this is headed in the short term, but that’s where I’d like it to go in the future.

To that end, I’ve developed what I hope is a witty business card. It’s unusual, it had a gimmick and I think that it’s one of my best to date. Now I just have to figure out how to produce them and distribute them to my “clients”. What do you think?

My latest project is for one of my wife’s friends. I won’t name this person because she’s still obligated to current\soon-to-be-former employer. It’s a new business website, pretty simple; for the most part some HTML and CSS. It’s a good challenge to learn some new skills. My latest read was HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS by Rachel Andrew. I’m hoping to hone my CSS skills.

For the past few weeks, I’ve taken on the part-professional\part-personal job of testing\reviewing the Windows 7 beta. I jumped at the chance because I really enjoy testing out the new Microsoft products; and it’s a cool job to do for work.

It’s still a little rough, but overall, it’s a pretty good product. I wouldn’t relegate Vista to the same category as Windows ME just yet though. While Vista had its issues, particularly with hardware support (sub 64-bit edition), with the right gear it wasn’t too bad.

Windows 7 is a clean OS. The interface has polish and it’s a lot less clunky than Vista. With the prior, I feel that Microsoft went menu\wizard crazy and forgot about usability. With all the UAC’s and get started wizards, somewhere productivity was forgotten about.

I seriously think that Windows 7 has the possibility of being the next big upgrade. After seeing the beta, I really think that many companies who haven’t made the Vista plunge will just skip it all together, in favor of a better contender.

My biggest problem with the latest versions of windows is the licensing schemes. I think that Microsoft has a right to guard their OS, but that those rights shouldn’t impinge on usability. There’s an ongoing trend in the computer world that you’re not really purchasing software, your purchasing a license or right to use that software. I think this idea started a lot with Microsoft and it’s been woven into other markets now as well, like games.

Companies like Microsoft or Blizzard are letting you buy rights to use this software but then retain the right to cut you off at any time if you violate the “agreement”. I feel that it’s a little anti-capitalist to dictate terms to someone who’s purchased something. I don’t think that these companies should have the ability to restrict the software they sell. What if I store my personal financial data on my laptop, and then Microsoft decides to retroactively terminate my privileges to use my laptop? I wouldn’t be able to access my information. What happens if there’s a glitch in the system or hack, though no fault of my own, and I lose access to my data? If a system like this exists, there’s always going to be opportunity to exploit it for malicious ends.

All new versions of Windows have a licensing model called KMS which is a network service that is used to proxy activation requests for your network to Microsoft (you need at least 25 hosts on your network to run KMS). The service is published in DNS, and actually takes the hassle out of entering keys at OS deployment time. However, these clients are then required to phone home to Microsoft periodically to check OS status. It is possible that if this communication never occurs then portions of the Windows OS can be deactivated.

I’m sure the home editions will NOT have these features built into them, because they are for single users. One could also say, why should I care about this if I’m using a valid license? I just warn you to be vigilant about your rights, and keep Microsoft and other operating system manufacturers accountable for bad as well as good business practices.

I sent the computer back into Dell again for a reinstall. They did their thing and sent it back. It arrived to me and on the little flier they sent, it said that they had replaced my wrist rest, but said nothing about a reinstall; sure enough, my old OS and accounts where still there. They hadn’t done anything that they were supposed to. What does replacing my wrist rest have to do with performance problems?

At this point, I had done a little searching on the web. I used a program called HDTune to test the performance of the SSD. The program stated its read performance at 2MB/s., compared to the 60MB/s of my desktop. For giggles, I tried it on my ages old 256MB USB Thumbdrive. My thumbdrive performed at 7MB/s. My old as time thumbdrive had over twice the performance of my “state of the art” SSD disk.

Armed with this info, I called Dell again (support call 6). They pretty much refused to do anything about it, even given this evidence that the Hard Drive was running a low slower than advertised. They refused to replace my unit. They stated that it wasn’t a hardware problem, and that it was an OS problem. They would no longer be able to help me and I would have to talk to the OS manufacturer for more help. They finally agreed to take it back for one more round of tests. They ran their diagnostic test on the drive and finally reinstalled the OS. They sent it back to me saying that it passed all hardware tests.

There’s a big flipping difference between acing a test, and scoring a D+, my drive was a D+. Even though it could physically be read and written to, the speed wasn’t enough to sustain the OS, hence the random freezing whenever it had to access the drive.

This time I had the wife call Tech support (support call 7). Women seem to get a better response than men, and I was also very t-d off. She asked to talk to a supervisor and was put on hold for an hour and a half. She laid out all this evidence. Finally, after 6 months, after over 7 support calls, and 4 trips to the dell service depot, this person was FINALLY willing to help us. The tech got the approval for an equipment exchange. I received a refurbished mini 910 with a revised SSD model. I loaded on Windows XP and it worked flawlessly.

The moral of this story is that my relationship with Dell is over. I refuse to buy from them again and will happily tell this story to anyone else I know that thinks about it. I was without a working laptop that I paid for for 6 months. I spent hours on the phone trying to get them to listen to me. I repeatedly sent my laptop back to the service depot so that they could dismiss my concerns and do nothing about it. I was repeatedly insulted by Dell’s Technical Support staff. I was called a liar and incompetent by Dell Managers.

This is my opinion on the mini 910. Dell shipped this laptop out with Ubuntu at a lower price in order to use Ubuntu as an excuse to limit their own culpability for dealing with problems in what is a bug-laden new product. Dell carted more about getting into the mini market, which was the IN thing, than with providing a quality product to throw their reputation behind.

When there’s a problem, Dell Technical Support is happy to pin it on Ubuntu and ignore hardware as a cause. Ubuntu isn’t their problem and they don’t have to provide support for it, it’s the perfect excuse for getting them out of spending money to actually help a customer.

In the end, it was totally a hardware problem. It was Dell’s fault and they didn’t want to admit it or deal with it. Heaven forbid they would have to replace my unit. If they had just replaced it when I asked on the first call, it would have saved a lot of time and frustration. I wouldn’t have been without a laptop for 6 months. They can all go to hell for all I care. I’m not buying from them again.

My wife was direly in need of a new laptop. She does a lot of our budget work and connects from home to work. That; and I just don’t want her to use mine. I’d rather have two laptops so I can do some of my computing from upstairs and not be sequestered in the basement on my desktop. With two, I can sit next to her while we’re watching our favorite shows, or whatever.

She was still using my old Dell X200 from college. It was a nice little laptop, but was definitely showing its age. Both of my screen hinges were broken, so the monitor panel was literally hanging by its interface cable; the cost of having kids and dogs.

I saw an advertisement for the new Dell Mini 910 netbook. The unit was new and it was only $300, compared to $500 for a full-sized laptop. I decided to buy here one. I decided to go with the Ubuntu option, because of the $50 cost difference, a decision that would come back to bite me later.

The netbook came after about a month. It arrived with a defective keyboard. The space bar key wouldn’t work unless you really press it hard. I reformatted the machine and reinstalled it with Windows XP (my wife’s office VPN is only compatible with Internet Explorer). Half an hour after I got it set up, I rebooted it to complete driver installs, and it failed to start up. It said that there was an Inaccessible Boot Device. I rebooted it in diagnostic mode and attempted to run the hard drive diagnostics. It seemed that the read\write tests all failed when the tests hit 51%. The entire second half of my Solid State Disk Drive (SSD) had failed.

I called up Dell, they were more than happy to fix my problems. They sent me a new SSD and a new keyboard. Unfortunately, the keyboard they sent me was the wrong model. It had unusual characters and appeared to be from another country. Immediately had to call back and get it replaced again (that made support call 2 to Dell).

I got my hard drive back, by the time I got the hard drive, the Dell Total Satisfaction 20-day return window had expired; I received the drive two-days after the 20-days from invoice period had lapsed. So it was no longer an option to just send the thing back. In hindsight, I should have just repacked it and shipped it back to Dell as soon as I realized I had two major problems the first day of owning it. It’s easy to see that looking back, but I took stock in their “We’ll be happy to fix your problem attitude,” which quickly disappeared during my next calls.

I received my new drive and reinstalled XP. I immediately noticed little system hangs. It would hang for a few minute opening IE, or opening office, or while just sitting there. It would hang while browsing web pages. These little quirks added up to huge frustrations. My wife would be typing a word document, only to realize that it missed two sentences when it froze up. Have this happen to you a few times, and you’ll really notice it after while; and after having to repeat your sentences in emails and such every 5 minutes. I also started to notice other little things, for instance, the logon music that plays when you log into windows began to skip; the sound in youtube videos skipped; mp3’s skipped.

Overall performance on the new drive was lackluster at best. This prompted call number 3 to dell. The technician waited over the phone as I reloaded the dell-provided Ubuntu image from the disk that came with my computer. After reinstalling Ubuntu, I had the same problem in Ubuntu with web browser hangs, system hands, and sound problems. This resulted in lots of complaints from my wife as well as support call 4 to Dell. I called them up, they gave me the run around, and I asked to talk to a manager. I don’t remember his name exactly, but he claimed to be a manager in the Mini 910 department and claimed to have been listening in the whole time. I stated to him as I stated to the last guy that the Mini was not performing as advertised, I couldn’t reliably browse the web. I insisted that I wanted a new unit, or to exchange it for a new model. My original hard drive had been DoA and the replacement parts had been delayed until after the 20-day window.

The manager felt my complaints were baseless and said that there’s no way he would do anything about it. I didn’t purchase my mini with Windows XP, so any problems were with the Ubuntu system, and that the performance of the Ubuntu OS wasn’t there problem because it was provided to me for free. He literally told me “We don’t’ license or teach you to drive the car, we just build it.” He said that any performance problems were Ubuntu’s fault and there was nothing he could do about it. He said that I could talk to Customer Service, but since my 20-day window had expired, the only thing they would do would be to service the model I already had. I grudgingly sent it in for service.

They rested my unit, said it was fine, and sent it back. I was unhappy with this outcome, so I immediately called them back (support call 5). They tried to get me to reinstall the OS over the phone again. I told them that we had already been through this before and I wanted to send it back and have them reinstall it. They agreed and shipped back a box.