Archive for January, 2010
Friday, January 29th, 2010
At Foliovision, we still plan to build a dual load balancing open source router on one of our old computers someday soon. In the meantime, our trusty old D-Link DI-804HV router was misbehaving a couple of weeks ago with all kinds of routing errors and slowing down our work. Another consequence was lousy Skype communication. Happily enough after a full reset, I was able to get it back to normal.
D Link DI 804HV
Our router has to look after about eight to fifteen computers at a time so it's no longer the load of just a few computers. Our primary connection is 3 MB/sec download from Chello.
But we aren't doing much VPN work so our needs aren't extreme. It would be nice if Skype didn't drop off on us in the middle of work. Our main concern is redundancy. With 8 to 15 people working at any given time, even 15 minutes downtime is too much now. Four hours downtime would be nearly 40 hours work as most of our work requires Internet access at this point!
Keep reading Backup Router-Firewall for a Small Office: D-Link DIR-100 vs ZyXEL Prestige 334
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
We use primarily use Paypal for our smaller transactions at Foliovision ($1000 and under). Some customers complain. They'd just rather not do business with Paypal. In these cases, we do have bank accounts in three major jurisdictions but it does slow down transactions and increase transaction costs on smaller invoices.
I tell them there is just no other payment service which works well for small international payments.
Precautions we take:
- we don't confirm our bank account numbers which technically means that Paypal can't withdraw funds from our bank accounts.
- they do do it anyway, but in our case it would be illegal and there's a very good chance that the bank would go after Paypal for the money themselves if Paypal did manage to snooker them into giving them cash.
- we run a balance under $2000. Over that and the money gets shunted off to one of our bank accounts.
- we are very good customers. We send lots of sales through and we buy lots of goods too. Occasionally we even have to switch currencies. Paypal makes a fortune off of Foliovision. We even introduce lots of new customers to them as well.
In general, limit liability and make yourself valuable. I recommend you do the same.
But then I go and read a post like this one about how Paypal single-handedly nearly ruined the Macgraphoto graphics bundle (sorry to have missed it Jacob: great idea for a themed bundle!). And I think we haven't done nearly enough and that we are playing with fire.
Keep reading Paypal sucks but so does Digital River and Google Checkout is no great shakes either
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
We buy and use a lot of software here at Foliovision. We have all kinds of weird stuff running for checking web rankings and logging backlinks in our SEO business. We don't like Adobe much for price gouging so we buy all kinds of graphics bits and bobs to
Basically our rule is that if a software program can do it faster, then have a software program do it. This approach allows us to offer our clients more service within their budget. So we have contact with a lot of software. While out shopping online (how's that for a pleonasm) I've often seen sterling awards pages for what looks like really rubbish programming.
inventory builder bogus software awards
Where do these ugly little banners come from and how the software developers earn them?
Keep reading Shareware awards just a scam? MacUpdate, Versiontracker and IUseThis.com vs the Windows world
By Alec
IT |
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
Everyone who works on the web should have a keylogger. Browsers crash often enough when you are writing into a form or browsers have hot keys (especially forward or back) which will reload the page on you at an unexpected time, just when you are in the middle of a very long post.
If you value your time, the question is not whether to use a keylogger
but which keylogger for Mac OS X to choose. Photo jgarber.
I've heard all the privacy arguments against keyloggers but I'm not sold. If you are typing into a computer, particularly one which is near constantly connected to the Internet, you need to accept that there is very limited privacy. For very private writing, it should be done on paper or on an old computer which is no longer capable of being hooked up to the Internet easily or at all (i.e. missing a network card and wifi and/or automatic DHCP).
Keep reading Keyloggers for OS X - Why you should install one and which one to choose: Spellcatcher, BackTrack, logKext
By Alec
IT |
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
In this day and age, running a computer without some kind of an outgoing firewall is like driving your car with your eyes closed.
There are so many malfeasors - from phishers to corporate spies - trying to track you and place you and grab you every time you check your email or you browse the web, that everyone needs a firewall.
You can test this on OS X by installing Little Snitch and scrolling through your messages. A few of the outgoing calls are for innocent images, mainly they are for tracking tags and tracking images.
Little Snitch - a few of the Edgesuite calls on one week fresh install!
Little Snitch is free for 3 hour periods at a time so it can be installed to test and find out what domains you'd like to be blocking.
For long term blocking of nasty sites OS X, your solutions are threefold:
Keep reading Little Snitch shortcoming: Badly needs wildcards
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
We just released a new version of FV WordPress Flowplayer plugin. For those of you who don't know it - it's the standard opensource Flowplayer, but without any branding in it.
Version number is 0.9.15 and it has two new features:
- widget support - now you can put videos to your sidebar with ease
- template support - allows you to insert videos with some simple PHP - nice feature for site developers
Read our FV WordPress Flowplayer page to see how to use it or download it from FV WordPress Flowplayer on WordPress plugins.
By Martin
WordPress |
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
I ended up with thousands of these ghost messages after moving from Eudora to Apple Mail with the help of Andreas Amann's brilliant Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. I didn't worry too much about it, as the messages were there in duplicate.
But after a while I got tired of seeing double messages when searching the old archives. I couldn't find any way to scare away these ghosts. Rebuilding the mailboxes didn't help. Nor did running duplicate message scanners.
Even the fantastic vacuum command line cleanup routine wouldn't get rid of the ghost messages with their "Show in Mailbox" in the top right corner. But vacuum did get speed up Apple Mail (highly recommended).
Keep reading Ghost Apple Mail Messages: "Show in Mailbox"
By Alec
IT |
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
The argument against the cloud succinctly made:
Cloud computing will not achieve measured penetration because data is the penultimate when it comes to IP and what drives value for corporations going forward. Look no further than Toys R' Us and Target as two recent examples. Once they realized that they had allowed the fox [Amazon] to guard their hen houses [i.e., their online stores], they immediately withdrew from Amazon's cloud.
When a competitor [or potential competitor] knows where your customer is located, what your customer purchases, how much they pay, etc., then you have given your business away -- pure and simple.
Do you think that Amazon, EBay and Google are not data-mining every transaction that occurs for every online store that they host ? The minute that they see a trend in a new product selling in quantity, etc., they will use the data to their advantage, which usually disadvantages the owner of the data.
Putting your data in the cloud is a sucker's bet.
via Sky's the Limit - Barrons.com.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
