Geek Practitioners Blog

Rob May has a great post at the company blog at Backupify on trends driving cloud backup. It sounds right to me, particularly the parts about data portability, it being managerially smart to prepare for black swans, and users being vastly more the problem than permanent data loss by a cloud provider is likely to be.

It has always irritated me when vendors try to “own” your data. It still happens, but I’d love to think it’s on the wane. In my ill-fated business, one of the key elements and benefits of our not-quite-finished document management software (and associated law firm case management, but the package could be used in other environments, or as a generic/personal doc manager) was that you owned your data and your documents. There was no lock-in. There was an easy ability to locate and access documents directly should the software not be available.

Thus I’ve always loved the data portability angle Rob brought to his startup.

This is a test of posting with BlogDesk.

Yet I can totally see it happening, based on my experiences with people and buildings and companies. Server room is a unique location.

I have run into the scenario of checking an end user’s computer for signs of p0rn, or surfing p0rn sites, and seen ambiguity introduced by popups from sites that are not p0rn per se, or clicks that were unintended and aborted. Obviously, malware can not only cause popups, but also download files nefariously.

This is an extreme cautionary case, in which a worker was fired for child p0rn, had his reputation ruined, faced criminal charges, and was found to be innocent. Tech support completely failed and even helped persecute him. That’s bad.

What could be geekier than cosmology?

It’s amazingly cool that we seem able to detect Hints of ‘time before Big Bang’, which explains entropy and the apparent one-way orientation of time. It’s as if the Big Bang were the zero on a numberline, in which we are on the positive side, while what came before was on the negative side.

Ever think about switching to a Mac, or adding one to your stable of computers?

Phillip Zannini has written a cleverly named book and transition guide: A Mac Eye for the Windows Guy – The Complete Guide to Software for Your Mac!

It’s worth a look, if you’re thinking about expanding your horizons.

If I had more money and less else to occupy me, I would consider going to the Providence Geek Dinner tonight. Oh well.

That and I don’t always do well jumping into a crowd of people I don’t know and socializing.

Desktopple sounds like the thing for me. I work centered mainly around the desktop, but that leaves me having to clean it up periodically. Usually that’s a dramatic sweep every couple months, with “running out of space” sweeps of the easy to move stuff in between.

Talk about feeling watched. No sooner did I remove the rogue links than they were replaced with similar ones off a different college URL.

I dropped everything to upgrade WordPress. Seems to be working so far.

I came over here to update the blogroll and noticed a funny thing:

Someone was able to hack WordPress in a way that gave them access to the blogroll. No idea when it happened, but the links all redirected through this WordPress blog using a trailing structure in the form of:

?q=cash-loans

At the end of the URL to which I linked. Not sure offhand what the ?q is and how it differs from the ?s format used to return search results. It did the job, anyway, redirecting to an entirely different location. I suspect the blog in question was also victimized and had no active role.

The lesson? This is probably why there have been security-related updates to WordPress that I should have installed periodically. I’m pretty sure none of the WP blogs in our “empire” are fully updated except the newest one. Oops.

The other lesson? If I posted here regularly as I really do plan to, I would notice these things promptly, limiting any benefit accruing from the linkage.

Now multiple WordPress updates are on my list of things that must be done sooner rather than later.