IT For the Rest of Us

Women, the best freaking firewall in the world

1. One human cell contains 75MB genetic information.

2. One sperm contains a half of that; that is 37.5MB.

3. One ml of semen contains 100 million sperms.

4. In average, ejaculation lasts for 5 sec and contains 2.25 ml semen.

5. This means that the throughput of a man’s member is equal to (37.5MB x 100,000,000 x 2.25)/5 = 1 687 500 000 000 000 byte/second = 1,6875 Тerabyte/sec

This means that the female eggcell withstands this DDoS attack at 1,5 terabyte per second, and only lets through one(!) data package, thereby being the best freaking hardware firewall in the world!

The downside of it is that this only small data package that it lets through, hangs the system for the whole of 9 months!

via SNAPSHOTS.

So last week I posted an article about tricking Google Chrome out so that your most commonly used tabs will lock themselves into place so you both save space and don’t constantly have to reopen them. Well, I still use Firefox on main desktop computers and I wanted to find the same functionality for it. It takes a couple of plug-ins to accomplish it, but that is still a nice feature about Firefox, if it doesn’t exist in the browser functionality, someone will create a plug-in that does.

Set Up Space-Saving, Permanent Gmail and Reader Tabs in Firefox.

It never fails that after I go through several scenarios that would have been greatly improved by a handy little program, then I come across an article that not only gives me a recommendation for one, but multiples! I have had 4 different systems fail on me at my day job in some form or fashion over the past 2 weeks. If I had any of these in place beforehand, my stress level would have been greatly reduced. But oh well, you learn the best lessons when you have fewer tools to work with.

Here is hoping that you can prevent your next computer disaster by reading the following article and implementing one of the programs before it happens. Good luck!

Five Best Free System Restore Tools.

As I have transitioned roughly 95% of my daily on-goings to being strictly in the clouds, I have embraced my two main browsers, Firefox and more recently Google Chrome as though they were my life preservers in the crazy ever changing sea that is known as the internet. Also being an avid stumbler… is being avid the same as addicted?

Anyways I’m getting off course, being a stumbler and having tuned my preferences to serve my wildly varied tastes, I do tend to get a large number of ‘you may not have known about the features of’ articles. I pass most of them because being a power user, I know most of the hidden abilities of programs. This one however caught my eye because it turns Chrome into an even larger part of my day. Having just applied to get the CR-48 to give it a merciless beating from my usage habits, it also gave me many items that I will be needing. Read about it at Guiding Tech:

15 Killer Google Chrome Features You Might Not Know About.

If you are your family’s resident IT guru, you typically get asked the same questions over and over again, even though you have shown them, written down the instructions and then even asked them to repeat them back to you a dozen times. While this isn’t the end-all be-all of self help tech sites, it does go a long way to eliminating the need to repeat yourself 101 times on how to take a screen shot of someything.

Teach Parents Tech.

It’s a little delayed, but being married tends to bring up situations that didn’t exist before. If anyone is interested in seeing anything of the wedding, you can check it out on my personal web page at http://zach.010techpros.com/

As for getting back to posting regularly, expect a change from how I used to do it. I will still write my own posts, but expect more informational posts from other sites piped in.

For those of you who read my blog regularly, I’ve slacked off a little on posting new material. The main reason behind this is I’ve been busy planning the final portions of my wedding that will occur in late August. That and work has been a little crazy, but that’s a different story.

Please check back in a few days after I make it through the 4th weekend and I should be back to more of a normal posting schedule.

So there may be a few things that you don’t know about me, like that I love free stuff, or that I’m a movie buff who has been looking for a way to actually track what I have without creating my own piece of software. Well, I found one while getting something free about a week ago. Over at GiveAwayOfTheDay.com, they had book tracking software (which interested me for my overstuffed bookshelves) that used the ISBN number to pull all the info about the book in (All My Books).

Great! I thought. When I visited the creators website, I saw that they had other tracking software, one for movies in particular (All My Movies). Of course I wanted to see how well it worked, and wondered how they would pull off the same trick they did with the books. Well, thanks to sites like IMDB.com and Amazon, they have all the actors listed, screenshots, the movie synopsis, and way more that they simply pull into your program after you either enter the title, OR even better the barcode that gurantees you get the right information and don’t pull in the cartoon version of one of your favorite movies.

After playing around with movies that I actually own, I entered ones that I wanted when I realized they give you the option of creating a wishlist (finally!) of movies you want to get (or have people get you). They have multiple layouts you can use to view the information for each movie, and even better, if you like sharing what is in your collection with the rest of the world, they give you the ability to export the html code for the layout to simply paste into a webpage!

If you are more of a ‘don’t need the DVD’ type, the program can even search your hard drive for what you’ve copied off your legally bought DVDs (wink). I haven’t tried this portion of the program out yet since my laptop is the only place I do this at.

All I have to say is that if you finally want to get an idea of what you have and not have to thumb through hundreds of cases over and over when someone asks what you’ve got, check out All My Movies.

Movie Database Software

Originally posted here.

By Liam Tung, ZDNet.com Australia, News.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Jun 19, 2008 6:09:26 AM

The makers of Wine claim that version 1.0 is the first such “stable” release and have said that although compatibility is not perfect, thousands of applications are reported to “work very well.”

Member and former president of Linux Australia Jonathon Oxer told ZDNet.com.au that the Wine project is “an attempt to make Windows irrelevant.”

“Essentially, it’s an effort to supplant the underlying operating system layer and allow Windows software to run on a Linux platform without requiring Windows to be installed,” he said.

A challenge for the Wine project is creating libraries that perfectly emulate Windows libraries.

“It never will be stable because the target keeps moving. As each new version of Windows comes out, the underlying libraries are also changed and so, Wine has the same problem as a typical Windows developer who is attempting to write software to run on Windows,” said Oxer.

Oxer said he considers the tool a Linux “migration path” for existing Windows users because they can move their applications across, even where they haven’t been designed to run on Linux. Although Wine’s original purpose was to provide a compatibility layer for office applications, the most popular use of the tool today is for gamers who want to play Windows games on Linux systems.

The only non-gaming application in Wine’s top 10 most popular applications is Adobe Photoshop CS2, which is in second place behind Guild Wars.

Wine, not surprisingly, has been the target of anti-piracy campaigns by Microsoft. In 2005, Wine users were prevented under the Windows Genuine Advantage scheme from receiving Windows updates.

Fellow internet giant Google, however, has chosen to support the program, recently contributing cash to the open source project to ensure that Adobe’s Creative Suite software still runs on Linux systems.

A list of Wine-compatible applications can be found here.

The folks who brought us Zillow and Expedia today unveil Glassdoor — a site that could have a powerful effect on the business landscape. Rich Barton, Zillow’s CEO and co-founder of Glassdoor, calls the new venture a TripAdvisor for companies.

Glassdoor sets up a way for people to rate the companies they work for — anonymously, of course. A Microsoft employee can respond to a survey of 16 questions about job satisfaction, enter information about his or her salary, reply to essay-style questions, and give CEO Steve Ballmer an approval rating. In exchange, the employee would get full access to the site — a “give to get” formula intended to convince people to participate.

If it works — if people enthusiastically jump in the way they do on TripAdvisor — then Glassdoor could be profound. Barton and Glassdoor CEO Bob Hohman showed me a preview. Anyone trying to decide what company to work for could get a view of the company previously only available by word of mouth.

You could starkly see how happy engineers are at, say, Google vs. Yahoo. One page Hohman showed me compared engineer salaries at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple, showing that Apple pays far less than the other three — but still woos engineers who believe in Apple’s philosophy. Another page shows that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has a not-great approval rating while VMware CEO Diane Greene has one of the top approval ratings in the industry.

Glassdoor won’t just be a boon to job seekers. It could become an important investment tool, helping Wall Street see more clearly into a company and its prospects — from an employee point of view. It certainly will be a resource for journalists — a window into a company almost impossible to come by otherwise.

Barton and Hohman initially funded Glassdoor, and it since raised $3 million from Benchmark venture capital firm. It plans to make money on advertising and keep the site free to anyone who contributes information. Hohman says filters will help prevent companies or disgruntled employees from gaming results.

All in all, Glassdoor struck me as one of the more important new Web ventures I’ve seen in a while.