Listing to Adam Curry's Podcast "Source Code.. it's great.. I remember him from the late 80's on Mtv. Sometimes the Internet amazes me, he's definitely someone I never thought I would hear again.. Now I just need a MP3 player so I can listen to podcast on the go.  Thinking about the Scandisk Cruzer Micro MP3 Companion Player which is very affordable at $45.00 USD.

  If I haven't mentioned it previously Jeremy C Wright's blog Ensight is one of my favorites. Scobleizer's use to be one of my favorites, but I like Ensight a bit better, and Ed Bott's blog is great.  I'm still using Onfolio to keep track of all my Tech Blog's.  I notice the Tech heads all use RSS Feeds for the most part.. but Blog's I visit for their Political content generally don't have RSS Feeds.

Trying to study PHP, after the limited Actionscripting I know it'll be my second Scripting lanuage. It's coming along rather nicely.. I'm actually studying rather regularly and picking it up.. For the first few days I would read something, try it out and it would just be jibberish. Since then I have come up with my way of studying and learning.. which is pretty much following Tutorials.. trying them up.. checking them on my Server and then going back and reading till I understand exactly what I did. One thing I have to watch is not typing things correctly. I'll type some code out.. FTP it to my server, check it online and it'll give a error message, then I have to check my code for error, a lot of times I put : instead of ; at the end or I'll forget to put the ;. But I'm learning and slowly understanding.

I'm using PHP Designer 2005, which is great, you can actually view what your code will look like without uploading, and it has debugging tools which helps. The documentation is a little weak, and I'm having trouble setting up the intergrated FTP, but I'm finguring it out. It's great to use for PHP, just wish I had a Dual Monitor setup for when I follow online Tutorials.

 

Was reading this article from eWeek titled, Hackers Aim to Sabotage Holiday Computing, and I'm wondering what the heck people are doing to get their PCs so messed up with Malware/Spyware/Adware. Is it really that hard to protect your PC? It's not like it takes a lot of knowledge to protect yourself while online.  Here's one quote from the article I really like.

 "You have to become something of a nerd to make sure your computer is safe," said Love, a former English teacher who recently installed anti-adware on her daughter's computer. "If you don't sweep the computer every night, you could hit."

She surfing for porn or something everynight on her daughters PC?   I have two PCs and visit a lot of sites everyday yet I don't have to scan for Spyware everynight. I do it once a week and 8 times out of 10 I don't find anything.

1 thing people need to learn is to have a firewall up while installing Windows. Windows XP comes with a Firewall, and Windows XP SP2 comes with a Firewall turned on.  That should give you more then enough protection while you update your machine, or to install a Firewall and Anti Virus software. Norton Antivius 2005 comes with Internet Worm Protection. Zonealarm comes with Antivirus Monitoring and some versions come with Antivirus software so you just need one installation. How hard is that?  No need to become "something of a nerd". For years it's been pounded in our heads, don't open unknown email attachments. Specially if it's a executable (.exe) file. Keep your Antivirus definitions up to date.. which should be easy to do since by default it's set to do so automatically.

Personally I would like to see these people's PCs, to see why they are getting hit so hard with Malware. I think it's more people's habits that are getting them into trouble, whether it be the sites they visit, or the "toys" they load on their PC, free games, free software. Their really is no excuse for these people, except for laziness, as there is a wealth of knowledge  available just about everywhere.

I'm still using Onfolio 2.0 Beta that I learnt about from the Scobleizer. It's a great tool and makes keeping up with RSS Blogs easy and fast. It's a great extension for Firefox. 

Some other extension I use for Firefox: Forecast Fox, Gmail Notifier, Tab X, and Image Zoom.  There are alot more out there.

  Even though I don't have a free laptop.. I like to use Freeware software.. and a Great site for getting some is Softpedia.com. It's a great place to go find the latest Freeware and Shareware. One of my favorites is CCleaner which is good for getting rid of temp files, IE History, Cache and files in your recycle bin really fast. Just right click on your Recyle bin, run it and it's done in about 1 second. Another nice program is Process Explorer 8.61, it'll show you all the active processes running on your PC. There are a lot of nice applications that can be found there, to address a wide variety of needs.

I need to come up with a idea like Jeremy. He was able to get a sponsor for a laptop. I guess it's not truely free as he's working for it or Blogging for it. He's going to Blog for the company for a year. I'm not sure how much work that is, but it's a good idea. Some reason MSN Spaces isn't liking my html tags.. I'll have to check into that.

 

*edit* found the reason, I was using Firefox, now I'm using IE6 and I have the Rich Text Tools now.

I'm still messing about with MSN Toolbar Suite.. by far the most useful feature for me is the Taskbar search.. I've added a number of Shortcuts to speed things up.. I like a bare Desktop with nothing but the recycle bin, so the toolbar comes in very handy. I did notice a few things that bugged me, not so much at home, but at work. While working I was taking data off one CD, to burn to a new CD. So I put it on the desktop, burnt the new CD (I only have a CD Burning Drive so I couldn't make a 1:1 copy) and after burning I tried to delete the files, but they wouldn't delete because they were being Indexed.. So I had to wait till that finished up before I could delete them. I think maybe a little tweak in the sensitivity of the Toolbar in determing when it should stop cause you are "busy". I'm not sure how the program works in that regard, but take Folding@Home as a example. I can have that program running, and my CPU at 100% but I can still surf the net, still open programs and still multi-task with no problems. But when the Toolbar is Indexing it's noticeable that my system gets sluggish. Or perhaps I'm a power user with a under powered PC. 8-P That could be it. My AMD Athlon 2400+ is getting long in the teeth. I'm trying out Onfolio Beta, so far I like it.. Before trying out Onfolio I was using FeedReader, but I'm liking Onfolio much better. See how that goes.

Tried it out at work.. and added the PDF filter.. works and is nice to use on finding hundreds of .pdf files that I archive. It's also nice that I can index files over a network, so that if I get asked where such and such pdf file is, I can check my local hard drives as well as all the drives in my Archiving Room as well as the Archiving Network Drive. Just have to remember the names of my mosted used programs, then I can just type ="name of program.exe" and it launches. And it's great for finding my MP3s.