Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Chris is an IT/IS management professional with over a decade of experience in IT, IS, Network Engineering, and Telecommunications integration. Chris specializes in web server deployment and information management. This includes CMS, CRM, and dynamic content deployment. Chris also manages a full service Video Head End with over 200 digital TV channels. Chris also has five years of project management, knowledge management, and engineering design experience. He specializes in both the Agile and Scrum project management methodology. He also has a background in computer forensics and information security including federal or state compliance audits (such as SOX).

10 Years And Still Going

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On May 21, 1999 at 06:23:21 EST, digitalflood.com came to life. Like the birth of most things both wondrous and mediocre, it was mostly unnoticed by the masses. Slowly over the years we’ve evolved from our early “Everything/Nothing” blog format to a multimedia art project to many things to many people. We explore multimedia in many forms: print/graphic art, prose, poetry, short stories, photography, pen & ink, originally composed music pieces, video, and everything in between. We’ve done web casts of radio shows and pushed out mix tapes that are the envy of many a DJ. We’ve drawn rave reviews and mass acclaim. We’ve also drawn controversy, started arguments that have led to literal fist fights, and offended oh so many people. In short, this is what we do and while opinions may very we do it well enough to keep drawing viewers back in– that’s as close to success you can get in the 30 second Twitter One Day; My Space the Next attention span that is web viewership.

On May 21, 2009 we passed the decade mark. DigitalFl00d Studios itself goes back beyond the 1999. We started in print and cassette tape format back in 1994. Our content was delivered by hand a select (and admittedly small) viewership. We migrated to our first web pages that were homed on home brewed servers in 1997. In 1999 we finally got our own domain. Somewhere around 2004 we jumped to our hosting and now we find ourselves on our own server. The site has grown from it’s original 2MB of disk usage to over 3GB (some 2.5GB alone in MP3 format).

To celebrate our decade of web life, I decided we should do something special in late 2008. I began work on researching a new digitalflood.com framework to birth version 11 (which you see here now in beta form). In February 2009 I began finalizing the underlying CMS engine and decided the only way to achieve what I really wanted required its own dedicated server format. That lead to an initial machine build and alpha launch in April 2009.  I ended up scrapping most of the early work and nothing jelled until May 2009 when I finalized the look/feel overview.

The more brutal work then began– I had to populate content and migrate it from the old hand coded HTML into the blogging engine. That took most of the Summer of 2009. Just before launch a fatal flaw was found in the CMS engine that had to be patched and then I had some issues cleaning up the dynamic database to move the content from the test web site domain name to the final digitalflood.com one we all know and love.

The result is I am five months late with version 11, but as you can see even from this early public release it is well worth the wait.

On the right hand side during the beta (in other words I’m still ironing some bugs out and cleaning up the old content) you’ll find our known issues. This will let you know what I know is broken. Of course if you find something not in this list you are welcome to drop a line. My goal is to be in public final version 11.0 release for the site in time for 1/1/10.

This will include a new season of Pirate Radio (wait till you see what we have in store for you… mawahahahah) starting in October 2009.

Again, I thank you for checking in and coming back. Like many times before, it’s been awhile since I’ve delivered the goods; but the wait is always worth it. Great things are ahead. More will be offended. More will be pleased. History will continue to be written and digitalflood.com itself march ahead. Enjoy the ride, but remember to keep your arms in the bus at all times.

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CPE On The Cheap

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I’m on a continuous quest to bring down costs for my clients and part of that involves keeping an ear to the ground for hardware trends that lend itself to reducing installation/maintenance costs of customer premise hardware. It’s as simple as crawling over our supply chain websites and seeing who is offering what. One of the best parts of technology is that what is cutting edge today is yesterday’s news tomorrow. The better part is that once bleeding edge hardware still offers robust performance and a lengthy life span for deployment well beyond year one of its life. We have a sawing in IT/IS, leading edge does not lend itself to industry best performance. In fact, sometimes giving vendors a chance to work out the kinks is your best bet. Typically within 1-2 years of product general availability (GA in geek talk) software matures and security holes are rooted out improving security, as well as, product performance (not to mention price).

Recently at work, we’ve come across a wonderful little router that seems to finally show some positive results for consumers resulting from the Linksys and Cisco merger some year or so back. You take Cisco’s leading edge IOS, VPN, and PIX firewall elements then mix them with Linksys’s low cost small form factor SMB routers. The result is the Cisco 870 series who is not done any justice on it’s own site.

My personal favorite variant is the 871 (who CDW has a great rundown on) which is perfect for Ethernet hand offs (100 Mb/s or less) to an SMB or remote office connecting back via VPN to a larger WAN/central office. The router comes with a built in DHCP server, can perform NAT, has a non-DPI firewall (right out of the ASA/PIX), supports VPN (server or client using IPSec or Cisco Easy VPN), and can be SNMP polled. The result is a beefy edge router for a small LAN connected via an Ethernet hand off (such a metro-Ethernet or xDSL and Cable). Add your favorite Layer 2 switch and you have yourself a decent LAN. There is also a WiFi capable variant and the router can act a WLAN central AP controller when coupled with Cisco APs. That’s good news for SMBs who want secure wireless access or for hospitality users who want to create a “hot spot” for their clients. The product scales well with memory, SSL VPN, and advanced IOS capabilities (if you really want to beef up the unit) when being deployed in a medium-large enterprise environment.

While I’m happy to see Cisco moving a bit down market with products I’m not happy about Linksys’s recent movement with its WRT54G2 revision. In order to drop the price of this residential grade router some twenty US dollars, Linksys/Cisco ditched the external antenna in favor for an internal one. Reach rate changes aside (Cisco claim performance is actually increased over the older WRT54G) the loss of external screw on antenna coaxial connectors means you cannot equip the unit with your own antenna. That type of switch out was a perennial favorite power upgrade for hackers everywhere. Specifically it worked wonders when you wanted a cheap wireless access point to hang off a wired Layer 2 SMB LAN.

The good news is Asus has filled the void with its WL-500gP v2 router. When equipped with 6dBi panel antennas we’ve seen full rate reach at over 300′ with clear line of site. 100′ in real world suburban deployments is possible. The units can be tied back to a hot spot controller of your choice or run via your favorite Linux compressed variant to deliver connectivity and full system control (DD-WRT being my personal favorite).

Not sure how to hook all this up? WVT can design and implement your LAN or WLAN. Drop by our contact page and drop us a line however you please. We’ll gladly setup one of the options above for your business and help with any of your communication needs including network design and upgrades.

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Security comes at a price… free?

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This weekend I spent some time fixing family and friends’ computers. This of course is a pretty typical event. For those of you who are handy with computers I’m sure your weekends are filled with much of the same and for those of you who are not– I’m sure yours is filled with the pains my acquaintances know all too well: downtime.

In a world where we rely on our computers at home and work to give us access to the Internet for vital tasks (i.e. bill payment, finance management, communication, and data storage) downtime is truly a costly item to deal with. Whether your personal or business computer, security is much more accessible than one may think. Better yet– aside from the time invested installing and maintaining these little gems of software (say an hour a week at the most if you’re obsessive about it like me) we’re talking no money here. When you’re humming along though and not wasting time trying to fix it– then you’ll see how much time a hour of prevention is worth compared to a few days of data recovery.

Software

Security software comes in two segments– prevention and recovery. In general, prevention applications run 24/7 in the background of your computer. A big issue is resource intensive security programs, but bloat does not equal protection. Therefore a true preventive security program will use minimal amounts of resources to provide maximum protection. A recovery program is one that let’s you recover or fix problem after an infection occurs. In general, no protective software is going to 100% cover every possible threat so you have to be prepared for the exception and ready to react in removal when it happens. Recovery programs need to be able to avoid being blocked by infections and work to secure holes while evading traps left by the malicious program. Let’s tackle common areas of security:

  • Malware – Malware is any program that intentionally causes harm or attempts to exploit your machines for benefit. Commonly referred to as “spyware”, malware programs usually turn your machine into a spam, ad, or virus factory benefiting their maker in the process.
    • Proactive – Spybot Search & Destroy: Developed as a final college research project by its creator, Spybot has grown into a full security suite for the prevention and detection of spyware. Spybot runs actively in the background and can be programmed to perform scans on your system during off hours. The active shield is not resource intensive, but the scans are and that is why it is better to automate the scan for an overnight run while you sleep.
    • Reactive – Malware Bytes: Malware Bytes works well to remove 99.9% of malware infections. Even the worst infections are easily remove with one sweep and a reboot. We use this one routinely in our Tech Support Call Center to root out problems and get PCs back in working order ASAP.
  • Virus – A virus is a computer program intentionally programmed to install without permission and cause harm to the underlying system it runs on. It also tends to try to spread itself and proactively replicate it’s infection using known exploits in specific operating systems or programs. Malware is annoying– viruses are disastrous.
    • Proactive – AVG Free: AVG Free is the same anti-virus program found in the AVG Internet and Security Suites, but because it doesn’t have all the extra programs in it the application is leaner and runs quicker. AVG Free is noticeably less resource intensive than other competing products and provides an excellent level of protection that is in general superior to what other pay products offer as a whole. The one downside is the product is known to have nag screens trying to get you to buy the pay version of the software, but those are far between during major upgrades and not overall intrusive in nature.
    • Reactive – SyncBack Free: SyncBack is an easy to use back up utility that allows you to sync your data between either a spare hard drive or to a remote site (via FTP over the Net). The trick here is to back up your data to a spare hard drive in your computer and if disaster happens you can simply either copy the data back over the primary hard drive from the swap or just wholesale yank out the “bad” primary and change over to the “good” spare. You can then safely format that “bad” hard drive in another PC and put it back in as a the spare at a later time. I have a good friend who has more than once averted virus disaster through back up and restore. Even if it’s not for virus protection, backing up your data is a good idea in case the primary drive did fail due to normal hardware deterioration.
  • Registry Repair – CCleaner: CCleaner comes in handy after the post malware or virus removal to make sure your Windows Registry is back in proper working order. Malicious programs aren’t particularly neat when it comes to installation and obviously less particular about being removed. The result is that simply removing the virus can leave gaps in your registry and malformed links that will lead to system crashes. CCleaner addresses that cleaning out both temporary files and fixing registry errors.
  • Prevention – There are several steps you should routinely take to prevent problems:
  1. Install operating system updates weekly and make sure your system update notification feature is on to let you know when they come out.
  2. Make sure you update your anti-virus program daily and malware prevention programs weekly.
  3. Run daily off hour antivirus and malware removal scans during off hours.
  4. Make sure to run CCleaner once a month after rebooting first to install all “hanging updates” that may be out there.

You should also consider switching to an alternative web browser like Firefox to insure you take advantage of AVG Free’s active toolbar and search protection. We’ll be doing a run down at a later date on Firefox add on’s you can install to further bolster protection. Also, backing up your data weekly is a good idea and a great “escape plan” if disaster does happen.

I hope you see that security does not have to be complex in nature or hard to pull off. Using the above applications will help do some primary hardening of your system and help to keep your PC running in good order long term.

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The Free Software Round Up

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We’ve talked about free office applications, free web based applications, and to round up our tour of free software I’d like to broaden the scope a bit. The following are some recommendations from other sites I trust when looking for applications to get the job done. From technical support, utilities, productivity software to beyond– there is no shortage of variety here. You’re sure to find a program that you would have otherwise paid for to help constrain costs and get the job done right the first time. Best of all– it’s all free.

  • MaximumPC 32 Essential Apps – Thirty two of the best applications out there are brought to you by my favorite computer magazine. Check out “DropBox” on the list. I know several professionals who rely on it today to sync files on the cheap across multiple computers.
  • ZDNet Reader’s Choice – Twenty five of the best lightweight free applications. Check out “7-Zip” if you’re looking for across the board support of compressed file formats (including Linux tar).
  • Open Source Web Design – Need a web layout, but don’t want to plunk down big bucks for the design? Check out OSWD for some basic lay outs that can be spruced up to meet your needs.
  • Aviary – Online graphic and layout design software that can be accessed using a standard web browser. Pull off neat effects and some top end layout tricks without spending hours reading about how to pull it off in Photoshop. Aviary is truly revolutionary and will change the way you make graphics.

As you can see from the last few blogs, there is a ton of free quality software out there to be had on the Net. I welcome your feedback. If there is an application that I missed that you feel deserves kudos please drop me a comment.

I hope you enjoyed our round up of free software and that I’ve got the creative juices flowing. Maybe you’ve even found an application or two that will help you constrain costs; which increasing productivity. Tune in for future blogs where we continue to keep you up to date on the latest free top rate software.

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Check out WVT SoHo

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A quick plug for my friends in our Marketing Department at WVT Communications— we just partnered a month or so back with Red Lake Media to offer Maniacal Marketing’s series of blogs on our SoHo site. WVT has sponsored a recent live event on social media and leveraging the Internet for marketing purposes at the Orange County Chamber of Commerce. These live events will continue along with online white papers on how you can use next generation technology to get your business message out to the world. You can check out some exclusive articles on our WVT SoHo portal from Maniacal Marketing’s marketing tips blogs. Be sure to check it out. Also be sure to look for upcoming events on our site. Registration is usually free for the first 50 or so attendees. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to get your message on the Net and how you can reach a whole new audience in an interactive manner.

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