Tech Remedy

by Tom Duffy

My god people…when will you get over the ‘Dislike’ button obsession?  Your undying love for this theoretical Facebook feature has led to the creation of a rogue Facebook Application.  Generally, status updates will say something like, “Get the official Dislike button NOW!” followed by a link that the user can click on.  When the user clicks on this link (because they can’t help themselves) the application then asks the user permission to access their info.  This is something Facebooker’s are used to seeing, so most don’t think about it…they just click “Allow”.

Once the user clicks “Allow”, the application will then start spewing spam using the users account while the user is distracted by the online survey that they must fill out in order to activate the new ‘Dislike’ button!

So please make sure to use caution when allowing ANY application on Facebook to access your content.  This goes for the “Find Out Who’s Stalking Your Facebook” applications as well!

Most people who need a website don’t actually know whether to hire a web designer or a web developer. In fact, most people don’t even know the difference between the two. So which one should you hire?

If a website is to be successful, it requires the talents of both. While, the work of a web designer and the work of a web developer have some similarities, there are also some very distinct differences between the two. Web design is the art of conceptualizing a design idea and bringing it to life on the web. Web development is the in-depth technical work that makes everything function the way it is supposed to.

It is very common for a web developer to have skills in design. In fact, one could say that web design is actually a sub-skill of web development. On the other hand, web designers are much less likely to have the skills necessary to write the markup and coding of a complex site. Designers tend to be dependent on developers, while developers tend to be independent and capable of doing an entire job from concept to finished product.

When it comes to the presentation of content, a designer might have many more creative ideas than a developer. This is not always true, but designer tend to be artists while developers tend to be more analytical. So, which one should you hire? Well, the ideal is a web developer with strong design and creative skills. I always recommend hiring a designer to help with the initial layout ideas and even creating a mockup of the final product. That is when you bring the developer in.

I hope this helps someone understand the difference between web design and web development!

HTML colors are defined using hexadecimal values for the combination of Red, Green, and Blue. Here’s a helpful chart:

by Tom Duffy

Has this ever happened to you? You go into your favorite cafe (with free wifi of course) and order your coffee. Then, after paying for the coffee and maybe a muffin, you sit down and open up your laptop. To your total disappointment, the wifi connection doesn’t seem to have ANY internet connectivity! BLAST! What a waste of 5 bucks, right? Well, not necessarily…

At this point, you should ask yourself a few questions.

• Am I connected to the Access Point?
• Have I been assigned a private IP address?
• Can I reach the Access Point via web browser?

So, let’s assume the answer to question number 1 is YES…I am connected to the access point with a good signal! Now I need to know if I have an IP address.

In Windows, open a command prompt and type:

ipconfig /a

…In Linux or Mac, open a Terminal and type:

ifconfig

There are other ways to find your IP, but these work just fine. The private IP address will likely look something like 192.168.1.xxx.

Next, take that IP and change the last part (xxx) to 1. For example, if it was 192.168.1.193, change it to 192.168.1.1. This is the gateway address. Now, let’s try entering that gateway address into a web browser. If you are prompted for a username/password that’s good news! That means that the Access Point has port 80 open and is running a web server to allow web based configuration. Look for a model number or company name in the window asking for a password. If it’s something like WRT54G, that is a Linksys and the default username and password are both: admin.

If you can’t get in with a default username/password, you should probably just move on…unless you want to try something more advanced of course. :)

Once you ARE logged in though, you can do some things to get the free wifi working again. Release and renew the public IP…reboot the Access Point. That combination will fix a lot of connectivity issues!

Have Fun!

Hi Everone! I have been visiting a coffee shop a lot lately that offers free WiFi. I have been using the connection to work on various things. I wanted to make sure that my browsing had some encryption to avoid sending out plain text data, so I figured out how to route my browser traffic through an SSH connection! The method basically uses an SSH connection as a proxy for the browser.

You will need:

• An SSH server that you can log into.
• An SSH Client on the computer you are using.
• A web browser.

The first thing we will need to do is connect to the SSH server. We will be using a special command flag when logging in in order to set a port and to avoid opening up an interactive shell. The command you will run is:

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ssh -ND 9999 you@example.com

Replace “you” with your login name for the server and “example.com” with the address of the server. You will notice that after you enter your password, nothing will happen. It will just sit there. That is exactly what we want. Now, minimize the SSH client or Terminal window. Next, open your browser. I will show you the settings for Firefox, but the setup is more or less the same for other browsers.

In Firefox

Open your Firefox settings. In Windows, it’s in the “Tools” menu. In Linux, it’s in the “Edit” menu. In Apple, it’s in the “Firefox” menu. Once you have the settings window open, click on the “Advanced” section and then the “Network” tab. Next, click the “Settings” button next to where it says, “Configure how Firefox connects to the internet”. Select the option that says “Manual Proxy Configuration”. The only thing we change here is the SOCKS Host and the Port. For the SOCKS Host, enter “localhost” and 9999 for the port number. It should look like this:

This is a very old method for setting up a SOCKS Proxy, but it works quite well. Please feel free to comment!

So here’s the scenario. You have a flash application on your website. The flash app is fed with content from an XML file on your server. You add some new content to the XML file and save it. Then you go to your site and the change doesn’t show up! Oh no!

Well, there’s a reason for this. Browser Cache. The XML file is stored locally by your web browser in order to make loading times better. For the new content to display, the user has to clear their browser’s cache. This would be a giant pain to explain to your visitors that they have to clear their cache in order for your site to appear correctly. It’s also not very professional! In order to solve the problem you need to add a little bit of code to your site. First, let’s take a look at what the code might have looked like originally:

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<script type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>

What we need to do next is trick the browser into thinking that the file it is checking the cache for doesn’t exist in the cache. So, we will add a random number to our script:

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<script type="text/javascript"><!--mce:1--></script>

This solves the browser cache problem!

Hey folks,

Please check out the Tom and Bat Man Radio Show! You can find it as a podcast on iTunes or go to http://tomandbatman.com to stream the latest shows. My friend Bat Man and I decided to start this show to provide a tech-related podcast that is also fun and entertaining! Imagine that! Please check it out!

Tom

by Tom Duffy

I am writing this for all of my fellow IT people. All of my fellow web development people. All of my fellow geeks. Why is it that as soon as somebody discovers that you fix computers for a living, they just assume that you will help them out for free? If you found out that someone was a house painter would you assume that they would paint your house for free? This is my business…my BUSINESS! You have to understand that I need to charge money for the services that I provide.

The kicker of this rant is my realization that people are getting slicker about getting my services for free. Promises of future jobs and referrals in exchange for advice or training on a certain problem. I am going to start asking these same people for THEIR services for free if this continues! I laugh a little inside when I think about how some of them will probably read this post. I laugh because they probably won’t even realize that it’s THEM I am referring to!

Please sir, a penny for your thoughts?

by Tom Duffy

Why is everyone tweeting about twitter? What’s the big deal? Where did the idea come from that NEW technology must be GOOD technology? I understand social networking sites and social bookmarking sites, but Twitter seems to be so benign in comparison to it’s big cousins. I can see how using Twitter to feed other social sites can be usefull, but hardly NOBODY is using it for this. I can also see using Twitter as a means to publish the status of a server. In fact, I might even write a script that will post my server’s uptime and load to Twitter. But there hardly seems to be anyone using it for this!

Most of the people who are using Twitter use it for the most ridiculous things. They take a shower and tweet about it…they eat breakfast and tweet about it…they hate monday so they tweet about it. I understand the whole “Web 2.0″ trend, but at some point we have to say Web 2.NO!

by Tom Duffy

In these times of economic recession, it is important to save every penny that you can. The internet, as you all know, contains a vast world of services and products. A lot of them can save you money! You probably know about most of the services that I’m going to talk about here, but many people still aren’t taking advantage of them. So here’s my top 5 money saving internet services:

5. Online DVD Rental

Companies like Netflix have changed the way we can rent movies. A lot of people are already using Netflix, but the real money saving potential of Netflix is the combination of the Watch It Now feature and canceling any home cable or satellite services that you have. With more and more movies available on the Netflix Watch it Now site, it is obvious that we can pull our Netflix plan back to the 1 DVD at a time minimum and take full advantage of watching movies on our computer. I can already hear all of my readers who use Linux groaning. That is because Linux isn’t supported by Watch it Now which sucks, but it is still a very cool feature for Windows users. With Watch it Now, you can watch as many movies as you want on your computer with no extra fees. If you have a supported device, you can even stream the Watch It Now movies directly to your TV! Some of them are even in HD.

4. Free TV Shows

By cancelling cable or satellite services, we can save at least $50 per month. You would be surprised at how many networks allow you to view their shows on their website for free! CBS, NBC, FOX (no Linux support), A&E, and many more networks have full episodes that are viewable online for free. There are also sites that have many different networks to watch all in one place such as WWITV.

3. IP Telephone

Services like Vonage use the internet to make phone calls. That’s only kind of cool though because they still want you to pay 20 bucks a month for it. Services like Skype allow users to make internet phone calls from PC to PC for free! They will also let you make PC to Phone calls for very cheap. Sign up for Skype! Get all of your friends and family to sign up too! Then you can save cell phone minutes by using Skype when you are near your PC. After a couple of months you will probably notice that you can pull back your minutes on your mobile plan which can save you some cash.

2. Online Retail and Grocery Coupons

There are a bunch of online coupon sites that are not very good. If you are patient, you can find some real deals on some of them though. I’ve had the most success with Wow Coupons which allows you to print coupons right from your computer for use in various retail and grocery stores. Remember, every penny that you save adds up over time!

1. Host Your Website At Home

This one isn’t for everyone. If you have a website that you host through a hosting company, you might be paying anywhere from a few dollars per month up to 40 dollars per month depending on the hosting company and features. If you have an internet connection with a high upload speed, you should really consider hosting your own site. It takes some work and some patience, but it feels great knowing that you aren’t forking out any money to that hosting company anymore! The best part about hosting your own site is that you can get all the features that you need for free! All you need is a computer that you are willing to set aside as a web server. For an operating system, you should use Linux because for web servers, it is much better than Windows and it’s free. I recommend CentOS or Ubuntu Server. There is a ton of information available on how to setup a web server using Ubuntu or CentOS out there on the web. Do some research and start your project. If you don’t have a static IP address you can use a service like DynDNS which lets you host a site without a static IP.

All of these services can really save you some money! By canning your home cable or satellite service, your home phone service, and pulling back your mobile minutes you can save up to $100 per month…or more depending on what you were paying for them! With Skype, the key is really to get your friends and family on it. I hope this list helps you save some money in these tight times. Good luck to everyone!