Think of your CMS like a piece software.  Just like the software on your computer, phone, or tablet, the creators are constantly making improvements and the system needs to be updated. One of the more frequent reasons for these updates is security. Every time a security hole is found in a CMS, someone rewrites portions of the code in order to fix the hole and prevent hackers from attacking your website. In addition, the developers of the CMS will publish the patch and the reason for the patch on the internet so that everyone knows that the patch is there and why it is there.  Though this is helpful to those maintaining a CMS it is also an announcement to malicious individuals on how to attack websites that are not patched properly. In other words, if you have a CMS that doesn’t receive regular maintenance, it is likely to have a number of security holes and there is a list of instructions on how to hack into your website and edit it however they see fit.

This weekend I assisted with cleaning up a website that had some script injected into it.  The script would cause search engines to be redirected to a different website.  The website they were being redirected to was a site for purchasing Viagra online.  Now, it was not redirecting users; just search engines.  The effect was that when someone searched for this website in Google, the results displayed a description and a cached version of a Viagra website completely ruining their search engine optimization (SEO), and advertising for a company and product that had nothing to do with the services they provided.

Redirecting search engines to this site, ruins the SEO of the company owning the hacked website.

This company was using Joomla 1.5.23. Remember earlier, we recommend Joomla as a CMS to our clients. This attack was the not the fault of Joomla.  Joomla’s current version is 2.5.8.  The 1.5 branch is no longer supported at all and the final version of 1.5 was 1.5.26.  So not only was the website outdated in regards to the CMS of choice, but it was also outdated in regards to the version it was in. The attacker didn’t have to work very hard to get their script in place. A Google search would have provided all the access information the attacker would have needed.

I should also mention that this is not the only type of attack that your CMS could be susceptible to. I have seen attacks that include popup windows on websites to advertise for products, redirect users to download viruses and malware, and even attacks that completely deface the website.

Some attacks attempt to get your visitors to download viruses and other malicious software.

If you use a CMS to maintain your website, it is very important to also maintain the core of the CMS to prevent an attack like these.  Updating the core is relatively painless and takes less than 30 minutes to do.

In addition to the CMS core, any extension used in conjunction with the CMS needs to be updated regularly as well.  Just like the CMS core, any vulnerability found in the extensions can often be exploited in the same way.  The vulnerability is published and widely accessible.

A CMS is a great way to lower the cost of developing, modifying, and enhance your website, and I always recommend that if you have a website it should be using a CMS. It is equally important to maintain it properly with regular updates.  I often recommend to my clients that they have my team at Ntiva scheduled to go through the update process for the CMS core and all extensions once a month. Though this does not guarantee that your website cannot be hacked, it greatly reduces the chances.

In order to control diabetes, as much as it can be anyway, I carry three devices with me at all times, plus a bag full of spare parts that I jokingly call my purse. The first device is one that every person living with diabetes must have in order to help determine how much sugar is floating around in the blood stream. I have to stick a special strip in the device and put a drop of my blood on the end of it. In about 5 seconds I get a number that tells me how close to normal my blood sugar is.

The second device has 3 main parts. The first is a censor. Using a special application device, I stick a small piece of the censor into my body. It looks like the filament of a light bulb. Then, I attach a small grey transmitter to it. Finally, I have a wireless receiver on my belt. This device is called a constant glucose monitor or CGM for short. It takes a reading every 5 minutes and helps alert me when my blood sugar changes dramatically and when my blood sugar is getting too high or too low.

The third device, and my personal favorite, is an insulin pump. Throughout the day, this device gives me an hourly dose of insulin to keep me normal. Then, when I eat, I enter in the amount of insulin I need and it gives me a little more to cover the carbohydrates I plan on eating. My particular pump has a lot of built in functionality.  For example, I don’t have to calculate my carbohydrate to insulin ratio. I just tell the pump how much I’m eating and it tells me what it thinks I should take based on my ratio.  It also takes into account how much insulin I have taken and how much of that should still be in my system so that I don’t take too much. It also has a food database where I can store common things that I eat so that I don’t have to check the packaging or guess for things that don’t have packaging.  Before I got the pump, I had to give myself insulin shots at least 4 times a day.

Not all people living with diabetes have all of these devices. The glucometer is the only one that is an absolutely must have. The other two devices just allow me to live a life that is a little bit closer to normal and a lot more comfortable.

In my house, there are 3 laptops, 1 desktop, and 2 smart phones, but the devices I can’t live without are my glucometer, CGM, and insulin pump.

Storage has undergone many evolutions, from a single hard drive to direct attached arrays and into highly scalable storage area networks (SANs). My most recent deployment was a meager 72 TB – an Equallogic PS6100E array seamlessly added to an existing 50 TB of critical storage. Increasing one virtual file server’s attached volume by 6 TB took mere seconds – a rather astonishing feat.

Regarding performance – even with the latest SANs sporting thousands of IOPs, changing security permissions on 200 million files can take hours or days. At the other end of the spectrum, new interfaces like USB 3.0 and SAS 6gbps have provided modest gains, but improvements in disk access times have stagnated. SSD technology has begun to fill the gap although hitting a few bumps along the way. In short, performance continues to play catch up with capacity.

As I’ve encountered larger and larger sets of data in the SMB space, the tools available to manage them have struggled to keep pace. Backup windows swell in light of the latest replication and de-duplication technologies, saturating once seemingly fast networks. Solutions for identifying important and sensitive data remain very expensive, delaying adoption. Predicting growth and future capacity needs has become more of an art than a science with the dearth of offerings in the market. I hope in the future there are more options, and they are better at consolidating these requirements.

Alternative approaches to storing data are showing promise. Object based storage aims to make billions of files easily accessible and at the same time provide flexible management and durability. This technology has predominantly been delivered in the cloud by services like Amazon S3. Several vendors have created products to bring this technology in house, but the shift from traditional storage will be a slow one as they bridge the legacy application gap. A whole arena of emerging cloud services intend to make your data available anywhere and everywhere. The question that remains is which path to choose?

I have come to one conclusion: everyone needs their data, and they want it now. It will be interesting to see how the storage landscape changes to meet this demand, and for now I will keep my eyes on the horizon.

Given my history, you can imagine my surprise to suddenly find myself happily typing this blog entry on a Macbook Pro. Recent developments at Apple and in the computing world in general have suddenly opened up the possibility of using Apple hardware for the most elite computing functions. First, in 2006 Apple transitioned from using their proprietary PowerPC processor family to Intel processors. This opened the door for Macs to run operating systems other than Mac OS X. Second, virtualization technology has matured significantly. There are now desktop virtualization products such as VMWare Fusion that offer a seamless, user-friendly integration of a Windows 7 virtual machine with a Mac OS X host. Third, Mac hardware today has arrived at the pinnacle of both elegance and durability. The 2011 Macbook Air is an undeniably beautiful machine and with its standard solid state hard drive (SSD) it is at far lower risk of disk failure.

VMWare Fusion for Mac allows lifetime Windows users who have eyed this beautiful Apple hardware in the past to “have their cake and eat it too”. With VMWare Fusion, I can set up any Mac to run both Mac OS X and Windows 7 at the same time. Swipe the touchpad with three fingers to the left and the screen swipes over with it and I’m suddenly in Windows 7 world. Swipe to the right and I’m back in Mac world. Connect a USB thumb drive or other USB device to the Mac and a pop-up prompt appears asking whether to connect this to the Mac side or the Windows side of things. When initially setting up the Windows 7 virtual machine I am given the choice of a “more seamless” or “more isolated” mode. In seamless mode every file I work with is easily accessible from both operating systems.

These developments have significantly expanded the possible uses of Mac hardware in business and technical applications. For example, Ntiva has clients who use 27” iMacs with 16GB of RAM to host 8GB virtual Windows 7 desktops as software development environments. They run Visual Studio and a variety of other resource-intensive Windows based software in these virtual machines. Because their environments are virtual machines, they are able to distribute a single master template “image” of the machine across six different iMacs with ease. They can also use the Mac host system for web browsing and other basic functions while keeping their software development encased in the virtual machine. Other Ntiva clients use similar configurations with Macbook Airs and Pros to connect to Windows domain networks.
Apple Mac hardware and software has evolved to become an ideal desktop virtual host that can be easily configured for a variety of advanced scenarios that were previously only possible on non-Mac, Windows- based desktops and laptops. These developments are a welcome departure from Apple’s historically restrictive and limiting nature.

If you want to read over all the policy changes yourself, go here.  Google also has another page, in which it shows a comparison of the new policy and the old policy. The old policy is a bit tough to read through the strikethrough marks but if you want to try to read it go right ahead.

I am going to break down each section of the new policy and paraphrase it for you.

Information they collect:

There are two different ways that Google collects your information. The first way information is obtained is when you sign up for a Google account. The other way is through the services that you use with your Google account, like Google+, Gmail, and your Android smartphone.

Now we get into what kind of information they collect.

• Personal Information like your name, email address, home address, telephone number, and credit card
• Device information such as hardware model, operating system version, mobile network information, unique device identifiers, event information such as crashes, hardware settings, browser type/language, and GPS location
• IP address, cookies, telephone log information such as time and date of calls, duration, and SMS (texting) routing information and the types of calls

How they use the information they collect:

Most of the information that Google collects is to help provide, maintain, protect, improve, and develop new services for Google users. The other small portion of information (mainly your name, location, language preferences) is used for ad based marketing. This marketing is targeted at what Google thinks you may want or need.

Google will only share this information:

1. With your consent – All of the Google services have an opt-in sharing option and you can decide whether or not and what information to share.
2. With your domain administrators – This is mainly for Google Apps users that are managed by a domain administrator and gives them power to do many things to your account like change the password, view stats on applications, and suspend or terminate your account access.
3. For external processing – Any affiliates or trusted business that receive information are to follow specific instructions and are in compliance with Google’s Privacy Policy.
4. For legal reasons – If Google has a good-faith belief that legal action needs to be taken, they will provide information to those companies or organizations that need to know.

Google offers a few ways of tuning your privacy and sharing options and here are some links to help you out.

Review and control certain aspects of your Google account with the dashboard. This is the main way of editing all the types of information tied to each Google service you are using.

View and edit your ads preference. You can use the Ads Preference Manager to opt out of ads all together.

Control what information you share with whom. This is to help protect your account from sharing your information publicly.

Now going through all your information on each service will be tedious but after you are done all your information will be safe and sound. Google also provides extra security measures like encrypting data using SSL and providing a two-step verification process if you decide you need the extra protection.

All in all the new changes to their policy is nothing to get your feathers ruffled as long as you are willing to take the time and fine tune your settings.

I found myself on the road quite a bit.  Travelling from city to city, event to event, customer to customer.  With me, I always had my trusty backpack.  In it was a wide variety of tools and tricks of the trade including my trusty, bulky, heavy laptop.  This was fine and dandy on most occasions but I also found myself riding my motorcycle more due to increasing gas prices.  Needless to say, my back was KILLING me.  I had this thought…one of many that I always think will change my life and make things so much easier, that if I could just replace this laptop with something smaller!  Wow!  What an idea!  My back wouldn’t hurt anymore and I could look like I was on the cutting edge in front of all of my customers!  WIN WIN!!

So away I went searching for what I wanted.  Being the Apple guy that I am, it didn’t take long.  The IPad had been out for a while and I had the same experience with marketing that the rest of the nation has had.  Genius.  Catchy music, fashionable people and oh my gosh! Look at everything that thing can do!  Shopping I went.  Home I came.  Got the glaring look from the wife that clearly stated without words that “I can’t believe you bought another toy” and then came the fun part….

I quickly discovered that out of the box, this device could not change my life instantly.  I had to find APPS!  I mean really….the commercial stated that there is an app for that so shopping I went again.  75 dollars later spent in the Appstore, I was ready to go.  I could open and edit word documents, edit Excel spreadsheets and modify my PowerPoints.  I could Remote Desktop into a customer’s network to fix an issue; I could even enter my time to keep the boss happy!

I never made it to the point where I would leave my laptop behind on a trip.  I did make it as far as going to see customers for meetings and using the tablet to take notes while the laptop was in the car.  Needless to say, my back received no relief.  In fact, I may have made it worse because I added weight to my already heavy backpack.

With all of that said, that is just my experience with the tablet.  I see various markets where the tablet is going to be, and already is, a game changer.  Health Care is a good one.  There are already various EMR software out there specifically for tablets.  Instead of a computer or laptop in every exam room, each doctor will have a tablet.

CES recently took place in Las Vegas.  I didn’t have the benefit of going (I am taking donations for next year though).   From what I am reading, tablets were a huge part of this year’s event.  With that said, it seems that a majority of what was displayed was just prototypes.  There seemed to be quite a few tablets that are scheduled to run the new Honeycomb OS but didn’t have it on them.  To me, that kind of defeats the purpose.  I would have wanted to see the functionality.  I mean really, this isn’t a car show. What I am waiting to see is who develops and markets a device specifically for the corporate environment.  The only issue that I see with this is the same issues that we are seeing with cell phones.  Employees want to bring their device of choice into the office and set it up to do their work.

I recently read an article on Reuters about a Cisco tablet http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/02/us-cisco-idUSTRE7B127I20111202 that I didn’t know existed.  More importantly, this article gave some great information about the current market place and the sheer numbers associated with what is going on in the tablet market.  There seems to be a new device every time that I turn around, but the one constant that I see, is Apple and the IPad.  Is there anyone out there that can take the market away from them?

I have heard various opinions on the application from “It changed my life, I don’t know what I did before it” to “I don’t think it is as effective as other voice recognition software on the market and I think it has been overblown by marketing.”  I also have one lonely friend that apparently stated that he was in a relationship with Siri for a while until she apparently became  very needy and he became tired of her always asking if he needed anything.

With all of this said, I began my journey to find out how effective Siri actually was.  Being an avid IPhone user and have owned every model except the 4s, I did quite a bit of research in advance of the release of 4s.  My opinion at the time was that it wasn’t worth my money to upgrade my phone for a faster processor and a virtual assistant (Siri).  After talking to people about the device and its functionality, I can see the benefits of having something like that.  One instance would be when I am in the car and I get a text (I spend a lot of time in the car), most States now have laws against texting and driving.  If I had the 4s I could speak my text and keep more of my attention on the road.  With that being said, it brings me to the most important part of my research, does Siri work instantly or do I have to teach it?  I found the excerpt below from an Apple support article (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4992)

Does Siri work out of the box or do I have to teach it?
Siri works right out of the box, without any work on your part. And the more you use Siri, the better it will understand you. It does this by learning about your accent and other characteristics of your voice. Siri uses voice recognition algorithms to categorize your voice into one of the dialects or accents it understands. As more people use Siri and it’s exposed to more variations of a language, its overall recognition of dialects and accents will continue to improve, and Siri will work even better.

With that said, I have a deep voice and at times a bit of a Southern Drawl, does this mean that Siri is going to have trouble understanding my dialect?  Do I need to wait for it to learn or do I have to deliberately enunciate each word and syllable so that Siri would understand me?  Don’t get me wrong, I can see the effectiveness of telling Siri to remind me to give my mom a call when I leave work.  What this means to Siri is to set a reminder to call “Mom” from my contacts list once I leave a certain geographical area.  Effective, yes.

What it boils down to is how you have configured your actual IPhone.  Do you have relationship status filled in for contacts?  What I mean by that is if I tell Siri to call my Wife, would she know which ones of my contacts was my wife?  I think this is where the leg work comes in.

I think one of the biggest benefits of Siri is the search command.  Yes it is great that it can send an email and set a calendar event.  It is amazing that it can shoot off a text to a friend telling them that I am running late but what I think is the most beneficial is that I can tell it to open maps, email, conduct a Google search for me all so I don’t have to type on that aggravating IPhone keypad.

All in all, I have decided to hold off on the 4s and wait for the next version.  As appealing as it is to me to be able to talk to my phone and in theory never be lonely again, I don’t think the price is worth me upgrading from my iPhone 4 at this time.  For those of you that disagree, enjoy.