General

No – the actor Chuck Norris is not giving a deadly kung-fu kick or karate chop to networking hardware devices  This is a new botnet attack against cable modems, DSL modems, and WiFi routers that use the Linux operating system.  This has been dubbed the “Chuck Norris” virus because the Italian author of this exploit wrote a tribute to Chuck Norris in the source code comments.

Why attack network edge devices and routers?  First, because these devices have a small but ...

I guy I know, Zach Peterson, is a videographer.  He was working on a project for Colon Cancer Awareness month, and was looking for people who had experienced a colonoscopy.  I volunteered.  Here are the links to my two commercials.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ZPPOnline#p/c/4B6C7BC4B887B083/13/92jpiplQ2LI

http://www.youtube.com/user/ZPPOnline#p/c/4B6C7BC4B887B083/14/zEHYhr3Qev4

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, speaking about aircraft design, said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."  In aircraft design, weight matters, to fly faster and more easily, light weight is essential.  This echoes the second of Bruce Lee’s ideas in my previous post, “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”  Both these points are important concepts for any ...

I don’t remember where I found this, but it sure is worth posting.

• “As you think, so shall you become.”
• “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”
• “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
• “To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”
• “Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”
• “I’m not in this world to live ...

According to the Number Resource Organization that represents the five Regional Internet Registries, we are down to 10 percent cushion of the available IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses.  These are the numerical addresses that are assigned to servers and web sites on the Internet.  My website, www.wyzguys.com, for instance is at address 74.208.82.191. 

In IPv6 this would look like 2002:0:0:0:0:0:4ad0:52bf.

When I was in the telephone business, we went through this experience first with 800 numbers, which was solved ...

Four years ago a consortium of Internet companies started a joint venture with the Berkman Center at Cambridge University called StopBadware.org.  This group was to become a central clearinghouse for new malware threats and malware infected web sites.  They recently were spun off to become a private corporation.  I received a press release from them this week.  I am reprinting it below.

“REINTRODUCING STOPBADWARE

Four years ago today, StopBadware.org was announced as a Berkman Center project, with the ambitious goal of fighting ...

In my November 22 post about smartphones, I pretty much dismissed Blackberry as a not too technically brilliant product.  I have revised my opinion.  My original Blackberry was a lowly 8700 model, which too be fair, was $49 on a new cell phone contract.  There was a reason it was $49 – because that was all it was worth!!  Thanks to the quick work of the thief who stole my Blackberry, wallet, credit cards, driver’s license, and watch from my ...

While these tips have been handed down since the early days of DOS, they really have no impact on performance on today’s computers and operating systems. 

Cleaning the Registry

Spending money on registry cleaning or optimizing software will not really improve performance by much at all.  And tweaking the Windows Registry on your own via Regedit can be dangerous.  You can skip this chore.

Disk Defragmentation

Back in the day when hard drives were expensive and had relatively small storage capacities, running a ...

I had a client ask me how to move his Internet Explorer Favorites to Google’s Chrome Browser, and I was able to find him some quick answers from Google and Techie-Buzz.  To find your Favorites, also called Bookmarks (which is actually an old Netscape term) go to C:/Documents and Settings/<user>/Favorites, where <user> is your user profile name or logon name.  In Vista or Windows 7 the path is C:/Users/<user>/Favorites.

You can open this folder highlight everything in ...