If you don’t want to bring your laptop with you but still want to carry most of your environment, tools, and digital documents, MokaFive gives you an interesting and secure way to do this. The software has a nice collection of utilities to pull this off, and while a bit quirky to get installed and operating, it could be a big convenience for people on the go. I say secure because the product is a lot safer than just using a borrowed PC at a public kiosk or library, too. And it is free, too!

You can read my complete review at Tom’s Guides here.

This week we had another Internet security exploit revealed. And while I don’t want to get into the details, let’s just say that if you aren’t using OpenDNS.com for your home network, now is the time to take the five minutes and get it done. It is simple (well, as these things go), it is free, and it will protect you from any number of issues in the future. And you might get better browsing performance as a result.

Before I tell you how to do this, let’s have a brief explanation of what the Domain Name System is for those of you that really want to know. Think of what a phone book (remember them, before we used online searches to look up a friend’s number, seems so quaint now) does – it allows you if you know someone’s name to look up their phone number. The names are in alphabetical order, so if you know the alphabet, you can quickly page through and find the person, if they are listed.

The DNS does something similar, except for computers: if you type in “google.com” it translates that name into a sequence of four numbers, called an IP address, which in this case for google.com is 72.14.207.99. Paul Mockapetris, a gentleman I have spent some time with and one of the Internet bright lights, put the thing together in the early 1980s, which is enshrined in RFC 882, even before Al Gore had invented the Internet itself.

The overall Internet infrastructure has a series of master phone books, or DNS root servers, located at strategic places around the world and maintained by a collection of public, semi-public, and private providers. They talk to each other on a regular basis, to make sure that as we add new domains they are in synch. As you can imagine, if someone wants to “poison” one of the entries,  or misdirect Internet traffic to a phony domain, it can be done with the right amount of subterfuge.

Here is where OpenDNS comes into play. When you set up your home network, typically you don’t give your DNS settings any further thought. If you have a cable or DSL modem, you hook it up and it automatically gets its DNS settings from the cable or phone company’s DNS servers.

What I am suggesting is that you change these settings, to reflect the DNS servers at OpenDNS. There are instructions on their Web site, but basically you specify the two (one is used for backup) DNS IP addresses for your router or DSL/cable modem. If you have a wireless gateway from Netgear or someone similar, you make the entries there. You need to know the router’s IP address, and how to access it via its Web interface.

There are a few nice things about using OpenDNS. First, you can set it up to block objectionable domains, so that you might be able to get around your kids seeing something that you would rather they didn’t. They also spend time to block known exploit domains, so you have a better chance of not getting trapped by some hacker. You also get better DNS service, because they have servers that will return the domains supposedly faster than the ones for the general Internet. They also catch common typos, so if you are like me and make mistakes typing in names in your browser, they can usually direct you to the place you intended.

How do they make money? If you type in an unknown domain name, you are directed to their search page where they show ads, just like the Google search pages.

OpenDNS is not the answer for everyone, and businesses should go a step further and protect their DNS servers on their networks. While I don’t want to get into that here, you can find out more about the explot from the experts, start with this blog post here:

http://www.circleid.com/posts/87143_dns_not_a_guessing_game/

It is sad that the Internet is at risk: this exploit is serious, and goes at the core protocol that everyone uses all day long. Hopefully, the engineers will find a fix soon.

I love places like this: labs where geeks do their geekiest stuff. Thanks to Seed Magazine, you can see some great pictures, like this one taken at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Extra points if you can actually ID any of the gear in these racks.

With Apple’s sexy MacBook Air thrusting them into the limelight, laptops with built-in solid state drives (SSDs) are suddenly all the rage. Now they are also available from a variety of Windows OEMs including Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell. While the drives can offer higher performance than conventional rotating storage, they also add about $500- $800 to the base purchase price of laptops, and can be almost ten times as expensive as a standard hard disk.

In this story for JupiterMedia’s IT Management, I discuss the issues and advantages of getting an SSD-equipped laptop.

One of the oldest cold war technologies still in current use has become the leading edge of present-day technology innovation.  The first satellite launched for the Global Positioning System or GPS back in 1978 has in turn launched a wide variety of programs and innovative applications across mining, farming, transit operations, as well as personal navigation.  And a key link between GPS and Bluetooth protocols is pushing innovation even further. You can read more about the relationship in a story I wrote for the Bluetooth.org’s SIGnature magazine (on p. 16) here.

Are you thinking about posting your videos online? There certainly are a lot of different choices, with dozens of providers ranging from the ubiquitous and free YouTube to content delivery networks that own their own pipes and charge starting at $500 a month for basic service. For a project that I have been researching for the past several weeks, I signed up with several of them and tried out the production process to get a better feel for what they offered, the quality of the resulting streaming video, and what they would charge. It is a pretty chaotic world out out there.

First, let’s look at the free players. Besides YouTube, there are: 

• Metacafe.com, limits each video to  <100MB
• Howcast.com  also limits each video to   <100 MB
• Wonderhowto.com  
• ExpertVillage..com
• Google video  
• VideoJug.com    (which doesn’t take flash)
• Vimeo.com, which takes a wide range of formats but limits you to uploading 500 MB per week of total content
• Blip.tv  
• Qik.com, which allows you to upload videos directly from your mobile phone
• Dailymotion.com

Some of these providers (like Blogger) require you to directly upload your video file, while others can link to YouTube and wrap their own content around the video stream.

Why bother with the free sites? Several reasons: First, you get their power of instant searchability, discoverability, and Internet indexing of your content. Second, they make it relatively easy to create and distribute your own “channel” to make branding of your oeuvre more powerful. But the quality isn’t the best, and you have to put up with their page formats, ad banners, and other effluvia around your creation. You also lose the ability to convert and monetize that clickstream.

A level up from the freebie sites are video streaming specialty providers. I looked at several that would sell me their service for less than $100 a month, including:

• Streamhoster.com, which for $25 a month and a free week trial might be the ticket for me. Plus, they have experience with Camtasia, the product that I would be using to create the videos
• Screencast.com, which goes for $70 per year 25 GB storage, 25 GB transfer. Screencast is the same people behind Camtasia, but they are more of a repository than a streaming provider.
• Videohost.com, which doesn’t require a long term contract and for $60 a month covers 500 MB of bandwidth, which isn’t much in the way of storage
• Streamingmediahosting.com basic plan goes for $175 a month, and they have a year contract but liberal cancellation clause. They also offer a multitude of flash players that you can use on your site.

At the top of the heap are the content delivery networks, used by professional broadcasters and people that are very fussy about their video quality. The entry point here is somewhere around $500 a month and quickly goes up from there. Typical sites include:

• Limelightnetworks.com
• Akamai.com
• Edgecast.com
• Cdnetworks.com

This is the level you will need once your videos go viral, or if you are developing your own TV shows and want your advertisers to appreciate the amount of money you are spending in getting your content to your audience. They have servers in multiple cities, and have all sorts of fancy service level agreements and guarantees.

If you are going to pay hard cash money for your video hosting, here are some questions you might want to ask each potential candidate.

1. What is the minimum term of a contract, and can you cancel early without any penalty?  Streamingmediahosting.com will give you up to 30 days to cancel, for whatever reason. Some of the other providers will give you a short trial period so you can evaluate their production and reporting processes.
2. Do you really need multiple servers in multiple cities? If so, you are going to pay a lot for that redundancy. Instead, ask if they own their own data center, and have multiple upstream providers or use multi-homed servers for improved reliability. Better yet, find out when they had their last outage that impacted their video delivery.
3. What are the support hours that you can get someone on the phone? Some providers, like videohost.com offer seven day a week service during the daytime hours that operators are standing by. Most promise email turnaround but as one sales person told me, we have our best support people on duty during the daytime, because that is when they want to work. So having a graveyard shift may not buy you much assurance.
4. How do they report viewers and bandwidth usage charges to you? Typically, with a Web-based portal page that you can login and examine who has watched which video. You may be paying for reports that you don’t need, or conversely get too much information, so it is important to examine these reporting tools before you sign any long-term contract.
5. How much bandwidth do you really need? It can be hard to estimate, because you don’t know your expected traffic, your target encoding rate, and the length of the videos. But if you can do the math, you can get a rough estimate of the bits that you will be paying for. But also understand what happens when you exceed the bandwidth that your monthly allotment entitles you to — with some providers, you can back date and bump up your contract so you won’t be hit with a big bill if your video gets popular.
6. What video formats do they have experience with streaming? In my case, I will be using Camtasia, which has a choice of encoding rates and formats that you can output to. I liked the fact that streamhoster.com had lots of experience with the product, or so the sales person told me.
7. How responsive to your initial inquiry is the firm? I had no reply from limelightnetworks.com, which is supposedly one of the leaders in the field. Most of the others called me back within 24 hours of my inquiry via either email or voice mail.
8. If you are going to use Flash, is the provider part of Adobe’s Premier Partner program and gone through the certification? You can find out real quickly here on their Web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/fvss/
9. How are you going to host your overall Web site? Some of the free blogging sites like WordPress are very finicky about what encoder and link and how the player is embedded in their pages. You need to think about how you are going to contain the media player on your pages, and whether you have to upload the video directly to the Web site or just embed a link to it elsewhere. I found LiveJournal.com, a free blogging service that is based in Moscow of all places, to have the easiest video posting production process of the free services, and you can embed videos that are hosted elsewhere. Google’s Blogger.com requires you to upload the video directly to their site, and then place storage limits on you.
10. Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment. Try out a couple of free sites, go for a limited trial with the pay ones, and post a few test videos to see what the quality will be and how the reports will look.

Apple’s MobileMe, its replacement for its .Mac cloud computing service, is having birthing pains, as this article by Carol Pinchefsky states. “Users are still having problems with the MobileMe service, five days after its launch. …The problems are particularly vexing because, in principle, MobileMe is a very good idea whose time has come.” You can read more along with my pungent quotes. And in a follow up piece, Carol also quotes me in talking about how Apple is giving 30 days of free service to try to make amends.

No, I don’t still have one yet, although am thinking about it. Too bad you can’t share your minutes with your existing AT&T phones — you need a new contract. But while you mull that over, enjoy this commercial. And no, it doesn’t feature FSJ.

My cable modem was down one morning last week. So I went to pick up the phone to call them (the lovely Charter Communications, kept afloat by Paul Allen’s largesse), and then realized the sad fact that since I have an IP Vonage phone, I wasn’t going to be making any calls. On to my cell, and the customer service number was busy. Busy! I guess this means I am not the only one without Internet service. Or else a lot of people aren’t getting TV service, either. Luckily, I was back in business in about an hour.

Skype’s customer service didn’t fare any better last week either. Seems like they were the target of a phish attack, and because so many people clicked on the bogus links, or because the attackers used bogus email addresses, their email system crashed. And how do you think you get ahold of Skype customer service? By sending them email, of course! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just, I don’t know, CALL them on the PHONE and talk to a real person?

Both of these episodes point out that you need multiple communications paths for your customer service department, if you want to have adequate customer service. You can’t just have an 800 number, if anyone can actually get through to it and not wait forever and a day on hold. You can’t just have email, if anyone’s job is to actually to answer it within a few hours of receipt. You need Instant Messaging connections, Web click-to-call, and what about those people that take the time to send you an actual postal letter, before they go postal on you? Yes, yes, and yes. Do it all.

It doesn’t take much, particularly in this era of reduced expectations, to rise above the mediocre level that most of us have experienced. Is this because of off-shoring? Because of corporate cut-backs? Because no one gives a hoot about their customers? All of the above! Plus, it is how we have come to think of the customer. My favorite anecdote: what does the telecom industry call their connection to the customer? The last mile. Hah! News flash: we are the first darn mile, and don’t forget it.

Sprint is finding this out first hand. Their new CEO, Dan Hesse, put his email address in the new ads, saying that Sprint will now actually listen to their customers, the few of them that haven’t yet switched to Verizon or AT&T. Yet, Dan (I feel like we should be on a first name basis) readily admits that he doesn’t actually have time to READ all these emails that he is supposedly getting – he gets a summarized (and presumably sanitized) update once a day. Once a day! I guess the world’s biggest all-fiber optic network that operates at the speed of light (or whatever their current marketing pitch is) doesn’t have to move that fast. Yes, Dan is making some progress, empowering all of his line managers to be more responsive to customers, as opposed to just pissing them off. But they still have a long way to go – a friend of mine, who has been a Sprint customer with five, count ‘em, five phones is about ready to bolt, because she can’t get a correct bill from them and has to call every month to fight the over charges. How many more times does she have to call before just being another one of their churn statistics?

It isn’t just the computer companies. For the last two months, I have been trying to get my health insurance provider, Anthem Blue Cross, to correct my birth date on my health policy. I have tried faxing. I have tried calling. I have tried begging my doctors to just change my real birth date to the one that Anthem has listed so I can get treatment and not go through the song and dance with their billing departments. I got someone to help me and they promised it will be fixed by next week. Yeah, I have heard this tune before.

As I have said in the past, those companies that don’t provide decent customer service won’t have their customers much longer. If you are in charge of your department, think about ways that you touch your customers and make a pledge to do something small to improve what you do, and that you will provide some incentives to your crew so that they actually follow through with it. Sometimes, all it takes is for the customer service rep to listen to the complaint, apologize, and make some small token of appeasement.

This column was also posted on Pajamas Media this week here.

Via voice mail. This is from Family First Mortgage. You can listen to the Voicemail firing message here. Apparently, there is some discussion as to whether or not the recording is accurate, but it sure is a crummy way to fire someone. What ever happened to having someone come to the HR department at 3pm on a Friday?