Just as I was scrolling down my favorite blogs the other day, an article by Matt Friedman for Networking Pipeline popped up. In essence, Friedman advocated to think ahead and figure out just how safe your computer network is. Once you have an idea about your level of vulnerability towards viruses, worms and hackers bent on doing harm to your network, you can implement an appropriate solution.

According to Friedman, “every great journey begins with a single step, and even if you only have ten minutes to devote to the project, you can still use that time to get the security ball rolling. “I think the key is not to think about securing your network in ten minutes,” says Jason Hilling, Director of Managed Security Services Product Management at Internet Security Systems, “but to get the whole process started in those ten minutes.” Here are some of Friedman’s key points:

• Evaluate your security policy: “Every organization needs some kind of security policy, but it is often surprising how many do not. The problem, of course, is that network security is often perceived as a technological problem that you can throw money and gadgets at to make better. If things were that simple, then worms and hackers would be a thing of the past.”
• Vulnerability Management: “One of the most important things you can do when you have limited time is to find out where you are vulnerable,” Hilling says. “To a certain extent, everything follows from this.”
• Patch management: “Once you have the process in place to identify vulnerabilities, you then have to ask how you are going to patch them,” Hilling says. “Patching can be the most important thing you can do.”

  I might add: if you don’t know how to do this, let an expert take a look at your network and teach you the basics of patch management. It doesn’t have to cost a lot, but will serve you well.

• Get informed: The best way to stay on top of security vulnerabilities, of course, is to make sure you know about them before they bit you in the tender parts. That means taking the time to scan the latest warnings and maybe even reading your favorite networking or security websites over coffee. It doesn’t take long to stay informed once you are informed but, as with everything else, you have to take the time to start the process.

  “There are a lot of solutions that can bring security intelligence to you,” Hilling says. “If you don’t have the time to address security yourself, any good managed service provider will deliver intelligence to its customers about what’s out there.”

• Go shopping: Even if security is not strictly a technology issue, you need technology to secure your network. It’s probably not a good idea to drop $10,000 on intrusion prevention systems and firewalls in ten minutes — and the board of directors would have your head if you did — but it only takes a few minutes to see what what’s out there.

Read the full article…

After discovering the benefits of WordPress, an open-source content management system, I recently switched the iserloh.com website to this database-driven format. I can only praise open source - it’s the way to go, and I have personally deployed open-source packages for e-commerce, blogging and bulletin board websites (see several examples at iserlohdesign.com). However, some of my recent clients were doubtful, wondering why I recommend open-source so highly. Tim Gnatek discussed his views in a recent Ziff-Davis publication, nicely making a case for the superiority of open-source products in today’s IT world:

Programs that are open source generally have three things in common. Most notably, they’re free. But so are many other kinds of software out there – like shareware, freeware and adware.

What further sets open-source programs aside from their budget-priced brothers is that their underlying source code is also free and open for others to examine, modify and update. Instead of hoarding the secrets of the programming innards, like commercial software, open-source programs encourage others to tweak the programs, fix bugs, and add features – essentially, they are invited to become part of the development team.

Open-source software can also be distributed freely: Copy it, give it to friends, even package and sell it if you like, as long as you continue to provide others the ability to do the same in accordance with the terms set by the Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit group that maintains the open-source standard.

Because finding bugs is a key part of the development process, proponents argue that open source results in a superior product, because more people are looking for errors and new software tweaks can be released as needed.

Proponents also contend that open source is more secure than proprietary programs because having source code accessible makes for transparent programs: Users can look into the software’s innards and know exactly how their personal information is protected.

Read the full article…

As digital cameras continue to spread like wildfire - fueled by falling prices and ever-increasing picture resolution - point-and-shooters are forced to deal with several unforeseen consequences:

• what to do when your computer’s harddrive collapses under the weight of gigabytes worth of pictures…
• how to store your images when traveling for extended periods of time without access to the internet…
• where to turn your digital images into prints?

The authoritative answer to the last question was provided in the August 2005 issue of Macworld. Contributor Ben Long discussed How to choose the best online photo service for your prints and provides a nice chart that compares pricing and features of select services:

One of the great things about digital photography is that you can choose to print only the photos you truly love—and then leave the other 20 shots of your cat perched precariously on the windowsill stored safely away for posterity. Far too often, though, even our best pictures never leave the confines of our computers. But if you have an Internet connection and a few minutes, you can turn your great shots into finished prints - without a photo printer, and without even leaving the house. Just upload them to an online photo-printing service and place your order.

There are a lot of online photo services out there, but there can be a huge difference in results from one online photo finisher to the next. To find the best option, I took a look at nine online photo services: Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Mpix, PhotoCheap, PhotoWorks, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Wal-Mart, Webshots, and the Order Prints option built into Apple’s iPhoto 5. I sent five different images to all of the services and then asked a jury of Macworld editors to evaluate the prints’ image quality. I incorporated their opinions into my overall evaluation of the services.

While I was hoping to find a clear winner that always produced superior prints, the frustrating truth is that most services produced good prints at some times and bad prints at other times. However, once you weigh price, speed, ease-of-uploading, and a few other considerations, some services stood out from the pack—in particular, Snapfish.

Read more…

I have come across a fascinating book, Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (Check out excerpts from the inside cover). While Gladwell discusses many interesting topics, I found his focus on decision making quite relevant to the realms of medicinal chemistry, and project management in general.

In project management, “we take it as a given that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are. For example, if a doctor says he/she needs to do more tests or examine a patient in more detail to diagnose a heart attack, few of us think that’s a bad idea.”

“Take the hypothetical case of a man who comes into the ER complaining of intermittent left-side chest pain that occasionally comes when he walks up the stairs and that lasts from five minutes to three hours. His chest exam, heart exam and ECG are normal, and his systolic blood pressure is 165, meaning it doesn’t qualify as an urgent factor. But he’s in his sixties. He’s a hard-charging executive. He’s under constant presssure. He smokes. He doesn’t exercise. He’s had high blood pressure for years. He’s overweight. He had heart surgery two years ago. He’s sweating.

It certainly seems like he ought to be admitted to the coronary care unit right away. Undoubtedly, all those factors certainly matter in the long term. The patient’s condition and diet and lifestyle put him at serious risk of developing heart disease over the next few years. It may even be that those factors pay a very subtle and complex role in increasing the odds of something happening to him in the next 72 hours.”

However, the role of all those factors - beyond ECG, blood pressure, fluid in the lungs, and unstable angina - is so small in determining what is happening to the man right now that an accurate diagnosis can be made without anything else. Research by many scientists has shown that all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all. “It’s harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.”

“In good decision making, frugality matters - taking a complex problem and reducing it to its simplest elements. Time and again, it has been shown that even the most complicated of relationships and problems have an identifiable underlying pattern. In picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision maker with information makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. So to be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.”

Going back to the recent post on Getting more from your Data, it is clear that applying medicinal chemistry successfully relies a good deal on knowing what parameters and properties are important for a given problem.

Whenever I get approached by clients to design and deploy their e-commerce sites, I always stress the importance of convincing future customers that a client’s online venture is legit and trustworthy. Sure, presentation is equally important in getting visitors to stay and ultimately return to their websites. But building trust is essential in closing the deal and making a customer go through with their purchase.

Paras Shah voiced similar sentiments in a recent article on setting up a secure e-commerce site:

To put it simply, in the e-commerce business, securing trust in your company is essential to your success. Trust is as important to a potential customer’s purchasing decision as the products you offer. And an essential element of building that trust, with both customers and partners, is the assurance that your e-commerce operation meets the demanding security standards required of organizations handling sensitive financial information.

(…) The shopping interface you introduce to customers is arguably the most important piece of your e-commerce site’s presentation. A familiar, easy-to-navigate interface can go a long way toward establishing the trust you’re after. Seasoned online shoppers will know what to expect from an e-commerce site, and meeting those expectations is a good way to gain their confidence. Novice surfers will probably be more comfortable if your online store closely resembles the major e-commerce interfaces they might have encountered.

Paras went on in quite some detail, discussing pertinent issues of SSL certificates, hosted e-commerce solutions and merchant accounts. If you’re thinking about opening an online store, his column is a must-read.

Have a new website? Want to put up some of your pictures? Afraid that someone might will steal your content? Many people don’t seem to know how their work is protected by copyrights, and what they have to do to use someone else’s work.

The Digital Library at the University of Texas/Austin has put together a basic primer on the pertinent issues. The Copyright Crash Course Online Tutorial will help you learn about how ownership of copyrighted materials works, what is fair use and when and how to get permission to use someone else’s materials.

Stephen Lawson of IDG news services recently discussed the common practice of bandwidth poaching in densely populated urban areas. “It’s not hard for even an innocent user to tap into a broadband Internet connection via an unprotected wireless LAN: As soon as the Wi-Fi client detects the network, the user can click on it and join. Some broadband subscribers even like opening their networks. But Internet access may not be the only thing being shared.”

I can only agree in that too many novice users of broadband routers/access points don’t bother to set up their wireless networks correctly. Sure, it is convenient to just take the wireless router out of the box, plug in the ethernet cables and start using the laptop from anywhere in the home. However, reading through the router instructions and enabling a minimum of wireless protection only takes a few minutes - I can’t feel pity if someone’s unprotected Wi-Fi network gets abused…

The growth of the Internet has led to a huge expansion of data - data on virtually everything - such that it has become nearly impossible to find a particular document without using search engines such as Google. Yu and colleagues pointed out in a recent presentation to the Mellon Foundation on Patterns in Unstructured Data that…

…for all their problems, online search engines have come a long way. Sites like Google are pioneering the use of sophisticated techniques to help distinguish content from drivel, and the arms race between search engines and the marketers who want to manipulate them has spurred innovation. But the challenge of finding relevant content online remains. Because of the sheer number of documents available, we can find interesting and relevant results for any search query at all. The problem is that those results are likely to be hidden in a mass of semi-relevant and irrelevant information, with no easy way to distinguish the good from the bad.

While Google’s algorithms are good at unearthing documents based on keywords, it will become paramount to extract more than just the documents itself. Analysis of so-called unstructured data - information contained in emails, reports, PowerPoint presentations, voice mail, phone notes, agendas and photographs (in fact anything less structured than database entries) will generate true and measurable value by providing information along with its context, something that is missing from today’s search queries.

Along the same lines, AP technology writer Brian Bergstein recently discussed how Companies Are Using Tech Analysis on Themselves:

Eastman Kodak Co. uses unstructured-data analysis to spot connections in its own and its competitors’ patent filings. Government agents use it to hunt for insider trading or linkages between terrorist groups. Mayo Clinic researchers use it to scan physicians’ notes for evidence about the efficacy of treatments. The breakthrough has been in getting computers to understand the content of the documents they scan.

The automated analysis of “unstructured” data is becoming remarkably agile at giving companies detailed answers to the age-old business question of “How are we doing?” For example, Intelliseek Inc. recently partnered with the Factiva information service to offer “reputation insight.”

Intelliseek scans 4 million Web logs and e-mail list servers, and Factiva — a joint venture between Dow Jones & Co. and Reuters Group PLC — combs news stories, radio transcripts and other media. Together they produce for companies a detailed analysis of how the public thinks about them at any given point.

(…) The most popular phrases relating to a company can be determined, and whether those terms are waxing or waning in significance. Comparisons with competitors can be generated — as well as to a company’s own business results. Who knows? Perhaps a seemingly unrelated bit of geopolitical news tends to boost sales. Or maybe early word can be gleaned about problems with a product that might lead to an expensive recall.

It is the extraction of this additional value in ordinary information that can provide a competitive advantage, allowing companies to discover profitable niche markets and to lower the cost of doing business by “getting more bang for your buck”. Without sophisticated software tools to cut through the chatter, we’ll likely drown in our self-created stream of information…

Wow, what an explosive growth in new weblogs (”blogs”) over the last few months! David Sifry and Technorati, the (self-annointed) “authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs” have crunched the numbers to provide a high-level overview on the expansion of the blogosphere, both in terms of numbers of bloggers, as well as in the growth of new blogs per day.

• Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005. This includes blogs hosted on MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, as well as a number of international hosted services. Use of software like WordPress and Movable Type to provide blogs continues to grow significantly as well.
• The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months. A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
• About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year. About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly
• Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages.
  During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time (10AM - 3PM Eastern time)

David further pointed out that posting volume has followed a strong upward trend. “After a brief dip last winter, the average rate of postings has grown steadily such that at the end of July 2005, there were about 900,000 posts created each day. That’s about 37,500 posts every hour, or 10.4 posts per second. It peaked at just over 1.1 Million posts per day after the Live 8 concerts and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her resignation from the US Supreme Court.”