CHRISdotTODD

Michael J. Copps wrote a great article yesterday, America's Internet Disconnect , on the impact of not having broadband Internet access. Mr. Copps claims that some experts believe we could ..."add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.2 million jobs" with universal broadband adoption. In addition, we are being over charged by $8 billion. Here is a few more facts... the government is supposed to have universal broadband in the U.S. by 2007, yet we are not even close. The U.S. ranks 15th in the world in broadband penetration, while Europeans and Asians are getting 25 to 100 megabits to their homes. Oh, but "the FCC still defines broadband as 200 kilobits per second." Who knows, maybe we will see some changes with the recent election. CNet posted an article describing some of the possible benefits to technology with the control of the House and possibly the Senate going to Democrats. I would expect at a minimum that we finally get some support on Net Neutra

If you are new to web analytics or need to brush up your skills, I recently read Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer's Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business and found it very helpful for this category. If you are a little more advanced, you might try another book from the same author, Eric T. Peterson, Web Site Measurement Hacks . Perhaps what I like most about both of these books, is that Eric makes it simple. In addition, Eric has experience with web tags, which is particularly beneficial when your site is distributed across multiple systems. Eric also has a companion site for his Web Analytics Demystified book. In addition to companion files to Web Analytics Demystified, he has done a lot of work to bring the web analytics community together. For example, Eric has organized Web Analytics Wednesday where professionals all over the world meet locally on the 2nd Wednesday of every month, at 6 pm, to discuss web analytics. I attend the local Web Analyti

Have you wondered how you might change settings in Firefox, yet not found any options in the Tools | Options... section? Firefox uses a file called About:Config to manage options that are not configurable through the Tools | Options... menu. Just type About:Config in the Address Bar to access these additional options. The Mozilla knowledge base has a list of options to set. Here are just a few that may be of interest to you. Set the check document frequency (browser.cache.check_doc_frequency): This is the option as to how frequently the browser check to see if the page has been update. 0: Check once per browser session 1: Check every time you view the page 2: Never check (always use the cached page) 3: Check when the page is out-of-date (default) Default Search (browser.search.defaulturl): Just as the name says. The default is Google, http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= Search Open (browser.search.openintab): Set to true and your search results will o

The Ethical Hacker Network runs various competitions to help grow the education of the hacker community [not be confused with unethical "crackers"]. Recently they ran Netcat in the Hat, after an old favorite Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss . You do not have to be a hacker to enjoy and appreciate the humor behind it. Here is an exert from the instructions: The data stood still, And the packets did stay Sitting there in the N.O.C. All that cold, cold wet day. Our connection went down When the phone lines were cut By some dude with a backhoe, Gold tooth and beer gut. Far worse was that we Quite nearly were through With a large data transfer Straight from Kalamazoo more... Three winners were announced. This is from the Creative Category: That Netcat in the Hat he'd showed us his tricks, he'd showed us the what and the what makes it ticks. He'd given us knowledge, he'd given us plans, but he'd left us the work, that t

Microsoft and Secunia reported another ActiveX bug yesterday. Just by visiting a website or viewing email in html mode can provide the means for malicious code to be executed on your computer. Microsoft recommends keeping your virus scanner up-to-date [of course you should] and to use safe browsing habits. The safest way to browse is to use Firefox or another non-Internet Explorer / ActiveX supporting browser. Microsoft provides directions on how to browse safer using their products . I highly recommend that you follow this if you want to continue using Internet Explorer. Here is a brief explanation: Set your Internet Zone security to High When you trust a site, add it to the Trusted Zone. Microsoft recommends you run the Trusted zone at Medium security -- if you do, you will have problems on some sites. You need to move it at least to Medium-Low. Read all email in plain text (not HTML). So you have to ask yourself, do you want to manually manage your browsing security like this or r

A while back I had reported difficulty with the reliability of my wireless connection. I learned that different channels may perform better than others, and by switching, my wireless connection is much more reliable. There are also various tools that can help the educated person with their wireless network. NetStumbler is one such program. With NetStumbler, you can test the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The higher, the better (i.e. a lower number is bad).

Did you know that you could use your Gmail account to store files? With nearly 3 GBs of space, this is an easy way to store files that you may want to access from multiple computers or that you want to make sure get archived off site. Rahul Jonna has created a simple Firefox Extension , making it very easy to store files from Firefox. I made a 1.5 minute how-to movie to demonstrate how this works. [The quality of the movie does not match my desire, but I had to use a program that would output a format that could be accepted by Google.] Be sure to watch the last 3rd of the video as it demonstrates how to write a filter in Gmail, so the files do not show up in your inbox.