HOEI

Father’s Day and my birthday are approaching. My wife has asked what I would like to receive as a gift on these days. I have been reading more in recent years and believe I am a great candidate for an iPad or Kindle as an electronic book reading device. I travel fairly frequently with my day job and like to read while on airplanes, trains, or in terminals. I often finish a book while on travel and am ready to begin reading a new book before completing my trip. I hesitate buying another book because I don’t want to add to my tight luggage load. I like the idea of being able to order a book on the fly without having to find my book of choice in the the local book store and waiting several days to get a snail mail delivery from Amazon just does not suit my schedule in most cases. So which device should I choose? The industry leaders appear to be the iPad from Apple and the Kindle from Amazon.

The iPad is the newest on the scene with a higher price, but the iPad has way more to offer than simply electronic book reading.  My chief concern about the iPad actually has to do with all the other features.  I am already carrying a laptop when I travel and that will not change.  So I have access to email, web browsing and a plethora of applications to do whatever else I need to do.  Since I am looking primarily for an electronic book reading device I am concerned that all the other stuff on the iPad could be distracting from my desire to simply read books.  If I want to be distracted by email or my social media interactions then I will fire up my PDA or my laptop.

At this point you might have guessed that I giving the Kindle a nod.  The Kindle has access to more titles that I can already surf via Amazon.  Yes I know that people say you can read Amazon books on the iPad, but they don’t bother to explain how if you are not a Kindle owner already with the installed Kindle app on the iPad.  I am not interested in an experiment with the iPad and certainly don’t want to buy both devices.  My experience with my  Windows to Apple laptop (MacBook Pro) has been less than desirable in terms of capabilities I am used to on Windows. So my hopes for a good experience with the iPad are low.  I also don’t want to add another monthly broadband fee to an already more expensive device.  The Kindle comes with all the connectivity for free.

I will be adding the Kindle to my wish list right along with some titles that I plan to download shortly after I get a Kindle.  I am sure I will follow up with a review of the Kindle in a later post. In the meantime I will link you to a few helpful reviews that I have found.

Kindle on Amazon web site

iPad on Apple web site

PC World: Apple iPad’s iBooks vs Amazon’s Kindle

The Apple Blog

chron Computing

Here are a few tips on how to change your Network Interface card IP address setting from the command line. Why? Well, as a network security engineer there can be a number of reasons that require switching between network segments many time in a day. I might have to move my laptop off into a DMZ to verify connectivity after making Firewall changes. Most of these segments were not running a DHCP server and required that I manually set the IP, Default Gateway, subnet mask, and sometime the DNS settings.  So running a ipconfig release and renew was not going to do it.  Then I might have to switch back to a segment running DHCP.  I was often running from the command line anyway to execute ping and tracert. I also use SSH from the Windows command line to access routers, switches, and firewalls so it just made sense to switch IP settings from the commandline.  Here is how I do it:

1. Create folder a in My Documents called “ip”
2. Inside of that folder create as many batch files as required to meet your needs

Example Batch (.bat) file used to switch from static IP back to DHCP.

netsh interface ip set address name=”Local Area Connection” static 192.168.10.200 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.2 1
netsh interface ip set dns “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.16.102 primary

Note: this file only contains two lines (each beginning with “netsh interface”)

Each of your Ethernet adapters will be listed as “Ether adapter [some name]:” The portion between the [brackets] is what you enter between the “quotes” after name=.

Below is an example of how to set a static IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS.

netsh interface ip set address name=”Local Area Connection” static 192.168.10.200 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.2 1
netsh interface ip set dns “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.10.102 primary

I create as many of these as needed and name the bat files something that makes sense to me for the job I am on. My bat files might be named;

• DHCP.bat
• homewireless.bat
• siteFWinside.bat
• siteFWoutside.bat
• siteDMZ1.bat
• siteDMZ2.bat

If you put your ip folder in your path then you can execute the bat files from any directory on the command line.  You can also put bat files on your desktop and create keyboard shortcuts as well. I put a copy of my DHCP.bat on my desktop and assign it a Ctrl+Alt+D keyword shortcut.

Apple announced this week an advanced preview of some new features that will appear on iPhone 3.0.  These “new” features include the ability to search your iPhone as well as cut-copy-and-paste.  These features which have been found standard on many other PDAs for years will arrive on iPhone later this year.

It is simply amazing how well iPhone has done while missing some very simply features.  Marketing is a powerful tool and the Apple guys have it figured out. There are and have been PDAs on the market for years that do most of the things iPhone advertises plus simple things like cut/paste across applications, searching, sending/receiving SMS (with pictures).

I have been an avid Palm user for years.  I started on the Handspring Visor Deluxe about ten years ago and have progressed through the Treo 650 and 700p in recent years.  Today I use a Palm Centro and love it.  Cut-and-Paste has been a stand a feature on Palm products for years, long before iPhone was conceived.  Palm has also for years offered as standard features many of the cool things iPhone offers like phone, sync with Exchange, camera, video, MP3 player, games, SMS, plus access to a ton of custom applications.

While I will admit that the built-in wifi feature is on iPhone is neat, it seems to breed illegal wifi use.  I know that some people see the use of open wifi as a murky subject, but it is not.  If you do not have permission from the wifi access point owner then you are stealing.  The iPhone is to open wifi as a slim jim or lock pick are to a car doors.   Just because you carry something in your pocket that makes it easy to get in does not mean you have the legal right to do so.  Yes, you can do the same thing with a wifi enabled laptop, but the iPhone makes it way more convenient.  Enough of that soapbox.

The bottom line is that the folks at Apple are the masters of selling an Eskimo and ice cube. In other words, they have mastered the art of selling people something they don’t necessarily “need”, but will certainly help make them more cool.

I am having problems with my home wireless switch/router.  It causes me and my wife to regularly loose Internet connectivity on both wireless and hardwired connections.  A restart of the Linksys WRK54G device immediately solves the problems for all connections without taking any action on any of the clients. So that is the reason why I am searching for a new device.

What I am looking for is a wireless/hardwired router/switch combination.  I like the features of the WRK54G, but it has seen better days as mentioned above.  I am only equipped with 802.11g cards right now and have no desire to upgrade to 802.11n.  Here are a few things that I really like and use on the WRK54G and want to have on my new device:

- At least 4 hardwired 100mb ports
- dynamic DNS interoperaility
- Advanced routing (able to add other IP subnets on private side)
- Lots of wireless security options with some backwards compatability
- MAC filtering
- Port forwarding
- 10/100 uplink to telco modem
- VPN PassThrough

Any advice on new device options would be greatly appreciated.

It appears that the new Alexa ranking system has benefited a couple of sites that I manage.  The ranking for HOEI was in the 500K range and GrowingKids was in the 600K range with both climbing before the change.  GrowingKids was launched in July of 2007 and has finally pasted HOEI in Alexa rankings with a new ranking of 344,414.  Traffic on GrowingKids.org has doubled since the beginning of the year and the RSS subscribers have nearly tripled so the Alexa ranking is not at all a surprise.  There have been criticisms of Alexa about the rankings favoring sites with technical content.  It seems that the new ranking system is proving to change that technical bias at least from my perspective.

Mrs. Ozz is a genius! Tonight she asked me, “what happened to Lowcountry Christian Community School web site?” As you can see from that link, there is little to see on their web site right now, well at least until I complete the instructions I am about to share with you. I told Mrs. Ozz that the LCCS administrators had let their domain registration and hosting service expire. This resulted in the hosting service deleting all of the HTLM files for that domain to free up space for the next paying customer. I told my wife that the school administrators had asked me to help build a replacement site which I had promised to do when I got some free time.

The next thing out of my wife’s mouth made me feel REALLY stupid. She asked, “can’t you just get a copy of the site from one of those online services that saves everything automatically?” My response was, “You are a GENIUS! I have not even considered that.” She turned a couple of shades of red as I proceeded to follow her advice.

What she is talking about is something like the Internet Archive WayBackMachine. As a result of her suggestion, I have been able to recover about 90% of the content from the original LCCS web site as it was last displayed in August 2007.

To recover the site I did the following:

1. Searched archive.org for the LCCS site
2. Clicked on the most recent copy of the site (Aug 2007)
3. Using Firefox – selected File – Save Page As (making sure to choose type “web page complete”)
4. Navigated to each subpage and repeated step 3 for each
5. Edit the content and FTP it into the new site location (In Progress)

That’s it. Now I have a pretty solid copy of the content from the school’s site prior to their domain and hosting service expiring. I can use these HTML pages to create the same look, feel, and content that they had prior to the expiration.

By the way, you have not heard the last of Mrs. Ozz. She has got the itch to do a little blogging. She will be joining me on The Land of Ozz(s) and she may actually jump into the mix over at GrowingKids.org as well.