Our mail server at work goes through a Barracuda spam firewall. We’ve had this setup for years and it’s always been fascinating to see what ends up in the spam filter and what gets through. Despite whitelisting valid emails from the same senders numerous times, they continue to go to the spam inbox instead of being delivered as they should.

This morning I was processing the spam inbox and noticed that in addition to a Whitelist button, there is another button that reads “Whitelist + Not Spam”. I had to take a second look at that one to be sure I was reading it correctly.

My eyes were not deceiving me, which brings up the question of the day:

Why would I whitelist spam?

Seems to me that if I whitelist something then it’s not spam by definition. Apparently, Barracuda disagrees.

I really wish the people who design user interfaces would send along some of whatever they’re smoking so that it makes sense to the rest of us, too!

John The Geek

You may have heard by now that the Microsofties have installed a Firefox add-on along with the .Net 3.5 update distributed some time ago. I was not aware of it until I checked this weekend and found that all my machines have the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant 1.0 listed in the Add-ons in Firefox.

I’m not quite as bent out of shape about it as others are, but it is annoying that Microsoft took it upon themselves to add something to Firefox that I didn’t request. Even more obnoxious is that the Uninstall button is grayed out and not usable. Worst of all, installing this add-on opens up Firefox and my PC to security vulnerabilities of the .Net framework! See the latest edition of Windows Secrets newsletter for more details on that little bonus.

I keep wondering when Microsoft is going to learn. If you go ahead and do something without giving the user the option, it simply pisses people off. If you give them the option to install and the option to uninstall, many people will be okay with it. The whole key is to allow users to retain control of their PCs, or at least the illusion of control.

I’m not going to add to the general ranting about the arrogance of Microsoft. That’s already well documented. The good news is that there is an update to the .Net update that enables the Uninstall button and allows the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant to be uninstalled. You can download the fix from Microsoft’s web site.

If you’re a Firefox user, my recommendation is to check your Add-on list to determine whether the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant is installed. If it is and the Uninstall button works, uninstall it. If the Uninstall button is greyed out, download the update and run it, then Uninstall the add-on.

John The Geek

As I mentioned about 8 months ago, I purchased an HP MediaSmart Server with the intention of making it the hub of my home network. It’s been a bit of an interesting ride, so I thought I’d bring you up to date on that project.

The box came with 512MB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. I knew 500GB wasn’t going to be enough to backup my existing computers, much less provide any additional storage, so I bought a 1TB internal drive along with the machine and installed that right after the initial setup, giving me a total of 1.5TB of storage.

I moved my music files and some other archives to the home server to free up some space on my main desktop machine, but otherwise, just set up that machine, my laptop, netbook, and my wife’s laptop to be backed up to the home server nightly. I’ve since replaced the desktop machine, but not before copying its data to the home server.

As a storage platform and automatic backup system, the home server works pretty well. I created shares on the server for music, photos, software installs, and user data then mapped drives on each of the machines to those shares. Windows Explorer simply sees them as drives and file transfers are quick and easy via the network.

I’ve learned a few things along the way, some of which were surprising. The big surprise was learning that if you let Windows automatically update on the home server it will spontaneously reboot itself when the update calls for it. I’ve since told it to download the updates and let me know they’re ready. I had hoped to be able to work on documents directly on the server, but this little “feature” makes it necessary to have a copy on the local machine and update the server as changes are made.

The first time I encountered this one I was, of course, in the middle of editing a document that was stored on the server. I was able to recover without a major data loss, but it was not one of the fonder memories I have of the home server! I had thought perhaps setting the Windows updates to notify instead of automatic would eliminate the problem, but no such luck. It still reboots occasionally, although it’s always around midnight so if I’m paying attention I can anticipate it.

Another thing I learned was that the server is a real worry wart! There are three status levels: normal/healthy (green), needs attention (yellow) and “Omigod the sky is falling!” (red). The latter is accompanied by dire messages like “your network health is critical!” Not only that, the normally blue status LED on the front of the box (which stays blue in “condition yellow”, go figure) changes to red, apparently to get your attention.

There are all kinds of things that trigger a yellow alert. If a machine known to the server hasn’t been backed up in 7 days or more, warning messages begin displaying saying “[name of machine] hasn’t been backed up since [date of last backup]. Your network health is at risk!” Since my machines aren’t all turned on and connected to the network 24/7, this happens a lot.

When this situation occurs, I have three choices: ignore the incessant warning messages, connect the designated machine to the network and back it up, or go into the Home Server Console and tell it to ignore the situation. If a machine isn’t likely to be used for a while, I’ll do the latter just to shut the server up and hopefully turn the yellow tray status icon back to green, at least for a while.

It becomes a sort of game to see how long you can keep the status icon green. You have to become resigned to the fact that it will be yellow quite often. There’s almost always something the thing isn’t happy about!

There’s apparently something a little flakey about my 1TB server hard drive. The past couple of months I’ve been getting “File conflicts” messages. These are yellow alerts, too. File conflicts are not a good thing, and in my case have been indicating that there’s an error on the hard drive. Maybe it’s a bad sector, maybe something else, I’m not sure and I haven’t had the time to dig into it and diagnose it properly.

I’ll occasionally get a red alert that the drive is “unhealthy” which tells me to “repair” it. Back to the Windows Home Server Console to run the Repair function on the drive. This is very likely good old CHKDSK, but it does seem to repair the problems which warning about possible data loss. A successful repair will turn the status icon green…until it discovers that the file conflicts are still there.

This last time, it was a set of four files which apparently were listed in the directory but didn’t really exist. I went in to the share on a connected machine and deleted them. That wasn’t good enough, the file conflict messages continue. The drive reports healthy, however, so there’s no option to run Repair again. –sigh–

I’ve mentioned the Windows Home Server Console. This bit of software until recently took performance to a new low. I’ve seen glaciers move faster!

Seriously, the login nearly always failed the first time (”Cannot connect to your server”). Clicking the OK button generally logged in, but it took several minutes for that to happen. Once in, clicking on any of the toolbar buttons required waiting another few minutes (not seconds, mind you, minutes!). Eventually, something would happen as a result of the mouse click, then the cycle would start over again if another mouse click was needed.

In trying to troubleshoot that phenomenon, I learned that you can access the server via Remote Desktop just like a “real” Windows machine! Doing so, however, is less productive than you might think. For one thing, when you log in, Internet Explorer pops up and delivers a dire warning that bypassing the WHS Console can have dire consequences (you could screw something up royally) and you really shouldn’t be doing this. Suffice to say that working directly in the server is not for the faint of heart and you’d better know what you’re doing to avoid catastrophe.

Within the past several weeks, the WHS Console has magically become fairly usable. Gone are the multi-minute reaction times. While performance is nowhere near snappy, it’s at least tolerable. You know that when you click something, you’ll see a response in this lifetime. The login even works the first time…usually. Whoever fixed this has my undying gratitude!

The MediaSmart Server isn’t really designed to be what I had in mind, but I’m adapting to it. If nothing else, the automatic backups are a major plus. Now I just have to implement a plan to backup the server itself!

John The Geek

In my last post on Twitter tools I mentioned that I’d tried Seesmic Desktop, but stayed with TweetDeck due to some issues with Seesmic Desktop. Shortly after that post appeared, an updated Seesmic Desktop was released that addressed many of the complaints I’d had with it.

I’m now using Seesmic Desktop as my primary Twitter interface. There are still a few things about it that could be improved, but overall, it’s working really well for me.

The big advantage of Seesmic Desktop over TweetDeck is its ability to handle multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. TweetDeck can only display one account at a time. Although there is a way to use the Search function to monitor other accounts, you can only tweet or retweet from the account with which you’re logged in.

Seesmic Desktop, on the other hand, gives you the ability to not only monitor multiple accounts, displaying the account(s) to which a particular tweet was addressed, but to reply or retweet from any of your accounts without a separate login. IMO, this feature puts Seesmic Desktop ahead of TweetDeck by a long way.

I’d like to see Seesmic Desktop provide a means of synchronizing settings between multiple machines. I use a minimum of two different computers on any given day and regularly use up to four different machines. It would be wonderful to have a way to automatically synchronize the settings between all my machines and avoid the lame manual copying that has to happen now.

You can download Seesmic Desktop for free from here:

http://desktop.seesmic.com/

John The Geek

I completely understand the concept of making lemonade when life hands you lemons. More power to those who are creative enough to do that rather than sitting around whining about their problems. I saw an interesting example of that today that illustrates a couple of different types of creativity.

I got an email from a marketer to whose list I subscribe. This guy is pretty well known and I assume pretty successful. The email basically said he’d done something really dumb and he wanted to share the experience for the benefit of his readers.

He provided a link to a PDF which contained the tale of how he’d fallen for a fairly cleverly designed phishing email despite his sophistication and experience on the Internet. His bank caught the situation and returned his money and all turned out okay aside from this guy feeling like the complete idiot that he’d made of himself.

The final paragraph says basically “Hey, I’m telling you this out of the goodness of my heart despite being terminally embarassed. There are no links in this document, nothing being sold, and feel free to pass it around to everyone you think might benefit.”

What a guy, right? We can all relate to doing something dumb and wanting to help others avoid the same fate. So, I’m thinking here’s a guy who’s generating some good will by admitting his human foibles and warning others so they’ll be more careful than he was.

Then I read the PS. Seems he’s got himself fixed up with a way to handle this problem if it ever occurs again, and oh, by the way, I might just want to read about it and see if it’s something I can use, too. I just click this link right here.

The link is pretty obviously an affiliate link, albeit cloaked. Being the curious sort that I am, I copy the URL into my browser and go visit. Imagine my surprise! My altruistic friend just happens to be a business associate (read affiliate) of the outfit which will provide identity theft protection should I be interested in same.

So, now we’ve gone from “no links here and nothing for sale” to “I just happen to have a solution to the problem I’m trying to convince you that you have.” Sort of like those “free” CDs that you only have to pay shipping for (which means they’re NOT FREE) and oh-by-the-way you’ll be charged $29.95 a month for the whiz-bang monthly membership that goes with it unless you happen to remember to cancel it, assuming you can correctly guess the current population of New York City plus or minus 5 people, or whatever other arcane cancellation criteria they’ve devised.

Now, let’s get something clear here. I am in no way against affiliate marketing. I do it myself and it’s a perfectly legitimate way to run a business.

What’s not legitimate is telling my reader that there are no links when there clearly is one, and that there’s nothing for sale when the opposite is true. Let’s call it what it is: lying.

Call it a fib, call it an evasion of the truth, call it whatever you want, it’s still a lie. The thing that I don’t understand is: why lie when it’s so obvious that you’re lying?

Personally, I make a point not to lie if for no other reason than my memory’s not that good any more! I’ve known people who were expert liars. They would have been totally embarrassed to have made it that easy to catch them in a lie. I mean, if you’re going to make lying part of your profession, at least do it on a professional level!

Seriously, do these guys even know they’re lying? Obviously, they don’t care, at least not enough to even make the effort to lie well.

I don’t know about you, but when I encounter something like this, it immediately blows that marketer’s credibility right out of the water. It’s just as likely that his little phishing story is made-up BS than not. And, if that story’s made up, what about the rest of what he’s telling/selling me?

Trust is a very difficult thing to build. It’s way easier to lose. This guy has lost my trust, and for what? A few bucks in commissions? Well, he won’t be making even those few bucks off of me, nor will he be making anything else from me again. Sleep well, dude.

John The Geek

Unless you’re living in that cave in which my wife grew up (a little family humor), you’re aware that Twitter is the hottest thing on the planet and therefore the single greatest contributor to global warming at the moment. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and have come to a number of conclusions about it.

First, it’s an incredible time sink if you don’t take control of it quickly. Once you’re following a few hundred people, you could literally spend all day reading their tweets and get nothing else done. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, that’s pretty obviously unproductive.

Second, the tweet-o-sphere is chaotic, to say the least. The word “twitter” is much more benign than the visual cacophony of tweets that come flying at you once your follower count starts to grow. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not physically possible to follow a large number of people and A) read all their tweets and/or B) get anything else accomplished.

Third, Twitter is a marvelous source of information, if you can manage to filter out the wheat from the abundance of chaff. I’ve learned some useful things from tweeple and managed to do so without spending more than 20-30 minutes a day on Twitter.

After a fair amount of experimentation, I’ve come up with the following system that works pretty well for me. I use TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) as my interface to Twitter. The Twitter website is a terrible user interface unless you sit there staring at it all day dealing with tweets as they come in. Its shortcomings are fertile ground for application developers, however, and there are a number of Twitter applications out there.

Admittedly, I haven’t tried most of them. So far, I’ve used TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. I simply don’t have time to use and evaluate the rest.

Seesmic Desktop (http://desktop.seesmic.com) shows promise. What I like about it is that it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously. I have several Twitter accounts for specific purposes and one “main” one, so it’s nice to be able to aggregate all my accounts in one place. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with Seesmic Desktop that are annoying enough that I’ve given up on it for now. It’s still very much beta software, so hopefully, they’ll get it together eventually.

I’m using TweetDeck regularly. It took me a while to figure out how to configure it for the best results. My current configuration is based on this article, so I can’t take credit for coming up with this strategy all on my own.

Here’s what my current TweetDeck configuration looks like:

Note there are four columns. The column on the left is for all tweets from all those I follow. As you can imagine, that column fills up rather quickly!

The second column from the left contains tweets from those I have added to my one group. These are people I want to follow more closely.

The third column is a Search query. This is the key to keeping track of all my accounts. I have written the query to search for my main Twitter username: johnsawyer or any of the other of my accounts. This is accomplished by using the OR keyword. My query reads like this:

johnsawyer OR john_the_geek OR critterreiki OR rootsrocknblues

The results of this query include any tweets containing one or more of those user names. This includes tweets I make, re-tweets of any of my tweets, replies I make to other tweets and replies to my tweets. It would also include any arbitrary references to any of those user names in anyone else’s tweets.

The last column on the right is for Direct Messages to the account with which I’m currently logged in via TweetDeck (usually my main account).

You’re probably wondering why the screen shot shows three of the four columns empty. That is because I keep them empty to reduce the clutter. I leave the search column tweets because those are typically the ones I’m most interested in and may want to refer back to later. The other three columns are disposable.

I know this will likely bruise some egos, but the left column gets skimmed fairly quickly. I’m looking for pictures I haven’t seen before, or for keywords to jump out at me. If I don’t have time to get through the whole column (there are often several hundred tweets), I skim as far down as I can, then clear the entire column and let it start over.

If I find someone tweeting something interesting, I’ll add them to my group so that they show up in the second column. This is a small percentage of all the people I’m following, so I can keep up with them more easily. I can always remove people from the group is need be, and sometimes it needs be! The idea is to keep people in the group whose tweets are interesting and/or useful to me and remove those who aren’t. This column is read and cleared regularly after noting URLs or whatever other info I may find to be of value later on.

Again, the search column is never cleared, but it doesn’t tend to fill up that fast, either. I’m not one who tweets constantly, as many seem to do, so at any given moment there aren’t a zillion tweets out there containing my usernames.

Finally, the DM column is checked when TweetDeck starts up to see if there are any new DMs since the last session. If not, the column is cleared.

One other tool I use is TweetLater (http://tweetlater.com). I discovered TweetLater by way of a tweet that touted it as a way to eliminate many of the automated Direct Messages we get when we follow people. TweetLater can be configured to block any that come from its service (which is most of them, apparently). That alone is worth its weight in gold! I get far fewer DMs now that I’ve turned on that filter.

TweetLater has a number of other great features. The two I use regularly are the keyword reports and the auto-follow feature. The keyword reports are just that: reports of tweets containing specific keywords for the time since the previous report. This is very handy for keeping track of references to your username(s) and for references to topics in which you’re interested. These are automatically emailed to you at specified intervals.

The auto-follow feature saves me having to manually check out and follow (or not) anyone who follows me first. I’m very likely going to follow back most anyone who follows me, so I figure it takes less time for me to unfollow the few I find obnoxious than to manually visit the profiles of those who follow me. I don’t believe I can make an informed decision on whether to follow someone just from their profile, unless they’re obviously a mismatch. So far, few people have been an obvious mismatch.

Between TweetDeck and TweetLater, I find I can accomplish what I need to on Twitter in about 30 minutes a day. I’d be interested in other strategies you’ve used that worked for you. Please leave a comment about your favorite Twitter tool or strategy.

John The Geek

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been using Derek Franklin’s Action Machine software for a while now. The more I use it the more I like it. I keep finding things it does that not only help keep me focused and productive, but enhances other parts of my product creation system, too.

Here’s a good example: I’m in the middle of writing an e-book. The e-book is actually written, it just needs some editing and formatting to make it look nice. There is still a lot to do, however, before it can go live and start making sales. Among other things, I need to create the cover graphic, make two web sites, one for a free e-book that promotes the paid one, and the other for the paid e-book.

The first site needs to interact with AWeber to collect contact info, and the second site needs a sales page, order button, and the back end for payment processing, downloads, customer registration, etc.

Once all that’s done, I need to promote the sites, so there’s a whole list of things to do in that regard, too. The list of to-dos is pretty long and keeping track of what’s done and what needs to be done can be a real challenge without some kind of system.

To help me manage all these tasks, I bought Marlon Sanders’ Promo Dashboard last year. This is a great product that lays out step by step everything that needs to be done from product creation to promotion. Each step is explained and there is a ton of videos and other training tools on the Promo Dashboard site.

Knowing what the tasks are is great, but even better is having a way of staying focused on each task until it’s done. Still further, being able to track how much time you spend on each task is very valuable for future projects. If you know how long it takes to complete a particular step, you can accurately gauge how long it will take to complete a project from start to finish and plan accordingly.

The Action Machine allows you to create your own task lists and groups of timers. It dawned on me that I could simply take the steps in the Promo Dashboard, create a list of them in the Action Machine and set up groups of timers for each phase of the project.

Once I understand the task thoroughly from the training in the Promo Dashboard site, I can set to work on it and the Action Machine keeps me focused on it until it’s completed. Then, I move to the next task and repeat the process.

This is a perfect marriage of two separate, but complementary tools. Each by itself is a terrific tool. Used together they make a killer product creation system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Check out the Action Machine here: http://johnthegeek.com/likes/action

Check out the Promo Dashboard here: http://johnthegeek.com/promodb

John The Geek

I’ve recently been evaluating a new piece of software from Derek Franklin. Derek came up with a really interesting and effective productivity strategy and wrote an application to support it.

In a nutshell, the strategy is very simple: allocate a certain amount of time to a task, set a timer, then focus only on that task until it’s either done or the timer goes off, whichever comes first. This increases your focus because you tend to want to get the thing done before that timer goes off!

It becomes something of a game with yourself to see if you can accurately estimate the amount of time a task will take, and then to see if you can get it done in the time you estimated. You know you can’t be sidetracked by anything else or you probably won’t get it done, so that increases your ability to shut out other distractions and concentrate on the task at hand.

Because it can be a hassle write several to-do lists, then to locate a timer and carry it around with you, Derek had the idea to write a software application to address the problems. What he came up with is called The Action Machine.

I bought The Action Machine v1.0 because I liked Derek’s strategy and the idea of the software. It was good, but had some limitations. Derek asked the users to let him know how the software could be improved and got a ton of great feedback. He’s just released The Action Machine v2.0 incorporating many of the requested features and enhancements.

Here’s what the new version of The Action Machine looks like:

I had to shrink the image so depending on your screen resolution you may not be able to read the text clearly. The lower left pane is the task list. The software comes with a default task list, but you can create your own.

For example, I have a list (shown) of my routine activities, daily, weekly, etc. This is my default task list to which I can add tasks to be done that day, or new daily or weekly or even monthly tasks. I can export the list to save it for future reference, or to copy it to another computer.

I have another list that is specific to the steps involved in a particular product creation and promotion process. When I’m going to be focusing on that process, I load that list to serve as my checklist to determine my progress. More detail on that to come in another post.

On the right, there is a grid of 12 squares each of which may contain a separate timer. In the screenshot above I have five timers loaded. Two of them are set for 30 minutes and the other three are set for 60 minutes. The total time shown at the top is 4 hours, so I know how much time I’ve allocated to the tasks I’ve committed to get done this day.

Timers can be started, paused, reset, cleared, or checked as completed. Completed items can be listed in a report. Lists of timers can be saved under specific names and reloaded at any time. If you know you’re going to work on a certain group of your default tasks regularly, you can simply create timers for each of those tasks, save them as a timer group and reload them when you’re going to work on that task group.

You can see the full demo video at The Action Machine web site. Check it out, I think you’ll like it as much as I do. Highly recommended!

John The Geek

As some of you may already know, the Conficker worm is due to begin contacting its “home base” for instructions on April 1, 2009. It is estimated that this worm has infected millions of PCs worldwide.

Windows Secrets has published an in-depth article on how to secure your PC from the Conficker worm and what to do if you already have it. I strongly suggest reading this article and taking the recommended steps to avoid having your PC contribute to the problem:

http://windowssecrets.com/2009/03/30/01-Run-a-Conficker-removal-tool-before-April-1

John The Geek

I was happy to see the top story in this week’s edition of the Windows Secrets newsletter pointing out the dangers of viral inviters. I have to wonder what took so long, but better late than never.

Some of you may recall that almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post in this blog on that very subject. I thought viral inviters were a bad idea at that time and I still do.

I know people aren’t going to stop using viral inviters. I’m just hoping that they’ll at least give it a moment’s thought before giving up the user IDs and passwords to their email and other accounts. It’s already way too easy for the bad guys. We just need to exercise a bit of common sense before doing something with such a potentially large downside.

I’d like to know your thoughts on this subject. Please leave a comment.

John The Geek