My Wright City adventure

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

My wife and I trekked out to Wright City this weekend for a surprise anniversary party for one of her uncles. It was in a park in Wright City. Wright City is a small town roughly an hour west of St. Louis on I-70. It’s most famous for Big Boy’s, a roadside hole-in-the-wall restaurant that predated the national chain by a couple of decades, and for the defunct Elvis Is Alive Museum, an old laundromat that a Baptist preacher converted into a tribute to the other Elvis (Presley, not Costello), where he spun theories about what Elvis did after faking his death.

I’ve driven through Wright City more times than I can count, since it’s along I-70 in between St. Louis and Kansas City, but up until this weekend, I’ve never stopped there, even for gas.

More on all that in a minute.

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Follow-up on the Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

After about a month with an Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor, I still mostly like it, but can note one annoyance. When booting up a system, the monitor sometimes likes to switch from the DVI input to VGA, without warning. If you happen to be sitting there when it happens, you notice it and can switch it back. But more than once I’ve rebooted, walked away, come back a few minutes later and wondered why I have a weird black screen in front of me instead of a logon screen. Read more

How to get your first job in IT

Dave Farquhar Careers , , , , , ,

I helped a friend of a former coworker with his resume this week. He’s looking to get their first jobs in IT, and found it difficult, even though he was applying for an entry-level helpdesk position.

His resume certainly indicated he was educated and able to hold down a job, but that wasn’t quite enough. Here’s what I had him do to beef up that resume to get past those initial rounds of screening and get interviewed.

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Java is patched now, but still not very safe

Dave Farquhar security , , ,

Rapid7’s Chief Security Officer, HD Moore, estimated it will take two years for Oracle to fix all of the current issues with Java, not counting anything new that happens in that timeframe.

Futhermore, Kaspersky states that 50% of cyberattacks in 2012 utilized a Java exploit. Among those is the newly discovered Red October.

Think for a minute. Antivirus software is anywhere from 75 to 90% effective. Assuming the worst, that means the simple process of removing Java from your computer does 2/3 as much good as running antivirus software. Of course, you shouldn’t do one or the other; you should do both.

If you have a legitimate need for Java in your web browser, such as commercial intranet applications built with Java, enable Java in one and only one browser, then use that browser solely for accessing those Java-powered web sites.

But the best thing to do is just get rid of Java. And if you have something that uses Java, find something else to use.

It took Microsoft about two weeks to fix a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It took Oracle five months. I never thought I’d say this, but Oracle needs to be more like Microsoft.

Yeah, you can quote me on that if you want.

But until Oracle gets religion on security like Microsoft did around 2002, we really have two choices: Avoid Oracle products whenever practical, or keep getting hacked. I’d rather you not choose the latter option.

Asus gets into the sub-$200 tablet fray

Dave Farquhar Android, Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Now Asus is jumping into the sub-$150 tablet range too, but with a device that’s much more subdued than what Polaroid and Archos are offering.

It appears to me that Asus is trying to remain mid-tier, and hope that name recognition and reliability advantages (whether perceived or real) keep their tablet in the game.
Their $149 Memo Pad has a 7-inch 1024×600 display and a single-core VIA WM8950 CPU, running at 1 GHz. It will be running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and has the precious microSD card slot, which accepts up to a 32 GB card. Read more