Loyal Moses

Once again, thank you IVNUA – had an excellent time

Posted on 7 May 2010 | 1 response

Wanted to drop a quick post and express my thanks for the opportunity to speak at the Illinois Valley Network Users Association (http://www.ivnua.org/). In addition to my gratitude towards the IVNUA organization, I appreciated the warm welcome and opportunity to visit with each of you, who now after so long, know me quite well.

If my memory serves me correctly, it’s now been 6 or 7 years, of which I have spoken at least one time per year.

That is quite a few conferences, and I look forward to the next one if the opportunity is presented.

Thanks again, and feel free to drop me a call or email if you have any questions or additional interest in anything that was covered.

~moses

Oh you little Craigslist dirtbags…

Posted on 11 March 2010 | 3 responses

I have a habit of browsing Craigslist for deals on new hardware to quench my little tech-addiction and ran across this little bait of a headline:

APPLE 17″ MACBOOK PRO 2.8 GHZ UNIBODY GLOSSY SCREEN NEW – $1200

Of course, the pleasant aroma of SUCKERS-CLICK-HERE was wafting all about, but I have to admit I have a second little addiction; telling these little punks exactly what I think of them, then reporting the behavior.

Why? well, besides it just really making me mad… I have friends, family and colleagues who’ve been burned for $1000′s of dollars. It’s no good all around.

Another reason, is that quite a few of these scams target westerners in a dual purpose fashion. Taking our money to use it against us; snag the cash, then ship it off to a little anti-American terrorist group that in my opinion needs a GPS guided gift with a Made in America stamp from a Predator drone at 35,000 feet.

Counting slowly… 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… deep breath… much better; moving on.

I sent Marky-mark a little bait email to get him all excited about a potential sucker-transaction. He replied quite quickly with the following:

“Hello,

Still available. The price is correct and not negotiable.
I’m willing to pay for all shipping and insurance fees because I’m from London, UK. I have a small electronics wholesale company here and I sold a lot of products in United States, in collaboration with a partner there. We stopped our work and now I have available in my warehouse a large quantity of products in US version.
All products are BRAND NEW in box, with receipt and 2 years international warranty.
Just let me know your full name, shipping address and personal email address then I’ll arrange the shipment through UPS 2nd Day Air.

Thanks“

Marks a nice guy! Free 2nd day shipping from the UK! Ya know, you don’t often find great businessmen like this anymore… wait a minute. He wouldn’t be scamming me would he?!

WARNING

If you have read up to this point and really think this is a good deal and want a piece of it, please close your browser window, go outside and try and clear your head. You are not thinking clearly enough to be on the Internet right now.

This is my response to Mark; but I fear I won’t get a reply.

“Mark, mark, mark…

What a dirtbag.

Of course you are in the UK selling Apple computers to people on Craigslist in the Seattle area at less than 1/2 of retail pricing.

I own an information security company and have an Apple reseller account and get a measly 8% discount off of retail pricing in one of their highest reseller tiers. Apple machines are premium sellers today, so the one and only reason to be listing a new machine at this price is to try and hook poor suckers deeper than their caution and common sense normally allows.

My guess is, you would like payment in the form of a money transfer, maybe Western Union or just be happy to take my credit card information. Of course to make me feel comfortable you’ll give me a UPS tracking number to convince me that the product is shipping, when in fact a tracking number means nothing if the product is never picked up or dropped off at UPS for delivery.

UPS 2nd day / express would run you about $400 US to send it to me. So of course you offer this at no charge, cause you are just such a nice guy and this makes the deal so amazing.

In addition to these obvious signs of lame criminal behavior, you are using a random @gmail address which of course a quick google search shows no results, so its obvious that you don’t do legitimate business with it.

I’ve already notified the FTC as well as the high tech crimes department of our local police agency as well as the FBI’s high tech crimes division. Chances are, there is nothing that will come of this based on my reports, but you’ll eventually get nailed. You losers always do.

My recommendation for you is to realize the full extent of what you are really doing here, crawl back in your little hole, clean your act up and try and become a productive member of society. Whatever your reasons are, realize this is absolutely wrong.

Hope you get caught sooner than later.

Loyal.“

Okay, truthfully… I only filled out the FTC’s online fraud forms, but never contacted the local high-tech crimes departments… not like Marky cares either way, but it made me feel better to call on such big guns even though they really don’t care either. Seriously… am I the only one that cares?!

Of course, I do realize this does nothing, but it sure makes me feel better. Like a super-hero, patrolling the dark streets of the World-Wide-Web…

This is Mark Wayne’s Gmail address for anyone who thinks I am nuts and wants a sweet deal on a 17″ MacBook Pro, shipped freely from the UK: waynemark4545@gmail.com

And a note to those who do use @gmail, @hotmail, @msn, @live, @mac/me, @yahoo, etc addresses, IMHO there is absolutely nothing professional about any of these free or semi-free email services… even though a domain and hosting service takes almost as little effort to setup and maintain, it lends a little something-something to your Internet appearance.

UPDATE : It was removed from craigslist about 25 minutes after my email.

Oh well, back to browsing Craigslist.

Enjoy.

~moses

Giant iPod… err iPad, whatever.

Posted on 27 January 2010 | Comments Off

I don’t really have to go into too much detail on the hype and excitement that had been building around the rumors that preceded today’s announcement and debut of the Apple iPad.

I’ve been using Mac’s now for about 6 years, and although I love Apple technology I am not a slobbering, flag waving (hate to use the term) fanboy. To prove, I’ve only had an iPhone for about 6 months until it became useful enough for me to replace my Blackberry.

I do however allocate a sizable annual budget for new devices like the iPad, and was excited about today’s announcement for this reason.

This morning ahead of the keynote, I had a list of things I wanted and / or features that would be nice to have.

What I wanted

OS X based operating system
Front facing video camera for iChat / video chat
Run multiple applications
Full web browser with plugin / extension support and Flash
Use existing OS X based applications along with App store apps

What we got

iPhone based operating system
No camera
No multi-tasking
Plain mobile Safari with no Flash
Use only App store purchased Applications

Not so good

So far, the majority of expression regarding the new tablet is rather bad. Family, friends, forums and twitter all share the same sentiment so far… If this is it, meh.

I’ve said now for several weeks that if it turned out to be just a giant iPod Touch, then I’d pass on the purchase because I have an iPhone and ultimately I don’t need a regular sized iPod Touch, let alone a super-sized one.

The new eBook Application and book store will get college students excited even though they won’t be able to afford it, and casual eBook users would save money sticking with the Kindle or Nook.

It doesn’t make phone calls, so you’d need both an iPhone and iPad… another fiscal reason college students are out. And besides, it would be weird holding that thing to your ear.

It’s too bad — was really looking forward to this.

Not quite sure what Apple was thinking… essentially, they’ve taken an iPod Touch and just stretched it a few inches each way. The iPhone OS feature changes seem nice, but at this point they are proprietary to the new iPad.

Even current App store games / applications use a “pixel doubling” technology to stretch them to the new iPad’s higher resolution. Hands on users have already expressed that although these Apps are now full screen, they look like they’ve been stretched. Yuck.

Early on during the keynote, I was even thinking to myself that even if it didn’t deliver as far as the OS was concerned, it would be a nice device to kick back and surf the web with. Possibly even take advantage of Adobe Flex on the device with Safari using many of the applications / interfaces I’ve written over the years.

Flashless… again.

Oooops. No Flash. But not surprised, it’s missing from the iPhone too. Apple claims it is because of CPU utilization and battery consumption. But we’re not so naive, we understand Apple does not want competition with the App store and Flash would certainly accomplish this.

Steve Jobs commented on how browsing the web on the iPad was possibly the best experience one could have. Really? Without browser plugins, without Flash? Really!? Not sure what web he’s browsing, but my web is not limited to HTML/CSS. The Internet has no bounds, and simplifying its use hurts Apple.

Peter Elst recent posted his thoughts on Apple’s idea of the best web browsing experience, which happen to be very similar to mine.

http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2010/01/28/apples-idea-of-the-best-web-browsing-experience/

Conclusion

Fun little device to swipe on every now and then, but definitely not something that will end up on my desk any time soon. However, they do have 60 days to make OS updates and possibly change my mind.

But ultimately, disappointed that Apples first mainstream touch “computer” is restrained to App store applications and confined to that limited iPhone OS.

~moses

Restart? What…

Posted on 10 January 2010 | Comments Off

Thanks a lot Intel! — Well, okay… there isn’t any rational logic here, but I’m still going to blame them for needing to reboot after something as trivial as a Safari update on OS X.

Prior to Intel my Mac’s were loaded with IBM PowerPC G4 and G5 processors and a reboot was NEVER necessary (it seemed)…

The anti-Apple crew will tell you this isn’t true (because they didn’t use them… because they cost too much. ), but ask any long time Mac user, and they’ll tell you the same. PowerPC processors and the iterations of Panther and Tiger were absolutely amazing when it came to stability and uptime.

The need to reboot after an update is eerily similar to repressed memories of Microsoft Windows, and I completely understand that logically it can’t be directly tied to Intel processors… but it helps by giving me someplace to direct my frustrations.

Apple did an amazing job porting an entire mainstream OS from IBM to Intel architecture, in total secrecy I might add. And in fact, they are the only OS vendor to have successfully accomplished such a feat up to this point.

With all of that aside, IMHO, Intel it is your fault that I have to close 20 some-odd applications and dozens of windows so your chip can rest a few moments…

~moses

Interestingly, not alone… Snow Leopard and Expose Issue

Posted on 23 November 2009 | Comments Off

Back in August I layed out a few of my frustrations regarding Apple’s Snow Leopard (New version of OS X) and Expose.

Original post: http://www.loyalmoses.com/2009/08/snow-leopards-expose-bad/

Approaching 4 months later, and that post is still the number one most viewed blog entry on the site. Apparently, I am not the only one who is still a little disappointed with the new changes to Expose.

Even though I still find it frustrating to work with the new Expose, the other features of the OS are outweighing the inconveniences and I am “dealing” with it.

Back to work…

~moses

PHP Socket Server, Flex XMLSocket w/ Reflection

Posted on 16 November 2009 | Comments Off

This was the result of a little playing with XMLSocket along with PHP to create a multi-client socket server for Flex to interact with.

Initially I only wanted to test the simplicity of Flex’s ability to make simple socket connections and pass data, however one can easily see how much fun you could have here. *scratches brain*

Left side is simply telnet’ing to the socket server on the remote host.

Right side is the Flex application which connects to the same remote socket server.

Then demonstrating basic Reflection using getDefinitionByName with ClassFactory to dynamically instantiate display objects and move them about the stage.

~moses

Silverlight… I installed it… Feeling dirty.

Posted on 4 November 2009 | 1 response

After months and months of intentionally avoiding Silverlight I finally broke down and installed it.

Not that I needed it, I have still yet to be presented with a situation in which I must have Silverlight, I rather installed it to check out some of the examples and take a look at their feature set.

It’s pretty!

Now, now… Don’t hate me… I’m not cheating on Adobe’s Flex framework.

~moses

Snow Leopard’s Expose = Bad!

Posted on 31 August 2009 | 10 responses

First, let me start this post by noting that should you know a little about me, you’re already aware that I am a huge fan of Apple and OS X since making the switch to Mac’s nearly 6 years ago. Now that it’s clear this isn’t an Apple / OS X bashing post, I can get on to the business of my issue with Expose in Snow Leopard.

What is Expose?

Expose is a feature of OS X which scales down all window displays to make them simultaneously visible for easy / simple / quick application or window switching.

How did Expose work in previous releases of OS X (10.5 and earlier)?

Expose scaled down windows, maintained their aspect ratio and made sensible x,y coordinate changes to ensure that all windows were visible at the same time and somewhat close to where they started (as best it could).

How is Snow Leopard’s Expose different?

Expose in Snow Leopard does away with maintaining aspect ratios and forces the display of strangely sized windows into an odd and awkward grid pattern.

My issues:

By tossing aspect ratios out the window (pun kind of intended), Expose creates IMHO silly and useless displays of unrecognizable windows. As an example, when several windows are open and Expose is activated a normally tiny iChat window dwarfs what was a full screen browser or mail.app window.

The reason Expose in previous versions of OS X was so successful, is that size was just one of the many visual queues that were used to quickly locate and switch between applications and windows. Now that Expose no longer maintains a size relationship for windows, this queue is gone and now a user is forced to visually hunt down a window by trying to recognize color patterns or worse, read each of the text displays under each window.

In addition to my complaint regarding window sizing and ratios, the new Expose forces windows into a grid pattern which again causes windows to be placed sometimes directly under your mouse or worse (and more often) at far reaches of your desktop. This may be fine on a 13″ MacBook, but this gets real old on 24″ or larger displays, when the two applications you are using are continuously thrown to opposite sides and corners of Expose.

Specifically for me, I can have a dozen windows or more open, of which half of them look similar when they are regularly sized. Throw this new Expose in the mix and its functionality is degraded to worthless as it takes immense concentrated effort to locate the window you want.

On any given serious day of Mac use, I may use Expose as many as a few thousand times. This is an enormous point of contention for me because Expose has become such a critical part of how I use OS X and my overall productivity level.

I will more than likely give Expose a few more days, and if it doesn’t grow on me (which I fear it won’t), then I welcome a clean install of Leopard on my primary development machine so I can get back to work without OS induced frustrations.

Snow Leopard has a significant number of very technical enhancements going on under the hood and several interface updates which for the most part are quite enjoyable, it’s just not enough to overpower my negative views of Expose. This particular machine didn’t really appear to benefit much from the performance gains in Snow Leopard as it was quick enough with 10.5 and was already running very well.

I will most definitely continue to recommend Snow Leopard to / for others, but for me it simply comes down to my particular personal feature usage patterns.

Last bit of whining:

…while I am crying about Expose, who approved that horrible blue glow around Expose windows? Seriously. It’s just bad.

“Change” I can believe in!

If you happen to feel the same way I do, or if you just feel bad enough for me to want some change, then drop Apple some feedback and let them know how you / I feel.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

~moses

Free ticket to Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 … for me!

Posted on 17 August 2009 | Comments Off

Yup, I be a winner again.

@umAndy (Andy Powell) dropped a tweet a few weeks ago with my name selected as the winner for a free ticket to Flash Camp Atlanta 2009.

Flash Camp Atlanta is a one day event focusing on the Flash platform, Flex and Actionscript. The camp provides tracks for both beginners and experienced developers.

Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 – Speakers and Sessions

Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 – Tickets

These surprises are always nice, and I do very much appreciate it. I hadn’t planned on attending, due only to my schedule being so full for the end of the month, however I’ll give moving things around a shot and see if I can’t get away for the day.

For those who might not know who Andy is (you should), drop by his blog and get familiar.

http://www.infoaccelerator.net/blog/

Thanks again for the ticket!

~moses

The month of July was a killer one!

Posted on 6 August 2009 | Comments Off

Here’s a short list of the business items that kept me from blogging as much as I would have liked to last month.

Aanval 5.2 development and testing
Aanval general support
Dedicated time for several small Tactical FLEX clients
Picked up two more professional services clients (Flex & AIR)
Development and testing on liveSnort (new name not announced quite yet)
Development on another personal AIR project (not announcing it yet)
A few external information security / vulnerability assessments

… and this doesn’t take into account anything relating to personal life / family! It was a rough month, but still 100% enjoyable.

August is looking much more routine… Aanval 5.2 is to be released here very shortly, only a single audit, and the new consulting work picked up so far this month combined with last months projects creates a nice rhythm.

~moses

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