Monday, August 29, 2011

Twitter shields up with an extra layer of Security

With their t.co domain, any posted URL in twitter will be shielded with this domain. Basically the shortened link of t.co will redirect to the URL giving twitter folks a door to process the link.

This way twitter can track and run security checks on all links on twitter. In case of any malicious links, Twitter can easily delete the reference and protect twitter users.

Of course this created an extra work for 3rd party twitter clients, and URL shorten services like twitlonger, in particular. Clients should now unpack the t.co to get the original URL before processing links.

As I wrote in a previous post added security decrease performance most of the time.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Jobs is now Apple Chairman, Cook goes the CEO

Yesterday the 24th August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned from his position as Apple CEO and jumped as the Chairman of the Apple Board. Jobs has followed a successful base plan for Apple during his time as CEO. He is well-known for the iPod, iPhone, iPad and iMac.

I'm sure that Jobs did not resign before putting down a comprehensive strategic plan for the next 10 years for Apple. If Tim Cook (the new CEO of Apple) well executed that plan, keeping up some strong defense measures towards the raising giant of Android, Apple could keep on shining.

You might already know that Cook ran Apple during Jobs health problems. Will you still see an iPhone6 and iPad4? Will it be as sexy as the previous gadgets? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe even better.

Lets Cook some gadgets.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Cloud, when it rains it washes your laundry

In 17 August 2011 an 3+ plus hour outage hits Microsoft Cloud affecting a number of the new Microsoft Office 365.

2 days later Microsoft releases the reasons behind the outage. Although not so convincing, they had to make a statement for the angry customers.

So whats this Cloud fuss? In a nutshell, I send my documents into the cloud. I save storage, I can access my documents and files anywhere I go. I don't maintain hardware. I don't install software. I just work.

Three main things you need to watch out when your documents is out in the wild.

Outages: A 3+ hour outage means 3 hour of idle time. In a typical organization with 300 employees that is more than 900 hours, which is a minimum average lose of 9000$. Office 365 literally means it should work for 365 a year (My own thought). If such outages started to emerge at this early stage, Microsoft should consider toughing up their cloud servers.

It can rain: Whatever these documents contain, from trival orginzation charts to confidential bank statements and ledgers, at the end its your laundry. You are putting your laundry on a cloudy weather. So when it rains, expect your laundry to be washed out. The main problem is that you don't know when it will rain. Hackers in their mothers basement will simply point their machines into breaking into the cloud and it will eventually rain.

FBI: If your cloud is in the US, well the server on which your documents lay out can most likely be taken by the FBI, and it did happen last month. FBI seized over 13 servers for evidence from a cloud provider called DigitalOne. They entered the premises unplugged the server and took them.


Maybe an average user like me want be terrified to push his document in the cloud. But organizations should.


Thursday, August 4, 2011

Arc2Google now also supports Bing and Yahoo Maps

Yes, if you already have Arc2Google for ArcGIS 10 installed, then you will enjoy the new features I just added.

Previously I used to add commands on ArcMap, now instead I tweaked the back-end web page from which the Maps are retrieved and made it a bit user friendly with more cool options.

Now you can see the current extent of your ArcGIS Data in Google Maps, Google Earth, Bing Maps and Yahoo Maps.

I'll leave you with the pictures.















Click here to download Arc2Google



if you like Arc2Google, then you might like Maps Compare V3.


p.s.: If you want to remove the ads, you can always download the map pages and host them on your company/personal website. Change the Arc2Google Source code as well to point to your domain.