I have been wanting an extremely bright flashlight costing $90 but couldn’t validate the cost until I seen this on Lifehacker!

There’s even a video!

Mod a $5 flashlight into a $95 light

Reader Kip modded a cheap $5 throwaway flashlight into a blinding torch that’s brighter than a $95 fancy pants flashlight. Hit the play button to see how. —Gina Trapani

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<a xhref=”http://www.metacafe.com/watch/581888/10_police_flashlight_hack/”>$10 Police Flashlight Hack! - video powered by Metacafe</a></font>

I was just thinking while calculating my chances to attend the next local Licensing Boot Camp. It really is a complex beast for anyone to understand. There are successful carrers being built by those few that really understand it. But why does it have to be complex? I have seen it all! Everything from proposing to sell an upgrade Office for a customer with 10 computers and them turning my proposal down handing me a Maxell CD-R with MS Office Professional scribbled in cursive along with a barely legiable product key requesting that that be installed on each and every computer.. to the fact that activation has some people turned around so confused that a guy was extatic claiming to have purchased 3 different copies of the same MS Office and XP software in the past —- one for each time he has had to reload his computer due to a terrible virus

He was very happy to learn that he can reactivate his software and even call Microsoft — They are not the devil you know - they are very understanding and helpful.

You see it’s my opinion that the very attribute that makes software so mass marketable is to blame for software’s own market loss due to piracy. Software is simply bits! Bits that can live on any available media or sent around the world in a matter of mili-seconds! It is so movable, flexible, and copiable that it can be supplied to the masses without the same supply and demand strangle hold that hinders a physical product!

Bits can execute on any supported platform that they are tested and or designed for. Well you can do some quick math here can’t you With cross platform being a key feature in computing today and the internet being the most used medium of media than virtually all software (bits) can be supported by virutually all platforms (at least the most widely used ones) and sent or copied thousands or millions of times over… Of course this story isn’t new. We have heard it over and over from the RIAA - yes - software like music and motion pictures; for that matter books too, are intelletual properties… Someone or a group of people dreamed it up. They sweated over it… Maybe even bleed for it to become reality and now they want their cut - “Do you blame them?” I certainly don’t! But enough on that soapbox. This post is about Software Licensing in particular.

If in the beginning they had done what they are trying to do now you wouldn’t hear the RIAA or the utter druming of law suits and Microsoft’s Activation or the questions of whats legal in the first place. The problem - Software (or any digital information) is not physically tied to the unit exists upon. There were no method developed in the early days because of how mass marketable the medium of distribution was and to do so would only hinder the profits of “the skys the limit” but now … ah … but now… we see that you “can’t have your cake and eat it too!” either they physically tie the bits to the physical machine by using non-flashable BIOS chips or serial number encoded processors with encryption and trusted computing platforms and all that mumble jumble or they battle the pirates copy by copy! Ah but you see too much time has passed… they are too late in the game… now when all this happens they get questions like what if I want a backup copy… What if my motherboard becomes fried… These are very valid questions and the answer is that those logistics would have been worked out by now if the bits were tied to the physical machine in the begining. You see it is my opinion that Greed caused the problem and now Greed is causing the issue as well. So the answer - there isn’t an answer yet…

Over the New Year holiday I migrated to another server. This one is much more robust than the original. Just look at these specs:

Hardware: 1 Intel Pentium Xeon 2.8 Ghz, Dual Processor motherboard, 2 Gig registered DDR400 Ram, and RAID 1+0 with 4 80gb WD SATA Drives and RAID 1 with 2 40gb Seagate SATA Drives, 1 300gb WD EIDE Drive!

There is plenty of room for expansion too! Looking to upgrade the ram to a OS max of 4 gb soon. I would add even more drives but I am sure I am over stepping a recommended draw from a server pwr supply and I don’t have any more mounting points.

Software: Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition R2 Release! This so cool! I was an old School with SUS and WSUS set up on the original server it is still much nicer to have WSUS built right into the management console. I have setup all the stuff now… Exhange SP2… IMF… RRAS… OWA (aka Outlook Web Access)…OMA (aka Outlook Mobile Access).. RPC over HTTP (aka Outlook Over the Internet)… Fax Services… Windows Mobile Security and Feature Pack Devices… VPN… ISA… and SQL 2005 Workgroup… I even fixed an email issue concerning smtp and recipeint filtering long battled against during this migration!

Next comes a upgrade of the SharePoint instance from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 — But what is the hard part you may ask?

Getting users to understand! I am pretty good with people but I’ve never faced such a challenge in all my years experience with being an IT consultant for many customers as I face with these users! My current goal is to get them exited about SharePoint - and to use it. I’ve never come across someone who wasn’t floored by SharePoint and have been told by many colleagues in the business that SharePoint is a powerful selling point! These users avoid it like the plague. They insist on keeping several Excel spreadsheets open updating them live on the server constantly!

Lately I have been trying to develop a SharePoint Application of Lists to control workflow and enable speedier and more accurate data entry as a way to attract them to SharePoint. However it’s been a tough haul because any question about their process is answered with “I don’t knows” or I am just ignored! They finally gave me some input on my prototype today that makes me wander why the heck I am doing this in the first place. They said they wanted to use it but wanted to be able to type everything free hand! — That’s right — It doesn’t make since to me either? Why would you want to enter the date when it can autofill (editable of course but not enough). Why would you want to type in a job number when you can select from a list of current jobs? Doesn’t it make more sense to point and click instead of typing in each and everything? Do they just want the freedom to invent job numbers that don’t exist (like they do now)? Do they like skipping important fields and having inconsistent data? Do they like having to open Excel and doing this all very precariously inside a spread sheet? And does Management really care about their data at all?

I don’t post frequently and those that stop by know I do lack in that discipline. However I appreciate those that keep their eyes out for my sparse posts. I guess when I do post they can be torturously long and if you are reading them I owe you a very sincere thank you.

In a shorter post tonight I would like to say that “I need 6 of me!” Isn’t it always the case that when you’re busy you’re extremely busy! Why do I need 6 of me? My business is growing all of a sudden. Not so much to justify hiring just yet but enough to drive me completely insane trying to keep up with it all. I have 6 roles that I play on a daily basis.

1. IT Consultant - Where my passion lies and the direction of my business!
2. Business Owner/Management - I enjoy strategic analysis and the business world!
3. Sales and Marketing - What I hate (and am not very good at)
4. Logistics - Boring!
5. Full Time Sys Admin for another Family owned SMB - Love it, Hate the difficult people though
6. Technician - I love to hate it, no really it used to be fun but now it’s boring to me

But why does it have to be 6 “of me?” I will fill roles one and two easily. Who would market like I want to but me though? Who will be as detailed as me when shipping or scheduling but myself? Who will put up with the asshole users in role five but me? And finally who will do things my way when working on a PC or network?

I know that sounds a little elitist and I am not like that really. I just need to learn how to accept that I can use help because one day hopefully soon I will need it and not have the luxury of being elitist.

I wish all 2pointzero readers a happy holidays and may God bless you all.

How can one deal with technicians from large telcos, custom software companies, or the like that portray an image to the client that since they are from a much larger business they have some technical superiority. If you have any experience in IT you know that this is not always the case. Actually it is more often that they are frankly inept.

Here is recent experience of mine. The objective was to upgrade internet access from a painful satellite connection to my recommendation of a partial T1. Since there Line of Business Application was dependant on their internet connection I continued to encourage this upgrade to avoid the constant issues they had with latency and dropped connections. So when they finally got it all approved through corporate I was excited and wanted everything to so smooth. This did not happen as you will see below.

First a mysterious package arrived (it was the T1 router) but no communication from the telco at all - just setting there for weeks… Finally the customer called me to find out what is going on. Since I did not order the service for them I could only refer them back to corporate and their telco. After 2 days I recieved a call that the guy will be here in the am of the next day and they wanted me there to assist.

Second - The guy was an idiot! He comes in - explaining how the router I setup years ago was “not going to get it.” But opens a router that is of the exact SOHO class he wants to replace it with. Unfortunatly the power supply was missing? Next he wants to try plugging the power supply from the original router to the new against my caution that he should check the volts/amps specs first. Thankfully no damage had been done (just not something I would have done). Then I started putting the end of the cable on and he stopped me - saying “Why are you making a cross over?” After I told him a cross over is usually neccessary when connecting a network device to a DSU/CSU router he said that it wasn’t neccesary. Open to the fact that many routers are self sensing and will reverse the signal internally I said yeah lets just use a straight thru and see what happens. In the end we had to make it cross over anyways. Finally here he couldn’t get to the router from any computer including his laptop. It wasn’t until he left to go use the restrom that I sat down and typed in the http:// in front of the ip address and left the admin logon page open on his browser. He configured the static IP of the router and only placed one DNS Server in the setup? No backup DNS?

Third he over stepped his boundries. Now that he had it working he decieded that it would be a great oppurtunity to run msconfig disabling almost everything at boot! To improve the speed of the internet connection was the explaination of why he was doing this? I maintain this customer and visit the site all the time. He is just a tech they will never see again. The startup apps on the system where there for many purposes of the business and have been there under my and were not an issue at all - he had it working - couldn’t he have just stopped there? No!

Forth he insulted me openly with his own ignorance! He disables Windows Defender slamming it as a terrible program (something that is a requirement of my customers). Next he wants to install a WGA crack - glad I stopped him! Next he removes the much loved AOL that the customer uses for communications instead of having to SMS on a cell phone. And can your beleive it? He disabled the multifuction printer manager program, the digital camera software, and the iPod software. Then he must have setup a BIOS password on one of the computers because no one else admits to doing it. All this from a guy there to setup the T1??? When he leaves he slaps his hands rubbing them togather vigorously. Claiming “They just tell me go make it work and I go make it work - now I am going home and I do mean home I shouldn’t have had to come all the way down here for something so little. 2 hours drive and I will back home chiling” that’s almost verbatium to what he said.

Fifth It’s all good in the end. He had already insulted the customer by arguing over their directions saying they don’t match his GPS in his truck. He had been short with them over the phone earlier. I am latter told about a user at another branch that wouldn’t let him touch her computer when they were rolling out their T1 saying he didn’t know what he was doing.

This guy openly insults me in front of my customer? This guy doesn’t ask do you use this, do you need that, this guy wants to install cracks, this guy is inept!

One affects Internet Explorer on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003:

Another zero-day threat hits Windows

And the other affects Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux:

Hackers claim zero-day flaw in Firefox

You think it’s safe to use Opera?