Brian @ Wongside

My dad loves biking.  For his birthday and Christmas, he usually requests a hike, or a bike ride with his family.  And now Google is happy to help him out because Google does bike trails. From the Google Maps “More” menu, it’s possible to pull up a bike paths overlay.

You can also plan a point-to-point trip by bike, and it will route you on the most bike friendly path.

It looks like there is some information on Bakersfield where my parents live.  But it is a tad sparse.  I’ll bet they add more information as time goes on.

There is, however, a plethora of information for the Bay Area, particularlythe South Bay where I live. Maybe I’ll have to dust off my bike and get out and ride, especially since the weather is getting better.

I thought Peter Belanger wrote a pretty interesting article on what it takes to produce a cover for Macworld magazine.

If this is what they do to an iPod, I can only imagine what they do to the cover models on other magazines.

Enjoy!

Play the classic game pong with your browser window…literally:
http://stewdio.org/pong/

HT: Andrew Wu

I was rummaging through some old e-mails when I came across this picture. It’s been over a year since the picture was taken, and I thought it was appropriate to post. So here’s the story.

It was my first week at PrimitiveLogic. They threw me right into the fire, and off to Workday Training. Workday was founded by Dave Duffield, former CEO, Chairman, and Founder of PeopleSoft which was acquired by Oracle a few years ago.

One day, as I was crossing the street from my car to the office, I came upon an older gentleman carrying a paper bag.

“Are you Dave Duffield?” I asked.

“Yes, I am.” He responded.

I was stunned. I introduced myself, told him I working for a partner consultant, Primitive Logic, and that I was in the office for Integration Fundamentals training.

We talked as we hopped into the elevator. I asked him what was in the bag, and he said that they were bagels he had found on sale. He had to go a few floors further than me, but as I was stepping off the elevator, he spoke up.

“Here, why don’t you take these bagels to your class?” he said as he offered me some of the bagels from his bag.

“Thanks.” I replied with a bit of hesitation.

As I got off the elevator, it hit me: I was just given bagels by one of the richest people in America. In fact, he’s #347 on the Forbes 400, coming in with just about $1.1 billion.

In any case, the wealth doesn’t seem to have gone to his head. He’s a super down-to-earth kind of guy. And heck, he gave me bagels!

Dave, the pleasure was all mine.

Intel has a really great high-level overview of what it takes to make an Intel processor. If you’ve ever wondered, here are the pages and the pictures to help you out.

Here’s an interesting article on why HD Video Downloads don’t look so great. Apparently, “hi-def” isn’t a really well regulated or defined measure of video quality. When you have bit rates that range from 1.5-40 megabits per second, it’s easy to see why there’s a range in quality.

This can’t be good news for Apple. Michael Arrington, one of the most powerful men on the web according to Forbes, is giving up his iPhone. He was an avid fan of the iPhone when it first came out, but apparently, the debacle over Google Voice was the last straw.

In the article, Arrington declares that he’ll be moving to an Android-based phone for the time being, and when Google offers Google Voice on the Palm Pre, he’ll move to that.

I’ll bet a certain CEO in Cupertino is about to blow a gasket.

In case you haven’t been following the news lately, microblogging company Twitter was hacked last week. As a follow up article, Tech Crunch has a great article on “The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack“.

I think it’s really interesting how the Twitter attack wasn’t so much the hack of one system, but of the entire technology ecosystem. The article calls out

The list of services affected either directly, or indirectly, are some of the most popular web applications and services in use today – Gmail, Google Apps, GoDaddy, MobileMe, AT&T, Amazon, Hotmail, Paypal and iTunes. Taken individually, most of these services have reasonable security precautions against intrusion. But there are huge weaknesses when they are looked at together, as an ecosystem.

So what do we take away from this? I think the article sums it up nicely:

So for a start, reset those passwords and don’t use the same passwords for different services. Don’t use password recovery questions that can easily be answered with a simple web search (an easy solution is to answer those questions falsely). And just in general be paranoid about data security. You may be happy you were.

This is a really good reason to keep those passwords secure and distinct. Use a random password generator, and don’t reuse the password across services. I wonder what, if any, implications this has for password managers like RoboForm or Keepass, which make one’s passwords all centrally located.

These conclusions also seem to advocate a stronger system of two-factor authentication in online services. E*Trade is the only company I know of that makes use of RSA keys as an additional layer of security. Bank of America offers a service called SafePass that sends a text message to your cell phone to add a layer of security similar to using an RSA key.

I’ve never used either of these services so I don’t know exactly how they work. My concern is that if these security features are “optional” it makes them easy to bypass, and provides only a false sense of security for the end user. And that’s definitely not a good thing.

I’m currently a subscriber of AT&T DSL. But because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, I’ve now subscribed to Comcast High Speed Internet (HSI). Since I have both pipes currently coming into my house, I figured I’d give them a whirl and see who’s faster, and whether or not cable is really 10 times faster as they claim. I’ll give you the results and let you be the judge.
Here’s the results from my AT&T DSL speed test at speedtest.net:

And here’s the results from Comcast:

I got similar outcomes from Speakeasy (no fancy graphics here):

AT&T DSL:
Download: 5170 kbps
Upload: 657 kbps

Comcast:
Download: 15875 kbps
Upload: 4451 kbps

That looks pretty fast to me. It’s hard to tell to what extent Comcast’s results are affected by their supposedly “secret sauce” Powerboost technology rather than simply better overall speeds, but it’s hard to argue the results. Say goodbye, DSL.

I’m in the market for an online backup solution. Historically, I’ve backed up my stuff to CD and DVD. But since I now have over 100GB of photos, it’s getting a bit unwieldy. The 1TB hard drive likely won’t help the situation either.

I’m looking at a few solutions, namely:

• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• Mozy

Backblaze is probably the newcomer to the group. I first heard about them on my favorite tech news site: Arstechnica. I think the thing I like about them is tye keep it stupid simple, and have a pretty nifty restore function no one else has: if your computer dies, (for a fee) they’ll mail you a DVD or USB hard drive full of your data. The one concern I have about Backblaze is the very fact that they are young. They seem to have an all-star team of leaders, but they’re such a young company, it’s hard to tell what their future is. I did find at least one user who switched from Mozy to Backblaze. Backblaze costs $5/month or $50/year

Carbonite seems pretty similar on the backup side, but doesn’t seem to offer a similar restore process. I think the one thing that concerns me about them is that they lost a bunch of their customers’ data earlier this year. Carbonite costs $54.95/year.

Mozy seems like a decent company. I think the one thing they have going for them is that they’re a part of storage and infrastucture giant EMC. That means they’ve got some serious backing, and likely won’t disappear anytime soon. I also like the fact that between Mozy and Carbonite, Walt Mossberg prefers Mozy.  The downside is that someone else found that it was a pain to restore from them. The fact that they give 2GB of free space is nice, but I’ve got almost 200GB I’ll need to backup, so that’s really immaterial to me. Mozy costs $4.95/month or $54.45/year.

There are a few downsides to doing online backup, and they certainly deserve special consideration:

1. Uploading takes forever. I’ve got a 6mbps DSL line, and Speakeasy says my upload is only 650kbps, meaning I could upload about 6GB per day. (Speedtest.net generally confirms this.) If I have to upload 200GB of data, that’s 33 days straight.
2. These services are subject to failure. I don’t worry about security as all of these solutions do proper encryption. But as noted above, Carbonite lost the data of 7,500 customers. I don’t think Backblaze was even in existence yet, but their data center of choice had a power outage in 2007. I’ve yet to hear of any problems at Mozy. Fortunately, neither of these issues is ultimately catastrophic to the data (the issue of credibility is entirely different). Since these are backup services, Carbonite customers should have been able to do a re-upload or “re-backup” and have their information be safe once again. Assuming they were in existence, Backblaze customers merely would have needed to wait for the servers to come back up in order to continue a backup or restore–no data was lost.
3. What happens if the companies disappear? Upline was a backup service provided by tech giant Hewlett-Packard. It shut its doors earlier this year, proving that even Mozy–as a part of EMC–might not be immune to being shutdown by it’s corporate backers.  Backblaze might not have to worry about the corporate bueracracy, yet. But what if they aren’t profitable, or run out of funding before hitting the black? They could very well shut their doors as well. And if they get bought by another company, their policies might change to the detriment of consumers, or their new overlords might shut them down for whatever reason.

All in all, I think an online backup service will serve as a secondary or tertiary backup solution around here. I’ll likely keep backing up to DVDs (or Blu Ray when I can get my hands on a burner) and to Charlene’s computer, and have an online, continuous backup solution in the cloud.

I’ll keep you posted as I find more, and when I make my decision.