Implementing external DNS for small sites

Just as you can drive a car without being a mechanic, you can also set up a website without understanding how all of the components under the hood work. While moving my sites to a new server (moved to a Hybrid server with WiredTree to reduce my costs), I was testing its performance and looked to optimize its speed. One place that popped out as an area that could be improved was the initial DNS lookup. Would it be a worthwhile investment even for a small site like mine?

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Product Review: Logitech G500s Laser Mouse

Following Logitech’s announcement about the availability of their G line of products, they offered a G500s Laser Gaming Mouse to test and review. Until the G500s arrived, I have been using the Logitech G5 Laser Mouse for the past six years. It is durable, precise, corded, and works great. That actually set the benchmark higher for the G500s Laser Gaming Mouse in order for it to impress me.

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From Adobe MAX: say goodbye to Creative Suite, hello to Creative Cloud

Adobe’s conference, Adobe Max 2013, began yesterday and there were a lot of announcements headed our way. The biggest announcement is that the Creative Suite line is fading away with CS6 being the last. In its place, Adobe is betting the company on the subscription model like Office 365 in the form of Adobe Creative Cloud. In addition, Adobe announced major updates to the Creative Cloud, software updates, and even hardware.

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Understanding the fine print in a Privacy Policy

Are you a compulsive liar? Do you consistently click ‘I Agree’ to having read the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy of a website or application even though you haven’t?

The Zero Knowledge Privacy Foundation provided a slideshow that covers the Privacy Policy that is very familiar to all of us yet still remains a mystery. For those of us who are not lawyers, understanding the importance of what is included and what is left out from a privacy policy might not earn a second thought. The slideshow explains and provides examples of:

1. What’s the point of a privacy policy?
2. Are companies required to have one?
3. How do privacy policies vary between companies?
4. How might they change in the future?

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Bug Hunters [infographic]

Bug bounties have become a big part of the strategy for companies to get security researchers on their side. While there are many bugs out there that fetch a higher price in the shady back channels than the bug bounties, at least the researchers are awarded something for responsibly disclosing the vulnerability to the company. Pwn2Own is one event we have seen is centered around exploiting software and notifying the developers.

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TouchPal, a third-party touch keyboard for Windows 8

I use Swype on my Android phone and have become quite accommodated to it. This past week, I have been setting up a few Microsoft Surface tablets. As I was using the on-screen keyboard, I hesitated a few times as I started swiping the letters. I began wondering if third party keyboards on Windows 8 would become a thing.

With a quick search later, I found I was late to the party. TouchPal offers a third party keyboard with their TouchPal Curve for Windows 8 in addition to iOS and Android devices.

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Would gaming eyewear like Gunnar Optiks also benefit the eyes of IT Pros?

Gunnar Optiks Advanced Gaming Eyewear have been building a bit of chatter in the past few months. Gunnars, put very simply, are glasses with a yellow tint that are being promoted to the gaming crowd. The glasses are meant to address issues that affect gamers in particular because they tend to stare at monitors and TV screens for a long time. Knowing my own habits, a description like that makes me wonder if the Gunnar glasses would also be a valuable asset to the IT Professional. I have heard of programmers who swear by them.

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How to synchronize your WordPress comment count

A year ago today, I wrote about fighting trackback spam on a self-hosted WordPress site. It involved running a SQL query directly on the database to speed up the clean up process and make it more efficient. Since I was dealing with over 100 spam-linking comments on each post, I could use all the help in that regard I could get. Fortunately, the solution written up there worked out quite well.

Unfortunately, I glossed over a side-effect of the manual clean-up effort. Since I deleted the trackback comments directly from the database, the process did not kick off WordPress’s other functions like updating the comment count on an article. This slight annoyance meant the comment count in an article byline would be extremely inflated over the actual number of comments. I dealt with it for 365 days, through no planning of mine, today I cleaned up the mess with one easy to use query to synchronize the comment count with the actual number of comments received per article. While my problem stemmed from previous modifications taken in the database there are plenty of plugins or other ways for this value to become inaccurate.

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