FireFox 3.6.6 released.

Today FireFox 3.6.6 was released, with one slight change that is considered a temporary solution for the FireFox “Hung Plugin” timeout, the timeout was increased from 10 seconds to 45 seconds, for too many purposes 45 seconds is a big number and it was chosen to stay on the safe side, although this is a temporary fix to be issued by 3.6.x hopefully later on.

People who used to notice FireFox not able to play Farmville or any resource hog Flash Game online, might notice an improvements after upgrading their FireFox to 3.6.6.

My disappointments with QuickBooks POS

15 months ago I regretfully bought a genuine copy of Intuits leading POS system AKA QuickBooks POS Pro 8.0 with the hardware bundle.
And I knew i would need intuits skilled support team, so i spent my $600 on a support plan.

After 15 months of usage i have the right to list my disappointments in the list below:

1. No alteration to a receipt once its saved. and that is a very useful feature available in all competitive products. for example if you somebody buy a watch and you give him a receipt stating the payment method as cash, and then after he leaves you notice that it was mis-entered as it should be Debit card instead. the only way to fix it , is reverse the receipt and do another receipt, and the problem we face in this situation was that the new receipt that the customer DON’T have has a different number, different time, and maybe different date.  thus the receipt with the customer is not valid anymore. and note it is very time consuming process, unlike the competitive products where you can right click on a receipt , edit it, and simply click change payment method.
2. Reporting, i wanted to view the payment summary report on time frames of 15 days for managerial purposes. and i couldn’t put the subtotal every 15 days, even with my SQL skills, adjusting customizing the reports have very constraints
3. The support, even with my $600 support plan, I NEVER EVER CALLED AND HAD A SATISFYING SOLUTION. there support specialist is very hard to communicate with, never understands the questions if explained less than 10 times, and never give you an answer without making you wait till he try it for 10 minutes on his machine. i had to hang up and call too many times every time i call for help.
4. Gift Certificate have any number, accept any number, and redeem any number. i can issue a gift certificate with the number 0011 and then another gift certificate with the number 0012 and third one with the number 0012 again , and again and again.
5. Gift Certificate issue again, if someone with the girl certificate of value $200 came to the store, used his certificate for 150 , and then he used it for 100, and then for 45 … etc, its all ok for QuickBooks.
6. If the gift certificate with number 0011 was never issued, and it was used as an input method, QuickBooks would be fine with that as well.
7. Pictures of items are very small, and can’t be enlarged. no need to save it in the database , but a hard copy with a 500x500 image can be saved on the hard drive on the same path as the database, in case bigger image was needed on a quote.
8. When you are viewing a list of receipts , the only way to view a receipt is double clicking on it, which will open a new window, there is no preview pane like in Microsoft Dynamics POS, which is kind of annoying and time consuming.

That's the most major complains i have, but not all of them.

cheers for now

IXP in the British Virgin Islands

According to the TRC (Telecommunication Regulatory Commission) The British Virgin Islands should be hosting its first IXP (Internet Exchange Point) within a month of the deadline of the public consultation which will be June 22 2010.

According to PCH (Packet clearing house) currently (the minute this post was posted) there is 88 countries with IXP, and 159 countries without IXP.

You can check the up to date list at any time here.

An IXP stands as an Internet Exchange Point, and it is a physical point where ISP's such as (Cable and Wireless, DigiCel, and CCT) exchange their local traffic instead of using means of sending the traffic off island to an IXP outside the territory, and then routing it back to island.

I will give a simple example on how an IXP can help in lower the cost on ISP's (Thus on the end user).

1-

Lets say i have 10 camera's installed at my office, i am viewing these camera's locally using a different ISP (in the office i have WiMax, and at home i have LIME DSL).

Instead of having the traffic routed from my cameras to CCT , and then remotely lets say Miami or NY IXP then back to Cable and Wireless). With an IXP it will be routed like so

Cameras , CCT , IXP (Locally) , Cable and Wireless, My home laptop.

thus we saved connecting via the internet to the USA and saved some bandwidth by using our local cheap in cost infrastructure relatively compared to other connecting media to the USA.

2-

The Second Benefit would be the privacy, lets think about it as our governmental documents and Emails, and remote connections .. etc.

We don't want such traffic to travel so long to foreign countries.

3-

Smaller distance of traveling and less number of hoops for a packet to travel would provide faster connection, especially when we are not using the backbone bandwidth provided by our ISP's as local traffic is not intended to be routed through the backbone.

4-

Having our own IXP, means contributing more in decentralizing the internet and providing a less dependent internet experience, with more routes to be taken.

That is all the benefits i could think off right now on such a hot Sunday.

I will post another post later demonstrating if the BVI market is suitable for an IXP or not.

Note: In case something was mis-typed or mis-explained, or missed. please feel free to comment.

PS: This is a link to the TRC (Telecommunication Regulatory Commission) in the BVI

iPAD Security breach

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was compromised.

read more here

Exclusive Steve Ballmer iPad Review

 

LOL Big time , that think made me laugh and sure it will make you have a laugh too … check it out

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft gives his thoughts on the ipad. He doesn't like the lack of flash, the fact that you can't multitask and that it is expensive. In this iPad review you can pretty much tell he thinks it sucks.

"The following entry in the [strings] section is too long and has been truncated" error message when you try to modify or to view GPOs in Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, or Windows 2000

Typically, the problem occurs when you try to view or modify a GPO that has been viewed by a different workstation, and that workstation contains .adm files that use the "IF VERSION >=5" construct. When an administrative workstation views a GPO, the workstation automatically updates that GPO with the latest version of the .adm files. If the workstation's .adm files are newer than the files that are contained in the \Adm folder of the domain GPO, the template files are updated. If the template files contain the "IF VERSION >=5" construct, when an administrative workstation tries to modify or to view the GPO, and the workstation does not have this hotfix installed, the errors occur.

Download the following to fix the problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842933

Difference between viruses, worms, Trojan horses, Spyware, and Malware.

Alot of my students, and customers have no clue between the differences of the mentioned above. and a lot of computers specialists know them and yet they have wrong definitions in their mind.
Thus i wrote this article, and in order not to make you bored i will be straight to the point and precise as possible.

Virus Vs. Worm Vs. Trojan Horse Vs. Malware .

Virus: A virus is a computer program that is written by a human to do undesirable actions to the infected system and its user. A virus starts infecting files, documents, and applications on the infected machine. As long as these files are not cleaned the virus will remain to exist in that specific system.
The virus doesn’t propagate intentionally from one computer to another, but it might propagate by a sharing files between two computers via any media (Emails, CD’s , Flash Drives .. etc).

Worm: Worms are just like viruses in the regard of being computer software programmed by another human, designed to infect a computer and do undesirable actions to that infected machine. But UNLIKE viruses these programs depend less or not at all on human behavior in order to spread themselves from one computer to another. Worms would try to spread itself from one computer to another over the network (E.g Emails , instant messaging .. etc). Hence computer worms spread much faster than computer viruses.

Trojan Horse: A Trojan horse,Name taken from the Greek mythology, is a non-self-replicating program, it deceive the user by pretending to do a desirable action for that user, but instead it opens backdoors facilitating unauthorized access to the infected computer.

Spyware: A spyware is a software that is hidden from the computer user, it collects information of the computer usage for legal or illegal purposes (E.g key loggers) these spyware programs can also be used for adware (Advertising-supported software)

Malware: Malware is derivated from malicious software, which includes all the undesirable software such as viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.
So unlike most people  who could define the above, Malware AND NOT virus is the biggest subset that includes all the undesirable software.

Now that we know the differences. i would like to note that although AVG Free is one of the best anti-viruses i ever used (and i recommend upgrading to to the full version) you can download AVG anti-virus here.
And for extra security against spyware, trojan horse, and worms, please download malware bytes here.

These two software are free, light weight, free to update. Please make sure they are installed and updated frequently (manually update unless you purchased the full version).