How to Shop Online!

I wanted to share some of my hints at how to get the best deals online.

My favorite deal sites are:

http://www.slickdeals.net - be sure to check the forums - this is where all the best deals start. When I am looking for something I add a cool alert that tells me when deals appear for what I am looking for.

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I was thinking it might be helpful for you to see a list of all of the software I use and the what and why of it. So here goes:

1. 7-Zip 9.20 (x64 edition) – the most efficient compression software there is.
2. Acronis Plus Pack for Acronis True Image Home 2011 – the Plus Pack allows me to restore an Acronis image to different hardware. Very cool. I can image my machine and then restore it to a VM and have everything work.
3. Acronis True Image Home 2011 – I use this to make disk image backups so I can restore my boot disk when it fails.
4. Adobe Acrobat X Pro – this is part of Adobe Master Collection CS5.5 – I use it all the time.
5. Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms – important to install this if you want Windows to be able to index PDF files.
6. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4 64-bit – I use this to manage thousands of images.
7. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 – I use this to do simple video editing.
8. Adobe Reader X (10.0.1)
9. Airfoil – this allows me to use my Apple AirPort Express from any application, not just iTunes.
10. BackupOutlook – this is the way to completely backup you Outlook mail and settings.
11. Bonjour – a necessary evil when working in an Apple or iTunes world.
12. Carbonite – my choice for online backup. It works and works well.
13. CCleaner – I use this to clean up my system.
14. CDBurnerXP – I use this for almost all my disc burning needs. In fact when I setup a computer for a friend I remove whatever it comes with and install CDBurnerXP.
15. CodeWallet Pro 2006 Desktop Companion – this is an old program but I use it to store all of my product serial numbers and other important data tidbits. I need to migrate all this data to RoboForm (see below)
16. CutePDF Writer – Although I have the full Adobe suite I sometime find it helpful to have this installed. This allows you to print documents to a PDF file.
17. Directory Report – have you ever wanted to have a document listing what is on disk? This tool solves that problem. Most of the time running “DIR /B >list.txt” from the command prompt is sufficient, but when it is not I use Directory Report.
18. Diskeeper 2011 – I have been using this lately to make sure my disk don’t get fragmented. I still need to get a clearer understanding of how it is helping me.
19. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 – voice control and dictation, I really want to use this but still have not gotten it woven into my daily work.
20. Dropbox – I use this to share files with certain users. It has issues but it easy for normal (non-techie) people to use.
21. DxO Optics Pro 6 – I use this to work with photos and remove all optical distortions, it is an amazing program.
22. Everything – Windows tries to do a good job at indexing but sometimes does too much. Everything indexes just the file names and is super-fast.
23. EXIFutils for Windows – this is a set of command line utilities for modifying EXIF data in image files.
24. FastPictureViewer Codec Pack 3.0 – I finally found this about a year ago, now I can view thumbnails for all the image files I happen to come across.
25. Fences Pro – this is something Windows should have built in. It allows you to create “fences” to your desktop and then you can put icons in the fence. You can then hide or move the fence. It is nice as I like things organized. There is a free version so give it try to help tidy up your desktop.
26. FileHippo Update Checker – this helps me keep my applications up to date.
27. FileZilla Client – This is my preferred FTP client.
28. FlipShare – this is installed by the Flip video camera and allows you to download and share Flip video.
29. FontExpert 2010 – I use this to manage my fonts as well as browse them and install them. It helps if you have a lot of fonts.
30. Gemminco FolderInfo – I use this find out what is taking up all the space on my disk. This allows you scan a disk or folder and gives you its size in a nice navigable report.
31. Google Chrome – another browser
32. IrfanView – one day I got tired of Windows taking too long to preview an image so I installed IrfanView and have never looked back. Super-fast!
33. iTunes – I really only use this to backup my iPhone and iPad. I really don’t like it.
34. K-Lite Codec Pack 7.0.0 (Full) – there are so many codec out there and so many downloads that claim to be the “right” one to download. Don’t do it! I finally spent the time and K-Lite is the one to download.
35. Logos Bible Software 4 – I use this to access bible study and other theological books. Especially useful because it allows you to cut and paste sections from the books you own so you can use them.
36. MagicDisc
37. MagicISO Maker
38. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware
39. MediaMonkey – I use this to manage all my music. This is the best music manager and player there is. It has the most amazing organization and renaming features – absolutely awesome.
40. Microsoft Expression Web 4 – I use this and Dreamweaver for HTML editing. It works very well.
41. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 – word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database programs.
42. Microsoft Office Visio 2010 – I use this to do technical diagrams, an awesome program.
43. Microsoft Security Essentials – this is all the virus protection I need – no need to use anything else.
44. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional – Microsoft’s development platform.
45. Notepad++ - a good fast programmers and general editor.
46. Nuance OmniPage 17 – I use this when the OCR built into Acrobat is not enough for the task.
47. NuSphere PhpED – a great PHP development environment with debugging!
48. ObjectDock Plus – an application launch dock. I use this at the top of my center monitor (I use three monitors) and it gives me quick access to everything I use frequently. A must have in my opinion.
49. Opera 11 – another browser
50. PNGGauntlet – this allows me to create the smallest PNG files possible. Very useful when you are trying to make the fastest web site possible.
51. Proshow Producer – the best tool for professional slide shows. You can also check out its younger brother ProShow Plus.
52. Reasonable NoClone 2011 Enterprise – a very good duplicate file finder. The enterprise version works on network drives as well. The UI could be better but it is good enough.
53. Recuva – file recovery software that works very well.
54. Registry Mechanic 10 – registry maintenance and general system utility.
55. Replay Converter 4 – easily convert media files between formats.
56. Replay Media Catcher 4 – when I need to capture video from a web site I use Replay Media Catcher.
57. RoboForm – my choice for saving passwords and forms and credit cards and the like for use in the browser. I use the “everywhere” version which automatically syncs all of my computers, my laptop, my iPad and my iPhone. It has great encryption and is a must have!
58. Safari – one of the many browsers I have installed to test with.
59. Secuina PSI – another must have! Secunia lets you know if any of your installed software has security issues and directs you to the update. Simply great, install it now and update your system!
60. SimplyFile – this works with Microsoft Outlook and makes it easy to file messages. A single click puts the message in the correct folder. It learns as you decide how message should be filed.
61. Skype™ 5.3 – Instant messaging and voice calls to other computers. I use this with Trillian.
62. Snagit 10.0.1 – I use this for all my screen capture and annotations.
63. Speccy – a nice simple system benchmarking software.
64. TeamViewer 6 – I used this as a free user for a long time and finally decided to purchase. It is so nice having the ability to quickly connect to a remote users machine. It works with both Mac and PC too!
65. TeraCopy Pro – this is an accelerated copy utility. I have it setup so I can use the Windows copy routine or optionally use TeraCopy. It works great and I use it quite a bit.
66. Tiles – this utility adds a docked panel to side of the desktop that shows you thumbnails of each running application. I have not gotten used to using it yet but I think it will be helpful as I get used to it.
67. TortoiseSVN 1.6.15.21042 (64 bit) – this is used for managing versions during development.
68. Total Uninstall 5 – I use this to remove every last trace of an application. It is the best uninstaller out there.
69. Trillian – my choice for instant messenger. Trillian supports all major IM services; I have it running multiple MSN, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo and ICQ account. I also use it with Skype, Twitter and Facebook too. There is a great free version and a version for iPhone too.
70. UltraCompare v8.10 – when I need to compare one file to another I use UltraCompare.
71. UltraEdit – A fast editor that can edit large files.
72. UltraMon – I have three monitors. UltraMon offers some nice enhancements to allow you to move apps between monitors. Right now, I actually have it turned off.
73. VanDyke Software SecureCRT and SecureFX 6.6 – the best SSH client there is. I especially like it because it allows me to save my username and password!
74. ViceVersa Pro 2.5 – an industrial strength batch copy program. You setup profiles of what to do, for example copy K:\Video to M:\Video and synchronize the directories. Extremely flexible and reliable.
75. Virtual Account Numbers – this works with one of my credit cards to generate virtual credit card numbers on the fly for use for web purchases.
76. VLC Media Player – this is the media player that plays everything, it is just that simple.
77. VMware Workstation – I do quite a bit with virtual machines and VMware Workstation is my choice.
78. VS.NETcodePrint 2010 – A nice utility to print .net source code.
79. Windows Live Essentials – don’t install this unless you really need it. Or at least selectively install only what you want or need. For example Windows Live Photo Gallery installs a Microsoft SQL server, which isn’t bad if you use the Photo Gallery. But some people just install stuff and never really use it. So if you have installed it and don’t use it, uninstall it. You will get some performance back.
80. Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant – this is one part of Windows Live Essentials that I find really helpful. Over the years I have accumulated quite a few MSN and Live ID’s, this helps you out by making it easier to login to different services with different ID’s at the same time.
81. Windows Live Mesh – this is another part of Windows Live Essentials that is helpful. It allows you to sync folders between machines, just like Dropbox, but it’s free and has no size limits. Plus you can also remotely control a machine you have Mesh installed on.
82. Windows Live Movie Maker – because I do lots of video work I have this on here so I can open these files.
83. WinRAR – The longtime leader for file and folder compression.
84. WinSCP – a nice SCP client and free too.
85. Winsome File Renamer 7.1 – this is my primary tool for renaming bunches of files. It has a simple useful interface. Highly recommended.
86. Xenu’s Link Sleuth – so you have a web site and need to know if you have any broken links, this is how you find out. Very nice.

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If you are interested in keeping your computer safe, do what I do, use the following pieces of software:

1. Microsoft Security Essentials - excellent free antivirus software. There is no need for anything else, it is what I use. www.microsoft.com
2. If you are really worried about Mal-ware then you need Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware - it is an excellent free malware detection and removal tool. I like it so much I bought the paid version. The paid version offers proactive blocking of potentially malicious access... and I see it block thing everyday. www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
3. Install Secuina PSI 2.0 - this software tells you which security updates you need for almost everythign on your PC. Very cool. www.secuina.com
4. Install the FileHippo Update Checker - this will tell you which programs have updates that should be installed. Very helpful. www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/
5. I used to use Mozy for online backup but have now moved to Carbonite. Pay for it and use it! It can really save the day! www.carbonite.com
6. I use Acronis True Image Home 2011 for local backup. I have it configured to image my boot drive every night to an external USB drive. www.acronis.com
7. I also backup my data files to a local FreeNAS server every night using SmartSync. SmartSync Pro is getting a little long in the tooth but it works great. www.smartsync.com

more to come...

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Lately I have been spending my days (and nights) inventing safe health care. It is very exciting to at the edge of helping solve some of the most complex issues we face as a nation. I am right down deep in the tech working on things like virtualization of data, dynamic data gathering and prediction, polymorphic schema mapping and data-exchange technologies use semantic reconciliation for highly flexible entity matching fusing many disparate data sources, correlation engines to discover set properties of data and security. Very cool stuff to be working with every day!

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Arik Keller and I had been thinking about what to do next and we both liked Groupon but wanted to marry that with location based services. So that is what we did. We set out to build a Groupon clone but sprinkle in LBS. I was the CTO and built the technology and Arik did the hard part – everything else. We embarked on the journey in late 2009 and that journey came to a successful conclusion today. LocalGinger was sold to WHERE.COM. Woohoo!

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In late August the White House mandated that all of the agencies in the US government have functioning DNSSEC capabilities deployed and operational by December 2009. I am suggesting here that we, as a community, commit to the same timetable. I call upon VeriSign and other registries to bring up DNSSEC support by January 2009. While DNSSEC is not the best ultimate solution, it is the best option currently available.Here are the additional resources suggested by the White House:

The following resources provide additional technical information and guidance to support your agency’s DNSSEC deployment.                

The USG DNSSEC deployment email list: http://www.usg-forum@dnssec-deployment.org                

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I have been thinking about how much people are thinking about DNS and I came across the Google Zeitgeist project (http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html). Basically this is an interface to understand what people are using the Google search engine for. Specifically, I was poking around Insights for Search and queried a few terms related to DNS. The information is fascinating. The most interesting part I noticed is the number of searches and the countries they are coming from. Again, I find this stuff fascinating. We beat the drum each day for DNS and most people never give it a thought, much as it should be, but if you are reading this you probably have a bit more interest. DNS searches have actually decreased over the past few years. Maybe people are more educated? Less concerned? However, DNS attacks are on the rise that is certain.

In our last TechTalk event we had a great number of participants and fielded a lot of questions. There was some good discussion about DNSSEC implementation. Based on what we discussed - you should plan to have your DNSSEC implementations done by the end of 2011, at the latest. Also there were lots of questions about reverse DNS. Reverse DNS is just like DNS but specifically for the IP addresses, for example when you want to know what an IP address points to you would do a reverse DNS query.

The questions were focused on how admins setup a reverse DNS. Reverse DNS is typically maintained by the organization who “owns” the IP address(s) or block. In their DNS server they create records for each of their IP address that point to hostnames. Many times those host names will be generic, which is fine. For certain things, especially email, having the hostname come back as generic can create a problem. For example, when you email server attempts to send a message to another server (the receiving server), nine times out of ten, the receiving server will do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of the sending server, if the hostname returned is not related to your email zone or if there is no reverse DNS record the receiving server may reject the message. Some email servers can get particularly persnickety about this.

So make sure your reverse DNS ducks are in a row. One of the easiest ways to verify all of your DNS settings is to run a DNSreport at DNSstuff.com. You first need to get a free 21-day trial account to have access to all tools.

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Email is one of the most important communication mediums to date. We have become dependent on it and since it works so well, we have high expectations that it will work when we need it. But, how does it really work, and what if any role does DNS play in email. First as we discussed in the past, every communication on the Internet depends on DNS, including email. So let’s dig in to what we need to know about DNS and email.

When a user sends an email they are not actually sending the email directly to the recipient. They are, rather, asking their server to take the message and deliver it for them. Once the server accepts the message it tries to deliver it. Here is what, in the simplest manner, the server does. It looks at the envelope and finds the address of the recipients mailbox, for example parisi@yada123.com.

The server then looks at the domain part of the address, everything to the right of the @ sign, yada123.com{dot} and does a DNS lookup. In effect the server asks what are the MX records for yada123.com{dot}? (By the way MX stands for Mail eXchanger, i.e. the server/host responsible/able to receive email for a domain) If DNS is working for that zone, in this example, it should receive an answer of yada123.com{dot} – what – huh? Didn’t we just ask for yada123.com’s address? What is the deal? Well we did, but we asked for the MX records for the domain. As a rule MX records point to A records. So we got back an A record. A records are also called host records, and A records resolve to IP addresses, cool, feels like we are getting closer.

What does the server do now? It needs to ask a second question of the DNS, please (servers are very polite) give me the IP address associated with the A record yada123.com{dot}. In this example the result returned should be 70.120.44.51 – finally, “whoo hoo” an IP address - we can do something with that! The mail server attempts to make a TCP/IP connection to 70.120.44.51 and does so using the SMTP protocol. If all goes well, we won’t get into SMTP details here; the receiving server accepts the message and, again in the simplest of examples, puts it in your mailbox.

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Let's move on. Let's suppose you want to put up a web site on your new domain name? You find a suitable, reliable web hosting company, buy an account and visit their control panel and create your web site, even if it is just a simple page with "Hello, world" on it.

Now you have a choice to make - you need to setup your DNS settings. For this example, let's say your DNS is currently hosted at GoDaddy, you can continue with that and go and add records there or you could move your DNS to your web hosting company, it's your choice (dedicated DNS hosting is available from EasyDNS, DNS Made Easy and DynDNS - all excellent companies with good infrastructure). If you want to stay with GoDaddy for DNS, you will need to change a few things, basically, remove your entries from pointing to parking servers to point to real servers. There is nothing inherently wrong with staying with GoDaddy, they have reasonable controls and they seem to work well. But, being IT people we never can leave well enough alone. So let's use our own DNS server, at our hosting company. We will need to use their control panel to add all of our DNS records to the new name server. Minimally, we need to create the following records:

; Zone file for yada123.com
$TTL 14400
@      86400    IN      SOA     ns1.examplehost.com. hostmaster.examplehost.com. (                2009031602      ; serial, todays date+todays
             86400           ; refresh, seconds
             7200            ; retry, seconds
             3600000         ; expire, seconds
             86400 )         ; minimum, seconds

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Over the past few weeks I have been seeing reports that some ISP's are actually subverting DNS queries to their own DNS server. Oh the humanity! What this means is that when you (your computer) does a UDP or TCP Port 53 DNS query the ISP is intercepting that and directing it to their own servers. Has anyone been told by their ISP that they are doing this? No? I didn't think so. Subversion of DNS, even for your own good, is not a good thing. This has the effect of controlling wherever you go on the internet. It is a good thing our ISP's know better than we do. Not!

I need your help here. I would like you to run some simple tests and report your results to me. I need you to run an NSLOOKUP or DIG to a specific name server on a specific zone that the DNS has not been made aware of. Using the zone for the query will cause any subverted queries to return non-existent domain (NXDOMAIN). If you have a few minutes please go to the following link on my home page and give it a try. Go to http://www.paulparisi.com/queryproject and input your findings. Once we get a critical mass we will start to publish the report. 

 

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