Archive for the 'Technology' Category

30
Apr

Excel Tutorial: Using Conditional Formats for Traffic Lighting

Note: This will be the first in a series of downloadable tutorials. Each tutorial runs in a self-contained browser with all files and software embedded [where legal]. If you would like a specific topic covered, please leave a message here.

Download: Mirror#1

Traffic Lighting on Excel

Simplicity is key when presenting statistics to management or customers. Data analysts are often tempted to put as many details as possible on the standard “one sheet” template; however, too many numbers on a page can cause confusion about where to initially focus. When reducing the number of statistics on a page is not an option and summary stats are not appropriate, traffic-lighting is a quick and effective method to highlight trends or draw attention to information that need to be addressed.

Included:
-Example Excel File
-Full tutorial

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live
24
Jan

The $699 Memory Stick

memorystick.jpg

When buying electronics, two factors remain relatively consistent -

  1. If it’s new, it costs a lot more
  2. If Sony is involved, it costs a lot more

Yet, even these two truisms fail to account the the $699cdn (roughly the same in American dollars) price tag placed on a (third-party!) Memory stick currently being advertised at Staples. Granted, 4GB cards are relatively new but can be obtained for less than $150 if you are fortunate enough to have an SD slot. Given Sony’s penchant for being proprietary and expensive, perhaps we should not be so hasty to give up on HD-DVD?

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live
11
Dec

The Drew Advantage is … the Law?

Main Entry:
iro•ny
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural iro•nies
Etymology:
Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler
Date:
1502
3 a (1): incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result

A few days ago, this blog wrote a sharp criticism or Dardene Prairie’s decision to enact a law to prevent harassment over the internet. The law was enacted in response to 13-year old Megan Meier’s high-profile suicide, and while it has no effect outside the city, there is still a possibility that several other municipalities/states/etc could follow suit.

One must reasonably assume that Megan Meier’s demographic profile (an innocent-looking teenage girl) tugged at more than a few heart strings, implying this law was little more than a latent and simplistic reaction to an unfortunate and complicated issue.

Megan could have been our daughter!
There ought to be a law stopping this from happening to our daughter!!

Well now there is a law in one municipality and first beneficiary of that law may be none other than the woman who allegedly drove Megan to suicide – Lori Drew.

Lori Drew, the woman accused of being behind that fake I.D., has denied through her lawyer that she knew what was going on, noting an 18-year-old employee created the false profile. But a strange thing has been happening since then. Someone purporting to be Drew has started a fake blog on the net, using a first person account to justify “her” actions.
Both Drew and her lawyer insist she didn’t post anything and authorities believe her. But the response from the public has been understandably vitriolic towards the woman and she now fears for her family’s safety. Attorney Jim Briscoe has contacted blogger.com owner Google and asked them to take the posts down.
…
The town of Dardenne Prairie, where this bizarre drama has been unfolding since October 2006, rushed a law into existence designed to prevent harassment over the Internet. And the first person it could be used to protect may be Lori Drew herself.
“I would say that would be a possibility, that they could be the first,” Mayor Pam Fogarty admits. “A law is a law is a law,” she concludes. “You can’t discriminate.”
-CityNews

So, essentially a law designed in response to a sympathetic victim may instead be used to protect her alleged attacker. Moreover, Meier’s alleged attacker is being protected from the on-line vigilante justice that would have otherwise been her only retribution for inducing Meier’s death. The folks scared of the ‘puter have potentially imperiled the efforts of their technologically-inclined sympathizers.

This is a deliciously ironic example of what happens when vague laws are quickly passed on the emotion of the moment.

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live
22
Nov

Legislating the “Flame”

The high-profile suicide of Megan Meier has taken a sad political turn, as officials in her hometown attempt to transform grieving into governance -

City officials unanimously passed a measure Wednesday making online harassment a crime, days after learning that a 13-year-old girl killed herself last year after receiving cruel messages on the Internet.
The six-member Board of Aldermen made Internet harassment a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail. Mayor Pam Fogarty said the city had proposed the measure after learning about Megan Meier’s death.
“It is our hope that by supporting one of our own in Dardenne Prairie, we can do our part to ensure this type of harassing behavior never happens again, anywhere,” Fogarty said, adding, “after all, harassment is harassment regardless of the mechanism or tool.”
Several dozen people broke into applause after the measure was passed.

It’s time to inject some sanity into this hoopla. What happened to Megan was tragic but the “insults” she endured online were far from the worst abuse that floats around even on a standard political chat board.

More importantly, virtually no child doesn’t know what (s)he’s getting into when signing up for MySpace or other social networking services. With few exceptions, people join these sites to put their business in public view – typically referred to as “attention whoring” on chat boards. The copious clubbing pictures, artistic dedication, sad poetry, and vanity user groups are all a way of saying “look at me – embrace me!”. This interaction is no different from real world EXCEPT that it is easier to dupe someone via fake personas.

Should impersonation in itself be crime? It already is in some instances (particularly when dealing with business matters) but the enforcement of such a law wouldn’t have made any difference for Megan Meier. According to news sources, she hung herself moments after being rejected – still under the assumption that “Josh Evans” was a real person. The obvious question is “what’s stopping this from happening in real life?”. Back in the traditional FaceLife world, boys and girls both have long sought pleasure leading on “inferior” members of the opposite sex, with the singular goal of shooting them down as meanly and publicly as possible. Unfortunate victims of these public attacks suffer considerable short term embarrassment and perhaps some longer-term confidence issues, but the overwhelming majority do not commit suicide. The proportion of victims who kill themselves after enduring similar ribbing on an impersonal medium susceptible to impersonations is likely smaller.

Dardene Prairie officials freely admit that their feel-good law is not enforceable anywhere outside city borders. The 2000 US Census lists the town’s population as barely over 4,000 so internet users at large have little to fear … or do we? Nothing guarantees the passage of hysteria-induced legislature quite like a sympathetic-looking teenage girl whose life was ended pre-maturely by evil outside forces. Since news outlets tend to report these types of stories in clusters to create the impression of an epidemic (e.g. the string of “noose” incidents reported after the original Jena incident), several more net-inspired suicides will likely come to light. The resulting hysteria will of course sell more newspapers and could -more dangerously- result in more feel-good legislation on the city, state/province or national level.

But who’s going to decide what constitutes cruelty? How does one user know what another user can put up with? Is photo-shopping a picture cruel? How about catching someone in a lie and reporting it online? How will the law address issues of impersonation? One stolen password could jail the owner of a popular internet persona.

Popular culture and media may forever to serve as a scapegoat every time tragedy strikes a valued member of society and those who sat by idly seek to redirect their guilt. Most of these attacks will be narrowly-focused and forgettable but some, if not checked, could lead to serious attacks on our freedom of expression. The Megan Meier case was saddening, but exacting political revenge on the dog-eat-dog aspect of social networking will not prevent the next depressed teen from voluntarily leaving this earth.

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live
16
Nov

Hamachi Patch for AOE 3 (all versions) and AOM

Some time ago I wrote a tutorial on how to make Age of Empires 3 work with a freeware Virtual Private Networking (VPN) program called Hamachi. There have been many questions about where to find the AOE3VPN.exe patch referenced in the tutorial. Some people were unable to find it from the supplied Google search bar.

The good news is that a much-improved patch is available from Crea-Doo:

aoe3loader.jpg

http://www.crea-doo.at/weblog/2006/02/13/age-of-empires-iii-loader/

Version 1.63 of the Age of Empires loader makes the startup even easier by providing a GUI to select between using a Hamachi IP address and the machine’s public address. Override ports, sound settings, bypassing the intro video and direct IP connectivity can also be toggled. Best of all, support is not limited to basic Age of Empires III. The following “Age of …” games are supported:

Age of Mythology
Age of Mythology – The Titans
Age of Empires III
Age of Empires III – The War Chiefs
Age of Empires III – The Asian Dynasties
Age of Empires III – Napoleonic Era (mod)

A quick test with the new Asian Dynasties expansion booted to the menu screen without the intro video and connected to Hamachi effortlessly. Age of Mythology is no longer on this system but I’d be interested to hear if anyone has luck connecting Hamachi to the notoriously picky game.

aoe3loader2.jpg
The Age of Empires Loader works with The Asian Dynasties Expansion

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live
23
Jul

Tutorial: Spotting a Phishing Scam in your Email

Phishing, in practical terms, is an attack used by hackers to gain access to private information such as credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and user passwords. Rather than breaking down a physical or technological barrier, phishing is a social engineering attack where targets are typically duped into providing this information directly to false versions of legitimate websites run by the hackers. Personal information can then be used for fraudulent purchases, resale to third parties and even identity theft. While there are no universal statistics on the number or nature of phishing scams, most security websites agree on the following –

-Financial Services is the most targeted industry sector overall
-Paypal, Ebay, Amazon and the major banks are the most targeted companies
-North America is both the primary target audience and the region were the largest number of phishing sites are hosted
-Websites are by far the most popular portals through which to gather information, although an increasing number of phishing scams instruct targets to call a telephone number

Below are screenshots from a phishing email I recently received. Have a look at the warning signs –
Continue reading ‘Tutorial: Spotting a Phishing Scam in your Email’

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live
30
Jun

Tutorial: Internet Gaming with Age of Mythology and Hamachi

Update: If you are having trouble with this tutorial you can do the following -

  1. Try following some of the tips provided by Alien X in the comments section
  2. Visit the Blink7 page on the newest available patch for network gaming with Age of Mythology: (click here

Important Note -

Try this tutorial first, and if it does not work for you then try AlienX’s suggest listed below in the comments section (thanks to AlienX!)
Background -
Tutorial: Internet Gaming with Age of Empires 3 and Hamachi

101-00-2.jpg

Age of Mythology typically defaults to the internal IP address rather than the Hamachi address during network play. This behaviour can prevent players from hosting multi-player games over Hamachi networks. Luckily there is a workaround …
Continue reading ‘Tutorial: Internet Gaming with Age of Mythology and Hamachi’

Bookmark this article: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • e-mail
  • Digg
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • Propeller
  • Facebook
  • Live



Further Research