Shamed

I am shamed. I’ve let this blog slip in the midst of coming back to the real world of Uni.

A week without something useful going up! Terrible… *stands in corner*

Fact is I’ve been experimenting with so many different things that nothing cogent has come out of it yet.

Some of the things I’ve been working on:

• Virtual Lab- Walk through of the setup and playing with of a virtual computer lab using VirtualBox including Windows, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, and Debian servers/clients
• Write up of my automated downloading system and the scripts associated with it
• Exploration of Setup of a VPN using the WRT54G or my MyBook
• A first-timers walk through of setting up Google Adwords campaigns

And somewhere in between all that I’ve been working and getting back to Uni…

Joy.

Online Media Marketing

‘Social Media’ has been lauded as the be-all and end all of the future of marketing, advertising, society, and general human decency.

There is no doubt that Social Media has taken over our connected lives. And while I don’t doubt this, I often feel that this is taken as a sign that we can abandon the so called ‘old-school’ of marketing and advertising (In this case ‘Old-School’ includes the Web 1.0 practise of advertising on Search and Comparison sites).

There are 100-and-1 different ways that viral ads, social apps, and a-like that take advantage of the six-degrees-of-separation effect and other social constructs to get all of old-media’s advertising impact with none of the overheads (billboards, tv-time, etc.)

Not all industries can appropriately take advantage of Social Media marketing, but that doesn’t mean they can’t create a random viral video with nothing to do with their product or service and tag their name on at the end, although the effectiveness of these is in question.

But if you still think that its the best idea for your business, check out this comparison (data borrowed from mad.co.uk)

As can be seen, search engines (54%) and comparison sites (43%) are given much greater attention than social networking adverts (28%), and email is even worse (22%).

Does this mean businesses should abandon the inroads made into social media advertising? I don’t think so.

Internet advertising as a whole flattened the playing field; I attended an IETNI Lecture on Entrepreneurship by Chris Williams who discussed his one-man-band use of Google Adwords to dramatically increase useful traffic to his site by over 300% through the use of Pay-Per-Click advertising on his very niche market (specalist electronic design) for a cost of about £1 a day.

Just a decade ago, advertising within niche markets was done through trade publications. I certainly havent contacted any vendors that I saw ads from in Trade publications, and I can’t think of anyone I know telling me ‘I found them in ZX Spectrum Users Monthly’; and Chris’s losses from that particular form of marketing venture were, as you could expect, significant.

Now, there are dozens of tools that allow you to pick words that directly relate to your business and exploit those in Adwords (other pay-per-click advertising providers are availiable)  campaigns with the minimal risk; you only pay if they make it to your site, then its up to you.

But I guess thats really the crux of the difference between Social Media marketing and Search/Comparison marketing; Search/Comparison marketing gets the preverbial foot-in-the-door, gets your brand out there into the ‘right’ peoples faces. Facebook/Twitter/Bebo/Myspace/Digg et al. provide a higher level of consumer interaction (eg, Burger King’s ill fated but very successful Facebook Campaign)

When deciding where to spend the hard-to-come-by advertising budget, consider what you want; and to make it easier, heres my thoughts…

• Don’t/SEO: Search Engine Optimisation can often provide sufficient rates of return on investment so that its fairly unnessary to pay for anthing else within the Search and Comparison fields. If you enter three words of your businesses ‘activities’ and your in the top 5, you have little to worry about with regards to Search revenue.
• Google Adwords: The first jumping-off point, with the least rish, most control, and widest (or narrowest if you select) reach of any of the other services. While it should never be the sole means of online-advertising, its a good cornerstone to start off with, and provides you with a wealth of analytics that make it easy to optimise
• Youtube Adwords: Only open to the US at the minute, but all the advantages of mass market TV advertising, with the specificity of Adwords, and added interactivity. If you’re a very visual business this is definatly a great idea.
• Yahoo Overture: AdWord’s less-popular cousin. If you’re appearing in Google’s first-page results, but not in Yahoo’s, consider using this to spread your bets.
• Facebook Advertising: This one is definatly a judgement call on the part of businesses. Facebook can be a huge boon to revenue, but requires an angle. Personally, I bundle the ‘vanilla’ facebook advertising in with Yahoo and Google as PPC or PPM. What I think is really going to kick off are
• Facebook Pages: Car Salesmen tell me “People buy cars with faces”, so give your business a social ‘face’, that can also act as a nexus for consumer discussion over your product (risky but worth it) aswell as a viral jump off point (“Joe Bloggs is a fan of your Business”), not to mention the ability to have overtly public conversations with consumers.
• Twitter:Coming out of left field with no real analogue, Twitter could be Huge for advertisers in terms of interactivity; The saying ‘the customer is always right’ only makes sense if you give the customer a chance to speak and be listened to. Twitter, unlike Facebook, makes the conversation much more personal; when you reply to a customers complaint or praise directly and personally, instead of from a press release, it will raise that consumers view of your business to an almost friendly relationship instead of a faceless economic entity.
• Youtube (Viral): We’ve all seen them. Some of them are absolute genius garnering millions of views or just plain insulting garning the scorn of thousands. Use with extreme caution, and don’t make it major factor in your overall branding.

To wind this up; Social Media is Social, keep it that way. Focus on using social networking sites to improve relations with potential / existing consumers, use Search/Comparison to pluck the ‘maybe’s and to push individual products or services. Its less ‘catch and release’ more ‘catch and cultivate’

Tags: marketing, ppc, seo, social media

Are we on the brink of War?

Recent events in the cyber-security world have got me feeling paranoid. Between Estonia, Georgia, and the ever-increasing focus on Chinese cyber-political-warfare, geo-political entities are starting to realise that the whole ‘lets stockpile enough weapons to blow up the world enough times for the number to be rendered pointless‘ may not have been the best plan.

China has caught everyone off-guard with its recent, albeit ‘hush hush’, displays of force (while not entirely getting off scott-free), and we should probably be alot more afraid of a cyber war than of flaming pants or security-crossed lovers.

I think there has been something ignored in this most recent spate of Chinese infiltration, is that if there is a bomb on a plane, or at an airport terminal, it blows up, theres horror, theres death and distruction, but if you’re a few miles down the road, your safe, but probably in need of a fresh set of briefs.

This is the list of companies and industries identified as potential victims of the Chinese attacks….

• Google
• Yahoo
• Adobe
• Dow Chemical
• Northrop Grumman
• Symantec
• RackSpace

Just think about that for a second. Dow Chemical, nice big conglomerate of manufacturing and government supply. Nothing to go wrong there, right?

Northrup Grumman

Designer, systems integrator and manufacturer of military aircraft, defense electronics, precision weapons, commercial and military aerostructures.

Yeah, nothing to worry about there…

If you’re on this page, then I probably don’t need to explain the implications of having the worlds biggest source of knowledge ever, one of the most popular network security vendors, and the biggest email provider for the non-web-literate (i.e most vulnerable to phishing attacks) compromised. But I will anyway.

Unless you’re a Schneiner-level security guru, these companies probably have, between then, more information and control over your life than you would like to have given away to anyone, let alone a hostile foreign dictatorship.

There’s two potential actions: Shut Down or manipulation.

Its at this point that I actually want to get back into the security field. Cus frankly, if your not scared, you should be.

Update:TechCrunch has a great article on the financial cost of Google changing its previously politically permissive stance in China

Tags: hacking, networking, security, software, terrorism

Peter Mandelson… TV Producer, Spin-doctor, Politician, Tosser

For a man who’s title is currently Baron Mandelson, of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, educated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and is hotly tipped to become a major part of the Lisbon-Treaty-generated-unelected-cou-detat-european-super-parliment, you’d think the power-addicted, peace-process screwing, ’shreud loaning‘ rat would leave well enough alone.

You’d be wrong.

Under the Digital Economy Bill, Peter… Sorry, BARON Mandelson has been given unlimited powers to extend penalties to (suspected, theres no real trials) illegal filesharers or copyright violators online. Similar to the much discussed and eventually culled french ‘three-strikes’ rule on filesharing (that Mr Sarkosy would fail), its once…twice…three times a bitch, as £50,000 fine would fall through your letter box (to be noted, this is per household, so thats  one movie for mum, a e-book for dad, and a tune for Ann, and poor little timmy foots the bill).  But Peter ‘The Baron’ Mandelson isnt done yet.

His powers, under this bill, are extended to that he can appoint whoever the hell he likes to keep an eye on you and your internet usage to catch right’s infringers (i’d say they should look inward for right’s infringement…) , and oust you from the network. No Trial, no Jury, hell, as far as I can read, you dont even need to know you’re under suspicion until your under-arrest. Then you don’t need to know exactly what your charged with, then you have no realistic way of knowing what potential punishment ‘The Baron’ will cook up.

And I mean ‘cook up’. In the bill there is no limit on fine amount or potential jail-time.

The icing on the cash-filled cake is that the the Government have already assured it’s success, by stating that ISP’s who are caught-not-catching copyright infringers will get (at least) £250,000 fines.

This kind of racketeering is shameful and pointless, and to add insult to injury to the internet-generation, the bill says nothing about providing computers for schools, guaranteeing broadband access for disenfranchised families and low-income areas, increasing governmental openess, adoption of Open Source Software in the public sector, cracking down on spams, scams, or credit card fraud. Nothing. Not a bit.

With such pressing matters already pushing Britian’s economy into the under-flab of international competition, what does this bill concern itself with? Ofcom is told to ‘observe’ more (umm, i thought that was their point?), Channel 4 gets public-service broadcast responsibilities (yay, more crap!), and expanding mobile broadband investment (because that’s going to be great for service in already served areas, such as LONDON).

And to finish the whole shambels off, a nice little ditty on compulsory age ratings on all video games…

To quote Cory Doctorow

why is it acceptable for the government to declare that some forms of artwork have to be mandatorily labelled as to their suitability for kids? And why is it only some media? Why not paintings? Why not novels? Why not modern dance or ballet or opera?

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Tags: economy, internet, politics, society

Delayed Post: LENOVO ROCKS

I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.

From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating.

About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100″ I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.

That was on a Friday at around 4:30. By 10am Tuesday, a fresh and shiny harddrive was on my desk.

Something that I should point out is that I got this machine from Lenovo America, with no extra fancy warrenties or anything, and they STILL gave me a great quality of service. I dont want to come across as ‘glowing’ or anything, but my next machine after this is going to be a Lenovo.

My only qualm about the experience was that there is no realistic way to ‘restore to factory settings’ for a blank drive on a machine with on Disk Drive  but I wanted to try out Windows 7 RC anyway and installed it from USB. But thats for a different post.

Tags: hard drive, HDD, laptop, lenovo

On Education and Employability

Yeah, i know, “What does a guy who hasnt even graduated yet and is in a placement job have to say about education and employability?”, and usually i would agree with the sentiment. But the times they are a-changing.

The world, especially for current or incumbant students, is very uncertain. I was lucky, when i was in first year i already had the connections to secure a job close to my Uni.

And thats the point.

School, College and Uni teach you alot. Maxwell propagation equations, linear algebra,Von-Neumann Architectures, Procedural Syntax, Accounting, Presentation Skills, Video Editing, 3D Design, Employment law, Snell’s Law, Information Theory, Network Analysis, Probability Theory, French, German, Latin, Beawolfe, The Iliad, Shakespeare, The Gas Equations, Punnet Square Genetics, Newtons Laws. This is just what I can remember off the top of my head of what I’ve learnt from these Institutions.

Which is great! Alot of these have very valid (and in the case of probability theory, profitable) applications in the real world. But thats what the employment-university-school agreement has been for about 20 years, Employers keep saying “this is what we want” to universities, universities say “this is what we expect” to schools, and school say “this is your homework”.

But the world has got alot smaller in those 20 years. I am currently working with Englishmen, Frenchmen, Polish, Swedish, Finnish, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, And a massive number of Indians. That’s alot of competition, wether its for the jobs themselves, or promotions or anything else for that matter.

Intelligence and “Book Smarts” will only get someone so far. There comes a point where you need an “in”. Whether it be a vast knowledge of football statistics (definitely not me) or a vast movie collection (slightly me), these extra attributes (i refuse to call the qualifications) make it easier on a personal level to get along with people, and its an unfortunate fact of human psychology that we favor people we like, and we like people we get along with, and we get along with people we have things in common with.

So Thought one is “Know as much seemingly random bits of information and anecdotes as possible because you never know when it will help you”

But before you get a conversation with someone, you need an introduction.

Sites like myspace, and bebo, and facebook have swamped the student/youth psyche; Employers know this. Google may be your friend when your looking for the best pizza place in Dublin, but its definitely not your friend when you say or do anything atall like a “student”.

Or a human for that matter.

Facts are;  recruiters are busy and have to make snap yes/no decisions, google is fast, google’s page rank is based on relevancy, if your facebook page is the only relevant site to your name, it’ll be the first thing on the list.

So, two options. Stop facebooking (which facebook makes VERY VERY difficult) or, do your best to put your best foot forward, in an online sense.

This leads me to thought two; Personal Brands are the newest and most elusive qualifications now. Blogs, forum posts, et al, all contribute to your online image. I’m not saying be a saint and never do anything bad, I’m just saying do enough good things that the good things come up first on the rankings.

Like this blog for instance! Recruiters don’t need to know about your personal life, so either keep it completely professional, or keep the personal stuff to anecdotes.

Finally, point three. While Facebook took students and young people by storm over the course of a few years, the professionals arnt neanderthals either.

At just over 7 years old, LinkedIn has been around long enough to be comparable to Facebook, and while MySpace and Bebo and Facebook exploded into the media and the public mindset, Linkedin smoldered and bubbled away is the much slower moving, but much more profitable world of professional headhunting and recruiting.

You dont want to friend your Professors on facebook (and if you do, its not for professional reasons), but with LinkedIn, you can have a real professional Internet presence that isn’t going to be haunted by pictures of you with a pumpkin; and as you float (or storm, or whatever verb is preferable) through your career, you can collect contacts, and receive recommendations from past employers.

Think of it as a google-indexed, globally visible, context relevant CV and resume, where you can be part of groups that are relevant to your interests and specialities, and if a recruiter is looking for someone like you, they can find you.

To wrap it all up, with contacts and connections, you can generally hear about vacancies and opportunities as they hit presses, if not before. Giving you, with your massive collection of small talk and (at least) equally massive technical abilities, a leg up over everyone else who’s just as good as you.

Good Luck

Tags: career, Education, networking

Hacking Weekend

So, I’ve been experimenting over the weekend with Backtrack 4. My… Lord….

Times have changed, it used to be that if you wanted to mess with WEP you have to go thru a dozen intermediate stages. wesside-ng makes life so much simpler.30 minutes, fully automated.

What i had done previously was manual airodump-ng, aireplay-ng with arp attacks, and then shifting the caps onto my big box to crack inside of 10 seconds, pity is the packet capture on a quiet network can take a day.

Also, if you cant be assed with the whole Backtrack thing. the whole thing can be swiped from the subversion repo

svn co http://trac.aircrack-ng.org/svn/trunk/ aircrack-ng

Its been a long day.

Tags: Aircrack, desktop, linux, remote, software, Wireless

EEEpc note

Ok, got the 900, sorry this blog is very very late

Pros:
AMAZINGLY small, you wont believe how small it is until you use one
The keyboard is just managable
the Webcam is amazing quality when it works
More responsive than i imagined
The Extra 16GB SSD really helps
Wonderfully fast bootups (If you never plug it in to any accessories (other than charger) set the Boot Booster enabled under the BIOS, trims a second or two)

Cons:
Battery life less than expected
Wireless strength depends on the driver you use
Webcam and Webcam-mic not fully functional (currently) under Ubuntu 8.04

What I’ve done:
Managed to get a dual boot system between the Xandros OS and Ubuntu 8.04 by resizing my home partition on the 16GB SSD and installing in there (dont bother with a swap drive)
Grub works wonderfully and straight out of the install i still have both the standard and recovery boot options thru xandros.

As for install, use this
And for tweaking use this BUT to fix the sound you have to go back in and re fix alsa (the 700 tweak doesnt work for the 900)

• Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and change the line “options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-dig”to “options snd-hda-intel model=auto”
• ALSO, run the following command:

sudo alsactl store

• Run:

sudo alsactl restore

I think that was all i had to do for basic operations.

Also got Kismet and the Aircrack-ng suites working with a bit of giggery pokery with an aim of stealing my dads old GPS and getting gpsmap to work properly, My personal recommendation is to install both from source, in the case of aircrack, you need to go into the folder that was built and make sure that all of the generated binary files are copied to /usr/bin or /usr/sbin depending on how paranoid you are (I’m not) because the install script doesnt install airmon, aireply, ivstools, packetforge, and a few other things i cant remember off the top of my head

As for the kismet source, i use source=madwifi_ag,atho,atheros and instead of relying on kismet to open the card as monitor, i use airmon and wlanconfig to kill the other interfaces first, eg

sudo wlanconfig ath0 destroy
sudo airmon-ng start wifi0
kismet (i did the suidinstall of kismet so there is no need for sudo. for a single user system the suidinstall is probably easiest)

I cant really talk about the performance of aircrack because truth be told i wouldnt have the patience for a 900MHz to get thru that kinda work, i collect as many packets as i can and get my dual core 3GHz 64bit system to do the dirty work (also usually do this over ssh if i can get an alternate connection, am working on a system where the ivs file can be emailed and an email reply will be sent back, with either the key, or “MEGAFAIL”)

Anyway
Battery life. thats a joke. Its less that the 701 my dad has. yeah, yeah, i know, its more powerful, bigger screen, that wud be fine if it wasnt just the UK getting the kneecapped batteries:

List of countries getting 5200mAh battery:TW,HK,USA,CAN,IT
4400mAh:UK

If anyone is reading this please go to http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=27140 and make your voice heard, cus i want the battery that was handed out to reviewers! (the forum explains it better than me)

Tags: 8.04, Aircrack, eee, GPS, Hardy Heron, Kismet, linux, Ubuntu, Wireless

Asus EEEpc

Just off the phone with Clove saying that my shiny new black eee 900 is winging its way to my homestead, which unfortunatly is not wer i am, but at least i wont be losing any time for revision (read: have any other reasons not to study)

I have to say I’m really disappointed with Asus’s attitude to they’re british customers regarding the battery issue and i really cant say any more about it except that were paying above the board globally, and not getting an equivalent product and an even less equivilant service.

Nevertheless I’ll be installing Ubuntu as soon as i get my grubby little mits on it, and will hopefully get some pictures, maybe actually get off my ass and do a how to. Might install an internal bluetooth mod aswell…..

On a brighter note, i really have to say Clove have been fantastic, i ordered mine about a month and a half ago and called me back the next day telling me that they were looking at a mid may delivery date, and then called me when the white eee’s came in stock at the beginning of the month, i pointed out that i had previously changed my order to the black, and they were great about it. Highly recommended! Not expensive atall either!

www.clove.co.uk

DISCLAIMER : no i dont work for them

Tags: 8.10, eee, hardware, Hardy Heron, linux, Ubuntu