PSA: Stop watching teh pron (social engineering and you)

It's a little know fact but watching porn on your computer will lead to viruses. But sadly this is not the most common infection site. It's all to common for users to casually click on every single link on the internet. Worse yet, they have no idea what their clicking on.

But let me back up. Why do I care what you click on? Because I'm your friendly neighborhood IT man. When you go pushing through pages like their going out of style your undoubtedly going to walk away from it with an itchy biting feeling, and in a few days or weeks end up with a bill from your IT friend.

The web is not your friend. The web is full of dirty tricks and garbage specifically designed to trick you into clicking on it. It's damn near an epidemic how bad things are, and only getting worse.

As much as I hate AntiVirus software, you need it on a PC. But you don't have to pay for it. Their are free, open source AV programs. Just ask your IT friend for a solid recommendation.

But please before you even do that, do yourself a favor and think before you click!

The good; the bad, and why verified backups are important

Last night I was posting a few links of pictures on a QA site that I often visit when I realized that my house address was clearly posted on my website. While I normally am not huge on my personal privacy; as I clearly post picture of my house and family on the open internet without a care. But I thought I was paying attention to not post my address up there too. But there is was in black and white. So like a good person I edited out my address. This is where it all went wrong. Apparently my TinyMCE did not like the horrible HTML that was also in my post. So it cleaned it up for me and removed all of the good information about me house that I was trying to save all along.

Now what

How can I get this back? Epiphany, I got it! I keep a history of all my posts so if I ever screw one up I can go back, Wiki style. Nope. That’s only for blog entries, not image galleries. Time to restore the database to 5 minutes ago. First. Lets take a clean backup just in case it goes wrong.

My backup plan

Currently I take a full backup 3 times a week. I also ship transaction logs. I can do a point in time to 5 minutes ago with no problem, right? Wrong.

The Bad

It seems I never changed my backup plan to coincide with the removal of a drive where my backups were pointed. My last full backup was November 21^st 2011. This hurts.

The Good

I have a nightly job that cleans up old transaction logs from older than 4 days ago. This nightly job keeps running like a champ. This is also where I shake my head. This is bad too.

In the wash

Left with a backup from November, and 4 days of transaction logs I quickly find that I’m not able to do a restore. Time to restore into another database and copy the missing information over to the working database. Thankfully this is old information and I have it captured in my existing backup. I now have another clean backup and 4 days to get my nightly backups running, before I’m left in the same position of not having all my logs.

Verified backups are important!

Blogging with Mobile Client Apps

In my quest to rewrite my very own website I've been wondering a few things. What use is it to have a mobile client app that you use to write your blog posts? Your already mobile, why not use a refined web app to do it? Or why not use a desktop app like Windows Live Writer?

My thinking is to have more of an overview, or admin mobile app. Approve and moderate comments. Look at page statistics. Then after all that, maybe have a portion of the app devoted to jotting off a quick blog post.
Why do I think about this? Because I've used the blogger mobile app to write a post.

It sucked.

Why did it suck? Because cell phones are *not* designed to write long form. Anything more that a couple hundred characters at a shot and the screen size inhibits your abilities to proof read and check to be sure your not just rambling on.

But why make my personal site have any client app at all? Because it is designed to be shared multi-user environment, with both shared and separate spaces. My current site hosts 8 people (ooohhh 8 whole people). The flaw in my current site is the lack of separation. Plus the new site will be honed for many people including shared contributions. But all of this is topic for another post.

Maybe I can get some feedback from people on this though: Why have a mobile client app to write blog posts?