Posted via email from Eric Jacksch’s Posterous

One hour into #journchat tonight, twitter died.  I love twitter, and I can only imagine the load their systems must handle.  I’m not sure I could design a system to handle that load. But going down on a bunch of PRs and journalists is bound to get them attention.

Users are fickle — as fast as Twitter has risen, it won’t take many of these to make them vulnerable to an alternative.

How will this impact your business?

I’ll be writing a weekly security column, as well as features on multimedia (including photography) and some product reviews.

TLP is currently in a “shakedown” phase lining up contributors and working on the web site and publishing platform.  The official launch is scheduled for Nov 1, 2008.  See you there!

Source: CWTA

I’ve started migrating my photos other there, and in a few weeks you’ll be able to order prints of some of my work.  Stay tuned!

Monitor Today also ran a more detailed article on how the system works.

“About 57% of small companies don’t think they need a formal plan to secure their data, and 61% say they never sought information on properly protecting their files, according to a March, 2007, survey by the National Federation of Independent Business and Visa USA.”

If you’re in Ottawa, I’m speaking to small business owners on managing information security risks next week, and I’m told there is still some space. Event information is here.

The Privacy Commisioner of Canada has a brief yet thought provoking presentation on social networking that’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Earlier today a friend contacted me through MSN and I found her text very difficult to read.  Being far sighed and having a pair of year-old Samsung SyncMaster monitors on my desk about 18 inches from my face, that’s not a problem that I’m used to.  Since everything else on my desktop was crisp, the problem was obviously my friend’s choice of font and colour.  The lines forming the letters were an inconsistent weight, on a bit of a slant (although not quite italicized), and small.

Now it is certainly possible that my friend has a different version of the font installed on her computer and that it might look fine there.  It’s possible that Microsoft released a different font with Vista, and that it therefore may look different on my system.  It’s also possible that my friend’s monitor is smaller, runs at a different resolution, has a smaller dynamic range, or her PC is set to larger font sizes.  But I just have to ask why, in a real-time communications tool, Microsoft even allows the other person to choose the font that appears on my screen.  I’m all for expressing one’s individuality, but the font on my screen should be what I want to read. 

But what’s more interesting is that my friend insisted that she hadn’t changed anything in quite some time, and I didn’t recall ever finding her text hard to read before.

Now you might be thinking I should visit an optometrist or that something is wrong with my montor, and my friend suggested both.  In fact, I even went as far as to check that I was still running at native resolution (1280×1024), 32-bit, a fast refresh rate, I quickly pulled up a photo test image, etc.  Absolutely nothing wrong with my system.

So I switched to another computer and the text was still red, but the font was normal and easy to read!  What was different?  That machine had SimpLite on it.  Then the proverbial light went on.

SimpLite, by default, changes the font colour to tell you if the communication is secured or not.  Apparently, when it does so, it also causes MSN to use the default font.  In other words, it no longer allows the other person to determine what font appears on your screen.  Security for your conversation and your eyes.

Kudos to the folks at Secway — I’ll be buying your “Pro” package for $25 shortly to say thanks for protecting me from evesdropping, application developers that don’t think, and friends who make bad font choices.

If you’re having trouble separating the wheat from the chaff, there’s one good question to ask:

“Do you support 64-bit Microsoft Vista?”

If the answer is no, you’re probably not dealing with a serious player.

64-bit processors have been around more than 5 years, and there’s a good chance that you have one in the computer you’re reading this on, even though you’re most likely running a 32-bit operating system. There are a few reasons that the 64-bit version of Windows XP never really caught on, most notably because the major benefit of moving to a 64-bit operating system is the amount of RAM it can access. Back when I built my Windows XP desktop several years ago, 2 GB of RAM was more than I needed, and it was expensive. But today RAM is cheap: 4 GB of DDR2 memory is about $150. Window XP, like any 32-bit operating system, can address a maximum of 4 GB of memory, but if you install it you’ll find that you only have about 3GB of memory for applications. 64-bit operating systems, on the other hand, can use as much memory as you can get onto your motherboard.

Realistically, if you only use your PC for the web, word-processing, and email, 2 GB memory is enough, even with Vista. However, if you like to play games, edit video from your camcorder, or do a lot of digital photography, the extra few bucks to move up to 4 GB is worthwhile. And, as memory prices continue to drop, more of us will be loading up machines with 8 to 16 GB memory within a few years. A few years ago, 64-bit was the cutting edge, but today it’s going mainstream, and software vendors who don’t support 64-bit Vista are declaring themselves dinosaurs.

For most software manufacturers, supporting Vista 64 is quite simple because properly written 32-bit applications run fine. So when you read, “We don’t support 64-bit Vista”, what most are really saying is that they won’t invest the time to test their application on it. Device drivers are a different story, but assuming that proper development practices have been followed, moving a device driver from 32-bit to 64-bit is not that difficult.

These vendors are playing a numbers game, assuming that most of their customers won’t care. And, a few years ago, the vast majority didn’t, and those who wanted to couldn’t, creating a classic chicken-and-egg scenario. But times are changing, and those vendors who think they can get away without supporting 64-bit Vista are in for a nasty surprise as 64-bit moves toward achieving a critical mass.

I recently found a good example: Digidesign (owned by Avid), is a well-known player in semi-professional audio recording. You’d think that anyone working in that space would want a high-end machine with lots of RAM. However, not only does Digidesign not support 64-bit Vista, they even have an article instructing customers on how to build a dual-boot machine. I’ll give them credit for helping customers with old software, and for having the balls to suggest that customers install XP on their Vista machine so they can use them. However, two of their major competitors, PreSonus and Cakewalk support 64-bit Vista, so it’s only a matter of time until Digidesign starts losing market share.

There are plenty of other examples out there, and I’ll try to post them as they come along. In the meantime, the message to software vendors needs to be clear: Support Vista-64 or die.

Sounds like I didn’t do too bad despite the cold I’ve been fighting for almost a month now…

The interview I did last month is now availible as a podcast at:

http://www.cfra.com/audio/podcast/tcs/tcs-2007-02-10.mp3