Well, that number is from 2004 so I’m likely to have more ears by now and thanks to Watchlister I can tap into a large number of the conversations being had about my products and services. No, Watchlister is not surveillance software - it’s online reputation management. Do you have a brand, a company, a product or a service? Do you want to know what people online are saying? Then Watchlister is for you.

At a glance Watchlister is a mentions aggregator; though if you don’t bother getting closer you miss some of the best features of the service: better results. If you care about reputation management then you’re already using services like Google Alerts. The problem with Google Alerts is that you get pointed at the same mentions; Watchlister on the other hand, removes duplicate mentions from your results and reports so you rarely get pointed at the same mentions repeatedly. In addition to the automatic filtering Watchlister allows you to create filters based on url. With Watchlister’s easy to use interface you simply create a comma separated list of urls (both full and partial) and your “watchlist” results will no longer include mentions from that source. This is handy if you don’t want your own blog or sites you create content for tarnishing your mentions listing and frankly the feature is a must have if you are a prolific content producer.

Signing up for the service is easy and fast and free accounts allow for three watchlists. If you need more, up to 10, you can sign up for a pro account or if you’re a OS X user you can download the dashboard widget and. be upgraded for free. The OS X widget, like any other well written widget, is completely integrated into your dashboard and provides you with a quick view of your watchlists. One feature I found missing from the widget is the ability to edit watchlists directly without a visit to the website.

Overall, it’s a great tool and offers a lot of features. I’ll be doing a fuller review of the reporting interface, the website and the widget as I use the tool more to get a handle on my own brand and see how it does with brands that I’m already familiar with.

The first thing you will notice about the Chrome experience is the small footprint as a function of install time.  The installer weighs in at a mere 475KB and installs in under 15secs on a 64-bit Athlon™ X2 running Windows Vista™ Home Premium rig with 4GB of RAM.  The installer will immediately prompt you for permission to import details from Firefox (Internet Explorer users have to click the ‘Customize these settings’ link) and you’ll be off to the races from there… and what a start you’ll have.  Using a blank home (or start) page, Chrome is faster than Firefox by a noticeable margin at load time and navigation to this domain, defang.net,  and rendering the previous article content was faster by the same wide margin.  Note:  I don’t have any plug-ins loaded in Firefox during this.

But speed is not the only factor here.   Lets talk about the UI… or not since the UI itself leaves a lot to be desired.  First off there is the surreptitious movement of my bookmarks into a non-obvious but aptly named ‘Other Bookmarks’ button.  Things on my Firefox bookmarks tab/bar are where I expect them to be once imported into Chrome but it took more time that is should to find the rest of them… 5-8secs is too long to find my bookmarks in a new browser.

Lets also face the inglorious and shabby facts that the UI is just ugly out of the gate.  I disagree with the idea that the tabs are too large, I don’t believe they are any larger on a pixel-by-pixel comparison to Firefox 3.  In fact, I believe they are smaller and they do actually give the appearance of ‘tabs’ given the shape.  Plain aside, the UI has a very Zen feel and is uncluttered by the presence of Menu Bar and the icons have a very familiar & meaningful feel to them.  The current menu and options layout extend the Zen and there is little in the way fluff or filler.

Out of the box you’ll enjoy the use of Flash based experiences.   Whether this is due to a ‘built-in’ flash engine or leverage of the fact that you likely already have Flash installed on your machine has yet to be determined by this user but given the fact that I didn’t have to think about Flash support, I don’t really care which.  However, when I upgrade my dev workstation to Windows Server 2008 I’ll let you know how that works out.

Alas, with all the good there are some things I want to see sooner than later:

• An ad-blocker, though I believe this will slow the browser experience
• A compatible, or easy porting path, plug-in architecture so that using Firefox plug-ins is not an arduous task assiduously avoided.
• Better discrimination when importing from Firefox.  I don’t like that fact that my saved passwords were so easily imported.  Though maybe this is a Firefox problem… master password?
• An option to import content from Firefox or Internet Explorer that does not import password data.
• A better cleanup routine at unintinstall time or options to remove all content, i.e. cache, settings and the like.

In short, Google is off to a great start in this 0.2 release.  One place I feel this browser will prove most useful is in web appliances and kiosks where small and fast are what you want above all else.

No doubt there will be a ripple affect with this new addition, not to be confused with a new combatant in the browser wars - if there is still such a thing. Chrome is about innovation and taking the next steps. If Apple, Firefox and Microsoft truly see themselves as innovators then they will take a long hard look at the internals of Chrome and apply the best things to their own technology.

Though, what’s with the logo that makes me want to play a game of Simon?
 
Update 2008-09-03: Google Chrome does not have a built in Flash engine.  Uninstalling all the Flash support from my system left Chrome flash deprived.

From Evernote:

Remember everything.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

What does that really mean? In short, Evernote wants to be your mobile brain. Pretty ambitious of them since my brain has a lot stuff in it; granted, a good chunk of that will only win me bar bets or games of Trivial Pursuit… there’s work stuff too but NDA’s say ‘no’ about posting that sort of thing. At it’s core Evernote is essentially an online filesystem like MobileMe’s iDisk or Gmail’s GDrive, but with a few nice extras.

Thanks to Web 2.0 we have been graced with bookmarklets and our browsers have been more useful since. Evernote’s bookmarklet allows you to clip entire web pages (if there is no selection) or highlighted content as a taggable and indexable entry into your notebook. Once uploaded image content is passed through an OCR filter so that text within images, including support for handwritten text, is searchable just the same.

Your browser is not the only way to get content into your notebook. Since the release of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 firmware a mobile version of Evernote has been available. Granted, there is a Windows Mobile (for versions 5.x and 6.x) but being a non-Windows (except for gaming) user I won’t be speaking of the relative ability on that platform. The iPhone/iPod Touch client lets you create text, photo (active or passive) and audio notes to be uploaded into your notebook. The ability to take a snapshot and upload it (active) or use a photo from your library (passive) is a great feature when wanting to tag and store while in the real world. If you’re like me, constantly trying to remember the great wine you had while out to dinner or wondering what the title of a book was you saw but couldn’t, real-time capture justifies having the application alone. A simple snapshot of a cover, spine or label and you’re done. The beauty of the mobile client lay not in being able to tag and name a note in real-time but being able to capture and store. This is the use case that truly allows Evernote to gain a step towards being your mobile brain. Since notes are editable after they’ve been uploaded you can easily change tags or names later! While you can add names and tags using the mobile client, unless your thumbs have the conditioning of Olympic athletes, it takes to long.

When it comes to editing and creating notes while at the comfort of a computer you have two choices, a full-featured web client and equally robust OS X Leopard or Windows client… sorry Tiger users. With either the Mac or web client, Windows was not tested, changing the names and tags of notes was easy. Since note organization is tag based, if you’ve not gotten into the usage mindset you’ll have a slight learning curve. Though once organized there are many ways to view your notes; additionally, sharing notes is made easy by allowing you to publish your notes in publicly available notebooks as well as one click email generation with selected note content.

Unfortunately Evernote’s features are not all sunshine and roses. One of the drawbacks is the slowness of the OCR. Basic testing using typed text took a great number of minutes for even basic in image indexing to available; additionally, the OCR-ed text that was available to index searches was inconsistent. In some cases text that was illegible in the image was indexed while large clear blocks appeared to be ignored.

One major problem is no SSL encryption without Premium service. At the very minimum protecting the login process should be par for the course of any web application that expects to be successful. Seeing there is no encryption at login or during note transfer, a strong password is your only defense unless you shell out $5/month or $45/year. Frankly, this is the biggest ‘feature’ of the Premium service, I’m disappointed that this is this the best they could do on the ‘value added proposition’.

From Evernote:

What Evernote Premium users get

* Monthly upload allowance increased to 500MB*
* Stronger security through SSL encryption at login and note transfer
* Priority image recognition
* Premium support
* Ads removed from public notebooks

The other major issue is Google Checkout. I don’t want my shopping habits trended by the same company that is trending my search habits so I don’t use Google. Though, distrust aside, not including alternatives is lazy implementation. PayPal, for example, only differs in .9% + $0.10 in overall fees and it available to much wider user base as and has as many more funding options for those users.

Despite a few niggling problems with the server side features and a glaring omission, SSL, Evernote has a decent service going. If you need a place to upload and store varied content types, text, html, jpeg, gif, png, wav, mp3, and ink (Evernote format), and have them accessible from a number of machines or devices then Evernote is a way to go. The service has some clear advantages over would be competitors like MobileMe and Google even with no .evernote.com email address. Even though you don’t get much, IMHO, with the Premium service the lack of security otherwise is worth the $45/year if you can stomach Google.

I was chatting with a friend of mine via Skype and somehow Katy Perry came up at which time my boyfriend reminded me that she had a song called “I Kissed A Girl”. Considering that I hate Jill Sobule’s song of the same name I assumed it was a cover and recoiled from it immediately.

But I went out and found it on her MySpace page and gave it a listen… WOW! A great thumping bass line, a little nasty guitar riff (short and oh so sweet) and the voice of a dirty angel. I have to admit the song is infectious and hard not to dance or bop to while listening. This will undoubted make it to iPhone’s playlist for my morning commute and I don’t care who stares as I mouth the words!

Next to “You’re So Gay” I remembered why I like her right off. Welcome back to my playlist Katy, I’ve missed you.

While I have to laud the creativity of combining two attacks (what’s not to like about the ‘you lay them down and I pick them up approach’) to deliver payloads to users computers it does may me worry about what other kinds of cross browser attacks can be perpetrated. Another thing that worries me about this situation is the lackadaisical attitude adopted by Apple, they’ve pretty much decide to not treat it as a security issue. Though I wonder if part of that is the fact that it’s a coupling of a year old(?) bug in Microsoft code.

… according to Aviv Raff, a security researcher. Raff says he originally reported the IE flaw to Microsoft more than a year ago …

No matter what the cause for Apple appearing to drag feet Microsoft has quickly tried to distance itself from the bad PR that will arise by putting boots on the ground.

I’m curious to see how this plays out.

Edit 20080620_T1157:

According to the latest CERT mailing on ‘Current Activity’ it looks like Apple addressed the issue in the release of Safari v3.1.2 for windows. From the CERT notice:

Apple has released Safari v3.1.2 for Windows to address multiple
vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities include the following:
* an out-of-bounds memory read when handling BMP and GIF files that
may lead to the disclosure of memory contents
* an issue in the way Windows desktop handles executables, which may
allow arbitrary code execution
* an issue in the way Safari handles executables from websites in a
trusted Internet Explorer zone, which may lead to automatic
arbitrary code execution
* a memory corruption issue in the handling of JavaScript arrays by
WebKit that may lead to an unexpected application termination or
arbitrary code execution

Eighteen days, from the time this issue was made a ‘big screaming deal’ until now, is a long delay in delivering a fix to what a number of folks consider a huge security flaw. I suspect a bit of the focus was shifted to the WWDC preparations and keeping the items that were going to be announced on track. However, I would rather have a slip in the dates for new .MAC services and Apple Store goodies than wait for fixes to security issues… from any vendor.

I got a new laptop this week to replace the machine that had been on loan during my time at ITA Software. I have to admit, the only reason I chose the MacBook Pro when asked on my hire form was simply to have something different than what I had been used to… what I hadn’t counted on was loving the machine. It quickly became my primary workstation, favored above my truly powerful dual-core Opteron, 16Gb RAM, 2.5TB disk desktop running Linux (both Ubuntu and Fedora).

For a while, during the process of my leaving, I wondered what I would do sans-MacBook Pro. Well, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. I’m a happy camper.

• OS X 10.5.2
• Intel Core 2 Duo - 2.33 Ghz
• 2GB SDRAM
• Ati Radeon X1600 - 256MB
• 160GB SATA disk

I haven’t gotten all my applications set up but I have the important ones thus far.

Update: I’ve gotten most of my applications setup after about two weeks of near constant use and I really like it. I have this annoying issue with the keyboard freezing at odd times which I think is a resource collision with the wireless device since I don’t seem to have the issue when connected to a wired network… this damn 802.11n crap…

I don’t have any of the iLife products on my laptop and I’m OK with that. I will likely get iPhoto since I will want to have some of the stuff I’m working on with my Canon available to me when on the go.

I’m also looking to get a iMac (one of the Intel Core 2 Duo ones) so I will likely get iLife with that. I think, finally, I will really be able to do all the creative things I want to do on my site. I’ve never felt the urge to write or create media content sitting at my PC, but sitting at my Mac Book Pro it just flows out of me…

I wish I had done this sooner.

This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic. This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers.

You can also load this tool on your own server or laptop computer running Apache and PHP 4.3 or above. I couldn’t get the tool running at home due to the measurement servers that the tests depend being either offline or being blocked by Comcast or under very heavy load. Running the glasnost test suite now gives this response:

The connection to the measurement server timed out.

Testing from the hosted version also gives an error:

We are sorry. Our measurement servers are currently busy. Please try again later.

Canonical Ltd. and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), today announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based (http://openjdk.java.net) implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server and Desktop editions, furthering the promise of Sun’s open source Java technology initiative.

In addition, the NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (http://www.netbeans.org) is being delivered as part of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release and Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several Sun x86 systems.

With this announcement, developers using Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8.04 LTS can now count on free software implementations based on Java technology as a standard element of an open source developer stack that they can leverage to build the next generation of web-based applications for both consumers and enterprises. In addition this announcement opens the door for numerous Java technology-based offerings to be included in the core of these GNU/Linux distributions.

All I have to say is: About-Fucking-Time!

The automated attack takes advantage to the fact that Microsoft’s IIS servers allow generic commands that don’t require specific table-level arguments. However, the vulnerability is the result of poor data handling by the sites’ creators, rather than a specific Microsoft flaw. In other words, there’s no patch that’s going to fix the issue, the problem is with the developers who failed follow well-established security practices for handling database input. The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user’s PC.

Ignoring corporate spin-doctoring, there seems to be plenty of blame to go around."

The best part of the Wired article is that they have one of my favorite xkcd panel in it. The Hackademix article has a very good write-up.