So the other week, I get a call from a friend who was having some “computer issues”, I’ll refer to him as “Stubborn PC User”, I of course offer to help. The symptoms were as follows:

My Suggestion to him was go with a mac - but sigh - those windows users who prefer to rebuild their PC’s for much less than buying a mac - are so stubborn!

So we swap out the graphics card - the obvious right? Wrong! This didn’t fix it. Apparently, the graphics card was not the issue, we decided to check the ram - but Stubborn PC User decides he wants to rebuild his entire computer and go faster. Alright I said, let’s do it.

$850 later, new motherboard - ASUS M2N-32, AMD 5600 Dual Core CPU, 4 Gigs of Ram DDR400, GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card and a brand new licensed Windows XP Pro. The problem still exists! Damnit I say!! There could only be one thing left - the Monitor - a Gateway HDMI Monitor ARGH!

We get past it and I recommend he buy a HDMI TV and use it to run both PC and TV in his room. Great Idea, so off we go to Frys to look at options. The TV Option works best, price wise and so he goes home dreaming of building this amazing PC.

The next morning he pulls his PC out to the living room and hooks it up to his current 65″ HDMI TV and sends me the following photo:

Moral of the Story:
Windows Users are Horn Dogs.

I love to poke holes in articles on top web sites and magazines, sometimes it’s a tough find but today I hit a jackpot (literally - won over 18k) but that’s another story. My current article challenge is the Forbes.com story titled “Apples for the Army“.

The Term “Top Secret” should be implied

Forbes.com
…you wouldn’t expect the U.S. Army to be much of a customer. Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping hackers won’t expect it either.

Linux-Girl
A Hacker is perhaps, one of the most intelligent species of computer technicians in the world. I can guarantee that many of them read Forbes.com on a regular basis. So to assume that hackers, will not expect the addition of Mac’s in the army is quite amusing. They should’ve chosen to release this story to Parenting Magazine if they had hopes of keeping it a secret.

Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Forbes.com
Wallington, a division chief in the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That’s because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military’s computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says

Linux-Girl
Quietly Working while leaking information to Forbes.com! I’m assuming the Army IT department has taken into consideration that should their mainframe be compromised, it wouldn’t matter what manufacturer you buy a computer from. The entire system is down.

Turning a Negative into a Positive

Forbes.com
Though Apple machines are still pricier than their Windows counterparts, the added security they offer might be worth the cost, says Wallington. He points out that Apple’s X Serve servers, which are gradually becoming more commonplace in Army data centers, are proving their mettle. “Those are some of the most attacked computers there are. But the attacks used against them are designed for Windows-based machines, so they shrug them off,” he says.

Linux-Girl
Well no-duh Sherlock! If only Wallington would step up and believe what he’s saying, his quotes make him sound like some “wisher” hoping that his comments will not come back to haunt him. Then he sits back and he gives testimony on one of the best reasons any major entity should consider when purchasing computers or servers.

Someone Tell Charlie Miller to Die in a Fire already

Forbes.com
The marketing pitch that Apples are inherently more secure than PCs is also largely a myth, contends Miller, who gained notoriety for remotely hacking the iPhone last August. He points to data gathered by software security firm Secunia, which showed that Apple had to patch nearly five times as many security flaws in its software over the past year as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) had to patch in Windows. Apple’s Quicktime player alone, he says, was patched 34 times. “I love my Macs, but in terms of security, they’re behind the curve, compared to Windows,” Miller warns.

Linux-Girl
Let me make this very clear Mr. Miller - the fact that Apple ACTUALLY patches it’s security flaws on a regular basis should be reason enough to go Mac over PC. Microsoft doesn’t patch as there wasn’t competition, and if a few computers went bad due to MSFT’s ignorance, it was no loss to them. Now that critical mass is ready to hit the Apple Shelves, you can be assured, that MSFT will jump up and take notice that perhaps - being more aggressive with their security flaws will make a difference in their revenue shares.

I’m not sure why Miller continues to stand behind such a flawed comment - perhaps because it was his original quote when asked by MSFT to perform the study. What Miller tends to ignore is that MSFT does not Patch regularly - a point that should be made clearly to everyone on a Windows PC.

The most intelligent paragraph in this Article

Forbes.com
But the Army’s Jonathan Broskey stands by his claims of Apple’s security: He says the high number of patches to Apple software is a good sign–evidence of the large community of developers actively working to tighten Unix programs and eliminate bugs. Nonetheless, like any responsible IT department, he says the Army’s Apple program will closely monitor security updates to Mac-specific programs. “The Army’s no different from any corporation,” he says.

Linux-Girl
A few good Apples in the Military keeps me feeling much safer on US Ground. Go Army!

Over at MacNN there’s an article on a study conducted by King Research, interesting enough, it shows that IT Professionals are preferring Mac over installing Vista.

I’m not a fan of PC’s but for myself, installing Vista is such a lame excuse to move to Mac. As an IT Professional myself, Linux System Administrator, I can find no positive reasons to utilize a PC other than for the displaying of web pages on Internet Explorer vs Firefox and Safari.

Here’s a specific IT reason to utilize a Mac vs a PC. On the day I received my Mac, I opened the pretty box, plugged it into an outlet, turned on the power, and immediately I was connected to the internet with Mac’s Airport Wireless Utility, and working directly on my hosting servers. The Mac terminal allows me easy access to SSH which is primarily where I am 80% of the day. On Windows, I would have had to sit there for hours first configuring my wireless internet connection, then installing countless software to connect to and work with my servers.

I have not yet tried, or even attempted any parts of Vista, but I’m going to be honest. If it takes me 2 minutes to get up and running at optimal performance on my Mac, why would I ever choose to spend countless hours on setting up a PC?

Messing around with Dojo has been great fun, sometimes frustrating with the latest 0.9 Dojo release and the lack of documentation. But, after much picking at my script, I was able to create simple forms, send them and receive information through Dojo’s xhrGet function.

Include the following code within the <head> and </head> tags of your document.

<code>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path to dojo/dojo.js” djConfig=”parseOnLoad:true”></script>
</code>

Include the form widgets you would like to use. I have the basics below:

<code>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
dojo.require(”dijit.form.TextBox”);
dojo.require(”dijit.form.CheckBox”);
dojo.require(”dijit.form.Button”);
</code>

Don’t forget the parser

<code>
dojo.require(”dojo.parser”);
</code>

Now for our main function
<code>
function getFormData() {
var kw = {
url: “/path to your php page handler/pagename.php”, //Explicit Path - leaving out the leading / seemed to break the code
load: function(data){
dojo.byId(’formdata’).innerHTML = data; // where do you want your data to be returned.
},
error: function(data){
alert(”An error occurred: ” + data); //in case of error
},
timeout: 2000,
form: “login” //what form
};
dojo.xhrGet(kw);
}
</code>

A Simple Form:

<code>
<div id=”formdata”>
<form name=”login” id=”login” method=”GET”>
<label for “user_name”>User Name</label>
<input id=”user_name” type=”text” name=”user_name”
dojoType=”dijit.form.TextBox” />

<label for “password”>Password</label>
<input id=”password” type=”password” name=”password”
dojoType=”dijit.form.TextBox” />

<button dojoType=”dijit.form.Button” onclick=”sendFormData()”>
Submit
</button>
</form>
</div>
</code>

Create your PHP Page:

<code>
<?
echo “Hello “.$_REQUEST[user_name].”. Your password is: “.$_REQUEST[password].”;
?>
</code>
Complete your form and click submit.

Demo Script

Last Month, August, I challenged a client to produce three new web pages per day for their website. These pages may have included, how-to’s, product reviews, current events, new product introduction and any other form of content that is related to any product they carry. It would seem an easy task to take on, after-all, three new articles a day would take only 30 minutes to an hour, wouldn’t it? I was wrong.Here’s the truth, writing 3 articles a day can get dry, boring and sometimes frustrating. Or at least I was told by the writer assigned to write. After two weeks of this challenge, it became apparently clear to me, that this would not be an easy task as I had earlier assumed. I tried another approach, this time, I negotiated, for every two articles they created, I would create one page. I get paid on percentage of online sales and a specified amount per lead - so writing one article per day would be no problem. Well this didn’t go so well, the number of articles turned in for edits by the writer decreased, and so content moved at a snail pace for near 30 days. We did manage to produce a healthy number of new fresh content, but unfortunately still behind on the 90 due by September 20th.

Interestingly enough, this month - September, the clients website visits, in both return visitors and unique visitors had doubled. Every day this month, our visits have doubled from the month before, and the year before as well. In fact Google’s referral to the site, had increased from 1800 to near 4000 in September. The client had assumed it was due to my ad scheduling at Google and didn’t pay much attention, until we sat down for our monthly meeting and discussed expenses. To his surprise, I had dropped our Google adwords expense by near 1/2 but increased clicks, in addition, we had purchased Yahoo and ads from other sites.

How was this possible? I went to broader keywords, not phrases, but keywords. Lowered my bids just enough to show up on page 2. I then took our current high qualified keyword phrases and positioned them on the top 2 places for their search. That wasn’t enough of course, I also had to run a whole different campaign approach and started adding prices, phone numbers and other interesting things that none of my competitors were doing. It worked!

Of course, that didn’t explain the near triple visitor numbers on Google, until we read the stats page. Every article and new page we had published in the last month and the month before, were being found by Google. Terms my client thought were impossible search queries were trickling in 3-10 queries per day. Great job he says, picks up his phone and immediately calls his writer and fires him - he then takes out an ad in the paper for a new journalist.