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Advisors Insights
Business as usual? That cliché is just no longer an option. Companies of all sizes have to rethink the way that they do business in order to survive...
Apple Aluminum Wireless Keyboard 2.0
Small Is Beautiful
I tend to like to write on my keyboard on my lap or on a lap bench...
Work For Topaz
Daily Notes, Musings and Thoughts Online
Seven Deadly Sins
Operating a successful business in todays economic times is difficult, even for a well-managed company. Now, add the complexity of the worst recession since the Great Depression. It is no surprise that commercial bankruptcies, among the nation's more than 25 million small businesses, have increased by approximately 44% from the third quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2009, according to Equifax Inc. So what is a business owner to do? Avoid these SEVEN DEADLY SINS!
SureMail Outage - 12-28-09
Don't worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition. -Abraham Lincoln What a bright guy, that honest Abe... Sadly, sometimes here at SureTech.com we get the most recognition when a system has trouble. Especially business critical system, like email. So, when ...Apple Aluminum Wireless Keyboard 2.0
Small Is Beautiful
I tend to like to write on my keyboard on my lap or on a lap bench...
Tombola 2009
In April we helped with the Arts Council of Princeton's Tombola 2009 fund-raiser. We had a fun time creating a rotating display using Flash of all the art work that played while the attendees were milling around and a Tombola countdown for the auction portion of the event to show ...What is the Cloud Anyway?
Cloud Buzz
Everybody's heard the buzz, but most people I talk to are confused about how to understand "The Cloud." Even for many that understand the buzz or work with Cloud computers, explaining The Cloud can be daunting.
Cloud Explanations and Illustrations
I usually explain it using a napkin network diagram of the internet which is ...
Defense in Depth
Today I want to talk about the benefits of defense in depth. The term “defense in depth” is used in a variety of ways. I like to think of it as a general term to describe any system where you have multiple layers of protection. If one layer fails, another ...Why Too Many Choices Can Be Bad
My cell phone provider lost a sale yesterday because they gave me too many choices (and not enough information at their store). Luckily for them, I’m not about to switch cell phone providers, but it is an example of how providing your customers choices without information about why they’d choose ...Datacenter Highlights
SureTech.com has partnered with some of the most secure, reliable and respected tier 1 data centers in the world. With locations in New York, Pittsburg, Chicago, Florida, Virginia and the UK, our hosted services are managed, secure, distributed and redundant to protect your data and provide peace of ...Some Attention to The Infrastructure
The NY Times magazine goes so far as to call datacenters, the cloud, which is a slightly different focus than the napkin network diagram I like to draw...
We're Popular, I guess
We had a problem Saturday morning (4/4/09) with all of our websites that use any of our databases. It appears that someone attempted to hack into our site by trying various standard attacks and while, to the best of our knowledge, none of those attacks worked, the number of requests overwhelmed ...Email Best Practices
A client recently went to a meeting where he assumed an email he sent had arrived at his client's inbox. When he learned it did not, he became alarmed and called us. I investigated and found the email in his outbox. I also found that it was over 4MB ...Avoiding Great Service but Bad Value
13 Hours and $1,400.00 To upgrade my Hard Drive?!? We’ve always said that Managed Services for IT is usually a flawed business model. Pretty much the better job you do the less you make. Kinda like lawyers, I guess, except at least we talk about ...Backups, Backups, Backups
I’ve been thinking a lot about backups recently for a variety of reasons. First, I’ve been involved in setting up a fund to honor the high school teacher who first taught me the importance of good backups. He hired me to help with the high school mini-computers and one ...Running Windows Update on Windows Server Core
We're running Windows Server 2008 core on our backup domain controller. I'm not completely convinced this is a good idea yet (even though I'm the one who suggested it). The lack of a UI seems to really hobble some functionality. Today I wanted to run windows update on that machine ...Windows Authentication and IIS - Seems Counterintuitive to Me
I'm working on my first ASP.NET application in Visual Studio 2008 running on a 2008 Server. It's a simple thing, just designed to get some information from our users. I did need them to authenticate themselves against Active Directory prior to visiting the webpage. I turned on Windows Authentication ...Apple Scores on Service
American based, for american customers - and email.
That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days. If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers ... - view comments
Einstein Imagined SureTech.com
Who are we to argue with Genius? Einstein was ahead of us on the internet AND SureTech.com! - View Comments
How does my web browser connect to a website?
When you type in somedomain.com your internet service sends a message to a machine called a name server owned by your internet service and asks this machine “hey, where do I find the website for somedomain.com?” - view comments
Happy Holidays 2008 from TopazGroup
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Love, Peace, Joy and all best wishes to you from Topaz Group.
Holiday Potluck 2008
SureTech.com
Invites You to Our
First Holiday
Potluck Supper
December 20
3:00 p.m.
87 Royce Brook Road
Hillsborough, New Jersey
The frivolity starts at 3:00 and potluck supper at 4:00
Please let Bonnie or Dana know what you plan to bring!
We are planning ...That's NOT What I Meant By "Cleaning Up the Audio"
My church records it's Sunday morning services so we can put the sermon on our website for people to listen to who miss a Sunday. I'm in charge of getting the CompactFlash card out of the recorder, bringing it home, editing the audio down to the sermon, and placing it ...But I am an Administrator
It's annoying when the things designed to protect us just get in our way. Today I was doing some work on our file server and wanted to check out some ways to see how much disk space was being used by certain clients without having access to their folders (I'm ...Book Review: Network Warrior
We've been having some interesting network issues that I've been tracking down and we've been trying to figure out how to set up our clients with our datacenter in Miami. I came across a book whose title looked interesting - Network Warrior by Gary A. Donahue. It is an O'Reilly ...Windows System Restore Saves the Day Again
I'm a big fan of Windows System Restore and today reminded me of just how great a feature it is. Hats off to the folks who thought it up and implemented it. I was installing a new VPN client on my main machine and, foolishly I will add, had two ...Cloud Computing: Is It Safe?
Cloud Computing: Is It Safe?
By Alan Cohen from Law.com
Corporate Counsel
October 31, 2008
If there's one tried-and-true way to tackle a problem, it's to make it someone else's problem. It's the strategy that's given us plumbers, fluff-and-fold laundry and lawn services. Yet for a long time, corporate ...IT Trends For 2009
We are pleased to share these trends via Baseline:
Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal ...Google Message Filtering and StartLogic
One of our consulting clients has a huge problem with spam (mostly because their previous website displayed their email addresses for all to see in plain text which made life easy for email harvesters). The other problem is that some of their email addresses are very common and thus also ...What do I do with this email warning me of a virus?
Any mail that has obviously been forwarded as a chain letter warning of just about anything, even if the warning is true is almost guaranteed to be some specie of SPAM. Sometimes messages like this refer to partially true threats, but the goal of the originator of the message ...Sum Ergo Sum
I just picked up “Love is the Killer App” at a café wherein Tim Sanders describes love as the ultimate competitive weapon in business. I have a friend who’s making a go for the fourth year working at home with her husband so they can be close to the kids. ...Startup Business Models: One Chicken vs RocketBoom
There are basically two ways to start a business that I'll call the buy a chicken model and the RocketBoom model. Rocketboom was the first videoblog to roll out a daily show and build a large audience successfully. As the first it commands a fairly permanent piece of popular consciousness ...Xobni for Outlook is awesome except it doesn't work.
Xobni which is inbox spelled backwards is an absolutely terrific plug in for Microsoft Outlook except for the small fact that it doesn't work... - view comments
What's your job?
This may seem like a silly question to some, but I think it's often easy for us to forget what our job really is. I'm going to write this from the perspective of a Software Developer, but it applies equally well to all job functions. As programmers, we have often ...Why The Mission Matters
A good friend who is also a Camaldolese Monk, was visiting us this weekend. Like so many of us, our friend lives in a wonderful nexus of contradictions. Not only is he a monk, but he travels the world, singing and teaching about the monastic life. Traveling and being ...Real Life Journey
"I might as well settle in," Anna told me one fall day in 1993. We had both moved to New York along with about a quarter of our graduating class the year before. "I kept thinking I would start my life someday, and was living out of boxes, ...Thriving in the Social Internet
These notes are in preparation for the Einstein Alley Panel June 23, 2008. The wall street journal reports today that medieval jousting is back in vogue in Europe. What's interesting to me about this is that the reporter Max Colchester specifically credits the internet with bringing jousting back to ...Never trust user input
One of the most common security issues I see in code from new web developers (and even some experienced ones) is not sanitizing user input. They trust user input to have always come from a non-adversarial user interacting with the site through a web browser. Given the HTTP(S) protocol, there is ...Watching your code execute
When I was a younger (and more foolish programmer) I was fortunate enough to learn from some talented software developers. One of the many important lessons I learned was the benefits of watching your code excute. Now, to some, that may sound as exciting as watching the grass grow. But ...Alberto Molina on Einstein Alley Panel on Thriving in the New Social Internet
Join me June 23, 2008 for a very interesting discussion on society, business and technology: Topic: Thriving in the New Social Internet Speakers: Dr. Charles Kreitzberg. Alberto Molina, Anne Kreitzberg Location: Sante Fe Grille – Upstairs private dining room Date: Monday June 23, 2008 Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM ...Service Outage for Hosted Microsoft Exchange
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Service Outage for Hosted Microsoft Exchange Services Due to Thunderstorm at Data Center - July 6, 2008 (One Hour and 28 Minutes)
This morning, we experienced a service outage starting at 8:42 AM EDT. Service to most customers was restored by 9:55 AM, with all customers having full service by 10:10 ...Why am I Blogging?
A reasonable question to ask really. My main audience at this point is the development staff at Topaz Group. We are separated both by space and time. By space, because we are spread out and do not share offices or even the same area code. By time because I know ...Book Review: Secure Coding: Principles and Practices
Last time I reviewed one of two books on security that I had recently read. This time I'll review the other book - Secure Coding: Princeiples & Practices by Mark G. Graff and Kenneth R. van Wyk (and published by O'Reilly which puts out excellent books in general). This ...Thriving with the Social Internet
Thriving in the New Social Internet The new social world of the internet represents far more than finding a friend on Facebook or keeping a diary on line for anyone to see. New Web technology, also referred to as social media or Web 2.0, is unstoppably shifting the way ...Book Review: The Security Development Lifecycle
Security is something that is very important in all kinds of applications today. I have many more articles I want to write about security (particularly since we fixed a recent security hole). I'm going to start, however, with a review of one of two books I read recently on security. ...Next Level Start Ups
The next generation of web start ups is going to be younger and more specialized. They are also going to be cheaper. It has become easier to get a website, for less than ten dollars you can register your domain name and hosting can be had for as little ...Embedding CSS in a Post
add CSS inline html: <style type='text/css'> sytle from .css </style> or like this within a div: style="border: 1px; " A sample that looks good class .intro ‘Rather than a mass customer base, advertising on these blogs gives lobbyists unbridled access to an extremely valuable audience: Britain’s political elite’ <font ...Num Lock Getting Stuck on a Macintosh
I couldn't get the Numbers keys on my apple keyboard to work, nothing I could do seemed to help. The digits refused to work. Every time I hit the "clear" button, which is the apple equivalent of Num Lock, I got a little squat sound like the fart of ...Hosting is Our Cup of Tea
Talking not Terrabytes ...
When we think of hosting we think of having guests at our house. We think of music to play and finger food.
Our business is taking the time to understand the equivalent of tea time in the digital age. Our business is communication, the kind ...