Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog

No, I will not fix your computer!

I bought the black version of the "No, I will not fix your computer" T-shirt from ThinkGeek over the summer, and wore it on my most recent visit to BZ Media's NY headquarters office.I'm not sure if my point got across, but at least it generated…
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The Windows Malware Wars: Viruses 4, Alan 0

I fought the hackers, and the hackers won. Here’s the story: One of our employees had a nice Dell Latitude D610 laptop, and it was totally messed up – running super-slow, lots of crashes, adware popups in the browser, and so-on. Because…

PR pitches that define my publication – badly

Here's the opening of a public relations pitch that I received a few moments ago:Hi Alan, Your publication is dedicated to providing readers with engaging and timely information about technology advances that can increase efficiencies throughout…

Would you like some ANSI Standard sushi?

I can’t let the approval of the National Information Standards Organization’s Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative by the American National Standards Institute pass without playing with the acronyms.To put it more succinctly,…

eWeek’s nice writeup of the Total Eclipse panel at EclipseWorld 2007

Darryl Taft, a reporter for eWeek.com, wrote a very nice summary of the Total Eclipse panel at EclipseWorld 2007.The panel, which had Eclipse Foundation’s Mike Milinkovich, Object Mentor’s Bob Martin, and CodeGear’s David Intersimone,…

Eclipse users focus on Java development

Greetings from EclipseWorld 2007. I’m delighted that the conference gets better every year. If you’re here, of course, you know what I’m talking about. If you weren’t able to make it, all I can say is: Bummer. Mark your calendar now…

Don’t die in London’s Houses of Parliament, or else

The BBC News runs the most wonderful stories. I'd have thought the following to be urban legends, were it not for today's BBC News story "UK chooses 'most ludicrous laws' " where I learned:• It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.•…

What I like and don’t like about big hotels

Here I am at EclipseWorld, staying in the Hyatt Regency Reston, just outside Washington, D.C. It’s a giant 15-storey hotel, very posh, very nice. Last week I stayed at two smaller hotels, a Fairfield Inn by Marriott and a Homewood Suites by…

Calling amateur radio operators: Motorola is buying Yaesu

There's a good chance that Yaesu, one of the best manufacturers of amateur ("ham") radio equipment, may be disappearing soon.I've been a proud owner of many Yaesu tabletop radios, from shortwave receivers to HF transceivers. My favorite HT (handi-talki…

I’m not quite ready for Universal Geometic Time

My good friend Larry O'Brien has gone beyond eliminating Daylight Savings Time. If I understand him correctly, he also wants to abolish time zones. Instead, he would implement Universal Geometric Time, which is a precise calculation of time…

Let’s play the Daylight Savings Time game

As suspected, I had to change the time zone on my BlackBerry 8700g again today.Last weekend, I had to change the handheld from Eastern Time (GMT-5) to Caracas Time (GMT-4), because it erroneously "auto-adjusted" for Daylight Savings Time on…

Hard drives keep getting bigger, with a WD 320GB 2.5-inch drive

Two days ago, on Oct. 31, Western Digital announced a 320GB hard drive in the 2.5-inch form factor that’s popular with laptops and notebook PCs. They claim it’s the first such drive.The previous winner in the 2.5-inch size, best I can tell,…

One laptop per child, one laptop for you

The “One Laptop Per Child” program, pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte, is breathtaking in its scope and vision.I had the opportunity to talk to him a year ago, at the AMD Global Vision Conference in Los Angeles, and was impressed that the…

Pizza, burgers and bratwurst, and the magic of statistics

I was recently involved in an interesting discussion about how to interpret survey results. This is the gist of the discussion.Let’s say you have a three question survey, “Do you like pizza,” “Do you like hamburgers,” and “Do you…

Tentative Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard recommendation: Wait for a firewall fix

I’m alarmed by early words about Mac OS X 10.5’s firewall:• By default, it’s turned off• When it’s turned on, rules are set by application instead of by service• Even when explicitly disabled, some ports are advertised on the LAN…

The Ford-Jaguar X-Type station wagon

They’ve been out for a couple of years, but mercifully, I’ve not seen one until recently: a Jaguar X-Type station wagon.At first, we didn’t believe it, thinking that someone stuck Jaguar letters on a Ford Taurus wagon. But it’s real:…

My old review of TrueTime’s TimeVault time server

On October 9, 2000, InternetWeek published a review I’d written of TrueTime Inc.’s TimeVault network time appliance. I wanted to link it as a reference to my posting “My BlackBerry is caught by the Daylight Savings Time fiasco.” While…

My BlackBerry is caught by the Daylight Savings Time fiasco

Is there anything as senseless as Daylight Savings Time? Perhaps there were historically valid reasons to move clocks back and forth every spring and fall. But there surely isn’t one now, and there are plenty of reasons to stop this rediculous…

Not time yet to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I have my copy of Mac OS X 10.5, and can’t wait to install it. I’m particularly excited about two features of the operating system:• How it will work on 64-bit-capable Macs, including my MacBook Pro and my son's Mac Mini. Even though the…

Smooth jazz from Jackie Allen

It’s not a new album – it came out in 2003 – but “The Men in My Life,” from Jackie Allen, is a real pleasure.From her mellow version of Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy [After All These Years],” to a sultry rendition of Herb Alpert’s…

iPhone, you phone, we all phone for Gphone

The battle of the programmable mobile phone is about to begin. And if Steve Jobs isn’t careful, Google will clean Apple’s clock.Apple makes great platforms. The Mac (with Mac OS X) is a better PC than a Windows Vista box. I haven’t seen…

Sys-Con redefines news into promoting PR professionals

I was astonished today to find this story on SOA World Magazine, an online publication from SYS-CON Media written for IT professionals working with service oriented architectures. Under a “news” banner, the story’s headline is, “Mariana…

A tremendous keynote panel at EclipseWorld 2007

Join Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, as well as ObjectMentor’s Bob Martin and CodeGear’s David Intersimone for a special interactive keynote panel at EclipseWorld 2007, coming up next month in Reston, Va.Led…

I gave away a perfectly good HP scanner

Don’t you just hate device drivers — particularly when major hardware vendors decide to support only certain operating systems, and don't update drivers to support newer operating systems? Thanks to driver issues, I just gave away a perfectly…

Flying, anyone?

American Express says, “Membership has its privileges,” and among of the benefits of having a corporate Amex card are free magazines. Lots of free magazines.One of the ways that American Express makes money is by providing demographically…

Have you hugged your bandwidth today?

In the Amusing Typo Department: I was reading the draft of a story for SD Times, and saw that a sentence read “Is clunky XML getting you down and hugging all your bandwidth?”Of course, that should be “hogging,” but the question is a…

BEA, Oracle market share

Several times over the past few days, I’ve been asked, “Do you know the relative market share held by BEA Systems and Oracle for Java application servers?”And amazing, the answer is yes. BZ Research does a formal study every winter on…

Let the BEA bidding begin

My only question regarding Oracle’s hostile takeover bid for BEA Systems is, “What took them so long?”It’s always been inevitable that BEA would be snapped up by a bigger company. It’s always seemed that BEA’s data-centric technology…

What’s the code actually doing?

Last week, a friend of mine told me that one of his Web servers was brought low when Apache Cocoon, an open source document-publishing framework, filled up a disk volume with a log file. At that point, Cocoon — and the Apache Web server that…

53 out of 225 ain’t bad

According to the Technobabble 2.0 Web log maintained by Jonny Brentwood, my own blog, Z Trek, is ranked as #53 out of approximately 225 tech analyst blogs.The ranking, dated Oct. 1, cites research that scores each blog based on a weighted composite…