Limewire's a No-No

Anybody who’s been online with high-speed access has probably experienced the thrill of trying out a peer-to-peer program such as Limewire or Gnutella or, back in the day, Napster. All those mp3 songs, free for the taking!

An example of a Limewire session.

(For the uninitiated, these peer-to-peer or P2P programs let you search collections of files hoarded by other P2P users, and download their music to your own hard drive. Likewise, others on the P2P network can retrieve files from you. Entire feature-films are traded this way, as well as hundreds of thousands of mp3 tracks. A more popular form of P2P trading today is called BitTorrent).

Without getting into the morality of it, there is one thing you should know about using Limewire and other P2P applications: It’s become a very risky thing to do. Akin to, let’s say, engaging in other “unprotected” practices.

For one thing, peer to peer networks these days are riddled with spyware and viruses. You think you’re getting the newest John Mayer CD, and you might be...but you might also be downloading a trojan horse that silently steals your passwords.

Second, you might be wasting time and using bandwidth needlessly because you won’t get what you're after anyway.  That’s because record companies have started “poisoning” the peer to peer networks with bogus files, or tracks that get garbled halfway through. 

Third, the recording industry does in fact pursue illegal downloaders, and takes them to court. The fines can be enormous - starting at several hundred dollars PER VIOLATION. One track is one violation. As well, companies can be sued when their employees use their networks for downloading copyrighted materials.

How do I know all this? I’ve cleaned it off many a customer’s computer and seen the effects first hand. 

Getting music online is very convenient - no trip to the mall, and you don’t have to buy a whole CD for one or two tracks. Fortunately, for today’s consumer there are legitimate and safe ways to get music online. For ease of use and quality, you can’t beat the iTunes store. No, it’s not free. It’s $1 per track or about $10 per album. But there are no risks, and you’re sure to get a quality product. Your tracks won’t have any hiccups, or be of different volume levels throughout the same album, as they might be if you piece together an album from a peer to peer network. And they’re nicely tagged with the correct artist, track numbers, album art, and so on. And you can easily burn them to an audio CD. 

And (yeah, I know I said I wouldn’t go here) the artist receives fair compensation for his work. 

Introducing the Drobo

I don’t remember exactly how I learned of the Drobo, to be honest, but I’m glad I found it. A Drobo is a really cool external storage device. It’s not a hard drive, but an enclosure into which you put hard drives. Then, you plug this thing into your computer via USB.

What’s so neat about it? Well, it has four slots. If your storage needs are moderate to begin with, maybe you buy a drobo and put two 250 gig hard drives in it. Down the road, after you’ve downloaded lots of music and imported tons of digital photos, or delved into iMovie, you can pop a third drive in and automatically expand the storage. You don’t have to configure anything - no formatting, configuration, etc. It just shows up like one big gigantic hard drive.

But hands down the best part is how it protects your data. If you put in more than one drive, it automatically spreads out the data so that if one drive died,  you would not lose any files. All your data is protected. You would just simply pop out the dead drive, and put in a new one. You can be copying 100 megs to the Drobo, and add or remove drives without hurting anything.  It has lights on the front that tell you if drives are healthy, how much space is left, etc. 

Below are screen shots of the software it comes with, Drobo Dashboard. That’ll give you a great idea of what this unit’s all about.

This is one of those devices that hurts a little bit upfront in terms of cost (about $500, plus the cost of whatever SATA drives you put in it), but I subscribe to the “if you’re going to do it, do it right” mentality. Get one of these, and you’ll be set for a long time because they’re so expandable. You won’t be changing external USB or Firewire drives in or out, or messing with a bunch of cables. And, you won’t have toss out an entire external drive kit when it goes bad - including it’s power brick and the enclosure and everything else. You just work with bare drives. Which can be obtained anywhere, cheap. AND the drive sizes don't have to match, either (a drawback of traditional RAID systems).

The only downside I've seen so far is that being a USB 2 device, it's not exactly a speed demon. If this thing were firewire 800 or even 400, you could actually use it for video production. But, it's great for backups (at least for personal or small business use) which don't have to be blazing fast.

The Drobo web site is well-done, with a neat “Drobolator” function you can use to simulate what happens when you add or remove drives to the Drobo. Check it out to learn more, including their video testimonials.

Looking at Leopard

My friend Dean over at Sage Advice recently launched a new blog of his own, and took the opportunity to share his experiences with the new Mac Leopard operating system (10.5 if you're a numbers sort of person). It's interesting to see his reactions at the beginning (some negatives), and how it's progressed since then. Check it out at www.sageadviceltd.com.

Here's the text of one of the replies I made to a fairly critical entry:

"I’ve had a bit different of an experience. Installed it first weekend after it came out.

Although this upgrade has been more problematic than 10.3 to 10.4, it certainly hasn’t been horrible and, like you, I probably push my machine and use a more varied set of software than most. (CS3, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Lightroom, Final Cut Pro, Office 2004, RDC, QBPro 2005, Mail, iCal, Toast 8, iWork 08, FMPro 8.5, Retrospect 6.1, Parallels, iMovie 6 HD, Garageband 3)

Time Machine is a disaster, and I had to wait two weeks for Adobe to issue a Lightroom update, but beyond that most software has been fine. All my app’s producers were pretty quick to release Leopard updates (Transmit, Adium, etc). Toast works fine, Retrospect works fine, Filemaker, etc. Oh, one problem - dropdown menus no longer work in my version of Quickbooks (which is old - 2005).

I don’t think I would have tried the upgrade with that SATA card, and I had found the Griffin iMic to be problematic even with 10.4.

Time Machine is causing problems with people running entourage, mainly because Entourage uses a big DB instead of individual files - so one new email means TM will backup the entire DB each hour.

Hardware specs: Mac Pro dual 2.66, 4 gigs RAM, SuperDrive, 4 internal SATA drives, HP LaserJet 1320, HP Photosmart Pro B8350, Epson 2480 Scanner, Snowball USB microphone.

One thing that does NOT work is the Formac Studio, which is a replacement for a model that quit working after 10.3. I hate that damn Formac company! Grrr! I’m keeping my Tiger clone drive just so I can boot from it if I need to convert VHS to digital.”

Virus and spyware on your PC

Word of caution - virus and spyware activity continues to rise, and a great deal of it gets generated via email. If you haven't checked your antivirus update definitions or renewed your subscription, better not wait until New Year's to make a resolution to deal with it. 

I often get asked what kind of anti-virus software I use. I don't use any - I use a Mac. (that's a completely separate newsletter post, I think...) But on my servers, and for customers with Windows PCs, I recommend either Symantec Antivirus if you want a more full-featured solution, or AVG Antivirus which is actually free. AVG doesn't have quite all the bells and whistles, but you can't beat the price. Go to www.avgfree.com for more info. For antispyware, again Macs don't need any but Windows users might want to consider the free Windows Defender from Microsoft. The only catch is that it's only available for Windows XP and above. Sorry you Windows 98 or 2000 users - it's time to upgrade, anyway!

If you suspect your computer already has a virus and you need help cleaning it up, let me know and I can help you scan and decide whether it's "cleanable" or if you'd be better off with a reinstall.

Open Season on Domain Name Holders

One of the most common questions I get from customers is: "I got this letter from such and such a company, saying that my domain name will expire if I don't renew with them. What do I do?"

Be aware that there are unscrupulous companies out there who send baiting letters trying to get you to "renew" with them, when in fact they don't hold your domain in the first place. Domain names are public records, so what they do is scour the databases and send letters to everyone. Some people bite, send them a check, and before you know it you've signed on with some fly-by-night registrar. It's kind of like phone service slamming.

One problem with that is that when you transfer registrars, all the settings that make your domain name point to your site and email may disappear, until they're re-established in the new registrar's system. Another problem is that any company that would use the equivalent of long-distance slamming techniques would probably also sell all your information to mass marketers.

Although a few customers use Verisign / Network Solutions, most of my customers use Register.com because at the time, their good customer service, security, and excellent technical setup was unrivaled. Lately, however, I've been switching domains over to GoDaddy because it's a LOT cheaper. I just can't see spending any extra money anymore for something you configure once and then never bother with again (until renewal, that is).

Anyway, bottom line: when it comes to renewals, you should only be acting on communications from either me or one of the three major registrars mentioned above. Especially watch out for "Domain Registry of America."