I'm an Uncle, Again...and Again

I don't usually share my personal life here, but it's not every day one has a niece and a nephew added to his family within the span of 3 weeks.

3 weeks ago, my brother's wife gave birth to a new baby girl. 2 hours ago my sister gave birth to a new baby boy. That makes it a total of 5 kids in this world who call me "Uncle Traveling Tech Guy" ("uncle trav" for short ).

Now, I'm not going to put any baby pictures in here, partly to protect their privacy (we're all about security on this blog ) and partly because I believe that the most hated pictures people have to look at are other people's baby pictures (not to mention that they all look the same ).

So, suffice it to say I'm happy for my brother and sister and am already preparing for that day in the future I'll have to buy 5 gadgets for each family gathering...

Earth Hour - Whatever

A bit over a week ago, people around the world "celebrated" Earth Hour (here's the official site). A bunch of cities around the world volunteered to darken their famous monuments (Opera House in Sydney, Coca Cola sign in Atlanta etc.) and streets for an hour, in an effort to save energy and raise awareness to global warming.

Google, and other companies, darkened the background of their home pages, claiming black pixels consume less energy.

Now, I'm all for the environment and improving the quality of our atmosphere, but this marketing campaign is driving me mad. Here are some facts I find irritating about "Earth Hour":

1. Turning power on and off at many places at the same time creates power grid fluctuations. Power plants then have to spend more energy to compensate for the fluctuations. Result: more energy is consumed.
   
   
2. Those monuments with their thousands of light bulbs consume a lot of energy all year long. Want to contribute? Turn them off permanently, or at least change the bulbs to LEDs. Turning them off for an hour is as futile as preserving wildlife in captivity.
   
   
3. I watched this "event" at my friend's house in Atlanta. The anchor asked everyone to please turn off all electricity in their home for an hour - but leave all TVs on. Presumably, your TV doesn't consume any electricity (or is it that the news station still needs the revenue from commercials at this hour?).
   
   
4. And then came the sponsor list of Earth Hour: GE - a company that makes money if we waste energy. And Jeep. Jeep!? The company that makes all those gas guzzling SUVs and "all terrain vehicles" (specifically modeled to fit the LA roads)? What do they have to contribute to the earth? Better have those companies work on alternatives to fossil fuel and to gas-driven vehicles.
   
   
5. This "TV event" was followed by many "on-the-scene" reporters, which I'd like to believe arrived at their reporting locations driving their hybrid vehicles. But I presume they just used a huge air-polluting news van.
   
   
6. Finally, let's look at the string of bandwagon-hopping companies that "darkened" their web sites.
   
   This might have been right in the old CRT days, but an LCD screen (like your laptop monitor, or your flat desktop screen) consumes the same amount of energy, regardless of the pixel color. So sites like Blackle, claiming to save millions of watts, are either plain mistaken, or just feed you BS on purpose.
   
   Google was asked recently why don't they darken their site permanently, and the cited this research, showing that in a Blackle vs. Google comparison, on average, black background actually consumes more electricity that white background.
   
   Whoops! Looks like all those site background changes actually got people to consume more energy during Earth Hour. I would have laughed, but studies show laughter consumes more oxygen off the atmosphere...

Fidelity Funds and Genocide

A week a go I wrote about Google's board urging shareholders to vote against resolutions that will make the company more humane (i.e. take human rights into business decisions and refuse to cooperate with censorship). I urged my fellow shareholders to vote FOR the resolutions (read My Vote Counts!)

But Google is not the only company whose share holders would like to see behave more humanly. Today I received an invitation to vote on several Fidelity Funds stocks that I hold. I usually throw out those letters - but this time, this caught my eye:

You see, some people would like the board to screen out stocks of companies that "substantially contribute" to genocide (I guess if you contribute just a little, it's Ok). But the board would like you to vote against this. "We don't care how they make their money, just how much money they make" - should be the new motto.

Needless to say, I voted FOR the proposal. And again I would like to urge my fellow human beings to vote for this or any similar resolution you come across. Take a second to look at what your boards are asking you to vote on - and vote with your conscience.

I re-wrote the title of this post several times, just so I won't end up at the sharp end of a law suite. This is the mildest I could make it.

Hardy Heron Coming Soon

A new version of the Ubuntu OS, dubbed "Hardy Heron" is coming out soon. To celebrate its release, I've added a countdown image on the right hand side. Clicking it will take you to the Ubuntu homepage.

You can test Ubuntu on any machine (32 and 64 bit versions are available for Intel, AMD and Sun Sparc machines), or virtual machine. It has very low hardware requirements. You can also "try-before-you-buy" by using the LiveCD option (it allows you to boot the system and play with it, without installing). And did I mention it's free?

Read my review of the current version of Ubuntu here.

Test Your Anti Virus

Just stumbled upon this tip, tried it and decided to share it with you.
You can never tell whether your AV app is working, until something goes wrong. This harmless test will tell you if it's doing it's job:

1. Open a text editor (e.g. Notepad).
2. Copy-paste the following string (one line) into the editor:
   X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$
EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
   
3. Save the file as EICAR.COM on your desktop.
4. Open a CMD window and try to execute this .COM file (or simply double-click the file on Desktop).
5. At this point, your AV should report the file as suffering from the EICAR virus.
6. To further test your AV, you can zip the file, send it as an email attachment, etc.
7. Try sending it to GMail, to see wheteher Google's AV manages to identify it. Repeat with Yahoo, Hotmail etc.
   

I'm using AVG 8 and it caught it on step 3. As I was saving the text to the file, a popup screen jumped, declared the file infected and moved it to quarantine.

Post a comment and let me know how your AV passed this test. Hopefully we can come up with some interesting results.